For Black Voters Matter, the goal is greater community power
LaTosha Brown opened with a song. Speaking about voting rights one recent spring day in Selma, Alabama, the Black activist delivered the civil rights anthem “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize” in a voice showcasing her background as a jazz singer. She told her audience, through music, that the fight for equal access to the ballot box was as urgent as ever. The song drew cheers from a few dozen listeners, young and old, who had gathered before the brown-bricked African Methodist Episcopal church in a city known for its poverty as much as for its troubled racial past. For Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, the song served to introduce a question. “Close your eyes,” she said. “What would America look like without racism?” “How will we ever create what we’re not even envisioning? There was nothing that was brought into the real world that was not first envisioned.” A year after the police killing of George Floyd galvanized public attention to racial injustices, amid a barrage of restrictive voting laws being passed by state legislatures, Black Voters Matter is redoubling its march toward its North Star: increasing the political power of Black communities. Like many groups that serve predominantly Black communities, the organization was flooded with donations after Floyd’s death. A year later, the impact is visible: The group says it gave $10 million to 600 community-based groups in 15 states, mostly in the South, who, among other things, registered voters, held phone banks, sent millions of text messages, and canvassed communities reminding people to vote. Those efforts are widely credited with helping fuel Black voter turnout in Georgia, which, in part, led to Democrats scoring victories in the presidential and U.S. Senate races that gave them control of both houses of Congress and helped President Joe Biden enact his legislative agenda. Now, in the face of new restrictions on voting in areas heavily populated by people of color, new challenges are emerging. Brown, the co-founder of Black Voters Matter, estimates that Black Voters Matter, which received more than $30 million in donations last year, has about 90,000 unique donors. Most of its donations were small gifts from ordinary Americans. The group’s operations are run through two channels. One is the Black Voters Matters Fund, a social welfare organization that can engage in political activity, like lobbying. The other is the Black Voters Matters Capacity Building Institute, a nonprofit that funds voter education, registrations, and other programs to expand access to voting. (Contributions to the Capacity Building Institute are tax-deductible; donations to the Fund are not). After the racial justice protests, most of the donations flowed into the Capacity Building Institute, which from June 2020 to the end of last year received $18 million — a 414% jump from the sum it collected in 2019, according to Alexis Buchanan Thomas, Black Voters Matter’s development director, though the increase was driven in part by the 2020 elections. Brown says $3 million earmarked for advocacy work was distributed to several dozen community-based groups. An additional $7 million was given to help local organizations run their own operations and conduct voter engagement work, including voter registrations. About $6 million was also used to support Black Voters Matter’s own get-out-the-vote activities and provide local organizations with vans for transportation, graphics support, and radio advertising, among other needs. The main goal for Black Voters Matter, Brown says, has been to strengthen these organizations for the long run. The roots of Black Voters Matter date to 2016, borne of the painful frustration Brown says she and the organization’s other co-founder, Cliff Albright, felt about the “nationalist, racist rhetoric” of former President Donald Trump and a “national discourse that didn’t include Black folks.” In philanthropy circles, Black Voters Matter is what’s called an intermediary — an organization that donors can turn to when they want to fund nonprofits but lack the expertise or connections to do so directly. “The South is a region that is growing tremendously and shifting tremendously. But it’s also, unfortunately, a hotbed for regressive innovation, such as efforts restricting voting rights,” said Jerry Maldonado, the director of the Cities and States program at the Ford Foundation, which, in 2020, donated $1.8 million to the nonprofit. “The South is a region that is growing tremendously and shifting tremendously. But it’s also, unfortunately, a hotbed for regressive innovation, such as efforts restricting voting rights.” Many restrictive voting laws have been passed in Southern states since a 2013 Supreme Court ruling threw out a provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The provision had required officials in jurisdictions with a history of discriminatory practices to receive federal approval before making changes to the voting process. This year, Republican lawmakers in Georgia, Florida, and other states have passed new voting restrictions based largely on unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud by Trump and his allies. Critics argue the new laws mainly serve to suppress minority votes. One Southern state that will always be special to Brown is Alabama. It’s where her grandmother, whom she calls her “soulmate,” was barred from voting for most of her life under Jim Crow laws. And, it’s where she lost a close Democratic primary race in 1998 for a seat on the Alabama State Board of Education by about 200 votes, even though a sheriff found 800 uncounted votes in a safe minutes after her loss was certified. For Brown and Albright, the focus of the work is not only on presidential and state-wide elections but also on local races that often have a more direct impact on communities. This raises concern about the lack of consistency they see in donations to Black Voters Matter. “As we got further and further away from the protest, a lot of organizations, including us, saw those donations going down on a daily basis,” said Albright. “We understand that any given month or any given year, the funding world, or individual donors, might be looking for the next shiny thing. We know that we
