How Do You Get Black Voters to Make the Difference?
A margin of just 22,748 votes gave Donald Trump Wisconsin’s Electoral College in 2016, and helped him win the presidency, despite losing the popular vote.
Rev. Greg Lewis is determined to stop that from happening again — by making sure Milwaukee’s Black and brown residents vote. His proof of concept: In 2018, his organization mobilized some 70,000 voters who hadn’t participated in 2016, helping oust Republican Gov. Scott Walker. “If we come out and vote, Trump can't win Wisconsin,” Lewis told AJ+’s Angie Nasser. “And Democrats will probably be in office in the White House and it will change the nation and the world. If we don't come out and vote, nothing’s going to change.”
Lewis is the executive director of Souls to the Polls, a grassroots initiative aimed at ensuring Black and brown voter turnout in what’s often called America’s most segregated city, according to the Brookings Institution. In real-life terms, this means Milwaukee has the most Black students in the state and is the biggest contributor to Wisconsin's achievement gap — which is one of the widest between Black and white students in the country. And Milwaukee registers the third highest rate of Black incarceration in state prisons among the 50 largest metro areas in the U.S. The Black prison incarceration rate in Milwaukee is 10 times the white rate.
And that means overcoming myriad systemic obstacles designed to disenfranchise voters of color. If Democrats are not willing to fight hard — and “nasty” — “we could be looking at another four years of the kind of trauma that has existed in my community right now.”
“It needs to be nasty because it's been nasty,” Lewis told AJ+. “We need to make that transition to taking control of our community and not keep letting things happen to us.”
But the obstacles are significant: “It’s hard to get people to talk about politics when they're worried about what they're going to eat. You know, how are they going to pay the rent? They're worried about their children. They're worried about education. Everything is falling apart and they don't have time.”
And the system of voter ID laws, gerrymandered districts and an arcane voter registration process is designed to reinforce the choice to stay away.
Voter suppression is most effective, Lewis says, when its effect is psychological, “just making people sick of it. You know, ‘I'm sick of this, man. I don't even want to be bothered’.”
The despair of older folks presents one set of problems; the militancy of a younger generation is a different challenge. “They understand what's happening. They're not like older people who are tired of fighting; they're ready to fight and they're ready to die. Now, we still want to be diplomatic and, you know, try to make a change. But young folks are like, ‘Man, forget that.’
“You know, in my other days I would have had other words for that, but it still would have been an F-word. We’re not going to be subject to your slave mentality. And we still have to grab them and say, look, man, we still got to try to pull this together.”
“They don't have any trust in this system. And we’ve got to try to get them to register. We got to try to get them to get these photo IDs. Some people can't get a photo ID, because when they were born, they didn't even have a hospital to go to. They don't have a birth certificate. We got to find a way to get around all those kinds of things. If you’d gotten married and changed your name, you'd had to have your marriage license with you. ‘You gotta have a what? Yeah. Where's your marriage license? You changed your name.’
Lewis works tirelessly to show his community how much of a difference they can make by voting, and that the fight for the right to vote should be their immediate priority: “Your vote matters, because if it didn't matter, why was so many people try to keep you from voting?”
“We have to change that by building this voting bloc, we got to change the whole way of thinking by showing people, you do have power. And if we show power on this one, we can brag about how you change the world in Milwaukee, you look Milwaukee, you change the world, you change the nation and it changed the world.”
Voting, he says, is just the beginning of building the community’s awareness of the power of collective action to make change. “After we go souls to the polls on Nov. 3, then the work begins Nov. 4.”
Produced by Tony Karon and Angie Nassar