In Valdosta, Georgia, a majority-Black city in South Georgia, something quietly transformative has been unfolding. In 2023, thousands of Black voters mobilized to elect a city council that actually represents their interests. For a community long shaped by disinvestment, rising housing costs, and political neglect, the victory was a stake in the ground for change. Black residents were no longer willing to be governed by systems that ignored their lives, and they had a shared vision for what their city could become.
Since then, local organizers supported by my organization, Black Futures Lab and Black to the Future Action Fund, have launched the Our Homes, Our Future campaign, pushing to end junk housing fees, fight rent discrimination, and expand affordable housing near jobs and grocery stores. The work is ongoing, but the shift is already clear: people articulating what they want their community to look like – and they are organizing to make it happen.
What's happening in Valdosta is not an outlier. It is part of a much longer tradition, one that stretches back to emancipation, of Black people using collective dreaming as a political practice. From the moment chattel slavery formally ended outside of prisons, Black communities insisted on imagining futures beyond the narrow confines imposed on us, and then building the power to bring those futures forward. Dreaming, for Black people, has never been about escapism. It is about strategy and execution.
Dreaming After Emancipation
After emancipation, newly freed Black people pursued education, land, and political participation as claims on their future. A key motivation for learning to read was that Black people could master contracts, deeds, and laws, the tools of advancement and self-governance. Building Black schools and churches was about creating institutions that could anchor and improve Black life for generations.
The Great Migration followed a similar logic. It is often remembered as an escape from violence in the South, but it was also an act of collective design. Families moved strategically–toward jobs, schools, and political opportunity–reshaping cities and building new Black voting blocs in the process.
Again and again, Black communities treated democracy not as a gift to be gratefully received, but as a system that could and must be made to work as advertised. They registered neighbors to vote, ran candidates, filed claims, appealed decisions, and built institutions capable of interfacing with the state. This belief that fairness should be repeatable, enforceable, and durable has fueled Black organizing for generations.
Why Dreaming Matters Now
Today, Black communities face a set of threats that are all too familiar: voter suppression, economic precarity, state violence, and a renewed effort to erase or rewrite Black history altogether. In response, Black organizing has often centered, and understandably so, on trauma, harm, and crisis. But pain alone has never been enough to sustain our movements over time.
As historian Robin D.G. Kelley argues in Freedom Dreams, transformative movements are forged through collective imagination. "Black radical imagination," Kelley writes, is not wishful thinking detached from material struggle. It is born against catastrophe, shaped by the lived realities of violence and dispossession, but oriented toward visions of freedom grounded in care, cooperation, and self-determination.
Revolutionary philosopher Grace Lee Boggs echoed this belief, insisting that misery and oppression have never been the true catalysts for social change. What moves people to act, she argued, is the promise of constructing a new world. For Boggs, making revolution meant remaking ourselves and asking how we "grow our souls," strengthen our communities, expand our capacity to care for one another, and build systems that can last.
The Black Census Project: Organized Listening as Power
That understanding sits at the core of the 2026 Black Census Project, an initiative of the Black Futures Lab that seeks to capture the diverse experiences and perspectives, and, yes, the dreams, of Black people across the country. With 200,000 participants, the 2023 Black Census was the largest survey of Black communities since Reconstruction; we are launching an even bigger Black Census this year. We aim to reach 300,000 participants.
To describe the Black Census Project as "just" a survey misses the point. At its core, the project is an act of organized listening. It asks Black people not only what problems we face, but what we want for our lives, our children, and our communities. It treats Black voices as sources of political and cultural knowledge.
The Black Census Project is rooted in W.E.B. Du Bois's documentation of the agency and determination of freed Black people during Reconstruction. Relying on partnerships with trusted community organizations, the project reaches people traditional polls often miss: rural residents, formerly and currently incarcerated people, LGBTQ+ folks, immigrants, and young people who have grown disillusioned with institutions that routinely fail them. By meeting people where they are, whether in churches, community events, and online spaces, the project rebuilds trust in a process that has too often extracted information without delivering change.
The 2023 Black Census findings are not surprising to anyone paying attention. Black respondents consistently name low wages, unaffordable housing, gun violence, and failing schools as top concerns. They overwhelmingly support policies like raising the minimum wage, expanding healthcare, making college affordable, and ensuring access to safe housing. What is surprising is how rarely candidates, funders, and policymakers engage Black communities with this level of seriousness and scale.
It is in this respect that the Black Census Project insists on something radical: that Black communities have the right to be counted accurately, studied rigorously, and taken seriously as governing partners in shaping the future. And when the 2026 Black Census closes, we'll have an invaluable playbook for a new world built from our dreams.
When Dreams Become Demands
At the Black Futures Lab, we've seen again and again how the power of collective dreaming becomes clearest when it moves into action. The previous Black Census resulted in our Black Economic Agenda, a series of policy solutions that governors and legislatures can use to improve the conditions for Black people in their states, including wages and worker protections. When Black communities come together to articulate their dreams, those dreams can become plans. Plans become policy. Policy becomes power.
We've seen it in California, where the Young Women's Freedom Center–an organization led by and for young women and gender expansive people impacted by incarceration and gender-based violence–has advanced a vision of justice rooted in healing rather than punishment. By centering the dreams and lived experiences of survivors, organizers helped pass sentencing reforms for people who are survivors of human trafficking or intimate partner violence, as well as legislation expanding maternal health education and resources for incarcerated pregnant people. These wins were a direct result of a community articulating a better future where systems work fairly and consistently for everyone.
The collective dreaming taking place in Valdosta began with a listening session we held there in 2022. Knocking on doors, we heard over and over again, the rent is too high, even in a small town. When a hurricane hit, residents noticed the disparity in response between white and Black neighborhoods. Residents spoke candidly about how disconnected local politics felt; few knew what city officials actually controlled, or that the mayor had won just by 90 votes. That realization produced power. In 2024, the city saw a 47 percent increase in voter turnout, marking a shift from political disconnection to deliberate self-governance.
What the Black Census Is Asking of Us
The Black Census Project is first and foremost a tool for candidates or campaigns to know more about the Black electorate and what we want. But it goes much further than that. It is a challenge to anyone who claims to care about democracy and the public will. The Black Census asks questions for all sectors:
- Are charitable foundations and donors ready and willing to resource Black imagination, not just respond to crisis?
- Are government leaders prepared to truly listen before legislating?
- Are businesses ready to invest in communities where Black dreams are primed to drive real change, rather than extracting value without accountability?
- Are Black allies ready to honor, celebrate, and help make possible the dreams of our communities?
- And are Black communities ready to go the next step in dreaming boldly, organizing collectively, and expanding our vision of what is possible?
In a moment when Black history is being erased from textbooks and Black political power is under attack, the Black Census Project offers a different path. It reminds us that democracy does not begin at the ballot box. It begins with deep, organized listening and with the courage to imagine a better, fairer future.
Dreaming Forward
There's a powerful story unfolding in Valdosta, Georgia, and in other Black communities across the country where people are engaging around shared visions for what's possible. And it is a story about inheritance. Black people have always carried forward a tradition of dreaming toward freedom, even when the odds were long and the risks were real.
That tradition continues today. If democracy is to mean anything at all, it must make room for Black dreaming. Even amidst the trauma and pain of the present moment, visions of a better future are taking shape in the hearts and minds of Black people across the country. The question is whether we will do what's needed to help make those visions full and clear for the world to see—and whether we will create the conditions for those visions to become truths.