A New South Is Rising: The People Came Because They Heard the Call

Saturday's "All Roads Lead to the South" march for voting rights "was not a one-off," writes LaTosha Brown. "This was the spark. We are calling this our summer of freedom and liberation."

Marchers walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., Saturday, May 16. (Courtesy of Black Voters Matter)

We made the call, and the people came.

In six days. Six days between the moment we decided this nation needed a sacred gathering and the morning thousands of us stood together on the soil of Selma and Montgomery. The people came not because they were chased down or courted, not because they received an invitation on embossed letterhead, but because something deeper called them. They heard it in their spirit, and they answered with their feet.

On Saturday, May 16, 2026, “All Roads Lead to the South” was not just a National Day of Action. It was something altogether different from what I have known in more than 30 years of organizing. The how of this moment is just as important as the what.

Why We Gathered

We gathered because the Voting Rights Act has been gutted, its enforcement teeth stripped by a Supreme Court that knows exactly what it is doing. The attack on our democracy is not a single blow but a coordinated, simultaneous assault: on the VRA, on Black competitive districts, on every mechanism that has ever given our communities a fighting chance to be heard. The people swinging at us have been swinging together, and we needed to respond together.

For months, people have been asking where Black folks were. Why weren’t we in the streets? Some of that was honest concern. Some of it was bait. We did not take the bait. We did not let other people set the terms of our resistance. The person in the White House was not mentioned, not once, in our gathering. He was, frankly, irrelevant. This day was not about him. This day was about us: affirming our power, affirming our alignment, affirming our need to love on each other in a moment designed to break us apart.

When we did move, we moved on our terms. Not theirs.

The timing was no accident. Saturday, May 16, 2026, fell exactly one day shy of 69 years from the day Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood at the Lincoln Memorial and delivered his “Give Us the Ballot” address at the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom on May 17, 1957. He delivered that speech because the courts had ruled, but it had not been enforced. Sound familiar? He delivered it because both political parties had betrayed the cause of justice. Sound familiar? He delivered it as a prayer pilgrimage, sacred ground summoning a sacred demand. Almost seven decades later, we stand in that same lineage, on that same fight. We did not plan the calendar to land that way. The Spirit did. And we honored it.

We Did Not Build It Around Egos

Every single speaker who stood on that stage made the choice to come on their own. Not one of the well-known voices who lent their presence to that ground came because of a personal invitation or because the logistics team was courting them. Not Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Not Sen. Raphael Warnock. Not Sen. Cory Booker. Not Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. Not the Justins from Tennessee. Not the congressional delegation that traveled to stand with us. They came because they cared. They heard the collective call and answered it.

We did not announce speakers in advance. We refused to. Up until the day before, no press release went out telling people who would be on that stage. We did not want people to come for a celebrity. We wanted people to come for justice.

When we built the call and put the invitation into the world, we did not lead with logos. None of our brands appeared on the materials that summoned the people. Yes, when folks arrived, organizations were proudly present, banners and shirts and all. That is how it should be. But the call itself was not branded with anybody’s flag. What was important was that the people came together, beyond organizational lines, beyond movement turf, beyond the old patterns that have too often kept us divided. This was a people’s march. Not a personality march. Not a celebrity march. A people’s march.

We Rooted It in Love and Spirit

This was not a protest. Let me say that again. This was not a protest. This was an altar call.

We started in Selma because Selma is sacred ground. We needed to sanctify our movement before we marched it anywhere. So we did something different. Instead of starting with chants and bullhorns, we went to church. We held an hour of power of prayer at Tabernacle Baptist Church, the site of the very first mass meeting of the Selma voting rights movement. Ministers, rabbis, leaders of many faith traditions came and laid hands on what we were about to do. They prayed for atonement over our movement. They asked that our work be rooted in our humanity.

Here is the truth our ancestors taught us: When we could not depend on the American Constitution, when we could not depend on the courts, when we could not depend on the leaders of this land, we could always depend on our Creator. Every movement led by Black people in this nation has been driven by faith. We were not going to break that tradition. We were going to honor it.

We Walked in Silence, and the Foot Soldiers Spoke

From Tabernacle, we walked to the Edmund Pettus Bridge. But we walked differently. No chants. No call and response. No sound system. We walked in silence. We wanted to be contemplative, in communion with the spirit. We wanted to listen.

