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When I started Spread The Vote + Project ID eight years ago, I had no idea how much it would change my life. I had no idea how many lives it would change. We weren’t like the other “resistance orgs”. Our goal was harder to accomplish, the people we were trying to reach were more difficult to help, no one really understood what we were trying to do, and absolutely no one thought we could do it.
So many people told me that I was wasting my time and couldn’t succeed. The brother of an A List celebrity made fun of me. A close friend of Hilary Clinton told me to give up and do something more possible. Everywhere I went, 99% of the people I met didn’t believe. But that one percent, they were everything. They joined me and worked hard. So, so hard.
Together, we figured out how to get IDs in a sustainable, scalable way. We figured out how to connect with people from disinvested communities and get them to trust us. A few donors believed enough to send the first checks that would make everything possible. And one day, I got a phone call from Arlington, Virginia. They had just gotten our first IDs. I ran around screaming, it had taken so long but we had finally figured it out.
Eight years later, we have helped over 13,000 people get the IDs they needed to change their lives. We’ve written the first ever book about the ID crisis in America, we introduced a bill to Congress that will solve that ID crisis forever, we have created the nation’s only national incarcerated voter program, we have accomplished so much and I have never been so proud of anything in my life.
This morning I woke up and I felt sick. The problem with living on the West coast is that when you wake up bad things are already happening on the Eastern side of the country. When I saw the news alerts roll in and remembered what today was, I thought “what were the last eight years even for?”. I thought about all of the business leaders who are bowing to fascism, all of the young people sporting MAGA hats, all of the liberal talking heads declaring that we need to give up on our progressive values. Hopelessness and despair started to sink in.
But then I remembered who I am. I remembered who we are. I remembered that today is not just Inauguration Day, it’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Today is the day when we remember the hundreds, the thousands of people who fought through conditions we will never understand, through horrors we will never experience, for an impossible dream. A dream I live every single day.
Today is the day we remember Fannie and Stokely and Diane and John and Malcolm and Coretta and my great grandfather who started the NAACP in Burgaw, North Carolina and raised my grandmother Dorothy who started the NAACP in Sierra Vista, Arizona. We remember Harriet and Frederick and Ida and Gloria and Cesar and Harvey and Dolores and Susan B. and Elizabeth and so so so many more people in this country who never gave up, even if they didn’t leave to see their fight. And we remember that these things are never linear. There is a reason I constantly recommend The Unsteady March [ [link removed] ]. It is so important that we remember that none of our fights come easy, and we always take two steps back for every one step forward. But in the end, if we keep going, we always win.
I felt hopeful on Election Day, because I never thought I would live to see a Black and Indian woman win 75 million votes in any country and Kamala did it, with only 107 days to run. Today I remember that those 75 million people are still here. And there is nothing we can’t survive, and can’t accomplish, if we remember who we are, and what we want this country to be.
I. do. not. believe. this. headline.
I am not resigned to this, and I don’t believe you are either. So let’s spend today doing whatever we have to do to survive a really terrible, horrible day. And tomorrow let’s wake up and get back to work.
I know who I am. I believe you know who you are. And I know what America can be. I am a Black woman who can vote and sit anywhere I want on a bus. I know what the impossible fight can achieve. We are not giving up.
I’ll end by quoting the greatest inauguration speech in history:
Let us go forth to lead the land we love.
Yours in the fight,
Kat

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