MULLINS STANDS: A Church Full of Witnesses and an Election Being Stolen in Plain Sight
- Javar Juarez
- 7 hours ago
- 8 min read
By Javar Juarez | CUBNSC
MULLINS, S.C. — Before the second reading of a city ordinance that could fundamentally alter when and how the people of Mullins cast their ballots, nearly 100 people filled the pews of Mt. Carmel Missionary Baptist Church on Monday night.
They came from across Marion County — some with grievances that go back generations, some with children in tow, all with a singular conviction: that what the Mullins City Council is moving to do is not an administrative adjustment.
It is an attack.
The ordinance at the center of the fight proposes shifting municipal elections from November of even-numbered years — when voter participation is highest — to odd-numbered years in April, when turnout historically collapses and civic attention is thin.
Mayor Miko Pickett, Mullins' first African American woman to hold the office, has been pushing back since the proposal surfaced earlier this year. On Monday night, she brought her fight to the congregation.
The History That Brought Them Here
Mayor Pickett did not arrive at the microphone with talking points. She arrived with history.
She walked the room from 1863 to 1965 — from emancipation to the Voting Rights Act — a span of one hundred years during which Black Americans in the South were systematically denied the franchise through poll taxes, literacy tests, constitutional recitation requirements, and outright violence.
She invoked Fannie Lou Hamer, who in 1964 traveled 24 miles just to attempt voter registration, was jailed and beaten for it, returned home, and was told to surrender her registration card or face the consequences. Hamer refused. That refusal — and the testimony she attempted to deliver on national television before President Lyndon B. Johnson deliberately interrupted her broadcast — helped produce the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Pickett connected that history directly to Mullins. In 2004, the city council attempted a similar election date change. That ordinance contained a single line requiring Section 5 pre-clearance from the United States Department of Justice before it could take effect.
No approval was ever found.
For thirty years, Mullins voted in November. It was not until the Supreme Court's 2013 Shelby County decision gutted Section 5 pre-clearance that the legal scaffolding protecting that practice was removed — and even then, the council moved on nothing for over a decade.
Until January of this year.
"Now they want to go back to an old document in 2004 that did not pass the Martin Luther King, Fannie Lou Hamer, John Lewis test," Pickett told the crowd, "and they want to implement it right now."
She detailed the procedural conditions the council has imposed on Tuesday's public hearing: the comment period has been cut from one hour to thirty minutes. Citizens who wish to speak must sign up in writing at least ten minutes before the meeting begins. Speaking time is capped at three minutes per person. The actual change from November to April is not explicitly listed as the item under discussion — though Pickett made clear that is precisely what is being decided.
"I asked for an hour," she said. "We got thirty minutes."
"She Woke the Devil Up"
The Reverend Nelson B. Rivers III, a Gullah Geechee son of Colleton County and one of the most consequential civil rights voices in South Carolina, did not mince words.
He delivered the meeting's theological and historical backbone in a nearly forty-minute address that moved from the Book of Numbers to the cigar factory strike on Charleston's Drake Street, from Nelson Mandela's Robben Island years to the founding of the African National Congress on the model of the NAACP.
Rivers had come to Marion County before — in the early 1980s as state director of the NAACP, he declared war on at-large election structures across South Carolina and came to Marion ready to litigate. Before he could file suit, Marion changed its single-member district structure. The entire county — city council, county council, school board — now operates on single-member representation. The struggle worked.
On Monday night, he drew the parallel between South Africa under apartheid and what is unfolding in Mullins.
"Mullins, you remind me of South Africa fifty years ago," he told the room.
He described how the African National Congress was founded not in a vacuum but on the very principles of the NAACP — because South Africa's architects of racial domination had studied Jim Crow America. And he described how Mandela, even from a prison cell on Robben Island, remained the political center of a movement that never stopped organizing.
The lesson was not subtle.
"When you are the majority," Rivers said, "the only problem you have is believing that you are."
On Mayor Pickett specifically, he was direct:
When this mayor got elected, she woke the devil up. They believed that if they elected a person of color, she would act like one of them."
She did not. And that, Rivers argued, is precisely why the machinery of obstruction has been set in motion — not through open opposition at the ballot box, but through procedural maneuvering on election timing, public comment restrictions, and the quiet reshaping of municipal governance.