About 15 minutes into the walk, something happened that no one could have planned. The foot soldiers who marched on that bridge in 1965 began, unprovoked, to share their stories. They recounted what happened to them that day: what they felt, what they saw, what they survived. No one asked them. No one cued them. It was as if the silence itself made room for their testimony, and they needed that room. So we walked with them. We listened. We loved on them. We bore witness.

When we reached the foot of the bridge, hundreds more were already there waiting, people we did not know were coming. We crossed two by two, in the tradition of the original march, until two by two became four by four, and four by four became a crowd that filled the bridge. On the other side, we circled up. More foot soldiers testified. Local folks lifted prayers. And then we caravanned to Montgomery.

Montgomery: The People Showed Up

By the time we reached the national rally, the scale of what the people had done was undeniable.

Thousands had gathered. More than 110 buses had rolled in from across the region, some from as far as Ohio. Speakers from every corner of the country took the stage, and every single one of them came of their own volition.

(Photo courtesy of Black Voters Matter)

Our independent media showed up the way independent media always shows up for us. Roland Martin Unfiltered streamed the rally to over 40 platforms. The Root, Essence, Ebony, The Contrarian, The 19th, Courier Newsroom and a host of independent outlets covered what corporate media too often misses. This was grassroots in the truest sense of the word. Fueled by the people. Organized by the people. Enjoyed by the people.

With that many people pulled together on that short notice, there was not a single major incident. None. The spirit of the people created the environment for success. The love we had prayed into the ground in Selma traveled with us to Montgomery and held the whole day. We are grateful for that. Profoundly grateful.

The witness extended beyond the ground we stood on. Former President Barack Obama posted publicly in support of the day. We received that with gratitude. The larger world is paying attention. And it should be, because what stood up on Saturday is not going back to sleep.

A Coalition as Wide as the Movement Itself

What stood up on that ground was not one community. It was every community. The faith tradition came strong, with leaders who had held calls all week prior to prepare their spirits for this moment. Our allied groups came: Indivisible, No Kings, predominantly white organizations that understand that the fight for voting rights is their fight, too. Latino organizations came, standing with us because the attack on democracy is an attack on all of us. Women’s organizations came because every fight we have ever fought has been carried on the backs of women. Labor came, leaders and institutions both, bringing the discipline and muscle of organized workers. Legal groups came, ready to defend what the people built. Young activist groups, Black Lives Matter organizers, environmentalists, elected officials, congresspeople, current U.S. senators, all walked alongside grandmothers and college students and foot soldiers and first-time marchers.

And here is the part that should stop people in their tracks. 228 organizations partnered around this day. 228. They did not just lend their names. They donated staff time. They shared resources. They took on the big pieces of the work, and they did it without asking who would get the credit.

We set a goal of 15 distributed actions across the country to accompany the gathering in Alabama. In the last 72 hours alone, that number grew to 82. 82 vetted actions, all anchored by real people who believed in this work, stretching from the Deep South all the way to Alaska.

The grassroots organizations that do this work every single day were the backbone of what stood up. We are not a monolith. We have never been one. We are a coalition as wide and as deep as the movement itself.

There is a line from Andor, the Star Wars series, that has become a kind of key phrase for the revolution at the heart of that story: “I have friends everywhere.” For our movement, for this new era, the keyword is the same in spirit. The South has friends everywhere.

We Sang. We Danced. We Loved on Each Other.

This day was full of love. So much love. So much kindness. So much care between strangers who left as friends. We had music. We sang gospel songs that our grandmothers sang. We danced on that ground. We laughed. We held each other. We fed each other. We made promises to keep showing up.

This was not the heaviness of a movement bracing for impact. This was the joy of a movement that already knows who it is.

We Are the New Architects

What we did on Saturday was not a one-off. This was the spark. We are calling this our summer of freedom and liberation, and the work continues. On Tuesday, we have major primary elections. By the time we got back to our respective cities, we were already back to work.

A new South is rising, and we are standing in it. We are the architects now. We are the founders of what is to come.

They are the past. We are the future.

The South got something to say. And on Saturday, we stood on business.

We are the people. We are the prayer and the answer. We are the call and the response. We are the spark, and we are the growing fire. What began in Selma and Montgomery will not end there. It will be carried into every county, every courthouse, every church basement, every kitchen table where freedom gets organized.

The South has friends everywhere. A new South is rising. And we are walking into it together.