Everton Blair vs. David Scott: Why Georgia's 13th Congressional District Is the Most Important Black Primary in America

Thank you Lalisa, Tamibetcha, Serena Fossi, Mary Lummis, Lesley Y, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.Y’all know here on the platform, I love to frame things in their implications toward education and politics, because a lot of us ignore the intersections between the two. We act like political knowledge just falls in folks’ lap, like we ain’t gotta teach it. That ain’t it though. So let me chop this up with y’all.I sat down with Dr. Everton Blair — everybody in Georgia’s 13th calls him EJ — and what started as a conversation about one congressional race turned into a whole seminar on how corporate Democrats, seniority politics, and the duopoly keep Black communities in a chokehold. Feel me? Let that marinate before we even get into the details.The District, The Incumbent, and the Absentee SeatGeorgia’s 13th Congressional District is all the suburbs south and east of Atlanta — Stockbridge, Stone Mountain, Snellville, Conyers, Covington, Jonesboro. Six counties. Most folks who say they from Atlanta actually live in these communities. And after the 2023 redistricting, this district was redrawn as majority-Black… not because Georgia wanted to do right by Black voters, but because the Supreme Court’s ruling in Allen v. Milligan (2023) forced Alabama, and by extension Georgia, to stop diluting Black voting power through gerrymandering. So what did the political machine do? They strategically carved up every Black neighborhood south and east of Atlanta into one sprawling district and handed the keys to Congressman David Scott.David Scott has been in elected office for over 50 years. He’s in his 80s. He has not voted in the past seven elections. He has never lived in the district. He has not spoken on the House floor this legislative session. He doesn’t take meetings. He doesn’t show up in community. There’s a video circulating of him being escorted in a wheelchair by staff just to sign up to appear on the ballot. That ain’t a representative. That’s a hostage situation dressed up as seniority.And the kicker? He’s the most corporate-PAC-funded Democrat in Congress by percentage. He raises almost nothing from individuals in his own district. AIPAC was bundling his individual contributions this cycle — until even they stopped, because even the folks who were on his side realized they had to find a new champion. And so now the corporate class is propping up a different candidate who also won’t disavow dark money. When the special interests abandon your incumbent and move to their next puppet, that tells you everything about whose interests were ever being served.What Does a Congressperson Actually Do?Before we go deeper, let me slow down. A lot of y’all weren’t taught this and ain’t got no shame in that — the education system was designed to keep you ignorant of how power actually works. Congress does two primary things: it passes laws, and it passes the federal budget. And your budget is your priorities. Your budget reflects your values. When David Scott broke ranks with Democrats to help fund the Department of Homeland Security — meaning more ICE agents in our streets — that was a budget decision. That was a values decision. When he became one of three Black Democrats to sign on to a House resolution honoring Charlie Kirk after Kirk was murdered — with no community mandate, with no constituent demand — that was a values decision.Facts over feelings.Congress also has oversight authority. It can subpoena officials. It can impeach. During the Biden administration, with Merrick Garland as Attorney General, the Democrats chose not to prosecute Trump because they were worried about how it would look for the election. Look how that turned out anyway. Democrats keep confusing caution for strategy. Meanwhile, Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi were cabinet officials who should have been impeached well before Trump himself fired them. Articles of impeachment should have been drafted. They weren’t. Because Congress is sitting on its hands, paid to be quiet, with its silence bought and sold.The Seniority Trap and Why Old Democrats Won’t LeaveLet me put a finer point on this. The Big Beautiful Bill — Trump’s signature legislation — passed by one vote. One vote, y’all. And three Democrats had died in office in the months before that vote: Sylvester Turner, Raúl Grijalva, and Jerry Connolly. Their seats were filled by Republicans before Democrats could hold them, and that’s how the ugly bill passed. Remember when we all joked about Ruth Bader Ginsburg not retiring under Obama? Remember how we cold-handed the argument until she died in office and Trump filled her seat? These ain’t abstract debates. These are material consequences that will outlive all the jokes.Nancy Pelosi. Jim Clyburn. Hakeem Jeffries signing onto the Charlie Kirk resolution. David Scott at 80-something in a wheelchair. This is not generational respect. This is generational sabotage. And the system works this way because it’s designed to. Why would someone in power voluntarily change a system that keeps them in power? That ain’t natural. Combine that with the Citizens United v. FEC (2010) decision that unleashed unlimited dark money, and you got a machine that eats reformers for breakfast and spits out incumbents who’d rather die in office than pass the torch.Everton said something in our conversation that I want y’all to sit with. He said, “Don’t wait your turn. Waiting your turn is what got us this.” Let that marinate.