As Goes the South

In October 2018 I pulled up to a community center in Jefferson County, Georgia to meet with a group of senior citizens and talk about the importance of voting. Many of them had heard of the Black Voters Matter bus—what we call the “Blackest Bus in America”—and they wanted to go outside and see it. So we wrapped up the program, went out to the bus and had an impromptu pep rally, singing and dancing to the music of James Brown and Al Green.

My new friends asked if they could ride the bus down the block to vote early as a group. After folks had hopped on and just as we were pulling away, staffers from the center stopped us. Someone had seen the “black” bus and called a local official, who told the center to unload the seniors immediately.

These were fully competent adults who wanted to go vote. The official had no legal right to stop our trip. Sadly, this is only one of countless examples of politicians choking the black vote through apparent fear and intimidation.

When people hear stories about Jefferson County and other places in the South, they assume these are staunchly Republican states and always will be. The truth is the South is the fastest-growing region in the country and is becoming more racially and politically diverse. The South has 10 of the 15 most rapidly expanding cities in the nation. This growth is driven primarily by young people, LGBTQ people and people of color. In 2018 and 2016, millennials and other younger generations outvoted baby boomers and other older cohorts. These young voters tend to identify as independents, but they also tend to support progressive policies and candidates.

In 2019 Democrats won total control of Virginia’s government—both chambers of the legislature and the governorship—for the first time in more than two decades. Kentucky elected a Democratic governor over a Republican incumbent who had modeled himself after Trump. And a Democratic governor won a second term in Louisiana. The South, even the Deep South, is not as red as many people believe it to be.

In 2018 we witnessed an increase in Democratic turnout in the heart of the Confederacy, including Georgia, Alabama, Texas and Mississippi. Part of the surge was inspired by younger, more dynamic candidates such as Stacey Abrams, Andrew Gillum and Beto O’Rourke. There is tremendous growth potential for progressives to win in the South, especially for candidates willing to expand the electorate and bring in new voters.

Demographics are changing, but demographics are not destiny. The biggest threat to building power and expanding democracy in the South is voter suppression. It comes in many forms, including the fear and intimidation we saw in Jefferson County, structural and policy barriers to voting, and misinformation to confuse voters and drive down their interest in turning out. On Election Day in 2018, for example, law enforcement in Jackson, Mississippi set up roadblocks near a polling site. In Crisp County, Georgia seven law-enforcement vehicles arrived to issue a parking ticket to a black city commissioner who had offered rides to the polls all day in a borrowed limousine.

Since Republicans can’t win on their ideas, they’ve taken to cheating by way of purging voters from the rolls, passing restrictive voter-ID laws, gerrymandering, shutting down polling locations and more. In 2018 election officials in Randolph County, Georgia tried to close down seven of the nine polling places in the predominantly black community. The county abandoned the plan only after an overwhelming public outcry and national media attention.

Some 36 states have voter-ID laws that require people to possess specific forms of identification in order to vote. In Texas a gun license is an acceptable document, but a student ID is not. Voter-ID laws set up hurdles that hurt poor people, people of color, students and others who can’t afford the required documents or have other reasons for lacking identification. Nationwide, up to 25 percent of African American citizens of voting age don’t have government-issued photo IDs, compared with only eight percent of whites.

When all else fails, election officials simply kick voters off the rolls, erasing their right to vote as though they never existed. Nationwide, at least 17 million voters were purged from the rolls between 2016 and 2018, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. Georgia alone just booted about 300,000 voters under a new state provision that encourages purges when voters are “inactive.”

As if this weren’t enough, disinformation campaigns specifically targeted black voters in 2016 and may do so again in 2020. The Russian Internet Research Agency used Facebook ads, memes and fake websites to discourage black people from voting. On social media platforms, a U.S. Senate committee found, “no single group of Americans was targeted…more than African Americans.” These efforts were shockingly successful: In 2016, for the first time in 20 years, black voter turnout for a presidential election declined.

So how do we shift the South? First, we disrupt the culture of fear by creating hope. We need to empower progressive candidates and campaigns that will build a coalition of diverse voters and challenge structural barriers to voting. We should not look at the South as a region that’s deeply conservative but a region that’s severely underfunded, its people’s power underutilized.

We can build a more just America, and the South is ground zero for this transformation. Once we shift the power dynamics rooted in fear and divisiveness in the South, we will shift this nation. We believe that our work in the South will make the difference.

We are doing the work. Ultimately we will win.

LaTosha Brown is co-founder of Black Voters Matter and the Southern Black Girls and Women’s Consortium.