He also raised a Freedom of Information Act concern that has not yet been fully aired publicly: he asserted that decisions about this ordinance were made in private, outside of the public process a democratic government is legally required to observe.
"Mullins is not a private club," he said. "You cannot cut a deal to disenfranchise somebody in America and keep it secret."
"Their Slips Are Showing"
Edla Vaughn is the president of the Marion County chapter of the National Action Network and a 25-year Navy veteran who was born and raised in Mullins, left in 1985, served her country, spent over a decade working for the governor's office, and came home.
She knows this town. She knows what it looks like when people pretend it was never like this.
"Mullins has always been like this," she told the crowd. "Their slips are showing."
Vaughn addressed directly the online campaign attempting to smear the National Action Network as a racist or outside agitator organization. She was unequivocal: NAN is a social justice organization, not a racial one. She had attended the NAN national convention in New York just days before, driven back, and stood in that church Monday night because Mullins was on her mind the entire time she was gone.
She spoke about the economic realities underlying the fight. Workers in Mullins are earning wages below what people made here in the 1980s. Jobs are scarce. Housing is inaccessible. The infrastructure of opportunity — the kind that Anderson Brothers Bank, with its billions in assets, sits at the center of — has not flowed equitably to the Black community whose labor and land helped build this region's wealth. The attempt to alter elections, she argued, is one more mechanism in a long pattern of extraction without investment.
"Trying to take the vote away is not acceptable," Vaughn said, "on top of everything else they've already taken away."
The Wider Coalition
Dr. Eric Nelson, president of the National Action Network's Colorado chapter, traveled from Denver to stand in that church. He came because Mayor Pickett extended the invitation at last week's NAN national convention, and he came because he understood the stakes.
"This is not simply an administrative decision," Nelson said. "This is an attack on the very foundation of our democracy, and more specifically, on the rights of Black Americans who have historically faced systemic barriers to voting."
He noted with precision the mechanism of the proposed change: moving elections away from November — when general election infrastructure, media attention, and voter habit produce the highest turnout — to April of off years, when participation falls dramatically and community voices are most easily diluted.
Barry Barbour, a white resident of the area, took the microphone and offered a short testimony anchored in John 3:16 and a simple declaration:
"I think we have a wonderful mayor."
His presence was noted by Vaughn and others. The coalition standing with Mayor Pickett is not monochromatic.
What Is at Stake
Five of the seven seats on the Mullins City Council are held by African Americans. That fact has been used online and in conversation to dismiss the concerns raised at Monday's mass meeting — the logic being that a majority-Black council cannot be acting against Black interests. Both Vaughn and Rivers addressed this directly and without hesitation.
"All skin folk ain't kin folk," Rivers said, drawing on a phrase as old as the Black freedom struggle itself. "Just because you look like me doesn't mean you love me."
The point is not about race in the abstract. It is about power, proximity, and whose interests are actually being served.
A council that moves to restrict public comment time, compresses a hearing that affects voting access, and reactivates a 2004 ordinance that never received federal clearance is not a council operating in the public interest — regardless of what its members look like.
Mayor Pickett framed the choice in the clearest terms. She has written letters to the ACLU, the NAACP, and the National Action Network.
NAN answered.
She is asking citizens to sign up and use their three minutes on Tuesday. She is asking for bodies in that room. She is asking Mullins to understand that the question before the council is not a procedural technicality but a test of whether the democratic promise this city claims to uphold — liberty and justice for all — actually applies to everyone.
"Before Fannie Lou Hamer was Fannie Lou Hamer," she told the crowd, "she was Fannie. Before Martin Luther King was Martin Luther King, he was Martin. Before John Lewis was John Lewis, he was John."
Before Mullins, South Carolina is who it is going to be — it is the people in that church, and the people who show up Tuesday, who will decide.
The second reading of the Mullins elections ordinance is scheduled for Tuesday, April 15, 2026 5:30pm-6:30pm. The public hearing begins with a 30-minute comment window. Citizens wishing to speak must sign up in writing at least 10 minutes before the meeting begins.
CUBNSC is an independent investigative news platform focused on exposing systems of power, advancing civil rights reporting, and documenting the political and economic forces shaping South Carolina. Under the leadership of Javar Juarez, its work elevates stories often overlooked in mainstream media.