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For two decades, Perman Hardy has worked tirelessly to help Lowndes County residents cast their vote. Doing everything from driving individuals to the polls to signing up college students for absentee ballots, her efforts have not gone unnoticed and in fact have gained national recognition by one network planning a feature to highlight her efforts.

On Thursday, Oct. 4, Hardy met with a news team from ABC. The crew drove down from Atlanta to meet with her at her favorite restaurant, Deep Woods by Mary Bell in Hayneville, to interview Hardy and find out why voting advocacy has become such an important part of her life.

“I’ve been giving people a ride to the polls, making sure they get registered to vote,” Hardy said. “It’s something I’ve been doing for so long.”

Hardy’s interest in helping ensure everyone votes began in her childhood, she explained.

“I was just a little girl that [grew] up on a sharecropper farm working in the cotton fields,” Hardy said. “Every time someone turned 18, two ladies in the community would go to homes at night to register them to vote. They couldn’t do it out in the open, and I was registered to vote at night. So, that was my vision, to do just what they were doing.”

Born and raised in the “Rudolph Quarter” community, Hardy helped her own father register to vote in 1980.Though he could neither read nor write, she did not intend to let his lack of formal education be an obstacle to having a voice in government operations.

“My dad didn’t understand what [voting] was or how important it was,” Hardy said. “But I wasn’t going to let what he didn’t know stop him, or other people, from exercising their right to vote. I didn’t let it deter me, and not only for my dad. I had other family members who didn’t have an education as well as myself. But that didn’t stop me.”

Recognition for her work began in 2017 with an AL.com interview and video that went viral across social media. From there, Hardy gained the interest of other media outlets and was eventually filmed by the same news crew that visited the area to interview Catherine Flowers about the area’s wastewater disposal crisis.

“Part of this same crew came down for 60 Minutes to interview Catherine Flowers,” Hardy said. “And one of the guys said to me, ‘Mrs. Hardy, where were you when we were here before.’ ‘Right where I am now,’ I told him. I said, ‘We [the Black Belt Unincorporated Wastewater Program] are doing the work solving the sewage issue in Lowndes County.’”

And, in spite of media attention, Hardy takes little notice of the accolades. Instead, she focuses on helping community members in whatever way she can.

“I’m just trying to help people,” she said. “That’s what I do. My heart tells me to do this and what you see is what you get. I don’t do it for the fame or fortune, I do it for real and I will keep doing it until the Lord tells me, ‘Well done.’”