Waves of emotion washed over DeJuana Thompson as she stood in the convention hall in Chicago last month watching Vice President Kamala Harris become the first Black woman nominated for the presidency by a major political party.

Battleground North Carolina

In North Carolina, a state that Donald Trump won by about 74,000 votes out of some 5.4 million cast in 2020, groups led by Black women are crisscrossing the state in a scramble to expand the electorate. Black residents make up about 21% of the state’s population, and North Carolina is home to nearly a dozen Historically Black College and Universities.

Thompson, the Alabama activist, is the founder of Woke Vote, an organization that in 2017 helped elect Doug Jones as Alabama’s first Democratic US senator in a quarter century. In this election, her work focuses heavily on a handful of states, including North Carolina and Georgia, which Biden won by fewer than 12,000 votes in 2020.

The Tar Heel State marked Trump’s tightest margin of victory four years ago, and Harris is trying to become the first Democratic presidential contender to win the state since Barack Obama in 2008. Thompson, who worked on Obama’s 2008 campaign in North Carolina, is focused on turning out rural Black voters in the eastern part of the state often overlooked by traditional outreach efforts, she said.

Black female organizers in the state also are extending their reach far beyond other Black women.

Janice Robinson is the North Carolina program director of an organization called Red Wine & Blue, which engages in “relational” organizing. She is encouraging diverse groups of suburban women to turn out their friends, neighbors and relatives for Harris and other Democrats in the Tar Heel State.

At a house party on a recent Friday morning in the Charlotte area, about a dozen people – mostly White women – gathered with Robinson to strategize over coffee, pastries and orange juice. Holding up her cellphone, she walked them through a tool to share information about the election with other North Carolinians in their contact lists.

“People listen to the people that they trust,” she emphasized.

Her goal is to get 40,000 voters to the polls in North Carolina.

The North Carolina chapter of America Votes, meanwhile, is working with an array of other organizations to reach 4 million voters in the state – a record quadrupling of its outreach in past elections, said Ashlei Blue, the group’s state director.

Deputy director Nervahna Crew is a veteran of several presidential elections in North Carolina, including 2016, when she logged so many miles door-knocking and literature-dropping for Hillary Clinton that she developed a cyst on her right foot. Crew said she worked “overtime” in that election, in part, to honor her grandmother Mary Starkey, a stalwart Democratic activist from Delaware who desperately wanted to cast a ballot to elect Clinton as the nation’s first female president but passed away in 2015.

This election cycle, Crew’s nonpartisan day job keeps her mostly focused on voter turnout rather than working directly on behalf of a candidate. But her commitment to making history in the presidential election hasn’t waned, she said.

“At the end of the day, what you’re not going to do is blame Black women for not doing their job,” she said. “If we’re not successful this time around, it won’t be because we didn’t give it our all.”

Read the full article on CNN.com

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“Voters must advocate to retain reproductive rights. In addition to abortion health care, we must ensure that access to contraception and IVF is not limited, because they are also being targeted,” she warned.

Janice Robinson, NC Program Director of Red Wine and Blue, and Susan Sawin, Dare County Democratic Party Chair, delivered compelling closing remarks, urging rally-goers to mobilize ahead of the elections.

“This rally is just the beginning,” emphasized Robinson. “We must channel our passion into action by mobilizing and voting for candidates who prioritize women’s rights and healthcare access.

Sawin echoed Robinson’s sentiments, stating, “Our voices matter at the ballot box. Let’s ensure our elected officials reflect our values and fight for reproductive justice.”

Read the complete article at: The Outer Banks Voice

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Robinson said in 1975, when she was just 15 years old, she endured a “back-alley abortion” when she was growing up in rural South Carolina.

Roe v. Wade had been decided two years earlier, but her mother didn’t know the U.S. Supreme Court had decided women had a fundamental right to access a safe, legal abortion. Robinson said after the procedure she went home and lost so much blood from the complications that she passed out.

“You’re probably thinking next that I was taken to the hospital. No, I was not. My mother nursed me back to health in our home.”

