Ben Gray/AP Photo
Supporters at a rally in Columbus, Georgia, where Vice President–elect Kamala Harris campaigned for Democratic U.S. Senate challengers Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, December 21, 2020
MACON, GEORGIA – Sheknita Davis wants her hometown to be a place where people can shape their own destinies. The obstacles are real but not insurmountable.
For Davis, bringing that world to life means pouring everything into the People’s Advocacy Group, a nonprofit she directs dedicated to empowering working-class communities with political, cultural, and civic tools to improve their lives. It also means partnering with organizations like Black Voters Matter, which works to both juice Black voter turnout and build lasting political power in Black communities long after elections are over, by supporting local organizers like Davis.
Located near the state’s geographical center, Macon is known as “The Heart of Georgia.” It has also been a primary target for decades of social and economic policy designed to pirate Black communities.
Davis points out the scars of this theft, drawing a straight line from the region’s history of economic apartheid and racial segregation to the pain so many continue to live through. Echoing findings from the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, Davis calls Macon the “most redlined community in the nation,” a process of market- and state-engineered housing discrimination that built an invisible moat around Black neighborhoods, making it nearly impossible for residents to escape and buy homes elsewhere. Redlining blocked Black America from joining whites along the nation’s signature path for wealth creation: homeownership.
The consequences are not hard to see. Bibb County, where Macon sits, is 55.8 percent African American, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. One in four Macon residents live in poverty, according to the NCRC, and “that rate is 2.5 times higher among Black residents.”
I met Davis in the expansive lot of Macon’s Harriet Tubman Museum, the launch point for the Black Voters Matter bus tour. Aimed at swelling Black turnout for Georgia’s January 5 Senate runoff elections, the tour is snaking through many of the state’s working-class Black corners, pairing with local organizers like Davis along the way. During the runoff, BVM has spread $1.5 million across its Georgia partners and is on track to send 15 million texts, co-founder and executive director Cliff Albright tells me.
Davis sees the election, on which the Biden administration’s ability to pass any legislation of consequence hangs, as a tool for keeping the window of possibility cracked open on things like more robust pandemic relief and rural hospital funding, a big issue in Macon, as more and more hospitals close their doors for good while people who desperately need them fend for themselves.
So, Davis says, they’ve been “talking to low-propensity voters one-on-one in the neighborhoods” to “let them know that you have to come back out in January.”
But that isn’t all. Black Voters Matter has a pair of tightly braided goals, and raising Black electoral punching power is just the first. The second is more ambitious: devoting real time and resources to “long-term power-building” in the communities they’ve partnered with. Without it, it’s almost impossible to sustain the kind of constant activism that fuels progress in this country.
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In Savannah, for instance, I met Jerome Irwin Sr., president of the A. Philip Randolph Institute and vice president of the Savannah Regional Central Labor Council. He describes the institute as “a labor-based organization” that bridges the gap between the inseparable fates of “labor and the community.” They’ve partnered with BVM to register thousands of people, “help get the vote out,” and boost their mission to build working-class power in a region where wages, benefits, and workplace safety have all suffered for one reason: the concentration of power and wealth in private hands and the historically unmatched inequality it produces. Elections alone won’t cut it. We need to be a “champion for those things” year-round, Irwin tells me.
“We weren’t enslaved for two months out the year,” BVM’s Albright explains. “That was an every day, 365 system, right? If you’re not willing to invest at least that much energy to undo it, then you’re not really serious.”
Davis highlights housing as a critical arena for this kind of dogged, round-the-clock attention. “We’ve had a lot of our communities become gentrified,” Davis says. Before demolishing the city’s New Deal–era public housing for new developments, the city “moved everyone out” without offering them “the opportunity to move back into their neighborhood.” The result, that a once largely working-class Black community is now white, strips gentrification of its academic elegance: There are still places where Black people do not have the freedom to choose where they live. Davis uses the example to point out the unbreakable link between structural racism and economics, and explains that there is no shortcut to staying “engaged between” every election in a “365 effort.”
From this angle, voting does not possess Excalibur-like powers to vanquish evil, because elections are not the actual fight.
From this angle, voting does not possess Excalibur-like powers to vanquish evil, because elections are not the actual fight. Elections are merely one tool you can use to make the terrain more favorable for the actual fights. After all, it was popular pressure brought about by the abolitionist, women’s, labor, and civil rights movements that forced this country to be better than it showed itself to be.
This holds true for BVM. For at least half a century, mainstream politics has followed a simple and brutal political math: Black voters have no way out of their second-tier status, and can therefore be tossed aside when inconvenient. After all, where else are they going to go?
As Paul Frymer writes in his 1999 classic Uneasy Alliances, the Democratic Party reasoned that “public appeals to Black voters will produce national electoral defeats” by alienating “Southern, working, and middle-class whites.” Their strategy? To become a Republican knockoff brand, worshiping the free market’s supernatural power and echoing right-wing gibberish about the cultural breakdown of Black and poor people. The master of this strategy, Bill Clinton, was also the last Democrat to win Georgia before this year. That was in 1992. And as Nathan Robinson details in Superpredator: Bill Clinton’s Use and Abuse of Black America, Clinton thanked Black communities’ overwhelming support for him by throwing more people in cages and machine-gunning the social safety net, pushing millions into extreme poverty.
BVM knows this history. And importantly, they know that only making a splash during elections, while leaving the waters undisturbed once they’re over, is a gift to the status quo. “You can’t change a community or a state by only being involved” during election season, Albright says.
“We got a repertoire of weapons,” Davis tells me, of which voting is only one. “Even after the runoff election, we’re going to stay engaged with our communities.” You won’t only “see the People’s Advocacy Group in your neighborhood when I need you to do something.”
Some of those conversations are already unfolding. In order to conquer people’s justified cynicism, Davis says, voter-shaming must be conquered with it. “Telling me that ‘your ancestors died for you to have the right,’ or ‘everybody voted in this community except for you’ is not going to make me want” to vote, she notes. “That’s the wrong approach. It’s better to find out what type of issues or problems you are having,” and “connect that” to its political source. This is the key: For BVM and its partners, overcoming the public’s political nausea requires creating a path to the kind of popular movements that can address their issues in a way no election can.
“At the end of the day,” Albright adds, “I’ve never heard somebody who was skeptical about voting” give “a reason that I didn’t understand.” By keeping it real about his own frustrations, Albright knows that a doorway opens up. “What is it that that person would want to see in their community? What if we had the power to get it done?”
