Bringing Back Intelligence: The Black Church Answers the Political Call to Shape South Carolina’s Future
- Javar Juarez
- 21 minutes ago
- 7 min read
At Changing Your Mind Ministries, a statewide slate of Black candidates made the case that competence, faith and collective action can change South Carolina—if voters move as one body.
By Javar Juarez | CUBNSC | July 18, 2026
GREENVILLE, S.C. — The political stomp at Changing Your Mind Ministries did not stay a political stomp for long. It became testimony, altar call and strategy session at once: candidates preaching policy, organizers reciting numbers and the congregation answering back as if the ballot itself were a profession of faith.
At the center stood the church’s senior pastor and House District 25 representative, Wendell Jones, with a phrase that settled over the room like a motto:
“They’re bringing intelligence back.”
Jones was not merely praising a slate of candidates running for statewide office.
He was answering a national campaign that has turned “DEI” into shorthand for unqualified, especially when the person in question is Black.
The people seated before him—an educator, a banker and bank examiner, a CPA and auditor, an agricultural policy professional and an organizer running for secretary of state—made that caricature look absurd.
“We spent the last two, three, four years talking about DEI,” Jones said, and advancing a narrative that people of “darker persuasions” were placed in jobs they had not earned. Then, he said, came this slate: “incredibly talented, incredibly competent, incredibly gifted, incredibly humble.”
Call it the Didn’t Earn It system: one set of assumptions for Black candidates who must prove themselves at every turn, and another for insiders who inherit access.
South Carolina has just watched Gov. Henry McMaster appoint Darline Graham, the late Lindsey Graham’s sister, to complete his Senate term. She has a record of public service, but she was not elected to the office. The appointment is legal; the contrast is political. Black candidates are routinely asked to arrive overqualified, while proximity to power is treated as a qualification of its own.
That is why Friday night’s gathering mattered. It put Black competence onstage without apology.
A political force hiding in plain sight
Pew Research Center estimates that 17% of South Carolina adults identify with historically Black Protestant traditions. Applied to the state’s adult population, that is roughly 700,000 people—a constituency large enough to reshape a statewide election. The institution is not confined to a sanctuary, either: Pew found that 66% of historically Black Protestants participate in religious services at least monthly in person, online or both.
That reach carries history. Black churches have been schools, meeting halls, mutual-aid societies and organizing headquarters. In South Carolina, Emanuel AME Church was a center of Black freedom work long before a white supremacist murdered nine worshippers there in 2015.
During Reconstruction, South Carolina briefly had the nation’s only Black-majority legislature. Then came the violent restoration of white rule under Wade Hampton and the 1895 constitutional convention led by Benjamin Tillman, which deliberately stripped Black citizens of political power for generations.
Getting our lick back from 1895 does not mean revenge. It means recovering the civic power that violence and law were designed to steal.
Lisa Sweeney, founder of Boots on the Ground, was unapologetic about organizing Black voters—and just as clear that Black political power is not a threat to anybody else’s humanity.
“What I’m not going to do is apologize,” she said of the candidates who chose to run in this climate.
Then she explained what solidarity looks like in practice. Her accountant, a white single mother with a five-year-old child, had lost a $50,000-a-year job connected to DEI work. The woman wept, unsure how her family would manage. Sweeney’s answer was direct: “I got you.”
The story punctured the lie that equity is a benefit Black people hoard.
Anti-DEI policies do not land only on Black workers. Their damage reaches white women and working families too. The pending SAVE America Act presents a related danger: it would require documentary proof of citizenship to register for federal elections, creating extra hurdles for millions of citizens, including married women whose current names do not match their birth certificates.
The measure is stalled in the U.S. Senate and is not law, but the burden it proposes is real. It is not yet clear where the first woman to represent South Carolina in the U.S. Senate stands on the legislation.
But the question is this: What have Black people ever championed that benefited only Black people?
The Black freedom struggle expanded democracy for women, workers, immigrants, people with disabilities and every American whose rights depend on equal protection. Black political self-determination and multiracial solidarity are not opposites. Properly understood, one makes the other honest.
