Of all U.S. regions, there’s none more full of promise and frustration for progressives than the South.
The South consistently elects Republicans at the state and federal level. Voting rights are in a constant state of peril. Harsh criminal justice laws and a lack of worker protection and rights combine with the region’s history of racial and economic inequality to present the left with major challenges. It’s an uphill battle where recent electoral surprises—most notably Georgia’s presidential election vote and Senate special elections—are still the exceptions, not the rule.
Wamiq Chowdhury, an attorney and member of the Democratic Socialists of America’s Chapelboro, North Carolina, branch, told Blue Tent in March that Republicans are entrenched.
“The GOP here has been very effective at what they generally do—take control of key institutions and bend them to make it very difficult to break that control,” Chowdhury said.
A rising tide of activism
Yet there are reasons to have hope for the future and opportunities for the donor dollar to go far. The South is a hotbed of union activism, voting rights advocacy, and other issue-by-issue and state-by-state fights that lefty donors can support.
With that expanded reach has come increased pushback from the region’s entrenched conservative power interests. Voting rights are under assault. New statewide legislation in Georgia that passed in May restricting the exercise of the franchise was so over-the-top that large companies have boycotted the state—for now. The future of the boycott is unclear; companies have pulled out of Georgia over its laws before, only to come back, but so far, it’s not made a dent in the GOP resolve to push back at the rising tide of equal access to the ballot box.
Harsh crackdowns on protest, like Florida’s new law that essentially legalizes running down protesters with a car, are also spreading around the South, making organizing collective action more dangerous than usual. Hurdles like that can present real challenges to groups on the ground.
Key groups in the fight
In our forthcoming brief “Building Progressive Organizing Capacity in the South: Three Things Donors Need to Know,” we examine some potential groups whose work on the ground around the region is worth supporting, including: Repairers of the Breach, Project South and the Texas Organizing Project.
Those groups and others are harnessing what’s becoming a wave of left-wing energy around the South and turning it into real change—whether it’s Repairers of the Breach working for a new Poor People’s Campaign, Project South’s advocacy for immigrants in detention in the region, or the Texas Organizing Project’s fight to expand and protect voting rights in one of the greatest potential swing states.
As New Virginia Majority’s Jon Liss told Blue Tent last year, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to handling the challenges to progressive goals in the South. Donors need to weigh each option and decide based on the needs of each community.
“There’s no magic formula—if there was, we’d all be doing it!—but I think there’s a methodology, there’s a deep analysis that needs to happen everywhere you are, whether it’s Kentucky or Tennessee,” Liss said. “They’re in very different situations, the election world, who the social base would be, but it’s about the constellation of people you want to bring together.”