Driven by South’s Past, Black Women Seek Votes and a New Future

AMERICUS, Ga. — Lorena Barnum Sabbs thought the past really was past. Born 67 years ago in a segregated hospital, she was arrested when she was 11 for trying to integrate the local movie theater and locked in a stockade for several days without beds, working toilets or running water. Later, as one of the first black girls to attend the formerly whites-only high school, she ventured to the bathroom only in groups for fear of attacks.

“I was the recipient of that hate and disrespect, and I thought, I have finally outlived it,” she said. “I was wrong.”

Nearly two years after Donald Trump’s election, with racial divisions increasingly in public view and voting rights under regular attack, Sabbs is one of a small army of African-American women across the South using networks originally forged in segregation to muster turnout for Democratic candidates in the November elections. They are mobilizing in conservative states and districts, hoping to pull off upsets like Doug Jones’ stunning Senate victory last year in Alabama, where 98 percent of black women voted for him and proved a critical base of support.

In Columbus, Georgia, women sit in the fellowship hall of the Emmanuel Christian Community Church, clipboards at the ready to register voters. In Panama City, Florida, sorority sisters park themselves at a street corner across from an imperiled elementary school, holding signs reminding people to vote. And in Greenville, Mississippi, the mayor of a nearby town founded by sharecroppers says she will not give up on coaxing young people to the polls, even as they complain their votes don’t matter.

As both political parties prepare for what many see as the most consequential midterm elections in memory, black women’s votes will be critical. Exit polls consistently indicate they are the single most loyal Democratic voting bloc.

It was Jones’ long shot victory in Alabama that brought national attention to the tremendous political influence these women can wield through the bedrock institutions of black life, from churches to historically black universities, sororities and beauty parlors. Once relegated to supporting roles, many are now major players, both in getting out the vote and in running for office in record numbers.

“When you invest in a black woman, she brings her house, her block, her church and her story,” said Glynda C. Carr, co-founder of Higher Heights, one of the many organizations that have sprung up to foster black women’s political leadership. “I use my mother as an example — until the day she died, she organized our little micro-precinct. She drove me to city hall to register when I was 18. Black women have been doing this since Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth.”

But whether black women can replicate their success in Jones’ Senate race is far from certain. No Republican candidate this fall is as vulnerable as his opponent in Alabama, Roy Moore, the conservative former judge who was accused of preying on teenage girls. And the South still remains solidly Republican: Trump easily won every state in 2016 except Virginia, and Republicans overwhelmingly control most levers of power throughout the region.

There are other hurdles. African Americans make up a third at most of the electorate in much of the region. Candidates vying to make history as the first black woman governor in the nation (Stacey Abrams of Georgia), Florida’s first black governor (Andrew Gillum) and Mississippi’s first black senator since Reconstruction (Mike Espy) still need white votes to win.

There is the sense of futility and alienation that has depressed black turnout. Organizers hear from reluctant voters about black men being killed by police, health insurance out of reach, school budgets cut and local economic development thwarted, even after the election of a black president. While black women’s turnout is consistently among the highest of all demographic groups, higher than black men’s, it dropped in 2016.

And there is the daunting and sometimes confusing landscape of voting restrictions — picture IDs, shorter voting hours, voter purges, attempts to close polling places and criminal prosecutions of ineligible voters that have erased some blacks from the voting rolls, raised barriers to voting that could depress black turnout and soured others from voting at all.

Interviews with more than 50 black women, encountered during a recent voter mobilization bus tour across Georgia, Florida and Mississippi, offered echoes of the South’s past and glimpses of its future. These are some of their stories.

LaTosha Brown lifted her voice and sang: “I woke up this morning with my mind set on freedom.”

In the Mississippi Delta, home to some of the country’s poorest concentrations of rural black communities, Brown asked a room of women what local issues could help convince people that their votes would bring change. Eulah Peterson, mayor of nearby Mound Bayou, told of losing a battle to save a storied black high school — decades after Fannie Lou Hamer, the civil rights leader, helped to found the rural development organization in Greenville where they met.

That history and this place resonated for her, Brown told them, her braids cascading down her back. She grew up in Selma, Alabama, but visited her grandmother over the summers in Summit, Mississippi. “Every Sunday she made sure her grandbaby came to church and sang,” she said. “I am so moved. I know where I am.”

