She needed to lean on her walker and to get the help of her 81-year-old son. But she wasn’t about to give up on casting her vote, in person no less.
This polarized political season, amid the rush of Georgians taking part in early voting, Ida Simmons, of Attapulgus, Ga., moved more slowly.
At 105 years old, she has lived to witness the elections of 19 U.S. presidents, 22 Georgia governors and countless other elected leaders, from U.S. senators to school board members, county commissioners and sheriffs.
She first registered to vote in the summer of 1964, according to Georgia records. It was a pivotal year in the fight for civil rights, an era when being a Black person like her and trying to vote in South Georgia could be dangerous. She was 47 at the time.
“I’ve been voting since they let us vote,” she said.
“I think it is my duty to do it,” she added later.
No longer very mobile on her own, she relies on family members to take her to the polls. And she regularly urges them to cast their own votes. Her eldest living son, Simon Simmons, has heard the message more than once: “She said too many people died and got beat up to (not) go vote.”
Her memories of many details from nearly 60 years ago have faded. But she told her son she wasn’t allowed to vote when she first tried to take part in democracy. And she recalled being excited when she finally was given the chance.
She’s still committed to it.
Recently, the elder Simmons visited the Decatur County elections office in Bainbridge. Simon Simmons and his wife, Roberta, took her there. Afterward, they documented her achievement at a “selfie spot.”
Most older voters in the southwest Georgia county rely on absentee ballots, according to local elections supervisor Joyce Coddington. This year, lots of absentee ballots already have been turned in and in-person early voting is on pace to be the most ever for the county of about 29,000 residents, roughly 15,500 of whom are registered to vote.
Coddington chatted with Simmons on her visit.
“I thought it was awesome to see,” the elections supervisor said later. She said she was impressed not only by Simmons’ age but by her determination to vote and to do so in person.
“It showed that everybody should vote, regardless.”
Woodrow Wilson was president in 1917, when Simmons was born in Decatur County.
She attended school only through the fifth grade. She was good at spelling, but she said she needed to drop out to go to work. She toiled on nearby tobacco farms and packaging houses for about 65 years, by her best recollection.
She married a minister — he passed away in 1987. They raised 11 children and had a small farm near Attapulgus, which now has fewer than 500 residents. Simon Simmons remembered that, for many years, his mother walked to the farms where she worked, six miles there and six miles back.
By the early 1960s, some Black people in Georgia had registered to vote, but many had not, according to Adrienne Jones, a Morehouse College assistant professor of political science.
Told about the timing of when Simmons registered, Jones said, “I would imagine this would be dicey and would be a bold thing to do.”
Black people faced plenty of extra risks in daily life. Hosea Williams, a future leading civil rights activist, had fled his hometown of Attapulgus as a young teen in the late 1930s or early 40s. Men had come to lynch him for having a relationship with a white girl, he and others said years later.
Into the late 1950s and early 60s, poll taxes and skewed literacy tests were used to keep Black people from voting. Some in Georgia avoided even attempting to because of fear of economic reprisals and violence, according to a 1961 report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
A month before Simmons registered to vote, three voting rights activists were murdered in Mississippi. The month that Simmons registered, civil rights workers trying to sign up voters in Bainbridge “were chased out of town by local whites,” according to a story published at the time.
Eight months after she registered, police brutally attacked marchers in Alabama pressing for voting rights as they were led by Hosea Williams and future Georgia Congressman John Lewis across Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. Then, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, outlawing a range of discriminatory practices, empowering federal officials to step in and requiring Georgia and certain other states or portions of states to get pre-clearance before implementing new voting practices. Voting registrations among Black people would increase dramatically over the following years.
Simon Simmons said he remembered that in his childhood his mother would open the family’s home to traveling strangers, feeding them regardless of race or standing. “She’s a good-hearted lady,” he said.
Nowadays, her hearing is not what it was. So she reads captions on television to keep up with political news.
It seems to be working, he said. “She knows more about it than I do.”
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