The Message
Where Black Pennsylvania’s Fight for Justice Meets Action.
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The Forty Acres Were Real: Lifting the Veil — No. 2
On June 19, 1865, Major General Gordon Granger stood on a balcony in Galveston, Texas, and read General Order No. 3 to the people of the city. “The people of Texas are informed,” he announced, “that… all slaves are free.” It had been two and a half years since the Emancipation Proclamation. The enslaved people of Texas learned that day that the law had freed them long before anyone had bothered to tell them. The country celebrates that date now as Juneteenth. At the moment Granger spoke, roughly 40,000 freedpeople were already living on land of their own.
Five months earlier, on January 12, 1865, twenty Black ministers had met with General William T. Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton at Charles Green’s mansion on Madison Square in Savannah. Sherman asked the ministers what their people needed to take care of themselves. The spokesman, Garrison Frazier — a sixty-seven-year-old Baptist minister born into slavery and freed eight years earlier when he bought himself and his wife for one thousand dollars — answered directly. The way to be free, he said, was to have land, and to turn it and till it by their own labor.
Lifting the Veil
In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk and gave American letters a metaphor it has never managed to put down. A Veil, he wrote, hangs between Black America and the rest of the country. From one side, it keeps white Americans from seeing Black life as it actually is. From the other, it forces Black Americans to watch themselves through a gaze that looks on — in his words — "in amused contempt and pity." To be born Black in America, Du Bois wrote, is to be born behind that Veil, and to be gifted by the same circumstance with what he called second-sight: the ability to see both worlds at once, while being granted no true home in either.
June 2026 Horse Race
I. Where Things Stand — June 1, 2026
Pennsylvania’s general election field is fully set. The May 19, 2026 primaries resolved the last candidate uncertainty across the state’s competitive congressional and legislative landscape. Every race covered in this report now enters a five-month general election phase running to November 3, 2026.
Three conditions are defining the political environment as of June 1. Presidential approval has fallen to the lowest sustained levels of either Trump term, with five independent national pollsters simultaneously recording new-term lows in May. The national economic data arriving this spring — slowing growth, rising prices, falling real wages, and credit stress at levels not seen since 2008 — is registering in voter sentiment surveys at historically negative levels. And Pennsylvania Democrats emerged from the primary season with greater organizational coherence than at any point since 2018, while Republicans retain structural district advantages across most of the contested races.
The combination produces a competitive environment in which neither party holds a commanding position. Republican incumbents and nominees carry party registration advantages and established district networks. Democrats enter the general election with a favorable national environment, Governor Josh Shapiro’s statewide platform, and a primary season that produced nominees without damaging intraparty conflict in key races.
The First Memorial Day Was Black
On May 1, 1865, three weeks after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox, roughly ten thousand people gathered at a former Confederate prison camp on the Washington Race Course in Charleston, South Carolina. Most were freed Black residents of the city. They had come to honor the fallen.
At least 257 captured Union soldiers had died at the Race Course of disease and exposure and been dumped in a mass grave behind the grandstand. In the weeks after Confederate forces evacuated the city, a group of Black workmen — many of them only months out of slavery — exhumed the bodies, built a proper cemetery, fenced it, whitewashed the fence, and over the arched entrance painted the words “Martyrs of the Race Course.” Then they held a parade. Three thousand Black schoolchildren marched first, carrying roses. Behind them came women’s mutual aid societies, Black ministers, and Union infantry, including soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts and the 35th and 104th United States Colored Troops. The Yale historian David Blight, who recovered the day from Union Army reports and contemporary newspaper accounts, calls it the first Memorial Day. It was organized by the people the United States had most recently held as property, and it honored an army that included 180,000 Black men.
POLITICAL INTELLIGENCE MAY HORSERACE REPORT
MAY ANALYST NOTE
Eighteen days out from the May 19 primary, the Pennsylvania portfolio is in motion. The national environment has not changed direction — it has continued to deepen. Trump's approval has fallen to 33 percent in the most recent AP-NORC poll, with disapproval at 57 percent — a record low for his second term. Democrats lead the generic congressional ballot by six points in the Silver Bulletin average as of late April. The Brookings Institution notes this is the first cycle since 2010 in which Democrats are more trusted than Republicans to handle the economy. That is a structural shift, not a polling fluctuation, and it runs through every competitive district in this portfolio.
