Three generations, one mission: Inside three women's quest to protect the vote

Black women have long played a key role in protecting voting rights and urging their communities to cast ballots. This three-part series highlights their work as they build political power and demand a seat at the table.

ATLANTA ? Mary-Pat Hector headed one recent afternoon down the promenade that connects historically Black colleges here, stopping at a table draped with a bright blue tablecloth. “Rise” was emblazoned across the front.

The 26-year-old leader of the nonpartisan organization checked in with organizers who had spent hours urging students at Clark Atlanta University to register to vote.

“Excuse me, queen. Are you registered to vote?’’ one organizer asked a passerby.

Before she left, Hector had collected the 263 cards from students who pledged to vote and seven forms from students who'd registered. The stop was one of many in the organization’s effort to connect with thousands of students across the country.

“It always felt like this was something I just needed to do,’’ said Hector, whose passion to protect voting rights grew during the 2016 presidential election. “I knew that there was a sense of urgency, that we were like beating down the clock ? the same feeling that I feel right now.”

Hector is among a young generation of Black women working to register people to vote and cast their ballots Nov. 5. But she's far from the first.

Like others, Melanie Campbell, a 61-year-old national voting rights advocate, has been doing this work for decades. Judy Richardson, a 80-year-old civil rights veteran, for even longer.

Black women like them have long played pivotal roles in national and local politics ? from the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter.

Tactics have changed. Voting barriers have changed. Even the dangerous environments where they do their work have changed. But their mission, they say, is the same across the generations.

“I want to help our people and I believe you can't do that without having an impact through the political system,” said Campbell, president of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation.

Democracy, she added, is “still something we have to fight to keep.”

Thoughts of freedom

One recent afternoon, Richardson sat next to other veteran activists in a classroom at Prairie View A&M University in Texas, sharing tactics they used in the 1960s to register Black Southerners.

Richardson and other veterans of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee have been visiting historically Black colleges and civil rights museums hosting “toolkit’’ meetings where they share organizing tips, among other things.

“You have a responsibility to make this world better than it was when you came into it,’’ Richardson said. “I'm doing this at 80 because the other people around me are also 80 are still doing it too. You could be sitting around knitting baby booties. And they may still be doing that too, but the main thing is the folks that I know who are SNCC veterans never stopped.’’

At 19, Richardson left Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania to head South and join SNCC, then made up of mostly college students and local activists fighting for equal rights for Black people. She worked in hostile territories like Alabama and Mississippi, as well as in Cambridge, Maryland, where residents conducted sit-ins to protest segregation.

She learned about and from local activists.

“I see these brilliant folks and with unlimited energy,'' she recalled. "I know people got tired and stuff but were fueled by the thoughts of freedom.’’

Despite the dangers of racist Jim Crow laws, Richardson and other SNCC activists were determined to fight for change.

“You weren't supposed to be sitting around moaning and groaning and saying, ‘Oh, it’ll never change. Oh, there's nothing I can do,’’’ she said. “The assumption was, yeah, you gotta get up off your behind and do something about that.’’

Over the years, Richardson, a documentary producer, has worked on projects focused on change, including the award-winning ‘’Eyes on the Prize,’’ a documentary about the Civil Rights Movement. She recently finished a documentary for the Frederick Douglass National Historic site in Washington, D.C.

Richardson said she often tells young Black women activists that voting is important, but there must also be long-term organizing. She repeats lessons she learned from her own elders.

“I may never see the change that I'm working for, but if I do nothing, nothing changes and then my children and my children's children have to go through the same stuff that I went through,’’ she said. “At some point, you got to say it will end here. Or at least I will do something that makes it easier for those who are coming behind me.”

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‘Black women, they’ve been long in this work’

Black women have long organized, campaigned and mobilized their communities to turn out to vote. And more and more they have encouraged Black women themselves to run for elected offices.

In recent years, record numbers of Black women have stepped up to run, including for state governors and the U.S. Congress, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Today, there are several national and local civic engagement organizations led by Black women, including Campbell’s and Hector’s. Many were created in the last decade.

“Everyone is recognizing the sheer power of the leadership of Black women and women of color more broadly,’’ said Wendy Smooth, associate professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University. “For Black women, they’ve been long in this work around political organizing and mobilizing voters and we are now seeing a greater interest in actually running for office.’’

Black women have been credited with helping candidates pull off upsets such as in 2017 when Doug Jones became the first Democrat in 25 years to win a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama. Black women also played a critical role in mobilizing voters in the 2020 presidential election and supporting the bid of Democrat Joe Biden.

Generations of Black women, including Campbell, lobbied in 2020 for California Sen. Kamala Harris to become the first African American and South Asian woman vice president. They also successfully pushed for the 2022 confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first Black woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.

“I do think now that we've turned the corner people are used to seeing Black women,’’ Richardson said. “You see Black women in positions of power, who are really, really smart and really, really committed. That's the norm now and that's a really good thing."

‘Each generation has to fight’

This spring, Campbell joined dozens of canvassers in a Maryland neighborhood knocking on doors and encouraging people to vote. For hours, they hung pamphlets on doorknobs and on windshields in a grocery store parking lot.

As head of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, which among other things urges people to register to vote, Campbell spent the following months spearheading other get-out-the-vote campaigns in communities across Georgia, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

She began her activism when she was a student at Clark Atlanta University in the 1980s. She also worked on several political campaigns, including volunteering for the early congressional campaign of civil rights icon John Lewis. She would later work with Lewis on efforts to protect voting rights.

