By Rev. Donald L. Perryman, Ph.D.
The Truth Contributor
If we hadn’t become soldiers, all might have gone back as it was before. – Thomas Long, Civil War soldier
From Montgomery to Selma to Black Lives Matter, Black Americans bled for the right to protest and the right to vote. Now the protests are increasingly white, and the ballot is increasingly abandoned by the very community that made both possible.
Look at the crowds — the ICE-out demonstrations, the No Kings rallies, the packed cafeteria hearings over data centers spreading across Ohio — others are marching under the banner Black people bled to raise while a quarter of Black voters are watching from the curb.
That observation carries a question inside it — and in Ohio, with November 3 under 75 days away, the question demands an answer.
Kicked to the Curb — or Watching From It?
Is Black disengagement a current strategy or a symptom?
Some would say Black voters — exhausted by decades of doing the heavy lifting and delivering margins for parties that under-delivered in return — are consciously recalibrating. Not marching doesn’t mean not engaged.
Black Voters Matter is organizing around exactly that distinction. They are in communities right now — not waiting for October — on the theory that you cannot turn out voters you never talked to. Disengagement without that kind of intentional organizing, though, is not a strategy. It is an absence.
Here’s the real, though. Black voters didn’t just step back to the curb. The Black community was kicked there. Many feel that they got played — by decades of margins delivered and promises deferred, by a political system that showed up at our churches and barber shops every four years, collected the vote, and then left.
What looks like a strategic pause may be the accumulated weight of being taken for granted. The question is what happens next.
A quarter of Black voters are telling Pew Research they are undecided or open to someone else. One in four Black men in key battleground states remain uncertain or unlikely to vote at all. Only 15 percent of Black youth voted in the last midterm. That is not leverage being withheld. That is the margin being surrendered — quietly, without negotiation, to whoever shows up.
Kim Hall, a white 59-year-old in North Ridgeville, Ohio, voted for Harris in 2024 after years of supporting Trump and now tells the New York Times she is likely to give up on voting entirely. “I don’t like anybody,” she said. That sentiment lives in Black Toledo too. The difference is that her community did not build the movement now passing them by.
The Margin Belongs to Someone
Ohio is in a dead heat on every front that matters — a governor’s race, a Senate contest, enough congressional seats to swing House control, all in play, all tied. Sherrod Brown is running ads calling his opponent “the face of data centers in Ohio.” Amy Acton and Vivek Ramaswamy are at 46-45. Black voters in Cuyahoga, Franklin and Lucas counties hold the margin in every one of those races.
In Lorain County, a software engineer whose job was just eliminated is voting straight Democratic for the first time, blaming “the president and the billionaires.” In Millersport, a Democratic candidate with a Pride pin and a veteran with an Infowars logo stood side by side against a data center. The coalition is broad and activated. The margin is going somewhere.
Disengagement is not neutral. Staying on the sidelines has consequences. Who controls the House and Senate in January determines whether Toledo’s fiscal or safety crisis gets a hearing. The governor’s race determines whether the bleeding slows and the wounds from the funding cuts heal. These are not abstractions. They are daily life in Toledo—and whoever shows up will decide them.
AltBlackNews put it like this recently: disengagement is not empowerment—staying home doesn’t withhold leverage; it surrenders it. A quarter of Black voters checking out is not a negotiating posture. It is a gift to the people who have been counting on Black voters to stay home.
Black America built the march. Not everybody can march. Not everybody should have to. Others can and, frankly, should.
Toledo’s Black community has something more precise available. The ballot. Use it. November 3.
Contact Rev. Donald Perryman, PhD, at drdlperryman@centerofhopebaptist.org