Organizers in this crucial swing state are working to increase Black voter turnout despite opposition from MAGA Republicans.
by Janell Ross
PHOENIX — Arizona and its biggest city, Phoenix, can be intimidating places to voice political opinions if you don’t subscribe to MAGA Republicanism.
Since the 2020 election — and as recently as this summer — white Republican elected officials who have refused to buy into the false claim that former President Donald Trump won the contest have faced boos, sustained harassment, smear campaigns and death threats here.
Black people in Arizona — especially those who vote Democratic — have faced that and more.
After a handful of Black candidates promoting racial equity in education began to accept appointments to or run for — and in some cases win — unpaid school board seats in districts in and around Phoenix, several faced such an onslaught of attacks and death threats, intensifying in 2020, that they resigned or did not seek reelection.
“Oh yeah, Arizona is the South of the West,” said Roy Tatem, 48, a Black man, political consultant, and Arizona voter who moved to the state from Virginia almost 15 years ago.
During that time, Phoenix, the state’s capital, has seen explosive growth in its Black population since 2010, luring newcomers with its sunny climate, abundant, high paying jobs and, at one time, affordable housing, making it one of the fastest-growing major cities in the United States. Now the state has more than 250,000 voting age Black residents, enough to tilt Arizona and the 2024 presidential election, which could be decided on razor-thin margins.
But as early voting began here this month in a historic presidential election — the first with a Black woman running as the nominee of a major party — the harsh political climate of this crucial swing state could undermine its growing but still small Black participation.
Black Arizonans face some of the same issues with educational inequity and police brutality as Black Americans in other states, but it’s all against a backdrop of more extreme politics and climate change. Organizers are trying to figure out how to overcome the culture of political intimidation here to increase Black turnout and Black civic engagement, but they are up against long odds. In the 2020 presidential election, less than half of Arizona’s eligible Black voters, only 45.4%, voted for any presidential candidate. That’s lower than other black voters in every swing state, according to the Center for Inclusive Democracy, a research group based at the University of Southern California.
Now, an aggregate of seven recent polls give Trump a narrow lead in Arizona. However, a Harris victory is possible. Eligible voters of color are growing faster here than white voters, and they identify more heavily with Democrats than Republicans.
President Joe Biden beat Trump here by 10,457 votes, riding similar demographic trends. Black Democrats outnumber Black Republicans by 5 to 1, but the large number of Black independents also make outcomes difficult to predict.
Despite chronically low turnout, Black voters in the state have made many strides — increasing the number of Black elected officials in the past decade and getting a street in Phoenix ceremonially renamed after Martin Luther King in 2015.
“I think one of the most important things about Black voters in general here in Arizona is that while we may not be a large population, we do have the ability to decide who wins or who loses at every level of the ballot,” said Reginald Bolding, co-founder of Our Voice Our Vote Arizona and Arizona Coalition for Change, two nonprofit organizations respectively working on voter registration and voter engagement this year.
A wave of new Black residents
Since 2010, more than 78,000 Black Americans have moved to Phoenix, more than doubling the city’s still-small Black population. Black residents, some of them immigrants but most of them U.S. born, now make up nearly 8% of Phoenix.
Black people who moved here, most of them in the past two decades coming from the Midwest, usually arrived with solid plans. They were, in many cases, recruited for a specific career-advancing job and a boost in salary. Some went on to found their own companies or franchises.
Until recent increases in home prices, transplants could often afford more house in a nicer neighborhood, a possibility that eluded them in Chicago, Gary, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Detroit, or elsewhere. Less constrained by segregation and poverty, they and other newly arriving people of color mix with one another in any number of the valley’s many subdivisions, gated communities, and suburbs.
But this freedom to live and work in predominantly white environments can come with a price. There are concessions and accommodations that white people living in Phoenix at times expect or even demand of Black residents, people here said. And living outside the historic Black neighborhoods in Phoenix’s Southside isolates Black newcomers. Both factors have eroded Black civic engagement in the city.
At an event that Capital B held in Phoenix to mobilize Black voters, Black residents complained that Black communities are not showing up in large enough numbers at school board and city council meetings where issues such as book bans, curriculum changes, and excessive and violent policing are slated for discussion or votes. And while some do show up, it’s often the same, small set again and again.