Campbell later moved to Washington, D.C., where she worked for the coalition and became its president and CEO.

She continues to press Congress to pass federal voting rights legislation named after Lewis. She was among a group of Black women activists arrested in 2021 on Capitol Hill for participating in a demonstration demanding the protection of voting rights.

‘’We're going to always have to fight for it in some way. Historically, we couldn't vote. Historically, we were enslaved,’’ said Campbell. “That’s the reality in this country because we never fully addressed and dealt with racism … Part of how you suppress was the suppression of the vote. So it's something that each generation has to fight for.’’

For her own inspiration, Campbell has turned over the decades to mentors like the late-civil rights legend Dorothy Height, once president of the National Council of Negro Women.

“I’m sitting there crying saying, ‘I’m ready to get out of here,’’ Campbell recalled telling Height, who died in 2010. “I really want to do something for Black women. I want to do something to lift up Black women's leadership.’’

Height encouraged Campbell to get more involved with the Black Women’s Roundtable, a national coalition of grassroots groups led by Black women. She's now the convener.

Richardson also looked up to civil rights activists Fannie Lou Hamer, a grassroots organizer in Mississippi, and Ella Baker, who served in roles with the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and SNCC. She recalled Baker saying it’s not her job to pass the baton to younger activists.

“Her idea was, ‘We're both on this baton,’’ Richardson explained. “You're on one end, I'm on the other end. And at some point, I will drop off. You will move over to my end … but it's not like I'm passing it to you. I will be here with you as long as I can.’’

A different battlefield

In the 1960s, Richardson relied on letters, pay phones and landlines, including a national network to call in emergencies. Today, social media is an essential tool.

“What's great is that they have all the social media. What's bad is that they have all the social media,’’ said Richardson. “The problem is that if you depend on it, that's a problem.’’

Unlike today’s activists, Richardson said veterans relied more on platforms they controlled, such as press releases, the phone network, its own printing presses and its own photographers. They also didn’t rely solely on traditional mainstream media. The Black press provided crucial coverage of the movement.

Campbell agreed technology has impacted the work and not necessarily for the better. She’s particularly worried about the spread of misinformation through social media. “But it is something that's a part of what you have to do to reach people where they are,’’ she said. “Being able to keep up with that is its own challenge."

In the wake of the COVID19 pandemic, Hector said the focus shifted to online mobilizing particularly for young people. But she said it’s important to use old and new organizational strategies.

“We can't disregard our grassroots organizing and just focus on the pure relational or just focus purely on the social media aspect of it all because young people are on TikTok, young people on Instagram.’’ She said. “We also have to invest in (knocking on) doors. We also have to invest in phones. We also have to invest in in-person events.’’

It’s also important, said Richardson, that younger activists learn to better connect with locals.

“Our organizing in the South was that if people were going to put their lives on the line for the efforts that you're talking about they need to see you,’’ she said. “They need to see who you are. They need to take the measure of you and you cannot do that on Facebook and Twitter. You have got to have some way of people connecting personally.’’

Training the next generation

A day after her stop at Clark Atlanta University, Hector traveled nearly two hours to another university in Georgia to train students how to get their peers more involved in voting and advocate for issues they care about.

For Hector, the work is personal. As a young Black woman, now seven months pregnant, she has fewer rights to her body than her mother had.

“That's very, very sad,’’ she said. “So for me, this upcoming election means more than just voting in an election, but it really is life or death. I'm a woman who's having a baby in the state like Georgia where more women die during childbirth in this state than almost any other state in the country. Like that is real. So like my life depends on it, my daughter's life would depend on the outcome of this election.’’

Hector became the CEO of RISE last year. The five-year-old youth-centered organization advocates for debt-free college options and youth political power. It’s active in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and has expanded into Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina since Hector took charge.

She grew up in the civil rights space, including a stint at age 13 as national youth director for Al Sharpton’s National Action Network. She recalled fighting an effort in one Georgia community that wanted to build a new jail instead of a recreation center.

As a student at Spelman College, another historically Black school in Atlanta, she led organizing efforts with Black Youth Vote and later became Georgia’s Black Youth Vote coordinator.

During her sophomore year, she served on the Student Government Association and along with Black Youth Vote and the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, the organizations set up discussions and watch parties for the 2016 election. Together, they registered 500 students.

The death of George Floyd and other unarmed Black people sparked youth activism that Hector aims to continue.

“How do we motivate them to utilize that passion and energy to also cast the ballot and vote in the upcoming election?’’ she asked.

Hector came up with “Black the Vote,’’ a program in Georgia to train Black students to become trusted messengers, talk to peers about voting and reach out via social media. The program also urges them to become election workers. It’s now part of a national multicultural effort called RISE University, which trains students at campuses across the country.

“With young voters, I think what makes them feel heard is talking to them about the issues that they care about the most,’’ Hector said.

Black women activists of older ages plan to continue grooming the next generation.

“I’m going to do all I can in my dash and try to train others and lift up other young leadership,’’ said Campbell. “Because that’s what’s important is to also have a continuum. We’re only going to be here for our finite time. The question we have to always ask ourselves is, ‘What are we doing in our dash?’”

{This story was updated to change a video.) 

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Generations of Black women share mission to protect voting