Netroots Nation 2022 — Day One — Opening Keynote: All Eyes on Pennsyvania Netroots Nation 2022 kicked off Thursday with a lively keynote speech from a long list of electeds, advocates and activists in Pennsylvania politics. These speakers included state Senator Lindsey Williams, state Representative Sara Innamorato, state Representative Malcolm Kenyatta, state Representative Summer Lee,…

W. Mondale Robinson Founder of The Black Male Voter Project The Black Male Voter Project-W. Mondale Robinson (center) at a 2019 ’Brothas Be Voting’ roundtable in Atlanta. Published February 19, 2022 at 8:51 AM EST This week on WCLK's The Local Take(Saturdays 8am), I reached out to the Black Male Voter Project. The Black Male Voter Project is…

ATLANTA — W. Mondale Robinson spent a large chunk of last fall in clubs and bars and concert venues in Georgia, trying to convince disenchanted Black men that casting a ballot — in the 2020 general election, then the Georgia runoffs for the U.S. Senate — could finally mean real change in their communities.

Fresh off the heels of the 2020 election cycle, Americans had the awakening of the importance of voting in both presidential and midterm elections; a trend that has been building over time.

Mondale Robinson calls them “fake shop talk” videos, the carefully coordinated discussions filmed by campaigns every cycle of Black men in barbershops, supposedly telling it like it is.

Out of roughly 250,000,000 voting-eligible Americans, only around half actually vote. For Black men, in particular, nearly half who are registered to vote have not gone to the polls in the past five consecutive elections. Many can’t vote under state laws that disenfranchise Black men because of prior felony convictions or incarceration.

When I was a kid, I used to watch my father do amazing things for people all the time—he’d fix roofs, lay drywall, pour cement for entire driveways. We were extremely poor, and I could never understand why. I thought: My dad is an anomaly. How can you be so great as a person and…