LaTosha Brown, the co-founder of Black Voters Matter, was recently the Humanitarian Award at the Washington Performing Arts and the Choral Arts Society’s annual “Living the Dream…Singing the Dream” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. tribute program.
The ceremony took place at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
Brown is one of the foremost community leaders credited with flipping Georgia blue. In the 2020 election, more than 1 million African Americans voted in Georgia.
Brown was presented the award by Humanitarian Award honoree Sherrilyn Ifill (President and Director-Counsel Emeritus of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund). Brown accepted the accolade by singing an acapella rendition of the spiritual “I Know I Been Changed.”
“Effective voting allows a community to determine its own destiny. We agree with the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. when he said, “Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love,” the organization’s mission statement reads.
In an interview with Shondaland last February, Brown revealed that BVM had been decades in the making. The nonprofit was founded in 2016 alongside Cliff Albright. The pair also founded the Black Voters Matter Fund.
“We had been in a conversation with each other around this question of, ‘What is it going to take to help Black people get independent power?'” Brown told Shondaland. “We worked on campaigns together, from presidential campaigns to the local campaigns. We would create businesses and business models to help for that same purpose. And so what I would say is that the formation of Black Voters Matter is simply a culmination of all the work we had done individually and collectively over the last two and a half decades.”
