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The Trump administration has made things so unbearable for the Black community that social justice activists are hoping they can use the outrage many feel towards the President to create a “Black wave” of voters willing to show up for this year’s midterms.
Saturday, nearly 200 people gathered in a downtown Atlanta conference center for a political event billed as a “Black Joy” brunch, reports CNN.
As the crowd sipped on mimosas and listened to Beyonce‘s singing over the sound system, the group of mostly African-American women in attendance all logged into an online voter-outreach tool on their cellphones called Relay and started a “texting marathon.”
In just two hours, the focused guests had reached 65,000 infrequent Black voters in a section of rural Georgia, known as the Black Belt. They urged every single one of those people to come out on Election Day in support Stacey Abrams, the Georgia Democrat vying to make history as the nation’s first Black female governor.
This brunch is just one of many pseudo-social political gatherings organized around the country by the Color of Change PAC; a two-year-old collective seeking to aggressively drive Black turnout in key states like Georgia, where African-Americans make up nearly 31 percent of the population, but often sit out on what many call off-year elections.
According to the report, “The event also illustrates how a little-known but growing network of African-American political groups are laboring behind the scenes to reshape who will vote in the midterms and engineer what Color of Change’s executive director, Arisha Hatch, hopes will become a ‘Black wave’ that sweeps Abrams and other Democrats into power.”
“Black voters are seeing this as a transformative moment for the country,” said Adrianne Shropshire, who runs BlackPAC. “They are using their votes as their resistance.”
The group is spending an estimated $8 million in the final week leading up to Election Day to target African-American voters with radio ads and circulars in Georgia as well as nine other states.
In addition to the Color of Change PAC, other groups working to bolster the “Black wave” during midterms include PowerPAC Georgia, Collective PAC, The Black Economic Alliance, Color of Change PAC, and a coalition of African-American groups, led by the Black Women’s Roundtable.
For those wondering what is fueling this unprecedented and concerted effort during midterms, Quentin James, who co-founded Collective PAC with his wife, former Obama campaign aide Stefanie Brown-James, told CNN, the answer is simple.
“People are saying, ‘I don’t just want to protest. I want to run. I want a seat at the table to make the change.’”
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