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The Implication to Education — Because Everything IsHere’s where I want to get into it, because y’all know education is elevation is my whole thing. Everton Blair is a former chair of the Gwinnett County school board — the largest and most diverse school district in Georgia. He passed a $2.5 billion budget. He raised teacher pay when teachers were fleeing Gwinnett for DeKalb and Fulton because those districts were paying $2,000 to $4,000 more per position. During COVID, he led a politically divided board — Democrats and Republicans — through remote learning, meal distribution, laptop access, hotspot access, and a science-aligned reopening. That’s governance. That’s budgeting. That’s consensus-building in a cantankerous environment.Now ask yourself this: what is David Scott’s education record? What has he done on the Department of Education’s existence — which Trump is actively trying to dismantle? What has he done on student loan debt, on HBCU funding, on Title I schools in Clayton County, on the school-to-prison pipeline that feeds Black kids from his own district into Georgia’s carceral system? The silence is the answer.And this is where the intersectionality gets real. When Hartsfield-Jackson Airport — the busiest airport in the world — sits physically inside Clayton County, but the city of Atlanta annexed the revenue, the economic development, the vitality, and Clayton County gets none of it? That’s an education issue. That’s a jobs issue. That’s a housing issue. That’s a health issue. Because when a Black community is stripped of its economic engine, the schools get underfunded, the teachers leave, the kids get disciplined instead of developed, and the Panopticon — the school-to-prison pipeline — grinds on.When BlackRock and the other private equity firms buy up every single-family home in Stockbridge and Conyers and turn them into rental properties, Black families lose the pathway to homeownership, which means they lose the pathway to building generational wealth, which means they lose the pathway to funding Black educational futures. The GI Bill and New Deal-era policies that built the white American middle class — we were structurally excluded from those benefits. Now, when we finally get access, private equity is snapping up the housing stock before we can even get in the door. And your congressman is silent about it.Intersectional Material ImpactsLet me break down what’s materially at stake, because the dots don’t always connect themselves:For Black women in the district, this race is about reproductive healthcare access in a state where abortion is banned after six weeks. It’s about Medicaid expansion Georgia still refuses to adopt. It’s about the Black maternal mortality crisis that makes Georgia one of the deadliest states in America to give birth in if you’re Black.For working-class Black folks, this race is about Medicare for All versus a healthcare system that’s still bleeding us dry. It’s about a universal basic income, about taxing billionaires and big business, about reinvesting in childcare so parents can actually work. It’s about a refund check big enough to matter.For Black immigrants and Afro-Caribbean families in the district — and this is a diverse diaspora district — this race is about whether your congressman is going to vote to fund the ICE agents raiding your community or vote to protect you. David Scott already told you what he thinks. He funded DHS.For Black youth trying to get into politics, this race is about whether the path forward means waiting 30 years for a seat at a table that’s already been sold. Or whether you can take the mantle now.For Black men — especially young Black men being flooded with right-wing propaganda about how “Democrats started the KKK” — this race is about understanding the party switch of the 1960s and 70s was itself a racial realignment. When Democrats passed the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, the Dixiecrats defected. The entire Southern Strategy was Nixon and Reagan courting white backlash. Nick Cannon and Amber Rose driving around the car recycling 1960s talking points about “Democrats started the Klan” — that’s a disinformation campaign dressed up as history. Thinking deeply about shallow s**t, that’s what we doing here.The Duopoly, The Pragmatism Trap, and the Southern Black HubHere’s where me and Everton pushed each other the most in the conversation. I asked him about the duopoly — this two-party system that keeps manufacturing outcomes that don’t serve us. He made the pragmatic case: there’s no way to get elected outside the current binary, so we push Democrats to be better. I made the structural case: pragmatism itself has been cornered by the system. The system gets to decide what counts as practical. And anything outside its permission gets labeled unpragmatic, unrealistic, unserious.We had more than two parties in the 18th and 19th centuries. The duopoly is a historical creation, not a natural law. And it came down to race — when Black folks got enfranchised through the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act, the parties realigned around racial coalitions, not issue coalitions. That’s the switch. That’s the whole game.And here’s my argument: if we’re going to break the duopoly, it’s going to come from a Southern Black hub. Atlanta. Birmingham. Houston. These are the cities where Black political power is concentrated enough — and independent enough from white corporate Democratic machines — to actually push a defection. Nine times out of ten, Black folks in Birmingham or Atlanta got to do something locally for Black folks nationwide