LaTosha Brown Has a Plan for the South (and Democracy)
61 years after the Voting Rights Act, the Supreme Court gutted it. Watch my latest episode on the coordinated fight forcing red states to back down and why we're the architects of what comes next.
A century of struggle reached a bridge in Selma. The 15th Amendment promised that no man could be denied the right to vote because of their race, but that promise was never really enforced. Black men were taxed, tested and terrorized away from the ballot. So they marched. And on that bridge in 1965, law enforcement beat them for it in front of the whole country. But their sacrifice forced this nation to pass the Voting Rights Act 61 years ago this week — the law that finally guaranteed that promise. This spring, the Supreme Court finished tearing it down. It was a demolition decades in the making.
First, in 2013, the Court struck down the VRA’s preclearance rule in Shelby County. This freed the worst-offending states from having to get federal sign-off before changing their voting rules. Then came the second blow. By a 6-3 majority, the Supreme Court gutted Section 2 of the VRA in April. This was the last provision standing between Black voters and Republicans who’d rather write them out of power than compete for their votes. Florida immediately jumped on the opportunity to change its congressional maps. So did Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Georgia.
That’s why I wanted to speak to my dear friend and civil rights leader LaTosha Brown.
LaTosha is the co-founder of Black Voters Matter and one of the most inspiring and relentless people I know. She grew up in Selma, raised by grandparents who were denied the right to vote most of their lives. So the law being dismantled right now is the same one her hometown bled for. Under her leadership, Black Voters Matter has reinvested close to $60 million into more than 800 Black-led groups doing the year-round work of building power on the ground.
But even for someone who’s built this much, I had to ask: how do you keep going when the highest court in the country has just erased the very thing your family fought for? Her answer is to not get stuck in grief. In an essay she wrote after the ruling, We Are the Architects Now, she argues “The Voting Rights Act is dead. We cannot organize around an instrument that no longer exists.” So her framework is the three B’s: Block, Build, Believe. Block the consolidation of power in every election. Build what comes next instead of clinging to what failed us. And believe the country we deserve is still possible because you and I are the “founders of the next 250 years.”
And here’s the part I think most people need to hear — gutting the VRA doesn’t just affect Black voters. Racializing an issue is the oldest trick in the book. As LaTosha puts it, when the powerful want to strip people of their rights or resources, they make it about race. They convince white Americans this other group is the threat while the people actually rigging the system get away with it. So this isn’t a Black problem for Black organizers to solve. LaTosha says we’re interdependent. Her fate is tied to yours. How this government is allowed to treat one group is the precedent for how it treats everyone. No one is free until we’re all free.
But there’s one thing giving LaTosha and I real hope. When the Callais decision came down, red states moved in calculated coordination. So LaTosha and her partners answered in coordination. In six days, they organized 228 organizations and thousands of people from across the nation. They gathered in Selma and Montgomery, not as a protest, she’s careful to say, but as a call to action. And it worked.
“The same day of that march where over 6,000 people came out, the session [to redraw Mississippi’s maps] was canceled. The same thing happened in Georgia… And we saw the same thing in Alabama. So it’s important we understand that resistance slows the train down,” she told me.
LaTosha doesn’t even frame this as saving democracy — at least not the way we usually mean it. We’ve made democracy the finish line when it was only ever meant to be the vehicle. The destination is our humanity. A country actually organized around people, where any institution that works against that no longer earns the right to exist. Which means we don’t get to wait for the courts or the parties to save us. They won’t. But as she reminds me, nothing they want to take can be taken without our participation. Our compliance. Our capitulation. And LaTosha’s whole life is proof of what refusing to give in looks like.
“When I look at 250 years of my family line, more of us were in bondage than were free. And so here it is that I have the opportunity to have some semblance of freedom. I not only have to do the work for the generations ahead, but I’ve got to continue to work for all the people that sweat, that were whipped, that were dehumanized, that were mistreated. I have to do the work, lifting up their legacy as ancestors who sacrificed so that I could be here.”
Sixty-one years ago, people who refused to back down won the right to vote. Our job now is to hold on so the next generation can keep it.
Watch or listen to our incredibly moving conversation and please share your feedback with us in the comments.
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You should also follow LaTosha’s work at blackvotersmatterfund.org, find her Southern Black Girls campaign at southernblackgirls.org and plug into this summer’s organizing at freedomsummer.org.
All roads lead to the South. Let’s get to work.
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