Phoenix has a culture, several people said, in which Black professionals are expected to remain silent about their grievances, as an expression of gratitude for opportunity or perhaps fealty to the city’s white, conservative majority. It is, in many ways, a concentrated public and political version of something that happens inside workplaces across the country every day.
During the Capital B event, two Phoenix-based DJs who are also Black men described moments in which their former employers chastised them for doing anything more than playing the hottest songs with the sickest beats on a hip-hop radio station. At the time, they were the city’s only Black DJs on air and playing major public venues.
In 2020, shortly after George Floyd’s death, the issue of police use of force reached its zenith.
“So many Black faces, so many Black tears, so much Black hurt,” said Quinton “Q Ward” Ward, one of the two DJs. “Once again, when I was supposed to be taking caller number three and trying to give out some more prizes, I had to speak up about George Floyd and how I felt. And this time … because I wasn’t at the station, Ramses [Ja, the other Black DJ] got called into the principal’s office.”
The men resigned and founded a Phoenix-based podcast, Civic Cipher, now airing on iHeart Radio stations in more than 170 cities. It focuses primarily on social and political issues.
The isolation of Black residents compounds the pressure to conform. It means that Black activists, candidates seeking office, and those trying to push for specific changes must mobilize and connect what are often small numbers of Black residents scattered across multiple districts, regions, even cities in the Phoenix area.
“One of the challenges and blessings of life in Arizona today is that many Black people come to Arizona now for a job, often a high-paying, high-level position,” said Tatem, the political organizer. “They get comfortable with their success or just comfortable enough that they’re not trying to rock the boat. So, many people, they just operate in their own lane.”
Brian Watson, founder of Black River Life, a Phoenix company producing news, cultural arts programming, and other media that aims to break durable anti-Black myths, moved to Phoenix with his wife in 2014. He said that Black newcomers often wrestle with a sense of belonging and that which builds it. That’s trying to find a house of worship, a place to get one’s hair cut or styled, where to purchase familiar foods and to connect with Black longtime residents and locals who can guide them through these things or others requiring true insider knowledge.
“From my perspective,” he said, “once you get past those preliminary things, now you are trying to figure out who am I going to be in this community? How do I contribute? How do I connect with people who want to do similar things and have a similar passion?”
An activist’s view
Tatem arrived in Chandler, Arizona, a city just southeast of Phoenix in Maricopa County, in 2011, leaving behind the Norfolk, Virginia, area where he lived. His Arizona job, his big opportunity out west, was in politics, running and working on local, state, and federal campaigns. So he’s also able to describe Black politics in Phoenix in clear ways.
“We have seen extreme immigration bills or anti-immigration bills, a rise in police brutality and police shootings, and there’s a large segment of the community that tries to shy away from those types of issues or avoid controversy to maintain, I guess, the status quo.”
In June, the U.S. Justice Department issued a report that the Phoenix Police Department has a “pattern and practice of” discriminating against “Black, Hispanic, and Native American people when enforcing the law.”
The report said that the police routinely violate the rights of those they stop, prohibit people from engaging in legally protected free speech, use excessive and deadly force, and make unlawful arrests.
Tatem noted that Trump has committed to creating universal immunity for police officers and objected to efforts to ban white nationalists from military service. Given the number of police departments that welcome veterans and current policing patterns in Phoenix, both are frightening prospects, he said.
“He wants to give them the right to abuse and kill,” Tatem said. “He wants to give them uniform immunity.”
In his free time, Tatem, 48, is part of what he and others described as a small number of Black residents involved in all sorts of civic activities and issues. He was part of the collective that pushed for the removal of two Confederate monuments in the state Capitol in 2020 and those who drew the federal government’s attention to the state of policing in this city. In early October, he was busy with work and spending what little time he had off the clock helping those working to register voters before the state’s Oct. 7 deadline.
Tatem is clear-eyed about the state, the burdens and the opportunities that can be found here, and what remains to be done. Earlier this month, The New York Times published a story detailing the way that some conservatives in Phoenix had taken to confronting and falsely accusing Latino activists of knowingly working to register noncitizens during tabletop voter registration drives. Some of the incidents were recorded on social media. And some of this activity may violate federal civil rights law prohibiting voter intimidation.
Too often, Tatem said, he has heard white people in Phoenix say things that remind him of things he’s read about the Jim Crow South.