to benefit. Montgomery bus boycotts happened because Black folks were in the same jurisdiction, boycotting the same system, in the same place. Now we spread across six counties, three area codes, and two media markets, and the big money weaponizes that diffusion against us.This ain’t despair. This is diagnosis. Feel me?The Black Economic Agenda and What’s Actually on the TableEverton’s nine-point Black Economic Agenda is at evertonblair.com/black-economic-agenda. Tax reform. Education. Healthcare. Transportation. Innovation. Black-owned businesses. Housing access. Middle-class expansion. He’s pledged not to take a dime from corporate PACs — in the campaign or in office. He’s out-fundraised the incumbent doing it the right way. The majority of his donors are Black folks he knows personally. That’s people-powered. That’s not an abstraction.And here’s the thing about DEI that I want to close on, because the question came up in our livestream chat. Somebody said corporations loved DEI, it was a corporate initiative, what are y’all complaining about? Here’s the receipt: DEI became a buzzword corporations adopted after George Floyd because it was politically expedient. They didn’t structurally change who they hired, what they paid, or who got access. They hired white women into DEI roles and called it diversity. And the minute Trump made “DEI” a slur, they dropped it with a quickness, proving it was never structural in the first place. It was symbolic performance all along.So when Trump signs his anti-DEI executive orders, what the federal government can no longer do by name — invest directly in Black communities — has to be done through proxies. Zip code. Census tract. High school. Family income. The policy-making system already knows we’re racially segregated, so any one of those proxies functions as a race proxy. And in states like Oklahoma where they’ve outlawed the zip code proxy, we get clever with the next one. That’s what a real fighter in Congress looks like. Not symbolic. Structural. That’s Everton Blair.The AskEarly vote in Georgia’s 13th starts April 27th. Final vote is May 19th. If you’re in Stockbridge, Stone Mountain, Snellville, Conyers, Covington, Jonesboro, or any of the six counties in this district — check your registration, find your early vote location by county, and show up. If you’re not in the district but you got $20 to throw at a people-powered campaign that isn’t taking corporate money, go to evertonblair.com. If you can phone bank or door knock, do that.This is the most competitive Democratic primary in the country. It’s the clearest case study we have of what happens when Black communities replace absentee incumbents with battle-tested, values-aligned, people-powered fighters. What happens here echoes in every Black district in America.Education is elevation. Don’t wait your turn.5 KEY TAKEAWAYS* The primary is the election. Gerrymandering in red and blue states alike has killed competitive general elections. If your district is drawn to be safely Democratic or Republican, the only vote that matters is the primary. Show up May 19th — or vote early starting April 27th — or cede your voice entirely.* Corporate PAC money is the silent architecture of political failure. David Scott is the most corporate-PAC-funded Democrat by percentage, and every “strange” vote he’s taken — funding DHS and ICE, honoring Charlie Kirk, refusing to challenge AIPAC — maps directly onto that funding. Follow the money and the votes explain themselves.* Seniority is not service. Fifty years in office, no floor speeches this session, no voting in the last seven elections, no residence in the district. Seniority was never the argument — it was the excuse. Incumbents dying in office has already cost Democrats the ability to block the Big Beautiful Bill and a Supreme Court seat.* Black political power flows through local wins. The Montgomery bus boycott, the Atlanta Student Movement, Birmingham 1963 — national Black progress has always been locally seeded. Georgia’s 13th is exactly the kind of Southern Black hub where a defection from corporate Democratic politics could reshape the national landscape.* The duopoly is a race story. The two-party system consolidated around racial coalitions after the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, not around issue coalitions. Any serious conversation about breaking the duopoly has to reckon with how race structures it — and any serious alternative has to be led from Black political strongholds, not lectured into existence by third-party think tanks.EXPLICIT ASK TO BECOME PAID SUBSCRIBER I’m fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education media. I document and teach the histories, legal frameworks, and cultural knowledge that are being systematically erased or distorted — including the redistricting rulings that created Georgia’s 13th in the first place, the Citizens United decision that unleashed the dark money flooding this race, and the generational politics that keep our communities underrepresented in the very institutions that are supposed to serve us.With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you. As a Black educator and researcher, my work depends entirely on a community of readers, not corporate sponsors. If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, we could build a full-time digital sanctuary: a new, independent source of PBS-depth reporting and curriculum, centered on Black expertise. But right now, less than 1% of my followers are paid subscribers.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. 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