ROCKY MOUNT, North Carolina — As early voting turnout in North Carolina’s midterm elections surged past levels seen in previous years, Mysha Holland was one of the first people in line.
Organizers in the city, about 45 miles from where President Donald Trump recently held a rally for his preferred candidates, are hopeful that they can overcome efforts to erode Black voting power by driving up turnout.
Holland and others have been preparing for this moment for a long time.
On Oct. 22, 2025, North Carolina’s Republican-controlled General Assembly approved a map that dropped the Black voting-age population of the 1st Congressional District from about 41% to 32%. The Nov. 3 general election is the first major electoral test of the new map and its impact on voters in the district, which for more than three decades has been a beacon of Black political representation in eastern North Carolina, the state’s historic Black Belt region.
“[The map] reflects a direct assault on Black communities,” Holland, 36, told Capital B at a coffee shop at Rocky Mount Mills, a 19th-century cotton mill that was built on enslaved Black labor and is now a cluster of stores, restaurants, and offices. “A lot of what we’re seeing is nothing new. It’s bringing out the old playbook.”
North Carolina’s redistricting battle shows how widespread efforts that could diminish Black voting power have become since Trump last year urged Republican-controlled legislatures to redraw their congressional districts in ways that would favor his party. North Carolina was one of the states that answered Trump’s call.
These efforts have only deepened amid a changing legal landscape. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Alabama to revive a map threatening U.S. Rep. Shomari Figures’ district. In May, Georgia and South Carolina pushed unsuccessfully to redraw their district lines, and Tennessee cracked majority-Black Memphis among three districts. This all followed a Supreme Court decision in April that dismantled a brand-new majority-Black district in Louisiana.
Across the region, however, organizers are fighting back. In North Carolina, Holland and others are mobilizing voters, aiming to counter the map that replaced heavily Black communities in the 1st District with whiter, more conservative ones. Through church outreach, door-to-door canvassing, and other tactics, they’ve been explaining the boundaries of the new map, convincing residents, or trying to convince them, that their votes still matter.
The stakes are high, even beyond this election. Republicans view the 1st District as one of their best chances to gain a House seat in the South. A defeat for the district’s current representative, Democrat Don Davis, could also leave Black communities in eastern North Carolina with less political influence and strip them of a lawmaker who can speak up for them on the issues impacting their everyday lives, including access to hospitals in rural areas.
“If eastern North Carolina turns out,” said a determined Holland, a senior administrator at the Opportunities Industrialization Center of Rocky Mount, a local nonprofit where her work includes community outreach, “this state will never be red again.”
A bastion of Black power
For more than three decades, North Carolina’s 1st District has been a center of Black political representation.
The district has connected rural communities that have large Black populations, granting voters who had long been excluded from political power the ability to elect the representative of their choice.
That opportunity congealed in the early 1990s. Following the 1990 census, North Carolina redrew the 1st District to make it majority Black. These new lines paved the way for the election in 1992 of Democrat Eva Clayton — the first Black American to represent the state in Congress since the early post-Reconstruction period. Frank Ballance succeeded her in 2003, and he was followed by G.K. Butterfield in 2004. All were Black Democrats, as is the district’s current representative, Davis, who took office in 2023.
But the district’s boundaries have been challenged again and again, each change making it more difficult for Black voters to influence election outcomes.
The 2025 map threatens Davis’ seat. He won his first election in 2022 by nearly 5 percentage points. Two years later, he defeated Republican Laurie Buckhout by about 1.5 points. The two are now facing each other once more, but this time under lines that further chip away at the voting strength of Black residents.
For Courtney Patterson, 81, an eastern North Carolina organizer, the latest redistricting has brought back memories of the long struggle for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Patterson was a student at North Carolina A&T State University when civil rights demonstrators were beaten on Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama. He remembers when Black Americans had little influence over the officials who governed them, and the push that followed the law’s passage to register Black Americans to vote.
“Think about the price that was paid for the Voting Rights Act,” Patterson told Capital B at the Rocky Mount office of the North Carolina Black Alliance, a nonpartisan network that centers civic engagement. Election buttons, pamphlets, and posters filled the small space.
As Patterson, an organizer with Blueprint North Carolina, a statewide coalition of more than 120 nonprofit groups, sees it, the fight is about far more than preserving a Democratic seat. It’s about protecting the political influence that Black communities have spent generations building, and ensuring that their needs, including rural access to hospitals, aren’t overlooked.
