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Inside the Democratic Party’s coordinated effort to turn out Black voters for the Nov. 7 election

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When U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn was elected in 1992, he became the first African American elected to Congress from South Carolina in nearly a century.

Clyburn, considered a Democratic kingmaker and one of the most prominent Black elected officials in the nation, visited Jackson last weekend to sound alarm bells that if Jackson pastors, metro voters and college students do not organize and participate in the Nov. 7 election, a history of inadequate representation could repeat itself in the Deep South.

“We’ve got to do what is necessary to make sure that our children and our grandchildren don’t live the past that our parents and grandparents lived because there are forces who wish to turn the clock back,” Clyburn told a room of Mississippi Democrats on Oct. 15.

The South Carolina congressman joined U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson and top Mississippi Democratic Party officials last weekend as part of one of the largest, most coordinated get-out-the-vote efforts from the state party in recent years.

The events Clyburn attended on Oct. 15-16 targeted predominantly Black churches, Democratic Party base voters and students at historically Black colleges.

He and state party officials visited several Jackson-area Black churches, historically anchors of progressive politics and activism, for weekend worship services, and they met separately with dozens of Black clergy members to discuss the importance of the Nov. 7 election. They visited Jackson State University and Tougaloo College, two historically Black universities, and Millsaps College to stress the importance of college students voting in elections.

The get-out-the-vote efforts from Democratic Party officials have continued into late October and have been focused across the state, not just in the Jackson metro.

This past weekend, state party leaders attended multiple events on the Gulf Coast, including a get-out-the-vote rally Sunday night at First Missionary Baptist Church Handsboro in Gulfport. The event, which organizers titled “Wake the Sleeping Giant,” was keynoted by Bishop William James Barber II, co-chair of the national organization Poor People’s Campaign.

The party will host a virtual organizing event called “Souls to the Polls” on Oct. 28, which is the first day of in-person absentee voting. The party has also hosted several town hall-style events in multiple Mississippi towns over the past few weeks focused on the state’s hospital crisis before mostly-Black audiences, culminating with a final stop on the tour in Jackson on Oct. 25.

And while party leaders organize their own events, Democratic candidates are benefitting from the independent electoral work of numerous third-party progressive organizations that are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to knock doors and target hyper-local Black communities. These groups, many of which have long organizing histories in Mississippi, are pumping money this cycle into door-knocking, phone banking, direct mailing, and digital and radio advertising.

But the party’s work of the past few weeks marks a noticeable shift in strategy to energize its base ahead of the 2023 election. Lackluster efforts with Black voters during the 2019 statewide election cycle from former state party leaders notoriously left candidates frustrated and Democratic voters feeling left behind.

“I don’t care if we’ve got a Democrat running for dog catcher now,” said Mississippi Democratic Party Chair Cheikh Taylor, who took over as leader of the state party in July. “I want us to win.”

The pitch to Black voters

Black Mississippi voters make up the overwhelming foundation of the Democratic Party — about two-thirds of the party’s voting base. If candidates and party leaders want to flip one of the eight statewide offices currently held by the GOP, encouraging Black voters to turn out on Election Day is critical.

Organizers of the recent political events have framed the upcoming election in a personal and somber tone, centered on how lives and personal health, particularly for Black Mississippians, are at stake in this election.

The basis for the grave tone is a fear that four more years of conservative policies from the Governor’s Mansion and state Capitol in one of the most impoverished states in the nation could dig the state deeper into negative health outcomes and cause rural hospitals to close.

Every region in Mississippi, for example, ranked higher in infant mortality than the national average, according to the state’s 2021 Mississippi Infant Mortality Report released earlier this month. The three counties with the highest 10-year averages were counties in the majority-Black Delta.

Mississippi Democrats have said this problem and many others the state faces have been avoidable. They say if the state’s Republican leaders, who have held most of the state’s policymaking power since 2011, expanded Medicaid coverage to the working poor and strategically developed the Delta economically, some of those metrics could be reversed.

“People say all elections and all voting is local,” House Democratic Leader Rep. Robert Johnson III said last week. “No, no, no, all voting is personal. See, when you cast a vote, you’re not casting a vote for Brandon Presley. You’re casting a vote for yourself. You’re voting for something that’s going to happen for you.”

