COLUMBIA, South Carolina — To Jasmine Broadwater, U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina isn’t some distant power broker in Washington, D.C. He’s a hometown fixture.
Broadwater, 32, grew up in Columbia, the state’s capital, and she said that Clyburn would sometimes “just randomly pop up at school.” His daughter Jennifer Clyburn Reed was one of Broadwater’s English teachers in high school, and his grandson Walter Clyburn Reed was a classmate.
This proximity influenced how Broadwater viewed the Democratic kingmaker: with a combination of admiration and familiarity. She credits Clyburn with helping to fuel tangible change, pointing to his push for the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina State House: “Once that came down after the shooting at Mother Emanuel in 2015, we started to see more money come into the state,” Broadwater told Capital B.
But Broadwater is also part of a growing group of Black voters who are asking: What comes next? At 85, Clyburn is the last of the old House Democratic leadership vying for another term. He’s running for reelection to continue representing South Carolina’s 6th Congressional District — a seat he’s held since 1993 — even as younger Black Americans highlight what they see as the need for aging party leaders to pass the torch.
This tension is unfolding at an uncertain time for Black political representation. Following an April 29 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Republican lawmakers in former slaveholding states — including Louisiana, Tennessee, Alabama, and South Carolina — started moving aggressively to draw heavily Black congressional districts out of existence. Clyburn has said repeatedly that he’ll run for reelection “no matter what” happens with the map.
Hours after early voting began on Tuesday, the state Senate rejected a White House-backed map that would have effectively drawn Clyburn out of his district. A Clyburn win in the June 9 primary is considered a near certainty.
His office didn’t respond to Capital B’s request for comment. But on Tuesday, he said on X: “We have someone in the White House that wants Republicans to ignore the Constitutional principles for which this current map was drawn. A critical number of Republicans did not believe in putting a man over the law.”
To many Black South Carolinians, the question of who should be Clyburn’s successor is complicated by the attacks on his district, according to Marcurius Byrd, the executive committeeman of the Richland County Democratic Party.
“I was a Clyburn fellow, I worked on Jaime Harrison’s 2020 U.S. Senate campaign, I got lots of political experience from doing this work — we don’t exist without people like Clyburn,” Byrd, 41, told Capital B at a local party headquarters in downtown Columbia, as volunteers prepared campaign materials in the next room.
“But at the same time, we’re in a whole new ball game, as we’re seeing with the Republican lawmakers who are trying to erase Clyburn’s legacy and give away his seat,” he added. “And we need to put people who are used to these kinds of fights in positions of power.”
The question of when to let go
As some Black South Carolinians see it, Clyburn’s tenure is about hard-fought political representation and know-how, not just age.
He has been in office for more than 30 years, the beneficiary of a deal between civil rights leaders and Republican lawmakers that led to the creation of a district where a Black American could win office. He’s credited with saving Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign after the former vice president suffered a series of primary defeats. To older Black South Carolinians, especially, this continuity is vital, and it’s not easily replaced by youth.
“With the status he holds now, for another person to come in and have to start all over, that would put South Carolina in an even lower position,” Bessie Cleckley, 77, who lives in the town of Rowesville, told Capital B. “He knows how to get things done. He knows how to get bills passed.”
Cleckley’s late husband, Roger, was the first Black elected official in Orangeburg County since Reconstruction. He served as the county’s auditor for 33 years, and it was his work on Clyburn’s campaign in the early days that influenced him to run for office. Cleckley doesn’t see Clyburn’s longevity as a detriment. To her, it offers a precious fluency in how power works, and an overlooked bulwark against those seeking to diminish Black political influence.
“Today it’s ‘Sit down because you’re too old’ and ‘Let’s go ahead and do something different,’” Cleckley said, referring to the clash between those who want change and those who are more resistant to it. “I think that we need to hold onto what we got for right now.”
But her conviction that experience is what’s needed to meet this fraught political moment isn’t shared across generations.
Byrd, the Democratic operative, framed the tension as a sharp divergence in how politics itself is understood — a disconnect between older Democratic Party leadership and a current political climate that’s defined by a Republican Party increasingly represented by relatively younger MAGA supporters.
“They’re not even speaking the same language,” he said of older Democratic leadership. He pointed to the viral meme and nonsensical expression “six-seven,” used by Gen Z, to illustrate this divide. “I have no idea what six-seven means,” he said. “But this is happening in politics. It’s as if older Democratic leadership doesn’t understand what their opponents are saying because those opponents are basically speaking a new language.”
And this disconnect, he said, isn’t trivial. He believes that it reflects a misalignment between a Democratic establishment that reveres institutional norms and a Republican Party that’s become much more aggressive in seeking and holding onto power, as has been seen in recent weeks through the dash to redraw voting maps.
“The Republican Party that exists today isn’t the one they came up negotiating with, and yet they’re still trying to use the same playbook,” Byrd said, adding that the Democratic old guard doesn’t seem to know how to let new leadership be new leadership. “Until we can see more than just Clyburn, nobody’s going to feel ready to step up and lead, even though they’re ready. But until he steps down, nobody’s going to see that.”
For Calvin Joyner, 32, the issue is also about seeing himself more directly reflected in elected leadership.
