Why Black Resilience is Democracy’s Only Blueprint

We are descendants of those who pushed America to live up to its highest ideals. The legacy of farmers, educators, caregivers, and organizers across the South who believed in the promise of American democracy, even when America did not believe in them, endures in us.

As America marks the 250th anniversary of its founding, we cannot forget the contributions of Black Americans, who have been catalysts for some of the most transformative democratic advances in our nation’s history. From the Reconstruction Amendments to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Black communities pushed America to confront the contradiction at the heart of its founding ideals. That insistence on full participation in American democracy helped transform the nation into a beacon of hope, demonstrating what is possible when a country commits itself to expanding freedom and opportunity. Or so it seemed.

Those who understand our nation’s history know we have been here before. America has repeatedly faced moments when progress was met with systematic violence — when expansions of democracy were followed not merely by political opposition but by voting restrictions, armed coups, organized terror, and the deliberate destruction of democratic institutions.

In 1898, in Wilmington, North Carolina, a white supremacist mob burned down the city’s Black-owned newspaper, The Daily Record, marched through Black neighborhoods with guns, and forced the democratically elected, racially integrated city government to resign at gunpoint. It was, as historians have confirmed, the only armed coup d’état ever executed against an elected American government. An estimated 60 to several hundred Black men were killed; more than 2,100 Black residents fled the city. A grand jury was convened. White witnesses refused to cooperate. No one was ever arrested. No one was ever charged.

Today, as America marks this historic milestone, we again find ourselves at a crossroads. Over the past eighteen months, we have witnessed executive orders dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives across federal agencies, book bans targeting histories of slavery, civil rights, and racial justice, and the removal of Black history from military museums, Department of Defense schools, and national park sites. 

This is not petty or performative cruelty. It is a strategy. The point is to sever the present from the past, to make invisible the direct line running from Wilmington 1898 to literacy tests to poll taxes to voter ID laws to gerrymandered maps being approved in Southern states following the Supreme Court’s decision in Callais.

The tools have changed. The playbook has not. To build our own playbook, we must look to the enduring legacy of Black communities across the South.

For centuries, the South has served as the proving ground of America’s promise. It is the region where the most innovative strategies to both restrict and expand democracy have coexisted. Black communities in the South have often been the primary targets of suppression — and have just as often become democracy’s most creative, and ardent, defenders.

They did not wait for the system to protect them. They built parallel systems that made the old order irrelevant.

The 1881 Atlanta Washerwomen Strike, in which Black domestic workers organized for economic power and autonomy, established that collective action by the most marginalized workers could succeed. The Montgomery Bus Boycott — sustained for 381 days — was not simply a protest. It was economic infrastructure. It was a community demonstrating that it did not need the segregated system to survive. The 1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools, which taught Black history never taught in state schools, trained civic leaders and drove the voter registration drives that built the base for everything that followed.
By naming white supremacy as organized power, not individual prejudice, Black communities across the South built alternative institutions that served the needs of the community. They showcased that collective self-organization worked when communities were educated on where they came from and where they’re going – understanding that issues such as voting rights, economic power, and legal defense were all connected and necessary for fully realized participation in American democracy.

Historians and legal scholars looking at the 2024 election and the current policy environment have described what we are living through as a “Third Reconstruction” — or more precisely, the backlash to it. The First Reconstruction was dismantled by the Jim Crow backlash. The Second Reconstruction — the Civil Rights era — was dismantled through Shelby, through Citizens United, through the fifty-year conservative legal campaign that culminated in the elimination of affirmative action and now Callais. 

And each time, Black communities have responded not with despair but with creativity — building institutions, building knowledge, building power in the spaces the state refused to protect.

That legacy is what this anniversary should call us to honor — not as nostalgia, but as methodology.

The communities most often excluded from democracy have done the most to expand it. That is not just Black history. It is American history. 
We must remember what they are trying to make us forget — because remembering is not merely honoring the past.
It is the strategy for the present.
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Daria Dawson is the Executive Director of America Votes. Nadine Smith is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Color of Change.

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