ATLANTA — LaTosha Brown is one of the many Southern organizers who turned Georgia blue in 2020 for the first time in nearly 30 years. But on Tuesday, she didn’t want President Joe Biden in the state.
After working 70 hours a week, leading bus tours across the state and rallying voters to the polls last year, Brown, who co-founded Black Voters Matter, said she was fed up with the Democrats she helped elect. As Biden called on the Senate to get rid of the filibuster in order to pass voting rights and elections legislation in Atlanta on Tuesday, she stayed away.
“So you come into Georgia, and what?” said Brown, who is based in Atlanta. “It's taken a year to talk about, ‘we gonna put away the filibuster.’ There's all kinds of energy and momentum I think has been squandered.”
As Brown sees it, she helped give Democrats power but, one year later, she and other Black voters are worse off when it comes to their ability to vote. There is frustration evident in her voice as she explains how voting rights still does not seem like a priority for the administration. “It makes the work harder for us,” Brown said. “What am I supposed to go back and tell people?....How do I convince them to turn out again?” Brown’s skepticism exemplified the political thicket Biden entered when he touched down in Atlanta on Tuesday to give his latest speech on the need to protect democracy, pass election reforms and, if necessary, revise the Senate’s rules. After months of inaction, those who have been demanding his help increasingly doubt he can deliver. A number of groups boycotted Biden’s speech. And the state’s most high-profile voting rights activist — gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams — didn’t show either, citing an unspecified scheduling conflict.
Biden’s speech, delivered at the Atlanta University Center Consortium on a brisk afternoon, served not only to put a spotlight on the onslaught of state Republican voting laws restricting ballot access but to keep the very Democratic base that Brown says is disillusioned, engaged.
The president, who served more than 30 years in a Senate that’s now become a thorn in his side, continued to push back against anti-democratic forces led by his predecessor. A self-described “institutionalist,” he condemned the chamber he once served in as a “shell of its former self” and warned that the “threat to our democracy is so grave” that it warranted “getting rid of the filibuster” if voting rights legislation is unable to pass any other way.
Comments