PBS Wisconsin Originals

Christy Clark-Pujara

I was a late in life child for my father. He was 47 when I was born. He was born in 1932; we don't know the month, in rural Mississippi. So a few years into the Great Depression in the Jim Crow South. And I grew up knowing that voting was something that my ancestors had to fight for. My dad was functionally illiterate, but the smartest person I knew. He always had three jobs, and he did what he could do to help the polls. So he worked the polls anyway. And so I always understood that as an African American and as a woman, voting was critical.

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