The primary on May 19 is the first hard test. In PA-10, Stelson is the prohibitive frontrunner with a 40-to-1 fundraising advantage over Douglas and the full institutional weight of the party behind her. The primary has developed friction — Douglas is withholding endorsement commitments and Stelson declined multiple debate invitations — but the structural outcome is not in doubt. What matters after May 19 is whether the campaign emerges unified or carrying an internal credibility cost on immigration that Perry's operation will attempt to exploit.
In SD-36, the Republican primary on May 19 determines the threat level for the general. A Tom Jones win — the probable outcome given the Lancaster County GOP committee endorsement — means Malone faces a credentialed incumbent-level challenger with five months to organize. That is a different race than the one PSI was tracking in March.
A Familiar Wound
Between the world we were promised and the world we now inherit lies a familiar wound. We have been here before — standing at the edge of progress, watching it recede. But this time, they have come for the ballot itself.
My mother was born in 1954. She and every other African American of her generation was born disenfranchised. Eleven years later, the Voting Rights Act was passed. And for the first time in the history of the United States, this land of the free could truly call itself a democracy. It had been a fight to get there.
Building the Foundation: A Digital Video Study of Booker T. Washington's “Up From Slavery”
This is a first from us — the beginning of a new video learning series focused on Black studies and history. In this video, we explore Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington, following his journey from slavery and poverty to the building of Tuskegee Institute, while examining his ideas on education, labor, discipline, and Black advancement. Please enjoy.
Truth Starts Young: Anti-Racist Summer Camp Is Coming This Summer
This summer, the Black Voter Outreach Network of PA is proud to launch Anti-Racist Summer Camp 2026, a new virtual youth web series built around Stamped (For Kids) by Jason Reynolds and Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, adapted by Sonja Cherry-Paul.
This series will take place on Zoom and will give young people and families a chance to learn honest history together in a thoughtful, welcoming, and age-appropriate space. Using Stamped (For Kids) as our guide, we will talk about race, fairness, dignity, truth, and the history that still shapes our world today.
TOWARD BLACK LIBERATION · A NEW LIBERATION MANUAL
I am a Black man in the process of becoming conscious. I want to be precise about what that means because it matters for everything that follows. I am not writing from the safety of distance or the authority of arrival. I am a man who looked up one day and decided that surviving was no longer enough — that the world my people are living in demanded more than endurance. It demanded understanding. And so I started reading. I started thinking. I started asking the questions that comfortable people learn early not to ask. And what I found on the other side of those questions was this: the condition of Black people in America is not an accident, not a mystery, and not a failure of character. It is the intended and measurable outcome of a system that has been working exactly as designed for four hundred years.
HORSERACE REPORT APRIL 2026 PUBLIC EDITION
The environment has not changed direction since March. It has accelerated. Trump sits at 39 percent approval nationally and just under 40 percent in Pennsylvania — a net negative of 17 points in a state he won in 2024. The two issues that carried him here, the economy and immigration enforcement, are both moving against him. Only 28 percent of Pennsylvania voters believe the economy is improving. Fifty-six percent say his immigration enforcement is too harsh.
Four of the five races in this portfolio are in better position for Democrats than they were 90 days ago. The force driving that movement is not enthusiasm. It is anger — and anger has a specific target. Scott Perry cast the deciding vote for the largest Medicaid cuts in American history. Lloyd Smucker helped write them from the Ways and Means Committee. Brett Miller voted with the Republican caucus on every party-line vote that produced them. Steve Mentzer has no answer for any of it and has not held a public town hall since 2024.
Is Lancaster City Following the Law? January 2026 Monthly Budget Report Not Publicly Available
Lancaster City’s monthly reporting requirement is set out in Section 3 of Administrative Ordinance No. 14-2025, codified in Chapter 30 (Budgets and Control).
Section 3 requires a Monthly Budget Report, defined as a monthly cash flow report: a financial statement of revenues and expenditures by department, bureau, and line item (organized to match the budget ordinance), showing the amount budgeted, the cumulative amount collected or expended, and the percent of each line item collected or expended by the end of each month. It must be submitted to City Council, the Office of the Controller, and to the public within 21 days of the end of the preceding month.
The HorseRace| Public Edition| March 2026
The 2026 midterm environment structurally favors Democrats. That advantage is conditional.
Escalating tensions involving Iran, oil instability, and sustained cost-of-living pressure define a high-volatility moment.