Robinson said she shares that ‘nightmare’ decades after the fact because she wants people to realize the same horrors could await women and girls who do not have access to safe abortion care, if they choose or need that option.“They risk being in a similar situation or worse without this care,” Robinson said.

Continue Reading at ncnewsline.com

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The debate at Tuesday’s school board meeting highlights the ongoing cultural wars going on across North Carolina and the nation.

It led to state lawmakers adopting the “Parents’ Bill of Rights.” The law’s provisions include barring instruction on gender identity, sexuality or sexual activity in kindergarten through fourth-grade classrooms.

Speakers regularly debate at school board meetings about what books should be allowed in school libraries.

“The school board is debating a grant from the organization We Need Diverse Books, which includes ‘Boy Meets Boy,’ etc,” speaker John Balog said at this week’s board meeting. “You can go on their website and check it out.

“Yes we need diversity. We need subject and curriculum diversity. We need passing grades in math, English, science, social studies, music.”

He said anything else needs parental consent.

But speaker Renee Sekel said students need to read about the lives of marginalized students. As an example she pointed to the case of Nex Benedict, a 16-year-old nonbinary student in Oklahoma who died this month a day after a fight in school.

“If such books weren’t under such deep attack then maybe a precious 16-year-old non-binary child who was beaten brutally to death in a bathroom in Oklahoma … at their school, good gravy, would be alive today. These are matters of life and death.” Sekel said.

Read the full article at yahoo.com

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“Well now they could add in anything they wanted,” explained Sekel, who is cofounder of the group Save Our Schools NC, and North Carolina deputy director for the organization Red Wine and Blue. “If Governor Cooper had tried to veto it, then they would be able to say that Governor Cooper vetoed Medicaid.”

Read more at JACOBIN

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Janice Robinson took the call seriously, and on a night in August when the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools board approved policies to comply with the Parents’ Bill of Rights, she spoke out. Robinson called the new laws that limit instruction of LGBTQ+ issues in elementary schools, among other things, a “ruse to take away the rights of other parents.”

“Our goal is not about being loud, but being reasonable and inclusive,” Robinson told The Charlotte Observer last week. “We join supporters of public education.”

Robinson and a group of about 20 parents make up Mecklenburg County’s chapter of Public School Strong, a network launched in May with about 30 other teams across the state. Their charge is to be an ever-increasing presence at school board meetings, wearing matching blue shirts with big hearts.

Read the full article at qnotescarolinas.com

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“We know that constitutionally there’s no way here in North Carolina constitutionally to recall an elected official,” Robinson, the Red, Wine & Blue N.C. program director said. “But we decided, you know, we wanted to make sure that voters in her district, really voters across the state, had an opportunity to make their make their voices heard.”

Robinson says so far, their organization has 7,000 signatures on the petition.

“Our goal would be, at minimum, getting one more signature than the number of votes she got,” she said.

Read more on CBS17.com

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In practice, it will ban medication abortion after 10 weeks and impose insurmountable barriers on people trying to get an abortion early in pregnancy. The new restrictions found in the 46-pages of Senate Bill 20 aim to shut down abortion clinics, make it unworkable for doctors to adequately provide care, and increase medically unnecessary barriers for people seeking an abortion even before 12 weeks.

Read more at Yahoo!

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A controversial bill that would restrict how the state’s public school teachers discuss race, gender and sexuality was approved by the state House by a 68-49 party line vote on Wednesday, and is now headed to the state Senate.

Several Democrats from the state’s urban centers vigorously opposed House Bill 187. The Republican-backed legislation would require school districts to give a 30-day notice to parents and the state Department of Public Instruction if teachers or invited guests plan to expose students to more than a dozen concepts GOP lawmakers deem unacceptable.

Read more at NC Policy Watch

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After hearing her child’s teacher call them by that name in a parent-teacher meeting, Sekel said, she realized her child was already happily out at school. In time, she grew thankful that the public school had been a safe and affirming place for her child to express their identity before it was fully accepted at home — and that they were able to tell family on their own terms.

Read more at ABC News [article no longer available]

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