PODCAST: Rep. Robert Johnson says Black turnout could be key in 2023 election

Governor’s race is a peripheral focus

The bulk of media attention and national party resources during the election cycle has focused on Presley, the Democratic nominee for governor who has mounted a formidable campaign against Republican Gov. Tate Reeves and recently outraised the incumbent governor in campaign donations.

But most of the recent Black voter outreach events have not been framed exclusively around Presley’s race or any specific candidate. Rather, they have served as a repudiation of conservative policies over the last four years that, in the Democratic leaders’ view, harm Black communities. The events have served as a call to action to elect all Democrats on the ballot.

However, there have been instances when Presley’s work as north Mississippi’s public service commissioner was lauded, and his attendance at predominantly Black churches, HBCU football games and other places over the past few weeks was clearly noticed.

READ MORE: At Jackson State homecoming, Brandon Presley pledges to advocate for Mississippi HBCUs

Clyburn, for instance, who previously served as House majority whip, partnered with Presley in recent years to pass federal legislation that installed broadband in rural areas of the country. Those efforts, according to Clyburn, ultimately led President Joe Biden to push for broadband in the final version of the bipartisan infrastructure bill Congress passed in 2021.

“I’m here to say to you that if not for Brandon Presley, I don’t think we would have gotten broadband in our infrastructure bill,” Clyburn said to much applause.

Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., left, comments on the support the Biden Administration has provided for rural broadband projects as Jason Gumbs, Regional Senior Vice President at Comcast, center, and Republican Gov. Tate Reeves listen at the Bolton-Edwards Elementary/Middle School, in Bolton, Miss., Tuesday, Aug. 22, 2023. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)

Clifton Carroll, a Reeves campaign spokesman, said in a statement that Presley has gotten support from “every corner of the national liberal machine” and brought millions of dollars into the state in an attempt to “flip it blue.”

“It’s no wonder that everyone from the Biden team to Bennie Thompson has gotten behind him — because he’s a true blue liberal Democrat,” Carroll said.

But Thompson, the state’s lone Democrat in Congress who has been a presence on the 2023 campaign trail, said the rhetoric from the Reeves campaign seeking to scare voters by connecting Presley with national Democrats is hypocritical. The governor, Thompson pointed out, has attempted to celebrate some of Biden’s policies and take credit for them, like he did with broadband efforts in late August.

“If you look at the resources that Joe Biden has put into the state of Mississippi, it’s unreal,” Thompson said. “And now, (Reeves) is trying to claim some of this money that we sent from Washington as if he’s being a good steward as governor and all of that.

“Look, right string, wrong yo-yo,” Thompson added.

New strategy from Democratic Party

The governor’s race aside, several progressive officials proclaimed the slate of Democratic statewide candidates was strong, and they were building a better foundation for the party that can continue to be stronger in future years.

The coordinated events last weekend when Clyburn visited were the first major ones the state Democratic Party has hosted since Taylor took over as chairman. Local Democrats’ ability to attract a national figure like Clyburn, a personal friend of Thompson, to Jackson is the first visit of its kind in several years.

When Democratic Attorney General Jim Hood ran for governor in 2019, for example, no major outside Democratic official came to Mississippi to stump for him. When former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy ran for U.S. Senate in 2018 as the Democratic nominee, then-U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris and U.S. Sen. Cory Booker stumped for him, but it was not billed around an organized event as was with Clyburn’s weekend visit.

Taylor, in quick fashion, has worked to build the weak foundation of the party up, brought national Democratic leaders to the state and, on Oct. 15, conducted the first large party fundraiser in several years.

“This party needs you, and we want to give you a reason to come back,” Taylor told party members at the fundraiser.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Brandon Presley visits with supporters during a forum concerning health at L.T. Ellis Community Center in Laurel, Miss., on Wednesday, Sept. 27, 2023. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today

But Clyburn warned voters during his Mississippi visit that just because the state party is working against well-funded Republicans, that is not reason to sit out the upcoming race. One absent vote during an election, Clyburn said, can set off a ripple effect of policies that last generations.

