Welcome back to Everything’s Political, Capital B’s news, culture, and politics newsletter! Every Thursday, I’ll take a look at recent stories that seem particularly noteworthy. Here’s what I’ve got for you this week. When the Anti-DEI Movement and Memory Politics Collide DEI advocates suffered a one-two punch over the past week. Punch one: Alabama Republican […]
Brandon Tensley
Brandon Tensley is Capital B's national politics reporter.
Posted inPolitics & Policy
The GOP’s Long-Shot Bid for Black Voters
When Kermit Williams hears a new pro-Donald Trump radio spot that’s supposed to draw in Black voters, his mind sprints in the opposite direction: He thinks about the former president’s history of aggression toward marginalized communities. “I can’t unsee the Central Park Five and what Trump did to try to get a group of innocent […]
Posted inHistory, Politics & Policy
Daring to Be Bold: Examining Shirley Chisholm’s Everlasting Impact
When Kimberly Peeler-Allen was in the fourth grade, she had to pick someone to research for Women’s History Month. Her mother had a thought: Why not Shirley Chisholm? For Peeler-Allen, 47, the link was personal. Like Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress and the first Black candidate to seek a major political party’s […]
Posted inPolitics & Policy
The Fight for Democracy and Black Votes Loomed Large in Biden’s Speech
Among the many special guests at President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address on Thursday was the jazz singer and civil rights legend Bettie Mae Fikes. Beloved as the Voice of Selma, Fikes is known for having led protests in song. She often changed the lyrics of Black standards to match the movement: “Tell […]
Posted inPolitics & Policy, Voting
Biden, Bloody Sunday, and the Ongoing Fight for Black Votes
Fifty-nine years ago on Thursday, white state troopers brutalized voting rights protesters as they attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Footage of the carnage — one officer cracked 25-year-old John Lewis’ skull with a billy club — enraged the country, and galvanized widespread support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, […]
Posted inElections, Politics & Policy
Why Super Tuesday Is a ‘Dress Rehearsal’ for the General Election
Kristin Powell vividly remembers watching the Super Tuesday returns in February 2008 and being consumed by a single question: Can he actually make it? A college student spending a semester in Italy at the time, Powell was referring to Barack Obama, the youthful U.S. senator from Illinois who was challenging the establishment darling Hillary Clinton […]
Posted inPolitics & Policy, Voting
How the Legacy of a Reconstruction-Era Massacre Shapes Voting Rights Today
Shauna Sias, 48, has lived in Opelousas, Louisiana, almost her entire life. And thanks to her father, a civil rights advocate who battled racial segregation in the Deep South, she’s always known about the massacre that shattered the small Louisiana city during Reconstruction. Over the course of around two weeks beginning on Sept. 28, 1868, […]
Posted inPolitics & Policy
Why Some Black South Carolinians Aren’t Responding to Nikki Haley’s Message
Kym Smith is passionate about a wide range of causes, from pushing for South Carolina public schools to include Black history in their curricula to bringing adequate health care to Black communities. But rarely, if ever, does Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley grapple with issues of deep-seated racial inequality, said Smith, a 36-year-old mother and […]
Posted inElections, Politics & Policy
‘New Literacy Test’: The Black Organizers Waging War on Disinformation
Every time an election looms, Baton Rouge resident Ashley Shelton notices the red flags — the signs sprinkled around the city and other parts of Louisiana that give the wrong information about when voters can cast their ballots. She doesn’t know who the bad actors are. But whenever she sees one of these signs — […]
Posted inElections, Politics & Policy
‘A Lot to Be Concerned About’: Jim Clyburn on the Stakes of the 2024 Election
Black South Carolinians saved President Joe Biden’s struggling 2020 White House bid. Now, on Saturday, in this cycle’s first sanctioned Democratic primary, the state’s Black electorate will have an opportunity to set the tone of the 2024 race and center the issues that matter most to Black communities, including the right to vote, health care, […]
