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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Distance can’t keep Big Easy refugees from casting votes

Errin Haines Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS – Their journey began at the church where the Rev. Martin Luther King once preached, and it ended at polling places in the shattered city where they once lived.

For four busloads of displaced New Orleans residents, their eight-hour ride from Atlanta was the ultimate expression of their civil rights – to have a say in how their city is going to be rebuilt after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

“That’s the purpose for coming down here: not to be left out of what’s happening in the city,” said Wellington Lain, 41, who said he has missed only one election since he was old enough to vote. “It makes me feel as if I still belong.”

Lain and the other New Orleans voters set out Friday night from King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta to vote in Saturday’s election.

“This is the first battle in a serious and important struggle,” Ebenezer Senior Pastor Raphael G. Warnock told the travelers before they boarded the buses.

Among the nearly 300 volunteers and voters on the four buses, J. Todd Smith and his mother, Paulette, sat near the front of one of the vehicles and kept each other company along the way. They had evacuated to Houston on the eve of the hurricane, then moved to Atlanta in October.

Through all their moving, they have remained loyal to the Crescent City.

“We’re still citizens of New Orleans,” said Smith, 24. “We still want to know what’s going on there. I still have my driver’s license. My license plate still says Louisiana.”

Going to the polls Saturday reassured Smith that his opinions still count, and he said he plans to also participate in the general election next month.

The bus caravan arrived at the Greater St. Stephen’s Full Gospel Baptist Church in New Orleans around 6 a.m. Saturday.

“Even though I’m somewhere else, this is still home,” Lain said, although he added that he plans to stay in Atlanta and re-establish his business there.

Silvinia Henry told one of her fellow bus riders that this would likely be her last time participating in a New Orleans election. The 59-year-old former New Orleans East resident lived in the city for more than three decades, but said she isn’t sure she’ll be able to return.

Still, she wanted to come back and make her voice heard in the city for a final time.

“I’ve been living here for so long,” she said. “It was a pleasure for me to come back and give my vote.”

Not all evacuees managed to do that. Dana Young, an 18-year-old college freshman who transferred to Spelman College in Atlanta from Dillard University after Katrina struck last fall, thought this was going to be her first election.

However, poll workers turned her away because they couldn’t find a record of her registration.

“I’m really upset,” Young said as tears welled up in her eyes. “I came all the way down here and now I can’t do anything about it. They said they couldn’t find me in the system, so I can’t vote.”

Young said she lost her voter registration card and other important documents, including her birth certificate, during the hurricane. Her mother, now living in Georgia, voted absentee, but Young wanted to vote in person.

“We really want to show that we are trying to come back home,” she had said after arriving.