Throughout American history, Black people have understood that an attack on their political power is not just an assault on their access to the ballot — it’s a threat to the culture and community they’ve built despite numerous obstacles thrown their way. From Reconstruction to the civil rights movement to Black Lives Matter, the attacks on Black political power have never been just about politics; they’re about rooting out the culture of civic engagement that has existed in our communities for centuries and has led to a stronger democracy for all.
Unfortunately, these coordinated attacks rooted in disinformation coupled with strategic missteps from the Democratic Party, which prioritizes transactional engagement over long-term investment strategies, have left a new generation of Black voters unsure if fighting for the right to vote and protecting American democracy is an urgent problem to solve.
On the 61st anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, which has been further gutted by the Supreme Court in Louisiana v. Callais, we must build something new to ensure that young Black voters understand that defending their political power, their culture, and their community are all intertwined. That defending one means we are working to strengthen and reinforce all of it.
For decades, the Democratic Party has operated with a concept baked into its electoral strategy: the GOTV voter. Black voters, in this framework, are a turnout problem to be solved every two to four years. The strategy activates Black communities in the final weeks before an election, extracts their votes, and dissolves the infrastructure the moment results come in. No long-term commitment to Black community power that exists independent of any single election cycle. Young Black adults who grew up watching that transaction play out repeatedly have rightly grown skeptical of the approach.
That extraction model created the conditions exploited by coordinated disinformation campaigns from bad actors, both foreign and domestic. These campaigns target Black communities with a single sustained message: Your vote doesn’t matter, the system is designed to ignore you despite your civic participation, and no material changes will take place in your community even after you’ve voted. They are strategic, well-resourced, and calibrated specifically to suppress Black turnout by amplifying the cynicism that decades of transactional politics already produced. The disinformation works because it lands on ground that real experience prepared.
Recent polling from The Black Opps Coalition reveals exactly what that combination has produced. Only 56 percent of Black Gen Z voters find it very urgent to defend the right to vote, compared with 74 percent of Black Gen X voters. Just 50 percent of Black Gen Z voters find it very urgent to defend American democracy, compared with 81 percent of Black baby boomers.
On the anniversary of the law that made Black political participation a federal guarantee, the generation now inheriting a world without that guarantee, thanks to Callais, registers the least urgency about defending it.
Rebuilding Black community power in this environment requires what the transactional model never delivered: genuine long-term investment in young Black people as civic leaders, across every dimension of their lives, regardless of the electoral calendar.
At Onyx Impact, we are investing in the next generation of civic leaders who will shape the future of issues impacting our communities. Programs like Vote HBCU, led by Xceleader, allows young people to take ownership of their civic power by building it among their peers on campuses of Historically Black Colleges and Universities across the country. Our partnership with Archiving The Black Web is an effort to preserve the digital record of Black cultural and civic life, because young people building a civic identity must understand what our communities have already accomplished to take the baton further. Each investment carries the understanding that sustainable civic power grows from treating young Black people as the leaders they are at this moment and providing them with the tools and resources necessary to match what they’re inheriting.
Throughout history, young Black people have never been spectators when their political power, culture, and community were under attack. They have been the leaders of the movements that led to the passage of critical legislation such as the Voting Rights Act. Four college freshmen in Greensboro, North Carolina, sparked a nationwide movement by organizing a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter. Their action drew 70,000 participants across the South and forced Woolworth’s to end racial segregation at its counters.
During the Birmingham Children’s Crusade, more than 1,000 students — some as young as 7 years old — marched against Jim Crow. The images of fire hoses and attack dogs turned on children moved President John F. Kennedy to publicly support federal civil rights legislation. The Voting Rights Act followed.
This generation carries that same capacity. This moment demands infrastructure that treats their culture as the foundation of civic power it has always been.
What Louisiana v. Callais took away communities can rebuild through organized collective power. That rebuilding will come from young Black people who carry civic identity as an expression of who they are, built over time, through genuine investment in their leadership and their culture.
History records the same truth across every generation. Progress arrives through ordinary people, young Black people especially, who organized toward something better and built the infrastructure to sustain it.
The next chapter of American democracy will be written by a generation that experiences civic engagement as a direct expression of the culture and community they are already building together. This anniversary asks one question worth sitting with: What infrastructure are we building to be worthy of them?
Black culture has always set the direction of this nation. Invest in it seriously, and it will continue to.
Esosa Osa is founder & CEO of Onyx Impact.
Yes, yes, yes!! Thank you.
Another thing is that Democrats don’t worry about Black turnout in places like Chicago because the city and state will vote Democratic. So turnout is abysmal in some communities year after year.
“For decades, the Democratic Party has operated with a concept baked into its electoral strategy: the GOTV voter. Black voters, in this framework, are a turnout problem to be solved every two to four years. The strategy activates Black communities in the final weeks before an election, extracts their votes, and dissolves the infrastructure the moment results come in. No long-term commitment to Black community power that exists independent of any single election cycle.”
The previous generations did not, as far as I know, have "infrastructures" to help them be engaged citizens. They believed it was important and they went out and did the work. Perhaps it's not infrastructure or empowerment that is the issue. Perhaps it is something individuals have to seek within themselves and get out and do the work.