As the bus crisscrossed the South, similar gatherings began with a spiritual and ended with a prayer, the rhythms echoing the call and response of church services. From Cuthbert, Georgia, where a spirited meeting at the Stone House restaurant drew activists who beat back an attempt to close polling places, to Gifford, Florida, where people at a barbecue sported “I Voted” stickers on primary day, Brown worked to rouse crowds of volunteers — mostly women, but with men among them.

In Panama City, Florida, black drivers honked upon seeing the bus, which was plastered with pictures of black fists raised in the power salute. Some white drivers looked stonily ahead. And then there was Montgomery, Alabama, where the bus’ front window was shattered. Brown believes something was hurled at the glass.

Many of the women are motivated by what they see as Trump’s attempt to turn back the clock. But Brown says that alone will not drive people to the polls; they also want action on issues that touch their lives.

She is a co-founder of Black Voters Matter Fund, which aims both to motivate black voters and help them wield local power. Her work has convinced her that delivering on issues and building local relationships not only persuades black voters to cast ballots, but also to become regular voters.

“Folks have been so used to what I call ‘round the Negroes up,'” Brown said. “Wait until the last minute, drop a couple of dollars and throw some ads on the TV or radio and say, ‘It’s a Democrat.’ That’s not been working for us. We’re trying to stir up the spirits of the folks who’ve been turned off this damn process.”

In 45 Congressional districts, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is spending what it described as a record midterm sum of $25 million specifically earmarked for nonwhite voters, with black women a major target of focus groups, digital, radio and mail advertising, and customized social media posts and text messages, officials said.

But the work remains grueling, and sometimes halting. Brown’s co-founder, Cliff Albright, struck out with two young men in Florida who said they had no intention of voting. At Edward Waters College in Jacksonville and in front of a small house in Titusville, he tried to make a connection, asking one what kinds of local changes he wanted to see, another if he was worried about getting shot. But they offered him only polite smiles and no commitments.

Kewyata Dice kept meaning to vote again, but life got in the way. She cast her ballot for President Barack Obama in 2012, but sat out the 2014 and 2016 elections, much to her father’s dismay. Dice, a soft-spoken 29-year-old nursing assistant living in rural DeSoto, Georgia, had to support two children, now 11 and 5, while working at a series of nursing homes and hospitals.

Her address changed, and under Georgia’s strict voting laws, she had to re-register and figure out where her new polling place was. In Georgia, polls close at 7 p.m., often a challenge for parents who need child care or struggle to pick children up after work.

“It really always looked as if my vote didn’t matter, being a single mom of two kids, struggling most of my life, losing a parent at a young age,” she said, explaining that her mother died when she was 14. “My state is really a Republican state, and I felt like the Democratic vote didn’t matter.” While she backed Hillary Clinton for president, when it came to voting, she said, “I just didn’t even make time to do it.”

But her father, a truck driver who is also active in the local NAACP, kept pushing her. Americus, where she works at a hospital, has a long history of civil rights protests, and Dr. Martin Luther King was jailed there. Her father is considering running for the county’s school board — one that was sued for drawing district boundaries that prevented blacks from gaining a board majority.

“Now I’ll be able to vote for Miss Stacey,” she said of the Democratic candidate for governor. “Some of the dream is coming alive that Dr. Martin Luther King had. I really would love to see a powerful black woman in Georgia.'’

She heard that a voting group was going to visit Americus and ventured out on a day off. The black-wrapped bus carrying Brown and the other organizers in the parking lot caught her eye, along with a small cluster of young men and women who gaped at its vivid, black empowerment design. She brought a friend who would be voting for the first time.

It turned out to be easy to register. Shy but smiling as she handed in her completed form, Dice had to rush back home so she could meet her children at the school bus stop, fix them dinner, read to them, and put them to bed.

She says she intends to vote in November — and she’s promised to reach out to five more of her friends to try to coax them to the polls.

“I feel like I should get out and make my vote matter,” she said. “Make myself matter.”

The eternal flame was burning brightly on the campus of Florida A&M University. A DJ was spinning “Fight the Power.” Students line danced in fluid formation on the lawn. The night before Gillum’s come-from-behind primary victory in late August, Kayla and Kiana Blaine put on their bright blue Gillum T-shirts. They cheered him on when he spoke to his alma mater, recalling his days of leading student marches and urging them to honor a tradition of political activism at this historically black university.

