Every election time, the exact same thing happens. Your campaign buses roll into Sunnyside, the Third Ward, Acres Homes, and Kashmere Gardens. Your workers set up eld o ces on our streets, and your candidates speak from the pulpits of our historic churches. You look out at the crowd, look into our cameras, and say the exact same words: “We need you. This election is too important. If your community does not vote, we cannot win.”
You are right. Black voters are the main group that helps you win. Without our votes, you cannot win city hall, county seats, or national races. You know how important we are when it is time to vote. But when it is time to spend your campaign money, you tell a completely different story. You ask us for free help and community loyalty, but you do not buy advertisements with us. You want our votes, but you do not buy our ads.
This is not a small mistake. It is an economic insult. Even our most powerful federal, county, and city leaders focus their massive ad budgets elsewhere.
• At the national and county levels, leaders like Congressman Christian Menefee, Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis, Harris County Clerk Teneshia Hudspeth, and District Judge Darrell William Jordan raise hundreds of thousands—sometimes millions—of dollars, yet leave the local Black Press out of their paid media plans.
• For our major federal districts covering historically Black neighborhoods, leaders like Congresswoman Sylvia Garcia representing the 29th Congressional District come right into the heart of Acres Homes to speak to our people. Yet, her campaign budgets bypass our platforms when it is time to spend paid marketing dollars.
• In our local city hall campaigns, leaders like Houston City Council Members Tarsha Jackson, Carolyn Evans-Shabazz, Martha Castex-Tatum, Letitia Plummer, and Willie Davis run hard for every single neighborhood vote.
But the neglect goes straight to the very top of our city and county executive offices. The candidates vying for Harris County Judge—including Democratic nominee Letitia Plummer and incumbent Lina Hidalgo—demand our community’s full alignment on their policy battles and executive budgets. Yet, when their teams manage multimillion-dollar communication pipelines, our platforms are frozen out.
When election time comes, these candidates talk constantly about the toughest issues facing our neighborhoods. You campaign on xing broken drainage so our streets stop flooding during storms. You promise to fix deep potholes, clean up illegal dumping, keep local water bills fair, bring grocery stores to food deserts, and stop greedy developers from driving longtime families out of their homes.
When you want to talk about these city issues, where do you go? You rush to Black media. You ask African American News&Issues to write long articles about your plans. You want us to take free photos of your ribbon cuttings, publish your press releases, and print voter guides telling our people to vote for you. You come to us because you know exactly how powerful we are. We have a massive, unmatched reach across Houston and Texas: 36,000 print copies weekly delivered directly into the hands of multi-generational households, and over 400,000 followers on Facebook engaging with us online.
We hold the attention, the eyeballs, and the trust of the exact voters you need to win. Yet, you bypass this massive audience when it comes time to pay. To see what true partnership looks like, you only have to look at leaders who actually show their respect through their budgets. Congressman Al Green consistently understands that you must invest in the community infrastructure that protects the vote. Even in competitive statewide and local battles, figures like Democratic U.S. Senate nominee James Talarico, Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham, and Harris County Commissioner Adrian Garcia understand that local community outreach requires actual commercial spending. They buy advertising. They invest in our platforms because they know that respect is a twoway street.
Local Black newspapers and websites are not free bulletin boards. We are independent businesses. We are the trusted voice of our community. When big television channels ignore our street ooding, our water issues, or our neighborhood safety, we cover it every single day. We do the hard work of informing voters 365 days a year, not just for two weeks before an election. Your campaigns raise millions of dollars by promising economic fairness. So, where does all that money actually go? Campaign finance reports show the painful truth. Almost all of your advertising budget goes to giant, white-owned television stations, out-of-town consulting firms, Facebook, and Google. You write huge checks to those companies without hesitating. You do not ask them for a “community discount.” You do not demand that they show loyalty to our neighborhoods first. You pay them full price because you respect them as real businesses.
Yet, when you come to the Black Press, the rules suddenly change. You expect free interviews, free front-page stories, and free digital reach. You tell us it is for “good exposure.” But exposure does not pay our paper bills. Exposure does not pay our local reporters, our delivery drivers, or our printers. Squeezing Black-owned businesses for free work while paying full price to everyone else is wrong. This bad strategy also hurts your own campaigns. Your out-of-town campaign managers think a quick, generic social media ad is enough to get our community out to vote. They do not realize that people tune out those corporate political ads. What they do trust is the local paper sitting on their kitchen table and the verified, trusted community voice on their Facebook feeds. By ignoring our 36,000 weekly print readers and 400,000 online followers, you are neglecting your most dependable voters.
The days of the one-way relationship are over. You cannot claim to fight for Black economic justice in City Hall, Acres Homes, and Harris County while refusing to spend campaign dollars with Black-owned businesses. If you want our people to show up at the ballot box, your campaign budget must show up on our ledger. Stop asking for our free labor as some say you pay to play. Stop taking our community for granted. Respect our business, buy ads in our papers, and put your money where your mouth is.
