Young Greensboro natives come home to mobilize black voters

Twenty-three-year-old James Burroughs stood at the podium last night at New Goshen United Methodist Church in Greensboro and addressed some 50 people at the inaugural meeting of Democracy at Home.

A nonpartisan organization, Democracy at Home is dedicated to registering voters and getting them to the polls, along with connecting them with the issues in their lives so that they can make meaningful choices in the voting booth. The people filling the pews were almost exclusively African-American, and so in leadership and constituency the nascent organization is implicitly about black political empowerment.

The phenomenal turnout that catapulted Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008, the sense of complacency in Greensboro’s black electorate the following year that resulted in the unseating of Mayor Yvonne Johnson, the emergence of the Tea Party movement and the racialized media frenzy that led to the firing of Shirley Sherrod – all these sounded as galvanizing calls throughout the meeting.

“The main thing is I see a lot of my friends in Greensboro went away and stayed away,” said Burroughs, a NC State University alum who worked at a biotech company and volunteered on political campaigns before returning to Greensboro to pursue graduate studies in philosophy at UNCG this fall, after the meeting. “I felt like I could really help our community. I was disappointed with Yvonne Johnson’s loss last year. I felt someone like myself who knows this community could really make a difference. I feel that our community is losing its voice. Our battle didn’t end in 2008.”

Burroughs, who is executive director of Democracy at Home, urged those in attendance to make sure their family members and friends are registered to vote. He said his organization plans to hold voter registration drives, town-hall meetings on local issues and candidate forums, and provided a phone number for any elderly or disabled person who would need a free ride to the polls.

Linda Sutton, an organizer with Democracy North Carolina, an allied statewide nonpartisan group, alluded to the conservative rhetoric of the Tea Party.

“I laugh every time I hear that we’ve got to take our country back,” she said. “What do they want to take our country back to? The last 10 years? Back to the forties and fifties? We built this country. Before we were here, the Indians were here. I have to keep it nonpartisan, but you understand what’s at stake. There are forces that want to take us back to before Brown vs. Board.”

Later, Sutton appropriated the “take our country back” rallying cry for her own uses. (It was also frequently heard on the campaign trail during Barack Obama’s bid for the presidency in 2008.)

“You know why Barack had a hard time getting healthcare passed?” Sutton asked. “You would think he wouldn’t have any problem because he had the majority. But half of the Democrats were taking money from the insurance and medical industry. Some of them were kind of hesitant. That’s why we need to take our government back from the special interests and corporations.

"Our government is supposed to be of the people, by the people and for the people," she continued. "It didn’t say of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations. We’re the people. It’s like fingers in a hand. When I touch your face with my finger you might barely feel it. But when I put them together into a fist, it’s another thing. We have a lot of power when we come together.”

Without mentioning candidates by name or referencing their party, Burroughs highlighted Kentucky Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul’s statement advocating the repeal of parts of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, pledges by Republican Congressional candidates such as North Carolina’s Richard Burr to repeal or amend healthcare reform legislation, and the efforts of the new majority on the Wake County School Board to dismantle the current school assignment plan emphasizing socio-economic diversity in favor of neighborhood schools.

“If there are people who are saying they’re going to get in office and vote for things that are not to your benefit,” Burroughs said, “then you have to vote for the other person.”

Only one candidate appeared at the forum. Marcus Brandon is the Democratic nominee for NC House District 60, which covers south Greensboro, central High Point and a swath of southern Guilford County. Brandon’s Republican opponent is Lonnie Wilson of High Point.

Brandon cited the electoral loss last year of Yvonne Johnson, the city’s first black mayor, in the nonpartisan Greensboro City Council election, and warned that Democrats could lose control of the NC House – and control of redistricting – if his constituency remains apathetic.

“Ask the people in Wake County: ‘Did it change?’ It did,” Brandon said. “Ask the people in Greensboro: ‘Did it change?’ It did. It does make a difference that you vote. We are at a crucial turning point this year. We could lose control of the House. Then we’re going to be yelling in the street, protesting about what the House did and did not do.”

The fight over what some call school re-segregation in Wake County has been part of Burroughs’ exposure to the more energized and unified civil rights activism in the Triangle. Like Burroughs, 24-year-old Kristen Jeffers attended NC State and recently returned to her native Greensboro. Jeffers is the executive director of Young Nonprofit Professionals Network Triad and a board member of Democracy at Home.

Burroughs’ political outlook has also been shaped by his experience working on successful campaigns to elect Democrats Kay Hagan to the US Senate and Cora Cole-McFadden to the Durham City Council. Compared to Raleigh and Charlotte, Burroughs said he finds his hometown lacking in civic mobilization.

“In Raleigh and Durham, you see older people and younger people coming together to work on issues,” he said. “Here in Greensboro, it’s splintered. One group here and one group here. But we’re not working together. That’s why Democracy at Home is a coalition. It can encompass a lot of different groups."