Black Louisianians express disappointment in election results, discuss what’s next

18th November 2024   ·   0 Comments

By Arielle Robinson
Contributing Writer

(Veritenews.org) — Alumni of historically Black colleges and universities were buzzing with possibility as they awaited the results of the 2024 presidential race at an election night party hosted by the Howard University Alumni Club of Louisiana at the New Orleans Jazz Market.

The potential for a historic event wasn’t lost on attendees of the event for the Democratic nominee. Not only could Vice President Kamala Harris become the first Black and Asian woman president, but she is also a Howard alumna, meaning she would have been the first graduate of a historically Black university to be elected to the presidency. The atmosphere was a mix of optimism and nervousness.

“If it happens … that would feel great,” said Jermaine Bennett, who graduated from Southern University, also an HBCU. “I’ll be on top of the moon if it happens. She’ll break so many barriers, it’d be something that would be … in the history books for a very long time.”

But as the night wore on, the mood at the party steadily became more somber as President-elect Donald Trump mounted a strong lead in vital swing states. As partygoers prepared to leave at around 11 p.m., Trump had secured around 211 electoral college votes to Harris’ 145.

Courtney Cola, president of the Howard alumni group, said she was still hopeful but nervous.

“We’re all biting our nails,” Cola said. “It’ll probably be a couple days until we know for sure, but we’re still very optimistic.”

Press Robinson was watching the returns at his home in Baton Rouge. He recalled that he started to feel apprehensive watching Trump beginning to overtake Harris.

“I could kind of see where things were headed,” Robinson, a former educator and the first Black person elected to the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board, told Verite News the following day.

By early Wednesday morning, The Associated Press called the race for Trump. The news deeply disappointed Robinson, who has spent over 50 years in Baton Rouge advocating for civil rights.

Robinson grew up as a farmer in South Carolina and went on to attend Morehouse College and Howard University. He served in multiple roles in the Southern University System and lived through the civil rights struggles of the 1960s.

He said that the election results demonstrate that the U.S. is fighting the same civil rights battles it did in the 1960s.

The Trump campaign has long campaigned on racial grievance, attacking immigrants as “criminals” and “terrorists,” referring to Black Lives Matter protesters as “thugs,” and falsely spreading widely debunked rumors that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating their neighbors’ pets.

Though Trump made inroads with both Black and Latino voters in this race, he failed to capture a majority of either group, according to exit polling data. Harris had a slim lead among self-identified Latino voters. An overwhelming majority – 80 percent – of Black voters backed Harris, though that was a smaller share of votes than President Joe Biden received in 2020.

“I don’t think this country has come very far in terms of racial relations,” Robinson told Verite News on Wednesday, Nov. 6. “We try to pretend that it [racism] doesn’t exist, but it’s woven into the fabric of this country.”

Robinson recalled a line from his memoir, “Pressing Forward: My Life as a Baton Rouge Community Pioneer,” which was published earlier this year.
“One of the things I say in that memoir is that the more things change, the more they stay the same. So we’re fighting the fights today that we fought in the ‘60s. And the only thing that has really changed is the methodology by which the fight occurs,” he said.

He pointed to legislation that he said is meant to strip away voting rights across the country as an example of the tenuous status of civil rights in the U.S. Laws like one in Georgia that reduced the number of absentee ballot box locations and a 2023 federal appeals court ruling that found that private civil rights groups such as the NAACP cannot sue to enforce the federal Voting Rights Act show a loss of some of the hard-fought gains for enfranchisement, he said.

“Our young people better wake up, because the fight is not over, it’s getting rougher and rougher,” Robinson said.

Asali Ecclesiastes, chief equity officer at Ashé Cultural Arts Center in New Orleans, said the election results left her with a lot of raw emotions and that the presidential election result goes beyond political parties.

“I think that we have been resoundingly told by the citizens that we share this country with that they do not want a fair and multiracial democracy,” Ecclesiastes said.

She said that even though Black people in the U.S. are accustomed to being told that society will not treat them fairly, they have still been able to build and sustain a culture that comforts in the midst of discrimination.

Still, she said, “I don’t think that should be taken as any kind of indication that we’re embracing having to go through it.”

A.J. Haynes co-hosts the reproductive justice podcast, “The South Has the Answers.” She has worked in reproductive care for over a decade, during which abortion rights, established under the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, were repeatedly challenged and ultimately fell. The court overturned Roe in 2022 with a majority that included three Trump appointees. The decision left decisions on abortion law up to the states, and many 5 states, including Louisiana, have since enacted laws that ban the procedure in most cases.

Haynes said that she was hurt but not shocked by Trump winning.

“As a Black, queer, femme based in the South working in abortion care, my safety has been on the line for a long time, and I have carried a lot of the brunt of what has essentially been a fascist state,” Haynes said.

Haynes said she wants to reframe the question of what this election result means for Black people and instead ask what it means for white people, who mostly voted for Trump. A little more than 8 in 10 Trump voters were white, according to the AP.

“I feel like this is an election for folks that are complicit in white supremacy to look at themselves. … I feel like oftentimes Black women and femmes and gender expansive people and queer folks are looked to for answers when things go wrong, to fix things, when in fact this is an opportunity for white folks and people who have access to resources to look at themselves,” Haynes said.

Not everyone has felt the same weight of the election results, though.

Kristi Dayemo, an organizer with New Orleans for Community Oversight of Police, said that she expected to be disappointed no matter who won.

Although the symbolism of Harris – a Black, South Asian woman and HBCU grad – becoming president would have mattered in a country long run by white men, she said doesn’t see herself reflected in the vice president.

I don’t want someone who’s so similar to me representing genocide almost in my imagery,” Dayemo said, referencing Harris’ continued support for Israel amid the country’s military attacks on Gaza and neighboring countries in the Middle East.

Dayemo also said that working-class and poor Black people in New Orleans and Louisiana are already facing some of the problems – like police violence, abortion restrictions, mass incarceration and violent repression of protests – that many fear about a Trump presidency. That’s because, she said, the state legislature, with the backing of Trump-aligned Gov. Jeff Landry, have advanced policies that could negatively impact those communities, like lowering the age teens can be charged as adults for crimes to 17 and classifying the abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol as controlled substances.

“Not much really changed for me,” Dayemo said. “I just kind of was like, ‘OK, we’re gonna continue to have to fight, organize, especially here in the South.’ We already have Jeff Landry, so I didn’t really feel like our life was going to change much either way.”

Alfred Marshall, a community organizer who works on housing, economic and mass incarceration campaigns, said he was disappointed by Trump’s victory and thinks his presidency will make mass incarceration worse. Marshall is formerly incarcerated and worked the farm line in the fields at the B.B. Rayburn Correctional Center, then known as the Washington Correctional Institute, in Washington Parish.

He said Louisiana is a state built upon a plantation economy, which he said still persists today through mass incarceration.

But he hesitated to say that Harris was the simple solution to many problems facing Black people.

“I’ve been in this plantation economy for almost 50 years, and I don’t see no change has happened for us under none of the parties,” Marshall said.

This article originally published in the November 18, 2024 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.