by David Ford
(All “From The Frontlines Of COVID” articles are summaries based on Zoom calls between Airlift and group leaders. Full audio is available upon request from donors.)
This post has been updated since the June Primary — see below.
“There are protests in the streets and where there’s protest, there’s power!” So says the powerhouse Co-Founder of Black Voters Matter (BVM), LaTosha Brown. She was addressing a recent South Carolina Virtual Town Hall.
At an earlier press conference, she said:
“Today we can say, this is it. We have seen their colors. We are seeing folks saying right now, from the highest offices in our country, that our lives don’t matter. That we are disposable. And we are saying no!”
Airlift team members recently caught up with the other co-founder of BVM, Cliff Albright, and got an update on how his organization is trying to turn today’s angry protest into tomorrow’s election victory—and doing it in the middle of a pandemic.
First, BVM is getting reliable COVID-19 information to the Black community. This is a critical service. The irresponsible nonsense that has been coming out of the mouth of Trump and his allies (such as the Governor of Georgia), combined with America’s history of health services to black communities (which has ranged from neglectful to, in the case of the infamous Tuskegee experiments, diabolical), created a need for trustworthy health information that groups like BVM provide. At a recent press conference, BVM included Dr. Camara Jones, 2019-2020 Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Dr. Jones provided a clear and sensible explanation of the public health steps that need to be put in place. She also laid out the political and economic injustices that resulted in Black people and Native Americans being the communities in the U.S. hardest hit by the pandemic. “Our people are not disposable!” Dr. Jones emphasized.
The second element of the BVM strategy, Cliff Albright told us, is reaching out to voters by phone and text. For example, they created a texting service called Keep Albany Safe that brings that kind of reliable health information to one of the hardest hit counties in the U.S. BVM team members call voters to connect them to services that will help in the concomitant financial crisis. And sometimes they just call folks and ask them how they are doing.
These acts of neighborliness are a critical part of how BVM, and other grassroots organizations that Airlift supports, create genuine trust amongst their communities. They fully understand the concerns of the people they then mobilize into an effective voting force.
Cliff Albright now sees a real change in voters’ attitudes: “Our notion of what is possible at a policy level has been shattered!” He sees voters angry, distracted and overwhelmed, yet motivated by the obvious lack of leadership in the current crises. According to Albright, their biggest job still is “just letting [voters] know they matter and they are not crazy.” Through BVM’s coordination and effort to create a reliable community network, they aim to get voters in a healthy mental headspace “so that our minds will even let us focus on something like the election.”
BVM has always brought to its efforts a “love and joy culture.” They used to do bus tours, but since the pandemic, they’ve created a video of the bus arriving to keep that spirit alive. And they have DJs open and close their public Zoom town halls.
Meanwhile at the policy level, BVM is confronting the irresponsible efforts on the part of regional governors to reopen. They joined the ACLU in a lawsuit that will make Georgia’s new vote-by-mail law fair and easy. There’s “never a dull moment in the South,” says Albright.
LaTosha Brown put it this way:
“We know that with regressive policies they start testing it here in the South and then it starts spreading all over the country. But as my grandmother used to say, ‘What the devil meant for harm, God will use it for your good.’”
We aren’t giving up, we aren’t going back. Can’t stop, won’t stop!
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UPDATE: Georgia had a primary on June 9th and conditions of voting in many predominantly black neighborhoods were terrible. Polling places opened hours late and closed early despite court orders to extend polling hours. Most didn’t even have power cords or keys to turn on voting machines. The Republican Secretary of State was working out of the usual playbook: the below-the-radar Jim Crow tactics a.k.a. voter suppression. And who’s on the front lines bringing voters masks, water bottles, moral support? BVM, every time.