FAMU, as everyone calls it, is a Blaine family tradition: the sisters’ parents and grandparents are graduates, and Kayla, a freshman, followed Kiana, a junior, from their home in Tampa to the campus in Tallahassee. Campuses like these have long nurtured black leaders, but there is less of a track record for instilling students with a desire to vote.

Yet in the era of Black Lives Matter, there’s a new motivation to cast a ballot. Fueling the Blaine sisters’ determination to bring classmates to the polls and elect Gillum is a protectiveness and fear about the fate of black men. The Democratic primary allowed the sisters to choose between two firsts for governor — the first woman in Gwen Graham, or the first black man. For Kayla and Kiana, it was no contest.

“I stand behind Andrew Gillum when he’s on the job to stand behind our black men,” Kayla said, applauding his opposition to Florida’s Stand Your Ground law allowing shootings in self-defense, a flash point after George Zimmerman was acquitted of killing Trayvon Martin in 2012. There are other urgent reasons to turn out. Both sisters back (as Gillum does) Amendment 4 to the state’s constitution, which would restore voting rights to most felons who serve their terms. Florida is one of four states that permanently bans felons from voting. “They’ve served their time,” Kiana said. “Their voices could make a huge difference.”

The very issue that has alienated many young black people — a belief that the criminal justice system is stacked against black men — can also be used to persuade them to vote, said DeJuana Thompson, a veteran of the Alabama Senate effort who founded the advocacy group Woke Vote to reach black millennials. She said she tells them, “You can do something to change what is happening to you and your friends. Part of that is voting, part of that is protest.”

So the Blaines plastered the dorms with posters listing Gillum’s policies, and say they will continue to be active on social media to recruit their fellow students. They posted pictures of themselves voting — Kayla’s ballot for Gillum was the first she has cast.

Still, sometimes getting out each vote can feel like a personal challenge. “Two of the boys I’m really close with, we got them to go vote,” Kayla said. “They didn’t much care, they just cared that I wanted them to vote. If you don’t care, at least do it for me.”

For Sabbs, the activist who grew up in segregated Americus, marshaling the vote is a family legacy. It’s something she remembers most vividly being taught by her grandmother, who took her to civil rights protests when she was 8 years old. The fifth-generation family funeral home Sabbs now runs in Americus has offered rides to the polls for decades.

Sabbs added a voter registration station to the funeral home, and describes her approach when people walk in: “Baby, have you registered to vote? It’s really easy; we can do it right here.” She hands out absentee ballot forms and offers free notary services — often crucial if people have to justify why they can’t vote in person or prove their address given Georgia’s strict voter registration laws.

Her college sorority is another basis for political action: She belongs to Delta Sigma Theta, one of the “Divine Nine” black sororities known for social activism (Shirley Chisholm and Barbara Jordan were among many famous alumnae). She attends their monthly meetings, where sorority sisters are urged to work on voter education and persuasion. When she was 11, Sabbs joined another band of women, girls protesting segregated seating in 1963 at the Martin Theater. She remembers “walking up the steps, three, four floors to watch movies in the balcony of that movie theater, and you never saw anything nastier.” Refusing to disperse, about 30 girls were arrested and transferred an hour away to be locked in the Leesburg Stockade. Sleeping on cement floors, with only an intermittent dripping shower, the girls were threatened and even had a snake thrown into their cells.

Sabbs cannot remember whether she was there for four or five days, but some of the girls were jailed for as long as 45 days. Not until a local dogcatcher spread the word did their parents even know where their children were — and not until the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee got a photographer to record their plight did pressure mount for their release.

Sabbs does not dwell on that time, but she evoked it briefly in a voting pep talk at a barbershop across from the parking lot where the theater once stood.

“When you sit home and you don’t do what is your privilege but also your responsibility — a whole lot of folks did a lot of suffering to get you to that point,” she said.

She understands that shaming tactics can backfire, and invoking the past alone is not enough to prod people — especially younger voters — to the polls. Turnout efforts fell short in 2016. They clearly could in 2018 as well.

“There’s a ton of pressure on black-led, women-led organizations,” said Nse Ufot, executive director of the New Georgia Project, founded by Abrams to register a newly diverse electorate. “If for some reason we don’t pull off this blue wave in November, people will say these organizations failed.”

Whatever the outcome, Sabbs traces a profound shift in the way many black women see themselves.

“Black women have tried to balance over the years the sensitivity in the black community that black men are not respected or that we have to somehow hide our light under a bushel in order not to offend,” she said. “And you know what, we’re just over it.”