Everett Staten sells Obama for President clothing and paraphernalia from a boutique storefront in Mount Airy, Philadelphia. By purchasing items, Staten says, people can both show their support for the President and help fund his re-election campaign.
One T-shirt has the outlined letters of the phrase, “Why I Vote.” Each letter is a window on a photograph of some significant even in the civil rights movement – the freedom riders’ bus that was set on fire, a police dog attacking a college student at a rally in Greensboro, a malt being thrown on an African-American woman at a lunch counter, Rosa Parks who refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white person, fire hoses being directed at protesters in Birmingham, an imprisoned Dr. Martin Luther King from where he wrote the “Letters from a Birmingham Jail”, one of the Little Rock nine girls braving segregationists to enter high school and Congressman John Lewis who, as chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, got pummeled
Everett says this t-shirt is especially needed to remind people why they need to vote – now to fight voter suppression in the form of the voter ID laws which a Pennsylvania Republican lawmaker boasted would guarantee Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney a win in Pennsylvania. Watch video here.