“When we dealt with segregation in the ’50s and the ’60s, many in the white establishment felt that our Negros were ‘good Negroes,’” he said. “The problem was those Negroes from the North or those Negroes that got education coming in, stirring up trouble, right? I was one of the troublemakers.”
Falling out of MAGA’s graces
Walter “Walt” Blackman is a Black Republican who served in Arizona’s House of Representatives from Navajo County, where 8.9% of Black voters identified as Republicans in 2020. (9.7% of Black voters identify as Republicans in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix).
Blackman represented Arizona House of Representatives District 6, in 2020, and is now running to become the state representative for the 7th District. He is an Army veteran and Bronze Star recipient. About eight years ago, Blackman settled in Snowflake, a town in Navajo County three hours north of Phoenix.
Blackman was a very public Trump supporter when he was in office. He said what it would seem MAGA wanted to hear. And, yet, even he has faced backlash from them, underscoring the political intimidation that erodes Black participation in the political process here.
In the legislature, Blackman sponsored a voter ID regulation that limited the types of identification that a person can provide when asked by poll workers for proof of who they are. And, after the 2020 election, Blackman reportedly sent an email to his constituents suggesting that he was prepared to somehow replace Arizona’s electors so that Trump could be declared the state’s winner.
When he later refused to go along with a plan to nullify the election results in which Biden prevailed, Gateway Pundit, a far-right website that sometimes publishes conspiracy theories and false information, turned on Blackman.
The site, which declared bankruptcy this year after facing defamation lawsuits, published stories that described Blackman as a RINO (Republican In Name Only) who was ignoring what it called evidence of “hundreds of thousands of fraudulent ballots.”
There was no such evidence, but Blackman was subsequently harassed or threatened by Trump supporters persuaded that Blackman and others had somehow robbed Trump of an officially recognized victory or the chance to stop Biden.
In December, Blackman was still fighting harassment. He tried to persuade an Arizona judge to uphold a restraining order he had obtained against an Arizona man — a white, Trump merchandise store owner who Blackman told the court has consistently harassed him for six years. The judge overturned Blackman’s injunction.
While Blackman did not respond to a request for comment from Capital B about his 2024 political priorities and voting plans, a look at posts Blackman added to his X feed this summer suggests that he shares Trump’s concern about illegal immigration and public resources, objects to the concept of a right to abortion, and frowns on young Black men who sag their pants and dread their hair.
His Twitter account contained no direct attacks on Harris, but he did criticize her running mate, Tim Walz, for saying that he “carried weapons of war” despite not having served in a combat zone during his time in the National Guard. Blackman and other Republicans have accused Walz of “stolen valor.”
“I absolutely refuse to tolerate Stolen Valor from anyone—be it a lowly E-1 private, a congressman, an Arizona Republican State House candidate, or even a Vice Presidential candidate,” Blackman wrote in an August post on X.
Rugged Arizona individualism
Kenja Hassan, 51, is an administrator at an educational institution and also a transplant to Arizona. She grew up in the Washington, D.C., area and first came to Phoenix in the 1990s, while a student at Princeton University, for a summer internship with the Navajo Nation.
“My heart and intellect were just swallowed up by Arizona,” she said.
After teaching abroad and working for a while with lawyers in Washington, Hassan decided to return to Arizona for graduate school. She’s lived in Phoenix since 1997 and has tried to immerse herself in Arizona history. The ethic of rugged individualism, the rigorous physical effort of cattlemen, miners, and others who arrived when Arizona was still a territory or not long after Arizona became a state in 1912, also deeply influences the culture here.
“The efforts of homesteaders and cattle ranchers and cotton farmers and all that is revered,” she said. “So people are really vocal about this rugged individualism and want to forget that in this climate — this harsh, dry climate — we wouldn’t be able to support this many people without dollars coming in from all over, including from the federal government.”
Federal and state dollars have created the transportation and water infrastructure needed to sustain life here, where a heatwave pushed temperatures to 108 degrees in the first days of October. And, before any of that, federal troops forced Native Americans off the land where an overwhelmingly white group of homesteaders would farm or raise livestock.
“But, that idea,” Hassan said. “‘I am an individual American. I made my own way. You should too.’ That’s a really big part of our culture.”
And, the outcome of the 2020 presidential election is often talked about as if not settled here.