He illustrated that point by recounting when no presidential candidate in 1876 garnered a majority of the electoral college votes, the race was thrown to the U.S. House of Representatives to pick the winner.

The House became deadlocked and formed a 15-member committee to determine the winner for the highest office in the country. That committee then voted 8-7 to choose Rutherford B. Hayes as president, who eventually agreed to remove federal troops from Southern states, effectively nixing Reconstruction in the Deep South.

That one-vote margin allowed white Southerners to institute Black Codes that barred African Americans, such as the eight congressmen that preceded Clyburn, from voting and holding office.

“You must remember that clock got turned back by one vote,” Clyburn told Mississippians during his visit. “I want you to remember that. Are you that one vote who allows the clock to get turned back this time, or will you be that one vote to keep it from happening?”

READ MORE: New governor’s race poll shows Reeves leading Presley by just one point

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Mississippi Today

Meet Willye B. White: A Mississippian we should all celebrate

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mississippitoday.org – @rick_cleveland – 2025-04-04 11:09:00

In an interview years and years ago, the late Willye B. White told me in her warm, soothing Delta voice, “A dream without a plan is just a wish. As a young girl, I had a plan.”

She most definitely did have a plan. And she executed said plan, as we shall see.

And I know what many readers are thinking: “Who the heck was Willye B. White?” That, or: “Willye B. White, where have I heard that name before?”

Rick Cleveland

Well, you might have driven an eight-mile, flat-as-a-pancake stretch of U.S. 49E, between Sidon and Greenwood, and seen the marker that says: “Willye B. White Memorial Highway.” Or you might have visited the Olympic Room at the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame and seen where White was a five-time participant and two-time medalist in the Summer Olympics as a jumper and a sprinter.

If you don’t know who Willye B. White was, you should. Every Mississippian should. So pour yourself a cup of coffee or a glass of iced tea, follow along and prepare to be inspired.

Willye B. White was born on the last day of 1939 in Money, near Greenwood, and was raised by grandparents. As a child, she picked cotton to help feed her family. When she wasn’t picking cotton, she was running, really fast, and jumping, really high and really long distances.

She began competing in high school track and field meets at the age of 10. At age 11, she scored enough points in a high school meet to win the competition all by herself. At age 16, in 1956, she competed in the Summer Olympics at Melbourne, Australia.

Her plan then was simple. The Olympics, on the other side of the world, would take place in November. “I didn’t know much about the Olympics, but I knew that if I made the team and I went to the Olympics, I wouldn’t have to pick cotton that year. I was all for that.”

Just imagine. You are 16 years old, a high school sophomore, a poor Black girl. You are from Money, Mississippi, and you walk into the stadium at the Melbourne Cricket Grounds to compete before a crowd of more than 100,000 strangers nearly 10,000 miles from your home.

She competed in the long jump. She won the silver medal to become the first-ever American to win a medal in that event. And then she came home to segregated Mississippi, to little or no fanfare. This was the year after Emmett Till, a year younger than White, was brutally murdered just a short distance from where she lived.

“I used to sit in those cotton fields and watch the trains go by,” she once told an interviewer. “I knew they were going to some place different, some place into the hills and out of those cotton fields.”

Her grandfather had fought in France in World War I. “He told me about all the places he saw,” White said. “I always wanted to travel and see the places he talked about.”

Travel, she did. In the late 1950s there were two colleges that offered scholarships to young, Black female track and field athletes. One was Tuskegee in Alabama, the other was Tennessee State in Nashville. White chose Tennessee State, she said, “because it was the farthest away from those cotton fields.”

She was getting started on a track and field career that would take her, by her own count, to 150 different countries across the globe. She was the best female long jumper in the U.S. for two decades. She competed in Olympics in Melbourne, Rome, Tokyo, Mexico City and Munich. She would compete on more than 30 U.S. teams in international events. In 1999, Sports Illustrated named her one of the top 100 female athletes of the 20th century.

Chicago became White’s home for most of adulthood. This was long before Olympic athletes were rich, making millions in endorsements and appearance fees. She needed a job, so she became a nurse. Later on, she became an public health administrator as well as a coach. She created the Willye B. White Foundation to help needy children with health and after school care. 

