'She was denied the right to vote': Houston voting rights activist dies at 99

The grandmother of Houston City Councilperson Letitia Plummer died, leaving a legacy of voting rights activism in the family.

On Plummer's Twitter, she pinned a video of her talking to her grandmother while waiting to vote at NRG Park. Plummer asked her grandmother about her first time voting.

"I don't have the slightest idea of the first time that I voted,” the grandmother said in the video, both her and her granddaughter wearing a mask in the car. “I do have an idea of the first time I tried to vote, and there was some discrepancy because I was [a] black American. And at the time I was growing up, black Americans didn't have the opportunity.”

Letitia Washington Plummer, 99, and her husband, Matthew Plummer, tried to vote in 1940s Alabama. Unfortunately, they couldn't.

"In the 1940s, she was one of the first people along with her husband to file a voting rights lawsuit in the state of Alabama when she was denied the right to vote," Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said during the July 14 city meeting.

Twenty years after being told they couldn't vote, the then-United States President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1965 into law, ensuring the black community's right to vote.

"I think our young people need to realize how fortunate we are to have this opportunity," Plummer told ABC13 in 2020.

Her grandmother's work went beyond breaking barriers for her community.

Many people knew of the strong relationship Plummer had with her grandmother. Even the mayor recognized it.

"We all know how close she was to her grandmother," Turner said. "And I'll never forget on swearing day, her grandmother was sitting right next to her."

In a tweet announcing her grandmother’s death, Plummer called her a “best friend.”

“Grams was the backbone of the Plummer family,” she wrote in the tweet.