Black voters stung by Democrats’ broken promises: ‘Doing terrible on racial justice’

The left had grand hopes at the beginning of the year that Democrats would make advances on a racial justice agenda.

With Democrats in control of the Congress and the White House — and owing their success in 2020 to high turnout by minority voters — long-dreamed aspirations to fundamentally changing policing and paying reparations for slavery to Black Americans appeared within reach.

What followed was eight months of disappointment. The most tangible victory was the creation of a federal holiday, Juneteenth.

“Congress is doing terrible on racial justice,” said Ría Thompson-Washington, senior manager for voting rights and democracy at the liberal Center for Popular Democracy. The group, which focuses on increasing turnout by Black voters, registered 500,000 voters before last year’s elections.

“They would rather make a symbolic holiday of Juneteenth when we were already celebrating it,” she said in an interview. “Thank you, but we didn’t need that. What we needed you to do was pass the voting rights legislation.”

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