When Shaun Smith, founder of the Black Push organization, whose core mission is advocacy for society’s most vulnerable, with a focus on ex-offenders, talks about becoming a minister, he speaks at once of a vocation he loves and of an internal conflict born from a life of dedication to something outside of his own. 

In the same way, Smith preaches the duality of the modern American dilemma- of fully understanding the country’s potential for self-destruction, while at the same time fully engaging in laying a foundation for it to instead change.

No one has embodied this more than Black women in America, who Smith lauds for making collective gains for the people, while having to bear the lion’s share of the nation’s systemic oppression. 

“Black women have really changed the nation,” Smith says, “there would not be a President Joe Biden were it not for Black women. There would not be a Senator Raphael Warnock or Senator Jon Ossoff if it had not been for Black women. So let’s make it clear. And now it seems like what we’re doing is we’re literally attacking the same people which we’ve depended on. We’re attacking them because you talk about Roe v. Wade- yes it affects women in general but mostly African American women.”

Smith views the attack on bodily autonomy as interconnected with another widespread attack on voting rights, to which he regularly bears witness in his work with ex-offenders and incarcerated people. 

Though Georgia is among the states that allow people with felony convictions and people incarcerated for misdemeanors to vote, the Big Lie and little lies that followed- all false accusations which led to the passage of a heavy-handed voter suppression bill and a carte blanche invitation to the GBI to investigate voter fraud accusations- resulted in an anxiety-laden climate, leaving justice involved voters panicked to do anything with the potential to steal even more time away from their life.   

While SB202 made no changes regarding the voting rights of people who are or who have been previously incarcerated, Smith has born witness to the large amount of fear and confusion the existence of the law has generated, among justice-involved people, and probation officers alike.   

Smith has received reports from people in the process of re-entering society who have experienced intimidation outright, upon attempting to register. They told Smith that they were repeatedly questioned about their status, and threatened with prosecution should they later be found ineligible. Others received letters in the mail from the Secretary of State’s office, further confusing them about their eligibility.  

“SB 202 made a question mark where there was not a question, made fear where there was not fear,” Smith says.

Smith’s mother, an organizer in Florida whose effectiveness, according to Smith, is so well known that candidates contact her for absentee ballots ahead of the county, has been receiving such letters in her home state since 2008. Smith’s mother has not been incarcerated in over thirty years, when shortly before Smith was born, she was arrested on charges associated with a drug addiction. 

“She got [a letter] in 2008 saying, ‘You wasn’t supposed to vote in the 2008 election.’ And then she got a letter in 2010 saying, ‘Oh yeah, you were able to vote.’ And then she recently just got told that she’s not eligible to vote again.

A person doing all that work in the community- why should her community just dismiss her and say you can do the work, but you don’t have the right to have a voice in the work in which you do? Shame on us as a society.”

Smith was born during his mother’s incarceration, and as an ex-offender himself, adheres to the extension of grace to everyone, as part of his Christian principles and as a matter of practicality. 

While Smith was incarcerated for committing what is considered to be “white collar crimes,” his religion teaches him that “no sin is greater than the next,” and moreover, “a person making a mistake should not prevent them from having a say in how their society evolves.” 

Especially when those same people tend to be the most knowledgeable about critical down-ballot candidates who are vying to hold positions within the criminal justice system, generally obscured from the public. Ex-offenders and select incarcerated people offer informed checks and balances to those officials, whose ethics they are personally familiar. 

“It does hold people [accountable] from the D.A.’s office, to the solicitor’s office, to the judges, to the sheriff, because the sheriff is the only law enforcement agent that’s elected by the people. [The vote] gives us a voice in those areas, and when we don’t have a voice in those areas, we can’t make changes in those areas”

Smith links voting laws directly to the posture of elected officials in the criminal justice system by comparing voting laws in Georgia to Florida, which used to require ex-offenders, upon the completion of their sentence and payment of fees, to begin a seven-year waiting period before registering to vote. 

“If I’m a [Florida] judge and I look at you thinking I only have eight more years on the bench to begin with and I understand you don’t have a vote, and not only can I keep your vote silenced for two years while you’re doing the sentence, but I can keep it for another seven years, I have no inclination to be fair, because you have no voice in whether I sit on this bench or not five years down the line.

In Georgia judges kind of look at you differently, because you know what? If I [acting as a Georgia judge] give you two years, you could probably have a vote, and you could cast a vote from me two years from now or become an advocate against me.”

Beyond their contributions to society as a voter bloc, Smith says ex-offenders and incarcerated people have the right to advocate on their own behalf and that of their justice-involved community because otherwise “there aren’t a lot of people out there who will take their voice and use it to that benefit.”

Black Push, however, along with the organization’s community partners, are passionate about doing so. 

The weekend following our interview, Smith and his colleagues will head to Macon with Black Voters Matter, as part of a statewide and national initiative to assist eligible people with navigating the justice system, in order to have their voting rights restored.

Black Push is also partnering with Emerge Georgia, Boss Girl, and others, to create an initiative called Government by Girls, the goal of which is to empower girls and young women between the ages of thirteen and twenty-one to be civically engaged and to run for office. 

When international organizations interested in social activism visit the state, local officials often connect them with Black Push.

A woman from Bahrain said to Smith, “Honestly when I came to America, I was so surprised. I didn’t expect to see as many homeless people as there are here. In Bahrain, we don’t have that problem.”

She went on to tell Smith, “And I don’t like your democracy. At least in my country, we know what to expect. One person makes the regulations and we follow them. [In America] you are so divided, you can’t agree, you’re fighting all the time about the same things.”

Smith told her that she made a valid point. 

“For a country to call itself a democracy,” Smith says, “the one aspect that we should not be battling is whether or not a person should have the right to vote, because that’s what a democracy is.”

“Do I still think a democracy could work?” Smith asks and answers, “Yes.”

“I think that the only way that democracy works now, is that we as a society have to do real soul searching. For people who are not Black, the one argument I get all the time is ‘You guys have come so far, what do you guys want?’

And my answer [to them] is, ‘We want to feel just as comfortable in our houses as you feel when you go home.’ That’s a huge difference.”