He went down to the firehouse and cast the first ballot of his life, for Donald Trump.

Then the news broke that Trump had carried Florida. The voices of CNN reverberated from too many television screens, monstrous, distorted, unintelligible. Everything liberal America had told itself about itself and the rest of the country seemed inside out and upside down.

Terri had voted, casting a ballot for Trump, but Shannon hadn’t bothered. She didn’t put much stock in politics. “People like us,” she told me, “aren’t heard.” She’d cast only one ballot in her life—in

His uncle Hulan had been the first black man to operate a grinding machine at the plant. Later, Hulan became the first (and last) black foreman. Uncle Hulan had taught Wally that a black man had to work twice as hard to get half as far, and even then, folks would grumble that he’d gotten the job only because of affirmative action.

Bob, the furnace maintenance man, popped into the lab, cheered by the news that Trump seemed to be winning. Bob had voted for the first time in his life earlier that day, hoping that Trump would save the factory. Shannon’s father had done the same thing.

Black people didn’t risk their lives to vote just because they liked voting. Casting a ballot is not an end in itself. They risked their lives to elect leaders who would help them access the well-paid jobs that they had long been denied. The march on Washington in 1963—where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his famous “I Have a Dream”