Pam's Points: We're missing Luther and guarding voter rights

Luther Masingill: Builder of community

Most of us knew him only as that strong bass voice that filled our homes every morning after our parents roused us from sleep.

His voice comforted his listeners like a grandpa's arm around their shoulders.

We knew him only as Luther. He talked about the weather, the county fair, another dog lost and found - it didn't matter, what we heard was the steadying continuity of another day. At least until there was snowflake; and then we were glued to his voice until we heard him call the name of our school.

Luther Masingill was a radio staple here for 74 years, lending his cheerful calm at the same radio station - WDEF - in the same time slot since 1941. He also worked at WDEF-TV 12 since it first signed on air in 1954. Many Chattanoogans learned of Pearl Harbor from Luther. Decades later, he also told us of the terrorist attacks on 9/11.

But Luther's voice stopped Monday morning. At 92, he died in a local hospital after a short illness. An entire city - an entire region - will miss him. He was more than a radio voice. He was family.

He was a National Marconi award winner and a member of the National Radio Hall of Fame and the Tennessee Radio Hall of Fame.

But what he really was - though there is no award name for it - was a community minder and a community builder. He viewed radio not just as a job and vocation, but also as a public service. Unlike many radio personalities, he saw his mission as one of unity, not polarization.

People here instinctively knew from listening that Luther was a very humble man who, without ever uttering these words, let folks know with every broadcast that he cared for them and for this community.

In 2010, he was honored with the Chattanooga Senior Leadership Award for his years of service. The 3200 block of Broad Street was renamed Luther Masingill Parkway.

He holds the record as the longest running broadcaster in one time slot in history.

And frankly, though he's not here talking to us anymore, he probably still is announcing on a higher plane. He's just using new call letters.

Access to the voting booth

For years, most of us have gone to our polling places and pulled out our voter registration cards - which have no photos - signed on the line with our name in a poll worker's sheaf of papers, then voted.

Now, thanks to the voter identification law passed in Tennessee in 2010 to stem fictional voter fraud, we have to pull out that card, along with our driver's license or some other approved photo identification, and everything has to perfectly match up.

Heaven help us if we've married, remarried or moved and now have a different address across the street. And surely we've not been so rash as to dare and get a post office box.

If any of those things are true, we may wind up on Nov. 4 having to vote on a provisional ballot - if we get to vote at all. In 2012, many didn't get to vote because of the new law. The Government Accountability Office said turnout here dropped 2.2 percentage points or about 88,000 fewer votes that year.

Statewide, only some 1,623 of the 7,097 paper provisional ballots cast in November 2012 were counted, according to figures compiled that year by state election officials. That means about four out of five were tossed out, mainly because voters did not show up at their county election commission within two days to present a valid photo ID, as required by state law.

The so-called voter fraud is held up to disguise the GOP's effort to keep minorities, women and young people - all most likely to be more liberal or progressive than not - from voting.

Tennessee isn't alone. Just Saturday, two days before early voting began in Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court said Texas election officials could go ahead and enforce that state's controversial voter identification law. Some 600,000 people in Texas lack state-issued IDs, according to the U.S. Justice Department, which has rejected the Texas law as a violation of the Voting Rights Act.

The court's majority didn't offer explanation for the ruling, but Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a nearly seven-page dissent, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

"The greatest threat to public confidence in elections in this case is the prospect of enforcing a purposefully discriminatory law, one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters," Ginsburg wrote.

Beware, America. If Republicans do eventually rule the House and the Senate, the next hurdle to voting may be a DNA test.

Upcoming Events