How black women are organizing to energize voters this fall
Meeting on the campus of Jackson State University on a recent Friday afternoon, dozens of black women came together to strategize about the upcoming midterm elections, opening the gathering with a freedom song. “The revolution done signed my name,” they moaned, invoking the names of the ancestors whose strength has willed them to persevere: Harriet Tubman. Shirley Chisholm. Aretha Franklin. Two were like them, daughters of Mississippi: Ella Jo Baker. Fannie Lou Hamer. “All of us who are in the room right now are midwives for transformation,” said Rukia Lumumba, daughter of the late Jackson Mayor Chokwe Lumumba, and co-founder of the Electoral Justice Project. The impact of such targeted work is evident. Black women went to the polls in record numbers last December to elect Doug Jones as the first Democratic senator from Alabama in 25 years. As of this week, 39 black women are nominees for the U.S. House in the November midterms, including 22 women who aren’t incumbents. The meeting soon shifted to strategy as the women plotted how to harness the energy of black female voters this fall. Scenes like these are playing out across the country as black women convene at schools, churches and homes to plan how to make sure that black voters — particularly women — are aware of the upcoming elections, registered and planning to vote and that their family members will do the same. It’s all part of an effort to reshape the politics of the Trump era when many black voters feel threatened by the country’s increasingly racially polarized climate, with concerns ranging from access to the ballot box to the president’s hostility to protesting NFL players and the violent demonstrations last summer in Charlottesville, Virginia. In California, volunteers spent last weekend working at phone banks and texting for Ayanna Pressley, whose upset victory Tuesday put her on track to become Massachusetts’ first black female congresswoman. Others have started political action committees to provide financial resources to candidates such as Stacey Abrams, the Democratic nominee for governor in Georgia. If she wins in November, Abrams would become the first black female governor elected to lead a U.S. state. The Mississippi gathering was part of a stop on a tour across the Deep South organized by LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund, which aims to increase political power in black communities. Brown said the time is now for black women to lead again. She pointed to incidents like the attempt to close a majority of polling places in Randolph County, Georgia, last month, as proof of the need for the kind of continued vigilance black women have long provided. “This is what we do,” she said. “We want to take it to another level. We see what’s happening in this country. . We know how to fight, we know how to win, we know how to transform, we know how to build power. We have everything we need.” Headed into November, black female organizers are hoping to elect more African-Americans to power and not simply be a reliable voting block for white Democrats. In Alabama, “black women were looked to, to bail out Democrats and the state from a very problematic candidate,” said Glynda Carr, co-founder of Higher Heights for America, which focuses on electing black women and galvanizing them as voters. “Alabama was this tipping point around black women’s leadership, when we woke up to our Twitter feed going crazy. The broader community recognized black women are the building blocks to a winning coalition.” Rhonda Briggins has long worked in politics but never considered herself “a money person” until this year. Briggins co-founded R.O.S.E.-PAC, short for Raising Our Sisters’ Electability, and started the Sisters Supporting Sisters campaign this summer, with the goal of getting 100 women at a time to donate $100 each. Her pitch is simple: When black women go to the hair salon, she asks them to talk to other women about the midterms and about the importance of voting. Along the Black Voters Matter Fund tour, Briggins told a crowd of black women organizers in Stockbridge, Georgia, “This is not a time for us to play.” “So many times we have good sisters on the ballot and they don’t have the resources,” she said. “We’ve come together . we need people to educate everyone. We’re just trying to find grassroots ways to organize African-American women. We have been always behind the scenes.” Fallon McClure, who was sitting in the audience, agreed. “For the longest time, there’s been a lot of white-led organizations, and there’d be a sprinkling of women of color, but now it’s starting to be women of color-led organizations,” said McClure, state director for Spread the Vote, started by a black woman, which is working in states with voter ID laws to get free identification cards. “Even in organizations that are still white-led, we’re seeing their whole organizing crew is starting to be black women and other women of color,” she continued. “They’ve been doing the work for a long time but weren’t necessarily getting the credit, or they had a regular, full-time job, and they were just kind of doing the work on the side because they cared about their community and wanted to make a difference, but now they’re getting the recognition for it.” Black women are also collaborating across states and across the country to maximize their efforts. Many have worked together on previous campaigns or on other grassroots projects in black communities, bringing a familiarity to the work they now share. As the Black Voters Matter Fund tour rolled through Mississippi, Kenya Collins and Cassandra Overton Welchlin chatted easily in their seats, each tooting the other’s horn and finishing the other’s sentences. Because there are so few black women on the ground, Collins explained, they have no choice but to stick together. “In Mississippi, black women have always been about community,” said Overton Welchlin, co-convener of the Mississippi Black Women’s Roundtable. “If we can shift the power
