The South Has Always Organized for Our Nation’s Democratic Ideals

In June 1943, workers from the Winston-Salem tobacco plant walked off the job, sparking an organizing campaign that would reverberate throughout North Carolina and across the South.

What began as a strike led by predominantly Black women workers at R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company quickly grew into thousands protesting dangerous conditions, low wages, and discrimination. Their efforts helped create Local 22, an interracial union that would influence labor, politics, and the struggle for civil rights for years to come.

Local 22 won better wages and working conditions for people, but its vision extended beyond the factory floor. After successfully unionizing the most powerful corporation in the city, union members registered thousands of Black voters and developed Black political leadership, helping elect Reverend Kenneth Williams to Winston-Salem’s Board of Aldermen—the first Black person to hold this position since the Reconstruction. Ten years after the Local 22 strike, the foundation I lead was established with a $12 million bequest from Mary Reynolds Babcock, the daughter of R. J. Reynolds. These unionized women carried the origins of what we now call radical imagination: to see beyond the conditions imposed on us and work towards the promise of a just and joyful life—our rightful inheritance.

The South is too often described by what it lacks, where it falls behind, and what needs to be fixed. But the region has long been a place where supposedly impossible democratic ideas have been imagined and made real.

Across the South, there is a story of industries accumulating wealth and power. There’s also a story of workers—disproportionately Black women—organizing for dignity, economic power, and political voice. We cannot tell one story without the other.

Our responsibility is not to rewrite history, but to be accountable to it. As the United States marks 250 years, our next chapter requires us to recognize and resource the democratic leadership that Southern communities have been building for generations.

The South Is an Offering

One of the most important lessons the region offers America at 250 is this: Democracy has always depended on people imagining the world as a better place and then organizing to make it so.

Communities in the South continue to build democratic possibility under conditions designed to constrain it.

The South is too often described by what it lacks, where it falls behind, and what needs to be fixed. But the region has long been a place where supposedly impossible democratic ideas have been imagined and made real. For instance: freedom in a society and economy built on enslavement; a multiracial democracy under the ravages of Jim Crow; worker power despite an extractive economy; and political participation among people violently excluded from it. These gains were not bestowed by institutions. They were built by people who knew the existing order excluded them—and organized anyway, for a future that they likely would not see themselves.

That tradition is alive today. Communities continue to organize around voting rights, the economy, racial equity, climate justice, community power, and so much more. Take the Promise of Justice Initiative in New Orleans, for example, an organization leading the fight to end mass incarceration, such as the forced labor system at Angola, a Louisiana State Penitentiary where agricultural labor conditions for incarcerated people—predominantly Black men—are reproducing conditions of chattel slavery.

Another important example is the Immigrant Alliance for Justice and Equity (or CASA IAJE) in Mississippi, which built vital safety nets during severe regional emergencies. CASA IAJE coordinated food donations, secured personal protective supplies, and redistributed essential resources during the worst periods of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Jackson water crisis. Communities in the South continue to build democratic possibility under conditions designed to constrain it.

Democracy Requires Racial and Economic Justice

The South also makes another truth impossible to ignore: There is no multiracial democracy without racial and economic justice. Economic power and democratic power have always been intertwined. In the US, a racial order historically has determined who can vote, own property, earn a living with dignity, and shape public institutions. Local 22 understood that changing one required changing the others. These connections remain true, and more leaders should take note.

Racial justice cannot be a priority only when it is politically comfortable to do so. A democracy cannot fulfill its promise while entire communities remain systematically excluded from economic and political power. Nor can it thrive when resources pledged during the racial reckoning of 2020 are withdrawn, leaving mission-critical organizations powerless—organizations that sustain civic participation, protect hard-won rights, and build the community needed to meet moments of democratic crisis.

Philanthropy historically has treated the South as a risky investment. We should instead recognize it as a source of movement wisdom, democratic imagination, and leadership.

This is precisely why we must look to the South when we think about this country at 250. Across the region, communities are organizing against this exclusion, while building the collective power that meaningful democratic participation requires.

The Mississippi Black Women’s Roundtable offers a powerful example. Through its statewide, intergenerational network, MSBWR shifts power by engaging and empowering Black women and girls at the voting booth, at policy tables, and in their communities. Through its Power of the Pocketbook campaign, the organization helped establish Mississippi’s equal pay law in 2022. Their Power of the Sister Vote Project has also helped to register and mobilize Black women and young voters across the state.

When equity becomes harder to name, fund, or defend, we should remember why it matters: Expanding who has voice, power, and agency is how the national project of democracy gets built, protected, and improved.

What Philanthropy Can Learn

Philanthropy historically has treated the South as a risky investment. We should instead recognize it as a source of movement wisdom, democratic imagination, and leadership.

For more than seven decades, the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, where I serve as CEO, has had the privilege of learning alongside Southern communities. That experience has shaped not only what we fund, but what we believe about power and our practice of philanthropy itself. That has meant looking beyond the next policy victory and to the communities that respond when the terrain shifts. It also means investing for the long term, providing flexible support, and recognizing communities as leaders, rather than treating them as sources of information or labor. The goal is not to determine the future for communities in the South, but to move resources and power to the people who are already building it.

We’ve put that commitment into practice through an 11 percent payout strategy—more than double the 5 percent that private foundations in the US are legally required to distribute each year to the communities they serve. Earlier this year, we doubled down by extending that 11 percent payout through 2031, timed to match the 2030 and 2032 census and redistricting cycles. These are once-in-a-generation opportunities to reshape the balance of power across the South.

Instead of retreating, we are choosing to remain in the work alongside our grantee partners and communities, providing the sustained resources they need to build power, strengthen institutions, and shape what comes next.

What We Build Next

Like the organizers who created Local 22 in the 1940s, we are living through another moment when the boundaries of what is possible are being contested. The instinct, especially within institutions, can be to become more cautious. The South offers another path. Collective liberation asks us to understand that our struggles are interconnected, that our futures are bound together.

As America marks 250 years, we should imagine our future as boldly as generations of Southern organizers have imagined theirs—and move resources and power toward the people best positioned to build it. Democracy has always depended on people who could imagine something more and organize until the impossible became possible.

Many of us in the South have been imagining and acting toward that possibility for generations. Our task now is to recognize it, resource it, and help carry it forward. Our just and joyful future depends on it.