Military conflicts carry profound human consequences and demand seriousness and respect. They are not political abstractions. Geopolitical events, however, reshape economic conditions and redirect voter attention.
Two forces govern this cycle:
From Endorsements to Infrastructure: Harrisburg’s Black Coalition Is Organizing
More than 50 Black leaders gathered at Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church in Harrisburg to learn more about Janelle Stelson’s campaign — and to endorse her. That’s the headline. Not because endorsements are rare, but because Black folks are organizing in public, together, in our institutions. This is the first step toward real political infrastructure: relationships becoming alignment, alignment becoming structure, and structure becoming power.
THE HORSE RACE — 2026 Midterm Election Status Report
Nine months out from Election Day, the 2026 midterms have moved from “next year” to a measurable, shifting contest. The Horse Race is a monthly tracking memo produced by the Black Voter Outreach Network of PA’s Research Division—a straight read of the political environment using the indicators that shape outcomes: presidential approval, the generic ballot, major issue pressures (like costs, SNAP, and healthcare), and what those signals suggest for control of Congress and for key fights in Pennsylvania. It’s not prediction or punditry—just a consistent, evidence-based snapshot of where things stand and what’s changing, updated each month.
Black History Month Is About Resistance — Not Theater
The City of Lancaster raised a flag today. The county will issue a proclamation later this month.
Today There was speeches. Photos. Logos lined up neatly. A proclamation read aloud. Black organizations invited into City Hall for a moment of visibility. And later this month the county commissioners will invite similar groups to county government building to the same.
It will stop there.
Black History Month did not begin as a celebration.
It was an act of resistance.
In 1926, Carter G. Woodson created Negro History Week as a direct challenge to Jim Crow. Black people were being erased from textbooks, classrooms, and public memory by design. Teaching Black history was not symbolic—it was defiant. It was dangerous. It was a refusal to accept erasure as fate.
Blood and Power
Let's stop pretending.
The Trump Administration is terrorizing Black and Brown immigrants.
Not immigrants broadly. Not "undocumented people" in the abstract. Black and Brown immigrants.
They are targeting Black people. They are targeting Brown people. They are targeting Latinos. They are targeting Somalis. They are targeting Haitians.
The administration is hunting them, detaining them, and killing them because of who they are.
President Trump sent ICE into Minneapolis to terrorize communities of color. That is the point. The administration concentrates raids, stops, detentions, and armed confrontations where Black and Brown people live. Fear is not an unintended consequence. Fear is the goal.
Terror by Design
John Donne wrote,
“Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
In Minneapolis this month, that bell has tolled more than once.
Two lives — two people — were taken by federal immigration enforcement.
Why I Will Not Celebrate MLK Day in Lancaster
Tomorrow is January 15th.
My birthday.
And the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr, born in 1929.
On Monday, January 19, 2026, Lancaster County will do what it does best when it comes to Black people: pause briefly, pose politely, and move on unchanged.
There will be prayer breakfasts.
Photo ops.
Proclamations.
Committees shaking hands with one another.
Churches reading excerpts.
Nonprofits posting quotes.
And then—nothing.
No feeding the hungry.
No housing the unhoused.
No clothing for the unclothed.
No material changes for Black people who live here every single day.
By Tuesday, the Black community will once again be an afterthought—until February rolls around, and then again until Juneteenth. Ritual recognition without responsibility. Symbolism without sacrifice.
That is why I will not celebrate MLK Day in Lancaster.
The People’s Brief: The Moral Test of Leadership
Lancaster is facing a simple but defining test: Will our leaders do what’s morally right, now that the court has made clear what is legally permissible?
A Lancaster County judge recently ruled that the city must release police body-camera and dash-camera footage from the March 2, 2025, arrests involving local teenagers. The city’s justification — that it needed to protect the minors’ identities — didn’t hold up. The judge determined that modern technology can blur faces and protect privacy.
Fixing the Jericho Road: A Call for Moral Action in a Time of Hunger
Right now, as we speak, the federal government is shut down.
SNAP benefits are frozen.
Workers are not being paid.
Families are going hungry.
Across Lancaster County, people are stepping up — churches, nonprofits, and neighbors are organizing food drives and meal programs to make sure no one is left behind. That is good and righteous work. It is what Dr. King would have called the work of the Good Samaritan — stopping along the roadside to help the wounded and hungry when others pass them by.
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