Jasmine Crockett Calls Out Democrats at SC NAACP: "We Just Can't Be the Lesser of Two Evils"
- Javar Juarez
- Jun 14
- 8 min read
At the SC NAACP Freedom Fund Gala, the Texas Congresswoman Told the Party Exactly What It Will Cost to Lose Black America Again
By Javar Juarez | CUBNSC Exclusive | June 14, 2026
West Columbia, S.C. - The Brookland Banquet Center in West Columbia was sold out Saturday night. Wall to wall. Dignitaries. Elected officials. Consultants. Operatives. The kind of room where people come to be seen and to shake hands and to remind each other that they matter.
Then Jasmine Crockett took the microphone.
And the South Carolina Democratic establishment — the same establishment that spent decades managing Black voters instead of serving them — found out exactly what this moment requires of them.
The Interview They Didn't Expect
Before Congresswoman Crockett ever reached the podium at the South Carolina NAACP's 2026 Annual Freedom Fund Gala, CUBN sat down with her one-on-one.
What she said in that room will not be summarized away.
CUBN asked her directly: "Congresswoman, you were gerrymandered out of your own district by Republicans who asked you to verify your home address before they drew the lines — and then when you ran statewide, you were outspent nearly five to one by a fellow Democrat while the party stayed largely silent. Do you believe the Democratic establishment has a structural problem supporting Black women — or was Texas your personal test of whether you could overcome that alone?"
Her answer was not diplomatic.
"There is no question about the fact that there is a divide within the party," she said. "Racism is alive and well. And racism is not limited to just the Republicans. The Republicans are just loud about theirs. But there are people within our own coalition that are racist as well."
She named it plainly and without hedging: the maps — here in South Carolina, in Texas, across the Confederate South — are racist. They are targeted instruments designed to dismantle the Black representation that the Voting Rights Act was constructed to protect.
"These VRA seats initially were created in mind of making sure that black representation was guaranteed. We know that the vast majority of African Americans in this country live in the South, sadly enough, in the Confederate South, yet it is the Confederate Southern states that have decided they want to go ahead and dismantle that black representation."
She said this not as a talking point, but as testimony. She lived it. Republicans obtained her home address, drew the lines around it, and erased her district. Mark Veasey. Al Green. All three of the Black members of her delegation — gone. Their constituencies cracked and packed. Their power was stolen by cartography.
And when she ran statewide, a fellow Democrat outspent her nearly five to one. The party stayed silent.
South Carolina was not incidental to this conversation. CUBN pressed her on what happened here — a Black slate of candidates who swept top Democratic primary offices without establishment money and without institutional party support. Her read was surgical:
"I think racism is at play."
From the Podium: A Reckoning, Not a Rally
What Congresswoman Crockett delivered from the stage was not a fundraising speech. It was a reckoning. She spoke into a room that included the chair of the South Carolina Democratic Party, Christale Spain — a Black woman who, according to sources close to the situation, is currently under pressure from white members of the Democratic establishment who question whether she should be in her position at all.
Crockett did not flinch.
"They had my address," she said. "They specifically made sure that my district was not included where my address is. Mark Veasey and Al Green were the only other Black members in my delegation at the time, and all three of our districts are no longer. Our constituencies have been cracked and packed to steal our power."
She told the room she believes Democrats will retake the House majority and that Hakeem Jeffries will be Speaker. But she refused to let that celebration go unexamined.
"While people celebrate, the Democrats who win the majority know that it was Black America in the South and in red states who paid the price."
Then she turned to the transaction — the one Black voters know by heart.
"Y'all will see folks you haven't seen since the last time they needed your vote."
She wasn't telling anyone not to vote. She was telling them to make candidates earn it.
Catch them at the Juneteenth cookout and ask where they stand on voting rights.
Notice when they go silent on your issues. Ask whether they've said anything about the injustice in the Chow case, or Karmelo Anthony in Texas — or whether they save that talk about criminal justice reform for an exclusive Black men's roundtable.
"That kind of mess won't cut it anymore. Not at a time such as this. Not when we're being killed in the streets, when unemployment is at a record high for Black folk, and people cannot afford to put food on the table."
She was precise about the breadth of what Black voters actually care about — as a civil rights and criminal defense attorney, she pushed back on the single-issue framing that reduces Black men to one concern.
"If they're not talking about home ownership, starting or growing your business, higher education, child care — if they're not coming at you correctly, like the professionals, entrepreneurs, and family men that you are — they need to work harder to represent you."