In 1982, at age 42, she returned to Mississippi to be inducted into the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame and was welcomed back to a reception at the Governor’s Mansion by Gov. William Winter, who introduced her during induction ceremonies. Twenty-six years after she won the silver medal at Melbourne, she called being hosted and celebrated by the governor of her home state “the zenith of her career.”

Willye B. White died of pancreatic cancer in a Chicago hospital in 2007. While working on an obituary/column about her, I talked to the late, great Ralph Boston, the three-time Olympic long jump medalist from Laurel. They were Tennessee State and U.S. Olympic teammates. They shared a healthy respect from one another, and Boston clearly enjoyed talking about White.

At one point, Ralph asked me, “Did you know Willye B. had an even more famous high school classmate.”

No, I said, I did not.

“Ever heard of Morgan Freeman?” Ralph said, laughing.

Of course.

“I was with Morgan one time and I asked him if he ever ran track,” Ralph said, already chuckling about what would come next.

“Morgan said he did not run track in high school because he knew if he ran, he’d have to run against Willye B. White, and Morgan said he didn’t want to lose to a girl.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Early voting proposal killed on last day of Mississippi legislative session

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mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-03 13:02:00

Mississippi will remain one of only three states without no-excuse early voting or no-excuse absentee voting. 

Senate leaders, on the last day of their regular 2025 session, decided not to send a bill to Gov. Tate Reeves that would have expanded pre-Election Day voting options. The governor has been vocally opposed to early voting in Mississippi, and would likely have vetoed the measure.

The House and Senate this week overwhelmingly voted for legislation that established a watered-down version of early voting. The proposal would have required voters to go to a circuit clerk’s office and verify their identity with a photo ID. 

The proposal also listed broad excuses that would have allowed many voters an opportunity to cast early ballots. 

The measure passed the House unanimously and the Senate approved it 42-7. However, Sen. Jeff Tate, a Republican from Meridian who strongly opposes early voting, held the bill on a procedural motion. 

Senate Elections Chairman Jeremy England chose not to dispose of Tate’s motion on Thursday morning, the last day the Senate was in session. This killed the bill and prevented it from going to the governor. 

England, a Republican from Vancleave, told reporters he decided to kill the legislation because he believed some of its language needed tweaking. 

The other reality is that Republican Gov. Tate Reeves strongly opposes early voting proposals and even attacked England on social media for advancing the proposal out of the Senate chamber. 

England said he received word “through some sources” that Reeves would veto the measure.

“I’m not done working on it, though,” England said. 

Although Mississippi does not have no-excuse early voting or no-excuse absentee voting, it does have absentee voting. 

To vote by absentee, a voter must meet one of around a dozen legal excuses, such as temporarily living outside of their county or being over 65. Mississippi law doesn’t allow people to vote by absentee purely out of convenience or choice. 

Several conservative states, such as Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Florida, have an in-person early voting system. The Republican National Committee in 2023 urged Republican voters to cast an early ballot in states that have early voting procedures. 

Yet some Republican leaders in Mississippi have ardently opposed early voting legislation over concerns that it undermines election security. 

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Mississippi Legislature approves DEI ban after heated debate

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mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-02 16:34:00

Mississippi lawmakers have reached an agreement to ban diversity, equity and inclusion programs and a list of “divisive concepts” from public schools across the state education system, following the lead of numerous other Republican-controlled states and President Donald Trump’s administration.  

House and Senate lawmakers approved a compromise bill in votes on Tuesday and Wednesday. It will likely head to Republican Gov. Tate Reeves for his signature after it clears a procedural motion.

The agreement between the Republican-dominated chambers followed hours of heated debate in which Democrats, almost all of whom are Black, excoriated the legislation as a setback in the long struggle to make Mississippi a fairer place for minorities. They also said the bill could bog universities down with costly legal fights and erode academic freedom.

Democratic Rep. Bryant Clark, who seldom addresses the entire House chamber from the podium during debates, rose to speak out against the bill on Tuesday. He is the son of the late Robert Clark, the first Black Mississippian elected to the state Legislature since the 1800s and the first Black Mississippian to serve as speaker pro tempore and preside over the House chamber since Reconstruction.

