Newark’s Rashawn Davis Empowers Young People to Become Engaged Citizens

"Our democracy is at its best when young people are involved,” says Davis, who continues the legacy of civil rights workers at the Andrew Goodman Foundation.

Rashawn Davis

Rashawn Davis is the executive director of the Andrew Goodman Foundation. Photo: Courtesy of Deanna Did That LLC

For Newark’s Rashawn Davis, bringing young people into the political process is a passion and, now, his professional mission. And it’s clear that this year’s presidential election may well depend on the turnout of young voters. “Gen Z and millennials are close to being the largest demographic of eligible voters in the country,” he says. “And that’s exciting because of the amount of energy that they’re going to bring into conversations. It makes us better.”

And yet it’s not just their votes in the biggest contest that matter. “Democracy is much bigger than that,” Davis says. “I like to tell them democracy is all of it: It’s voting in the presidential election; it’s showing up to your city council meetings; it’s having your voice heard.”

Born into a family whose Newark roots span nearly a century (“A classic Great Migration story,” he says), Davis, 32, just marked his first year as executive director of the Andrew Goodman Foundation, an organization formed by Goodman’s grieving family in the wake of their son’s murder when he was a civil rights worker in 1964.

Sixty years ago, Andrew Goodman, a native New Yorker, was one of hundreds of white Northerners who ventured to Mississippi in what they called Freedom Summer to work alongside Black Americans to attain their legal, civil and voting rights. He was murdered, along with Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, by Ku Klux Klan members who buried their bodies in a shallow grave near Philadelphia, Mississippi.

Davis first learned about Freedom Summer as a boy growing up in New Jersey. “Andrew Goodman was 20 years old when he went down to Mississippi,” Davis says. “Martin Luther King was 26 when he started the Montgomery bus boycott. He didn’t even see 40. These were young people who had a different vision of the country and pursued it.”

[RELATED: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Civil Rights Career Began at a Modest NJ Café]

Goodman’s parents have passed away, but his youngest brother, David, serves on the foundation’s board. “I talk with David multiple times a week,” says Davis. “It’s amazing to me that I get calls from people who knew Andy personally. It was mind-boggling to me, because you think of this stuff as ancient history. But this legacy is alive now.”

And it’s a legacy with a crucial role to play today, Davis adds.

“Our work is rooted in the fact that our democracy is at its best when young people are involved,” Davis says. Goodman was 20 when he got on a bus headed south. People that age today were born in 2004. “They have a real distance from the Civil Rights Movement,” Davis says. “There’s this question that our organization and others have to figure out, which is, how do we tell this story to new generations, how do we make sure that it’s relevant?”

As director, Davis heads up a nationwide network doing outreach to college students and other young people to help them become more politically active.

In New Jersey, Davis has spent time with students at Montclair State University and Ramapo College, where the Andrew Goodman Foundation supports projects ranging from voter-registration drives to a civic-leadership course designed for first-year students.

One way Davis hopes to grow the Goodman legacy is to expand beyond traditional four-year colleges. “Our mission doesn’t say, ‘Make young voices and votes a powerful force in democracy on leafy college campuses only.’” He’d like to see young people learn about democratic engagement wherever they are, whether that’s in community college, trade school or the workforce.

He calls it the civic pipeline—helping young people learn that they have a voice in the community and the nation they inhabit, whatever role they go on to play. “We want to build an engaged citizenry, whether you’re a banker, a teacher,” Davis says. “Because then our communities are better off. Every young person is going to grow up to be an adult, they’re going to grow up to be a citizen, maybe a homeowner. For us, the really rewarding thing is that at the end of the civic pipeline is an engaged citizen for life.”

Davis chose to live in his hometown. “Newark has always been in my heart, in my bones,” he says. Although his family moved to the Maplewood-South Orange school district when he was young, elders never stopped telling Davis about Newark’s historical importance. A “real turning point” came when Davis transferred to Newark’s University High School, where he remembers “being surrounded by incredibly educated Black professionals” who nurtured his budding interest in history and politics. “I fell in love with this idea of public service, of civic action.”

Then, while in his junior year at Georgetown University, Davis ran for an open seat on the Newark City Council. After all, he says, “when you look at a place like Newark, the most intractable problems the city faces are problems that affect young people.” So he got himself on the ballot: “For my five minutes of fame, I like to tell people I’m the youngest person ever to appear on a municipal ballot in Newark, at 21.” While Davis didn’t win, the campaign made him see that he could make a life trying to help people make their own communities better.

Following stints at the ACLU and the Council of State Governments Justice Center, along with graduate studies at the Wagner School at New York University, Davis spent four years at Change.org, where he helped found and supervise a fund to support grassroots racial-justice initiatives around the country.

Taking on the job at the Andrew Goodman Foundation in the summer of 2023, Davis says, felt like “a full-circle moment.” Connecting young people to their political power is huge. “I get to see up close the amazing talent and the amazing ambition of young people trying to make better communities, better government, better civic life,” he says.

While Davis’s job is based in New York, he’s still proud to call Newark home. “I’m a die-hard Jersey person. I love New Jersey. So much of who I am is because of this state.”

He’s bullish on Newark. After graduating from Georgetown, “I always knew I wanted to settle here. I would tell people, ‘It’s easy to move to New York and kind of do the thing, move to DC and kind of do the thing.’ I kind of always wanted a challenge.”

“I think what we’ve forgotten, particularly with suburban sprawl, is that Newark is truly central to the history of this state,” he adds. “If you put Newark anywhere else in the country, it would be a different experience. It’s a big city. But because of its proximity to New York, it doesn’t get the respect that it would if it were in a different location.”

What does the future look like for Davis? He and his fiancée (also from New Jersey) will be married in summer 2025. After that, will voters see him on another ballot again? He’s not ruling it out. “I do think there will be a moment when I run for office again. I feel compelled by it—to serve my community again, to help my community again,” Davis says. “Newark has this incredible story and this incredible future, and I want to help tell it.”

Kate Tuttle is a writer and editor based in Montclair. She edits the books section of the Boston Globe.


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