Like Broadwater, Joyner grew up with Clyburn as a familiar presence in his life. Clyburn’s daughter taught at Joyner’s middle school, and he went to high school with both of her children. That familiarity meant a lot to Joyner because he got to see up close how high Black Americans can ascend in politics and how much of an impact Black leaders can have on their communities.
Still, Joyner is hungry for representation he can identify with on a deeper level.
“As an educator — and as someone who’s Black and gay — I want to be a source of representation for my students on a number of levels,” Joyner told Capital B. “So when it comes to political representation, I also want someone who can identify with me in different ways. I’m optimistic that, going forward, we’ll have people in office who represent Black Americans’ diversity.”
“We’re just going to disappear”
The debate over Clyburn’s political future is unfolding during an escalating national battle over voting rights. This struggle has turned heavily Black districts such as Clyburn’s, which connects Columbia to the state’s Lowcountry region, into targets, though the state’s Republican lawmakers seem more willing than their peers elsewhere to defy President Donald Trump, fearing that a redistricting plan could backfire.
“With the status he holds now, for another person to come in and have to start all over, that would put South Carolina in an even lower position,” Bessie Cleckley, 77, who lives in the town of Rowesville, told Capital B. “He knows how to get things done. He knows how to get bills passed.”
In the April 29 decision, the Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana map with a second majority-Black district and further weakened the Voting Rights Act of 1965, considered the crown jewel of the Civil Rights Movement.
Since then, Republican lawmakers across the South have been advocating for new voting lines that would strengthen their competitiveness ahead of the 2026 midterm elections by diluting Black voting power.
A measure to eliminate Clyburn’s district failed in the South Carolina state Senate on Tuesday. The ACLU of South Carolina and other groups condemned the process, saying that lawmakers violated open-meeting laws in their scramble to redraw the map. Additionally, Alabama intends to appeal a Tuesday federal court ruling that blocks the state’s use of a map with a single heavily Black district. And a new Tennessee map fractures majority-Black Memphis into three districts, likely making it a near impossibility for residents to elect a Democratic representative.
The targeting of South Carolina’s 6th Congressional District brought Oveta Glover, 72, the president of the Columbia branch of the NAACP, to a protest outside a state House Judiciary Committee hearing earlier this month.
Protesters gather at the South Carolina State House earlier this month as concerns grow over proposed changes targeting South Carolina’s 6th Congressional District. (Brandon Tensley/Capital B)
“They’re doing everything they can to dismantle what we have,” she told Capital B on the State House grounds, within walking distance of a large monument to the segregationist Strom Thurmond, as people chanted, “Hey hey, ho ho, Jim Crow has got to go!”
“It’s just unjust,” Glover concluded.
She had arrived outside the hearing at 8:45 a.m., hoping to get a seat inside. But capacity was quickly reached, and the doors were closed to anyone else. She stayed anyway. To her, showing up still mattered.
“We need to be cognizant of what’s being done with these maps, even if it’s not in South Carolina,” Glover said. “If something is happening in a state next to us or in another Southern state, we’ve got to pay attention. What happened in Louisiana should have triggered us right away. This is all being done according to plan. This isn’t anything that they just thought of overnight.”
At a separate rally the following afternoon, Barbara Charles, 68, carried a similar mix of frustration and resolve.
“I’m here because I want to support our community,” she told Capital B, standing with two friends as she held a sign saying, “This Is What Democracy Looks Like.” “Representation is important. With them trying to eliminate the 6th Congressional District, we’re just going to disappear. We’re not going to have a voice. And we need a voice.”
But it’s not just everyday voters who are angry. Political leaders are, too.
South Carolina state Rep. Hamilton Grant — who’s among the younger Black Democrats vying to shape South Carolina’s future and is seen by some as a possible successor to Clyburn — didn’t mince his words. He framed the issue as an existential crisis.
“You are really talking about decimating Black voting power,” Grant, 37, told Capital B from his office in Columbia, as protesters called for fair voting maps outside. “One of the narratives that’s disturbed me is that Black Americans won’t have access to voting. You’ll have access. Access isn’t the issue. The issue is you won’t have representation on the matters you care about.”
His warning reflects a broader anxiety among Black Americans, including Black emerging leaders: that the very districts that helped to produce figures such as Clyburn are rapidly being undermined just as conversations about a new generation stepping forward are coming to a head.
That concern extends beyond South Carolina. In Maryland, Democratic Gov. Wes Moore, 47, the lone Black governor currently serving, has been outspoken about the stakes of the redistricting battles playing out across the South.
“What we’re seeing is basically political redlining, and no one can call it anything otherwise,” Moore told Capital B, referring to a discriminatory practice used to keep Black Americans out of certain neighborhoods. “It’s the greatest form of political redlining we’ve seen in generations — where people are intentionally attempting to disenfranchise Black voters and minimize Black leadership in a way that, frankly, we haven’t seen since the end of Reconstruction.”
Maryland’s earlier attempt to redraw its map failed due to internal disagreement among Democratic lawmakers, but a special legislative session now seems possible after Republican redistricting efforts have prompted a shift.
For Broadwater, back in Columbia, this fight complicates the conversations around Clyburn’s political future. Her view of the longtime congressman remains empathetic. She doesn’t see him as a man who wants power for the sake of having power. She sees him as someone who believes that he’s still working toward something that isn’t quite finished.
“I think that he just feels as if he has an assignment that he needs to complete,” she said. “And he doesn’t want to get up out of that seat until he completes it.”
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