It is not a stretch to credit DeLee with helping transform the white, racist southern wing of the Democratic Party into the party of today, in which the Black vote is crucial to victory.

Born in 1925, DeLee grew up in a rural Dorchester County not much removed from Reconstruction. Her family worked as sharecroppers, picking vegetables "for white people," she said. She witnessed a lynching. She attended a Black school in a one-room shack heated by a pot belly stove. This impoverished, segregated school did, however, kindle her sense of unfairness and led her to a life of activism in Dorchester County.

In the year since Trump won reelection, nearly 75,000 people have signed up to run for local or state office through Run for Something.