AMERICUS, Ga. — Lorena Barnum Sabbs thought the past really was past. Born 67 years ago in a segregated hospital, she was arrested when she was 11 for trying to integrate the local movie theater and locked in a stockade for several days without beds, working toilets or running water. Later, as one of the first black girls to attend the formerly whites-only high school, she ventured to the bathroom only in groups for fear of attacks.
“I was the recipient of that hate and disrespect, and I thought, I have finally outlived it,” she said. “I was wrong.”
Nearly two years after Donald J. Trump’s election, with racial divisions increasingly in public view and voting rights under regular attack, Ms. Sabbs is one of a small army of African-American women across the South using networks originally forged in segregation to muster turnout for Democratic candidates in the November elections. They are mobilizing in conservative states and districts, hoping to pull off upsets like Doug Jones’s stunning Senate victory last year in Alabama, where 98 percent of black women voted for him and proved a critical base of support.
In Columbus, Ga., women sit in the fellowship hall of the Emmanuel Christian Community Church, clipboards at the ready to register voters. In Panama City, Fla., sorority sisters park themselves at a street corner across from an imperiled elementary school, holding signs reminding people to vote. And in Greenville, Miss., the mayor of a nearby town founded by sharecroppers says she will not give up on coaxing young people to the polls, even as they complain their votes don’t matter.
