'Voting while black': How activists are racing to create a midterm 'black wave'

https://fox2now.com/2018/10/28/voting-while-black-how-activists-are-racing-to-create-a-midterm-black-wave/

On a drizzly Saturday morning, nearly 200 people gathered in a downtown conference center here for what was billed as a “black joy” brunch — complete with mimosas, glasses of sweet tea and plates of fried chicken and waffles.

But the gathering wasn’t merely social.

As a DJ blared Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love” over the sound system, the crowd of mostly African-American women pulled out their cell phones, logged into an online voter-outreach tool called Relay and began a texting marathon. In a little more than two hours, they had reached 65,000 infrequent African-American voters in a swath of rural Georgia, known as the Black Belt.

Their messages warned of purges of African-American residents from the voting rolls and urged support for Stacey Abrams, the Georgia Democrat who’s vying to make history as the nation’s first black female governor.

This brunch and a crop of other quasi-social events organized around the country by the two-year-old Color of Change PAC seek to drive black turnout in key states. That includes Georgia, where African-Americans make up nearly 31% of the population but, like many voters, sit out off-year elections in droves.

The event also illustrates how a little-known but growing network of African-American political groups is 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.

Their ultimate goal: build lasting political clout for African Americans, especially in the South, where more than half of the nation’s black residents live. To do so, they will have to defy history and permanently change decades of voting behavior.