Election mailers targeting Black households are causing outrage in Virginia, where voters will decide on a ballot measure that would allow the state to redraw its congressional map to combat an effort led by the Trump administration to help Republicans retain majority power in Congress.
The mailers, urging Black Virginians to vote no on the referendum, read, “Just like Jim Crow, they want to silence your voice.” They also include images of Black Americans being terrorized by the Ku Klux Klan and law enforcement during the reign of Jim Crow in the segregated South and the rise of the Civil Rights Movement.
“To see these folks try to use this type of language to trick Black people is not only shameful, embarrassing for our state, but it’s also very harmful to folks who’ve been impacted by the loss of the franchise of voting,” said Virginia House Speaker, Del. Don Scott during a recent press conference condemning the mailer released by two political action committees, Democracy and Justice PAC and Justice for Democracy.
Scott, who was sentenced to prison on drug charges and received a pardon from former President Joe Biden in 2025, explained, “When I see people sending mailers using images from the civil rights movement, brave men and women facing down the KKK, people who marched, who bled, who died for the right to vote, to try to trick Black voters in Virginia, I take that very personally. The civil rights movement is not a prop.”
Virginia State Senator Mamie Locke, who joined Scott for the virtual press conference, slammed the “misuse” of “hurtful imagery” from the Civil Rights Movement. The senator said the MAGA-linked mailers misrepresented “one of the most hurtful and dark chapters in our history to scare people into voting no and help Republicans rig the 2026 midterm elections.”
The referendum vote in Virginia, on April 21, comes after California considered a similar, successful ballot measure to counter Republican-led states like Texas, where President Trump has urged lawmakers to bypass existing congressional maps intended to be in place for 10 years (ending in 2030) and craft new ones that give Republicans an advantage in this year’s midterm elections. Ironically, many districts with majority Black and Brown populations or that are represented by Black lawmakers have been disproportionately targeted by the Trump-led campaign.
“Donald Trump and Republican legislators across the country are trying to rig the midterm elections because they know their policies are so unpopular. No one in their right mind would continue to support them,” said Del. Scott, who is the first Black speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates.
He continued, “When you go to the pump right now, today we’re seeing gas prices at all-time highs, grocery prices at all-time highs, inflation run amok. We’re seeing families being devastated not only in the Commonwealth of Virginia but across the country, and so we know they cannot run on their policies. So they have to try to rig these midterms.”
Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones said Virginians “deserve honest information about the choices before them,” adding, “Invoking the pain and sacrifice of the civil rights movement while spreading misleading claims about this referendum disrespects the very people who fought to secure the right to vote and have their voices heard.”
According to the Virginia Mercury, A.C. Cordoza, a former Republican state delegate who is taking credit for the mailers as chairman of the PACs, said, “People who have controversy with this mailer are the same people talking about fairness while constructing a map that disenfranchises Black voters in favor of Northern Virginia legislators. It’s a shameful act.”
Scott, however, said he isn’t buying Cordoza taking ownership of the mailers, “when we know for a fact that was not the case. They [the PACs] brought him in after the fact.”
The Virginia Democrat added, “The blood and sacrifice of those who fought for the right to vote belongs to all of us and will not be hijacked by anonymous MAGA-aligned political operatives trying to deceive our communities.”