“We are better than this, and all of you know that we don’t need this with Mississippi history,” Clark said. “We should be the ones that say, ‘listen, we may be from Mississippi, we may have a dark past, but you know what, we’re going to be the first to stand up this time and say there is nothing wrong with DEI.'”

Legislative Republicans argued that the measure — which will apply to all public schools from the K-12 level through universities — will elevate merit in education and remove a list of so-called “divisive concepts” from academic settings. More broadly, conservative critics of DEI say the programs divide people into categories of victims and oppressors and infuse left-wing ideology into campus life.

“We are a diverse state. Nowhere in here are we trying to wipe that out,” said Republican Sen. Tyler McCaughn, one of the bill’s authors. “We’re just trying to change the focus back to that of excellence.”

The House and Senate initially passed proposals that differed in who they would impact, what activities they would regulate and how they aim to reshape the inner workings of the state’s education system. Some House leaders wanted the bill to be “semi-vague” in its language and wanted to create a process for withholding state funds based on complaints that almost anyone could lodge. The Senate wanted to pair a DEI ban with a task force to study inefficiencies in the higher education system, a provision the upper chamber later agreed to scrap.

The concepts that will be rooted out from curricula include the idea that gender identity can be a “subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality.” The move reflects another effort to align with the Trump administration, which has declared via executive order that there are only two sexes.

The House and Senate disagreed on how to enforce the measure but ultimately settled on an agreement that would empower students, parents of minor students, faculty members and contractors to sue schools for violating the law.

People could only sue after they go through an internal campus review process and a 25-day period when schools could fix the alleged violation. Republican Rep. Joey Hood, one of the House negotiators, said that was a compromise between the chambers. The House wanted to make it possible for almost anyone to file lawsuits over the DEI ban, while Senate negotiators initially bristled at the idea of fast-tracking internal campus disputes to the legal system.   

The House ultimately held firm in its position to create a private cause of action, or the right to sue, but it agreed to give schools the ability to conduct an investigative process and potentially resolve the alleged violation before letting people sue in chancery courts.

“You have to go through the administrative process,” said Republican Sen. Nicole Boyd, one of the bill’s lead authors. “Because the whole idea is that, if there is a violation, the school needs to cure the violation. That’s what the purpose is. It’s not to create litigation, it’s to cure violations.” 

If people disagree with the findings from that process, they could also ask the attorney general’s office to sue on their behalf.

Under the new law, Mississippi could withhold state funds from schools that don’t comply. Schools would be required to compile reports on all complaints filed in response to the new law.

Trump promised in his 2024 campaign to eliminate DEI in the federal government. One of the first executive orders he signed did that. Some Mississippi lawmakers introduced bills in the 2024 session to restrict DEI, but the proposals never made it out of committee. With the national headwinds at their backs and several other laws in Republican-led states to use as models, Mississippi lawmakers made plans to introduce anti-DEI legislation.

The policy debate also unfolded amid the early stages of a potential Republican primary matchup in the 2027 governor’s race between State Auditor Shad White and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann. White, who has been one of the state’s loudest advocates for banning DEI, had branded Hosemann in the months before the 2025 session “DEI Delbert,” claiming the Senate leader has stood in the way of DEI restrictions passing the Legislature. 

During the first Senate floor debate over the chamber’s DEI legislation during this year’s legislative session, Hosemann seemed to be conscious of these political attacks. He walked over to staff members and asked how many people were watching the debate live on YouTube. 

As the DEI debate cleared one of its final hurdles Wednesday afternoon, the House and Senate remained at loggerheads over the state budget amid Republican infighting. It appeared likely the Legislature would end its session Wednesday or Thursday without passing a $7 billion budget to fund state agencies, potentially threatening a government shutdown.

“It is my understanding that we don’t have a budget and will likely leave here without a budget. But this piece of legislation …which I don’t think remedies any of Mississippi’s issues, this has become one of the top priorities that we had to get done,” said Democratic Sen. Rod Hickman. “I just want to say, if we put that much work into everything else we did, Mississippi might be a much better place.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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