This weekend, LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund and the BVM Capacity Building Institute, celebrated the 56th Anniversary of Bloody Sunday/Selma to Montgomery March — the landmark march that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
“We received an award for fighting for voting rights. Honored to be lifted up and recognized along with the original leaders of the movement,” Brown tweeted.
Brown worked tirelessly alongside Stacey Abrams’s Fair Fight and Nse Ufot’s The New Georgia Project, who are all credited for helping flip Georgia blue for the first time in 28 years.
Speaking to Shondaland earlier this month, Brown says her organization is all about building power.
“We [did that] by creating a vehicle that would help build capacity to Black-lead organizations, by investing money, by being a stock partner, to being a strategic partner, just the same kind of resources that go into the building of the power of a party.”
And her hard work and influence have not gone unnoticed.
Last month, Brown was selected as a Senior Advisory Committee member at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s Kennedy School. In her role, she will work with five other committee members to further the Institute’s mission to inspire Harvard students to pursue pathways in politics and public service.
But in the grueling fight for voting equity, this is just the beginning.
Speaking with the Harvard Gazette, Brown stressed the importance of not becoming complacent when it comes to putting in work.
“We have to reckon with what created this [situation] if we don’t want this again. If we just pick back up and do the same thing, it’s going to ultimately lead to this again. There’s been an exposure of the fragility of democracy, and we can’t unsee that,” she told the publication. “We can’t act like it doesn’t exist. It is far bigger than Trump or the Trump administration. Cracks in the foundation of democracy in this country have been exposed and revealed. We’ve got to have a reckoning of how we got to this place and we also have to really fit in this question around, like Dr. King asked, “Where do we go from here?”
“Some of the shifts are already here. We will never go back to an America where it is acceptable for white men to control all the resources. That’s over,” she added.
Watch Brown’s recent appearance on “The Karen Hunter Show” below.
LaTosha Brown deserves to be honored for her ongoing work to empower Black voters.
