‘We’ve been electrified’: after success in Georgia, Black organizers look to transform the south

Ever since the runoff elections in Georgia, people have been talking.

They’ve been talking about how turnout among Black voters surged in December and January, propelling two Democrats to stunning victories in the state, long seen as a Republican stronghold. And how those same voters had helped Joe Biden become the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry the state in nearly 30 years.

They’ve also been talking about how it was a success made possible by years of voter mobilization led by Black organizers, including many groups led by Black women.

And this success is sending ripples in neighboring states across the US south. Since the election, Black women who helped organize the transformation in Georgia have been fielding calls from their counterparts in other states, asking them to come speak to organizers and share strategies for replicating it.

Related: Georgia Republicans in sweeping new effort to make it harder to vote

“Everybody in the south that I talk to is talking about what happened in Georgia,” said Oleta Fitzgerald, a Mississippi organizer who runs the Southern Black Women’s Rural Initiative, which targets barriers faced by southern Black women. “It’s like we’ve been electrified.”

Mobilizing voters in the south is not easy, Fitzgerald and other organizers said. Many southern states, including Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and Texas, make it difficult to cast a ballot with strict voter ID laws and draconian restrictions on voting by mail.

White Republicans hold the levers of power in state houses and governor’s mansions. And gerrymandered electoral districts have helped entrench Republican power and Jim Crow-era laws disenfranchising people with felony convictions leave swaths of the Black voting population unable to vote.

“Georgia couldn’t carry a torch to the racism in Alabama,” said Sheila Tyson, a Democratic county commissioner in Birmingham.

Each state also has its unique politics and geography. Mississippi, for example, has a sizable and growing non-white population, but does not have the same kind of growing urban areas that helped carry Democrats to victory in Georgia, Politico reported in January. Voting in the state has become racially polarized – White people overwhelmingly vote Republican while Black voters back Democrats – making it difficult to build a multiracial coalition to back a Democratic candidate. There has not been a Black official in statewide office in Mississippi in over 150 years.

Some learnings from Georgia, however, could spread elsewhere in the south. Over the last two decades, organizers in Georgia have built a strategy around investing in Black communities, even when there’s no election around the corner, signalling to voters that the goal is building their communities, not just helping a particular candidate win. When an election does come around, organizers are already deeply embedded and connected to the communities they want to turn out and vote.

This was one of the lessons Cassandra Wechlin, a co-convener of the Mississippi Black Women’s roundtable, took away from a recent discussion with Helen Butler, an organizer in Georgia. In speaking with Butler, Wechlin said she recognized a lot of similar work was already going on in her state.

“We didn’t really see that there were these differences. They just got to it quicker than we did … We didn’t have a Stacey Abrams,” Wechlin said. “But we can continue the organizing year round.”

And many of the women who helped transformed Georgia are already connected to organizers in other states through a national group called the Black Women’s Roundtable. They talk regularly to not only share strategy, but also offer encouragement when organizing seems quixotic.

“When you want to give up it’s like, ‘Oh my goodness, are we doing this in vain or do people really need it?’” said Salandra Benton, co-convener of the Florida Coalition on Black Civic Participation. “It’s become a sisterhood.”

Wechlin added that it was “motivating and invigorating” to see the organizers she had worked with for years finally succeed in Georgia. She can now use the success in Georgia as a concrete example to show Black voters in Mississippi the power of their vote. She already has plans to have Georgia organizers speak to activists in Mississippi this month.

“It really just reminded us of our power as Black women in the south and in Mississippi,” she said. “After so long of doing the grinding you wonder, ‘is it ever gonna be [possible]?’”

“It has meant so much to these Black women in these local communities,” Fitzgerald added. “It’s almost like metamorphosis. It’s almost like we can do something.”

Tom Bonier, the CEO of TargetSmart, a Democratic data firm, said there are states in the south that had a potential path to follow Georgia, but it’s difficult to predict.

“A decade ago, Georgia seemed like a bad investment for Democrats. Yet the combination of favorable demographic trends with organizing strength built over several years created an opportunity,” he said in an email. “Looking at most other southern states at this point, it would appear that they don’t have enough well-educated white voters, along with a critical mass of voters of color, to deliver Democratic victories. Yet investment and organizing, along with favorable national trends, could change that.”

Despite the success in Georgia, getting financial support for organizing could still be difficult. National groups and philanthropic funders often look at long-term investments to mobilize voters of color with skepticism, several organizers said.

“We have been on the ground educating people for well over 10 years, so the footprint is there,” said Tyson, who also leads the state’s Black women’s roundtable. “What we don’t have, is what Georgia had, is funding. That’s what’s stopping us.”

In 2017, Black women in Alabama helped propel Doug Jones, a Democrat, to an unlikely victory in a US Senate race. In November, Jones lost his seat by nearly 20 points. “We didn’t have the resources in 2020 that we had in 2017, nowhere close to it,” said Tyson, the Alabama county commissioner.

“We drive the Black vote,” said Melanie Campbell, who leads the national Black women’s roundtable. “We are the secret sauce. If you need the Black vote to win, you have to talk to Black women.”

Teresa Younger, the CEO of the Ms Foundation for women, noted that groups centered around women and girls of color in the south often are underfunded. The Georgia election, she hoped, would be a wake up call. In December, the Ms Foundation, which focuses on backing women-led movements, announced an effort to fund organizations led by women of color.

“I actually hope people don’t just go, ‘Wow, what happened in Georgia was great,’” she said. “What happened in Georgia was a plan, it was a commitment, and it recognized that change takes time. And that you have to build relationships and deepen those relationships.”

While there are signs of new political force in the south, the structural barriers are increasing. State Republicans are advancing measures that would make it harder to vote by mail in what seems to be an obvious reaction to the high record turnout among minority voters. There are at least 165 bills in state legislatures across the country to make it harder to vote, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

“These bills are coming up because people are watching. And they see what happened in Georgia and so they’re trying to do whatever they can to stop that from happening here,” said Wechlin, the organizer in Mississippi, where Republicans are advancing legislation that would make it easier to purge the voter rolls.

Even if it takes years to achieve, the Georgia election gave organizers a glimpse of what may be on the horizon.

“In southern states, in Mississippi, the minority are gonna become the majority,” Wechlin said. “It’s a matter of time and so we know it’s coming.”