“We should be choosing the people we elect to office,” he said, adding that politicians shouldn’t be choosing their constituents.
Inside the Alliance office, located next to the historic Booker T. Theater, Patterson gathered with several others on a hot day in October. The election and the fate of the 1st District were top of mind. They’re connected through an overlapping network of groups attempting to strengthen Black communities’ political power. In addition to Blueprint North Carolina, these groups include Advance Carolina, which grew out of the Alliance and also uses the office.
Their work this year has had a particular focus on how the new map affects Black voters in the eastern part of the state.
For Viola Harris, an Edgecombe County commissioner, the issue of representation is personal. Her mother raised six children on her own — working on a farm for just $3 a day, cleaning a white woman’s home, and taking a job at a store. Harris grew up understanding that, though people such as her mother worked hard, they had little say over the decisions affecting their everyday lives.
The question of representation is personal for Harris, 67, in another way, too. She was only the second Black woman elected to the Edgecombe County Board of Commissioners. For her first eight years, she was its only woman. Though her position isn’t affected by the new map, she takes representation seriously.
“When they change districts, they’re trying to take away from the have-nots,” Harris told Capital B. “When they take away your vote, you don’t have a say.”
“I can create some change”
But organizers across eastern North Carolina are determined to make sure that Black voters still have a say.
Among them is the Rev. Christopher Braswell, the director of community transformation and strategic development at Light of Peace Missionary Baptist Church in Rocky Mount. A native of Pinetops, a town in Edgecombe County, Braswell, 30, has lived in the 1st District his whole life. He maintains that protecting Black representation requires developing relationships with people who might stay home on Election Day.
Last year, Braswell joined a redistricting tour through Wilson, Nash, Edgecombe, and Wayne counties, explaining the implications of the map changes to residents who might not have been following the legislative fight closely. His organizing efforts also include spending time at other churches. He hands out voter education materials, urging congregants not to look away from what officials are doing.
But Braswell doesn’t pretend that mobilizing voters is easy, even through the Black church.
“It’s like pulling teeth, because people don’t want to move,” he told Capital B. “I can go knock on your door on Monday. By Friday, you don’t even remember nothin’ I done said.”
To counter this, Braswell and other church leaders try to make politics relevant to congregants’ daily lives.
“‘You need to come to this civic meeting,’” Braswell said, describing the kind of message he delivers. “‘They’re voting on a speed bump on your block. You need to know what’s going on.’”
What’s crucial, Braswell added, is keeping in touch with potential voters long enough to get them to the polls. This means that grassroots groups must follow up constantly. They shouldn’t treat one conversation as proof that someone will vote. Even with his frustration with the pace of mobilization, Braswell still believes that a relatively small group of committed people can make a big difference.
“If I can just get me a room of 10 folks who want to move and do something,” he said, “I can make something change.”
Betty Selby, 62, the northeast regional coordinator for Advance Carolina, shared Braswell’s concerns about the challenge of mobilizing Black voters in the face of redistricting that threatens to weaken their strength at the ballot box.
Selby lives near the Outer Banks — in the neighboring 3rd District, which was affected by the same redistricting effort — but her organizing work includes the 1st District. She was one of the leads over the summer of a four-week canvassing campaign in Edgecombe and Nash counties, going door to door to teach residents about proposed ballot amendments and to counter any misinformation.
“We’re mobilizing people. We’re educating people about this political process,” Selby said. “And not just educating them, but building them up to be advocates who can create political power in their own communities.”
A legacy worth protecting
For Holland, the fight to protect Black voting power is a family matter. It’s her family history, after all, that has shaped how she thinks about the franchise.
Holland first voted in 2008, when she was 18 years old, helping Barack Obama to become the country’s first Black president. Her great-grandmother, now 93, had a very different experience. She was in her 30s when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, Holland said, and closer to 40 when she cast her first ballot.
The contrast between these experiences is clear to Holland. Her great-grandmother is part of a generation of Black Americans who faced dizzying barriers to voting but have lived long enough to cast a ballot for a successful Black candidate. Holland, meanwhile, grew up with opportunities that earlier generations could only dream of.
Now, as the mother of a teenager, she’s determined for her son to inherit a world with even more opportunities, not fewer. Her resolve fuels her organizing.
“When I learned that I was going to become a mother,” Holland recalled, “the one thing that was just not going to sit well with me was leaving him a world that was worse than the one I came into.”