“The degree to which people are willing to let go of the idea that we have a process, that we have a peaceful transfer of power, that we have three branches of government that are separate in order to be able to put checks and balances on each other, has been, well, shocking to me,” Hassan said. “When it came to 2024, it was troubling to me that people had successfully turned so much of the public against all the systems that the Founding Fathers created in order to prevent one single human being from having massive power.”
For Hassan, her primary concern this year is the state of American democracy and sustaining a healthy and balanced form of government attentive to all 330 million people in the United States. Harris has expressed a clear understanding of and respect for the Constitution, for the balance of powers and the limits of the presidency, Hassan said. During his first term, Trump repeatedly punished and summarily fired those who opposed him in any way.
“The presidency is not a solo job,” Hassan said. “It’s not just him, or her. It’s all of the people a president puts in place.”
The future of Black Phoenix
Ahead of the 2024 election, massive voter registration drives and get-out-the-vote efforts are targeting Black voters here, aiming to break through the reluctance of some to participate. One Arizona organization alone has knocked on nearly 700,000 doors this year.
PACs associated with Black-led nonprofits such as the Arizona chapters of the NAACP, Black Voters Matter, and Our Voices Our Vote have spent months working to boost voter registration and participation in Arizona and have fanned out across Phoenix in the last days of voter registration.
Black Americans here face many of the same issues as Black people in other states, including conservative state legislatures that deepen educational inequality by making public school funds available for use at private schools and that defend discriminatory policing. But, here, there’s all of that and the undeniable effects of climate change.
“Black politics here means negotiating those things that we have come to understand as being bedrock issues, but we also have to be able to negotiate that against the backdrop of an impending ecological crisis,” said Rashad Shabazz, an associate professor at Arizona State University who studies the relationship between race, gender, culture production, and geography, at a Phoenix political conversation hosted by Capital B, the Arizona Republic, the city’s primary newspaper, and several other organizations. “Black politics here looks different than it does in other parts of the country.”
Before the newcomers, Black people born in Phoenix or living here for a long time minted a small group of political leaders who left a lasting impact on the city.
The Calvin C. Goode Municipal Building, one of two in this city, was renamed in honor of Calvin Goode, Phoenix’s second Black city council member, who died in 2020 after serving the city for 22 years. Born in 1927, Goode came to Arizona in the late 1920s from a small town in Oklahoma with his family, while still a baby. They came for work, picking cotton.
Goode earned degrees from Arizona State University and as an adult worked as an accountant for Phoenix’s “colored” high school, the only one of its kind in segregated Arizona when it opened its doors in 1927. Later, after integration, he did the same work for the unified school district, and as a city council member brokered a Phoenix ordinance prohibiting workplace discrimination against gays, lesbians and minorities.
He was also instrumental in getting the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday observed in Phoenix, paving the way for the holiday to be observed statewide in 1993, according to a 2007 interview Goode gave The History Makers, a digital repository of Black History. A former governor described any recognition of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday as a form of reverse discrimination.
Goode’s family and other early Black settlers put down roots on the city’s Southside, where, by the 1920s, institutions like the Booker T. Washington Memorial Hospital and The Phoenix Colored High School (later renamed George Washington Carver High School and, after segregation, transformed into a meeting space and museum) were built alongside homes, churches, and businesses populated overwhelmingly by the city’s Black residents.
In Phoenix, most businesses beyond the city’s Southside would not serve Black customers. Homes outside the Southside could not be sold to Black residents. As the U.S. government helped to make home buying affordable for millions of white Americans in the 1930s, South Phoenix was redlined and everything from mortgage lending to Black residents to business loans were scarce. This, along with government-mandated demolition for highway and airport construction, helped to create the patterns of pollution, income, wealth, and other disparities which persist in Phoenix today.
An upside of the racially integrated neighborhoods that exist in Phoenix now is that they create opportunities for Black voters to join multiracial alliances.
Latino voters were also mostly absent from the 2020 election, with 45.7% casting a ballot, but they make up a quarter of the state’s electorate, compared with Black voters at just 5%.
Black and Latino coalitions that have flourished have been built around specific issues, including concerns about policing in the Phoenix area and state immigration policies, said Bolding.
“I think Phoenix is a very unique place,” Shabazz said.
“Because of the way in which people in this city are organized and because of how we are all spread out, Black people can play a role in creating the nation’s first, multiracial democracy,” he added. “There has never been one, not in this country, not in a city, not in a county, not in a state. And we are afforded an opportunity now to imagine it, to create such a thing here.”
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