The slate makes its case
The candidates laid out that argument from the podium themselves. Courtney McClain, the Democratic nominee in the 4th Congressional District, was present. The statewide candidates then made their case through the duties of the offices they seek.
Jason Belton, the nominee for secretary of state, connected local economic power to electoral accountability. Small businesses and nonprofits, he said, are the state’s backbone, yet large corporations receive the incentives while local institutions struggle. His refrain was simple: “We can win this.” His office, he argued, should safeguard the systems and information that make accountability possible.
Sylvia Wright made public education personal. Searching for preschool for her grandson, she felt convicted by one question: “What about the other kids?” Her answer is universal public pre-K for four-year-olds, safer and healthier school environments, stronger mental-health support, and a teacher pipeline that exchanges years of service for help with college debt.
“Every kid deserves a fair shot,” she said.
Vincent Coe, a former bank examiner and banker running for state treasurer, reduced his pitch to a discipline too often missing in Columbia: “I know how to follow the money.” He framed the job as stewardship—protecting public funds, demanding transparency and refusing to let status-quo politics substitute for financial competence.
Tiffany Boozer, a CPA, auditor in the Comptroller General’s Office, reminded the room that vision without reliable books is just talk.
“The state’s accountant should be an accountant,” she said.
Boozer pointed to South Carolina’s multibillion-dollar accounting debacle and pledged to modernize paper-heavy systems and make sure the numbers the state reports are real.
DeShawn Blanding, the nominee for commissioner of agriculture, connected land to hunger and family memory.
His campaign, “Rooted Forward,” calls for protecting farmland, rebuilding local processing and connecting producers to institutions and retailers. His family’s land story began with an enslaved ancestor, grew to 400 acres, suffered devastating loss and endured through recovery. Agriculture, he argued, must work “from the farmers again to the people in the communities.”
And Jones, already elected and unopposed in November, gave the evening its governing frame.
“There is a District 25 in every county,” Jones said—a community overlooked by political leaders and burdened by policies that fail families at the kitchen table. He urged voters to look beyond manufactured distractions and focus on what directly shapes their lives: food, housing, education and better-paying jobs. With Republicans holding an 88-36 veto-proof majority in the state House, Jones is working to flip enough seats to break that control.
“We need to take care of the people who built the state,” he said. “Policy can make that happen.”
One faith, disciplined action
The Black church has talent, treasure and reach. It also has factions, personality politics and leaders so cautious about tax law that neutrality becomes an excuse for inaction. The Johnson Amendment still bars 501(c)(3) organizations from intervening for or against candidates, though churches may conduct nonpartisan voter registration, education and turnout work. That distinction calls for training, not retreat.
Training matters because enthusiasm without structure evaporates. Churches need lawful civic-engagement plans, voter files, transportation teams, digital outreach, issue education and year-round accountability. They need intergenerational leadership of the kind Sweeney described, pairing young organizers with elders who remember what previous movements cost.
In his 1933 book, The Mis-Education of the Negro, Carter G. Woodson warned of an education system that teaches Black leaders to seek acceptance from the very institutions that deny their communities power. His warning still speaks to gatekeepers who confuse proximity to power with liberation—and silence with strategy. Black collective action will always be called divisive by those who accept white collective power as normal.
There is nothing wrong with speaking directly to Black people, financing Black candidates from within our own communities and moving voters from our own congregations.
Anyone alarmed by that is telling on themselves.
Black unity is not a demand to dominate.
It is a demand to survive and to serve.
Friday night offered a glimpse of what that service can look like: not a cult of personality, but a body in motion; not race without policy, but race understood as one of the central facts shaping who receives protection, investment and the presumption of competence.
“Something is happening in South Carolina,” Jones kept saying.
The opportunity now is to make that something durable—to move like one faith, grounded in God and organized in public. The work is bigger than any candidate.
It requires all of us.
Javar Juarez is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of the Columbia Urban Broadcast Network (CUBN), an independent investigative news outlet based in Columbia, South Carolina, and a member of the South Carolina Press Association. He is also President of the Capital City Chapter of the A. Philip Randolph Institute.