Then she named the dynamic that every Black voter in that room has lived but rarely hears said out loud from a podium:
"Candidates can phone in their outreach to Black voters, not prioritize our communities, yet we are expected to show up and hold the line."
She anticipated the rebuttal — she always does.
"Now, some people will quickly say, 'But Jasmine, the other side is so much worse.' I know. I do. That's why I've been going hard against them for the last five years."
She acknowledged going bar for bar with Marjorie Taylor Greene. She acknowledged her history with South Carolina's own Nancy Mace — who, she noted, told her she wanted to take it outside.
"I fight back in the language they'll understand. But you have to understand that fighting back does not mean we're in a race to the bottom."
Then she delivered the line that should echo past Saturday night:
"We don't want to be two sides of the same coin. Just because Republicans think it's okay to nominate white supremacists doesn't mean we should be okay doing the same. We just can't be the lesser of two evils and expect people to show up — and Black folks are the last group that needs a lecture on the politics of harm reduction."
She catalogued the cost of harmful policy on Black communities — ash plants and data centers sited in Black neighborhoods, schools closed in Black zip codes first, maternal mortality rates, heart disease, recidivism, wages. The list was not rhetorical. It was a ledger.
"We know what's at stake, and we've been showing up, holding the line, doing our part time and time again. We've shown our power. Now stop taking us for granted if you're ready to win."
She lifted Black women — specifically her Delta Sigma Theta sorority sister, Representative Joyce Beatty of Ohio, who sued to ensure that Donald Trump's name was removed from the Kennedy Center. At 4 a.m., just a day before Crockett took that stage in West Columbia, the court prevailed. The name came down.
Then she named the Black prosecutors who held Trump accountable when the institutions around them flinched: Alvin Bragg in New York, Letitia James as Attorney General, Fani Willis in Georgia.
"Don't let anybody tell you that Black folk — Black patriotism — we are consistently on the front lines."
She closed where the NAACP itself began — with the reminder that the civil rights this organization has fought for were never only for Black people.
That the fates of Black Americans, Latino Americans, Asian Americans, women, and LGBTQIA communities are bound together. And that there is one group of people for whom showing up in the face of water hoses, dogs, the threat of lynching, and the threat of imprisonment is not exceptional. It is ancestral.
"There is a certain group of people that it is in their DNA — in the face of water hoses, in the face of dogs, in the face of the threat of lynchings, in the face of the threat of being jailed — that they show up and they are never afraid, whether it's out in the streets or in the halls of Congress."
What This Means for South Carolina
There is a specific delusion that has long circulated through the rooms of Columbia's Democratic establishment. It holds that the people who have managed Black political power in this state — the party functionaries, the major donors, the gatekeepers of access and endorsement — know better than Black voters do about their own interests.
That the way things have always been done is the way things must continue to be done.
That proximity to institutional power is the same thing as community accountability.
Jasmine Crockett just told an entire sold-out room that this is a lie.
The candidates who swept South Carolina's Democratic primary on June 9th did not win because the establishment handed them a path.
They won because Dr. Jermaine Johnson knocked on doors in communities where no statewide candidate had ever shown up before. They won because voters who had been told their vote didn't matter waited in line to cast it anyway. They won because the New SC coalition, organized under Brandon Upson's strategic leadership, built something the establishment did not build and could not have built — because building it required being present among the people.
What CUBN is now observing is that some of South Carolina's leading Black officials are turning their attention not to how the establishment gets behind this slate, but to how the slate can be convinced to chase down the white donors and white establishment figures who declined to support them — to recruit them back into a coalition that they themselves refused to join.
The implicit message is that the Black candidates who won must now go earn the confidence of the white Democrats who rejected them.
That is the inversion of accountability. And it is exactly the structural posture that Congresswoman Crockett named — the expectation that Black candidates and Black voters must perpetually prove themselves worthy of support that should flow naturally in their direction.
The Democratic Party has a choice. It is not a complicated choice, but it is a costly one — costly to the people whose power depends on the status quo remaining undisturbed.
Get behind this slate. Put money behind this slate. Show up for the people who have always shown up for you.
Or keep raising money to lose.
Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett walked into a room full of the powerful and the comfortable Saturday night and told them — plainly, without apology, with receipts — that the moment requires more than their presence.
It requires their reckoning.
The question is whether they heard her.
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.
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