# Black Voters Matter A **501(c)(4)** founded in **2016** by **LaTosha Brown** and **Cliff Albright**, working primarily in the South in areas where Black voters are at least 15% of the electorate — as of 2020, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Tennessee. ## The model What makes it worth a page here is that it is not a get-out-the-vote operation, and the distinction is strategic rather than cosmetic. Instead of parachuting canvassers in before an election, the organization **funds and trains existing Black-led local groups** — grants, organizer training, candidate development and networking — and does it continuously. Brown's own framing is that the aim is "about power and not just about participation," and she has credited the 2017–2019 groundwork, not the 2020 campaign season, for what the network was able to do in 2020. The practical consequence is that the infrastructure exists between elections, when voter-roll purges, polling-place closures and registration-rule changes actually happen. Set against the state-legislative pattern described at [[Voter Suppression]], that is the difference between contesting a rule change and discovering it on election day. ## Record - **2017 Alabama Senate special election** — helped elect Doug Jones, the first Democrat to hold the seat since 1992. - **Georgia, 2020–21** — credited with raising Black turnout in the general election and the Senate runoffs won by [[Raphael Warnock]] and [[Jon Ossoff]]. Volunteers distributing food and water to voters in line were investigated and **cleared of wrongdoing by the Georgia State Election Board** — a detail worth keeping, because the accusation outlived the finding in political memory. - **Bus tours** — "South Is Rising" (2019), "We Got Power" (2020) and "We Won't Black Down" (2022). Brown estimated the 2020 tours reached at least 10 million Black voters. ## Funding Multi-year grants from the [[Southern Poverty Law Center]] and a five-year commitment from the [[Open Society Foundations]], advocacy support from America Votes, and a series of corporate and media partnerships — BET's #ReclaimYourVote, MTV's Rock the Vote, Oprah Winfrey's Own Your Vote, and a Ben & Jerry's flavor campaign. It has also run disaster and bail funds, including roughly $400,000 for COVID-19 relief and more than $250,000 in bail funds in 2020. The Open Society connection is the one that draws attention from the right, and it is disclosed by the organization itself. ## See Also - [[Voter Suppression]] · [[Felony Disenfranchisement]] — what the organizing is set against - [[No Kings Coalition]] · [[Indivisible]] — the broader mobilization network it partners with - [[Raphael Warnock]] · [[Jon Ossoff]]