Director of new SPLC Georgia state office ‘there to listen,’ forge bonds

The town of Sandersville sits near the center of Georgia, its rolling hills home to vast ancient deposits of the soft, white powder called kaolin. It is also the hometown of another local find, Yterenickia Bell, who in May launched the new Georgia state office of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

While born of the chalky hills, Bell, like her grandparents who raised her, is made of firmer stuff.

“My grandma told me that if I saw injustice or felt like something was wrong, then I should use my voice and say something,” said Bell, who at just 35 has blazed a trail of social justice achievements that brought her to the attention of the SPLC. “She told me, you got one mouth and two ears for a reason. Listen to people, hear people, be passionate about people.” 

In Georgia, where poverty is saturated throughout the historically neglected southwestern and southeastern areas of the state known as the Black Belt, that voice is deeply needed. It is in those regions – along with the western edge of Atlanta, where prominent Black institutions took root – that the SPLC hopes to make its mark.

As one of a vanguard of young leaders steeped in the intersectionality of the racial justice movement today, Bell will play a key role in that pursuit.

“We are at a pivotal moment for the Civil Rights Movement,” SPLC President and CEO Margaret Huang said in explaining why she chose Bell to lead the new effort in Georgia. “The extraordinary leaders in the 1950s and 1960s created a movement that really transformed the entire country. And we continue to celebrate those leaders. But today the challenges are different.

“We’re still fighting white supremacy. We’re still fighting systems and structures that are unequal and discriminatory. But the ways that we need to fight and the people who need to lead are a younger generation. The leaders of our state offices are exemplars of that younger generation, and they are very much at the forefront of redefining the Civil Rights Movement and bringing it into the future.”

New SPLC strategy

The Georgia office will be based in Atlanta’s Westside, but most of its organizers, perhaps as many as 16, will be spread throughout the Black Belt, Bell said. They will be charged with working with community groups on issues that affect not only Black Americans but members of other racial groups, religions and gender and sexual orientations.

As with her counterparts who have taken the helm at new state offices in Alabama and Mississippi over the past three years, Bell’s focus will be on building trust in marginalized communities, bolstering community engagement and working to alleviate poverty, injustice and assaults on democracy. The new state offices are employing different methods to face a variety of challenges in each of the three states. But they have a common mission: to learn from and stand alongside local leaders and to bring the skills and resources of the SPLC to help them realize the hopes of their communities.

It is all part of a new era for the SPLC, founded in 1971 by civil rights lawyers originally focused on using the courts to enforce the landmark civil rights laws of the 1960s and dedicated today to ensuring that promise of the movement becomes a reality for all. As the organization grew over five decades into a national force deeply respected for its legal muscle in representing disadvantaged people and in fighting hate groups, it became less known for local organizing and advocacy, Huang said. But in recent years, the organization has increasingly been dedicating itself to bolstering its well-honed legal skills with people like Bell who put a premium on listening.

“We’re there to listen, not to tell people, ‘Hey, this is what we’re hearing. This is what we think you should be doing.’ No, we’re listening to you, and then we’re figuring out, how do we come back as a team to say, this is what these folks need,” Bell said. “How do we support them in getting it done?”

Building trust

Central to Bell’s strategy is organizing and mobilizing.

In 2½ years at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a national umbrella coalition of which the SPLC is a member, she worked to promote voting rights across 11 states. Bell said she plans to draw on that background to convene disparate advocacy groups to work with the SPLC. Drawing on the strength of, among others, women of color in communities small and large, she is already bringing together faith leaders and advocates for civil rights and sustainability.

While in the past, the SPLC had frequently reached out to local advocates in support of specific lawsuits, now the organization, through its state offices and elsewhere, is seeking to support communities not just through legal representation but through policy, poverty alleviation and economic justice initiatives, Bell said.

It will do that, she said, by making this kind of work in places like the Black Belt its bread and butter, placing full-time staffers in these communities to help local advocates “hold on to the power that they have.”

“We are going back to those communities to build trust,” Bell said. “When they know that they’re going to have people on that ground in those areas 365 days a year, it won’t be as hard to turn people out or to get people activated, because we’re not just doing it on a one-off basis, but to be a year-round catalyst for racial justice.”

‘Lean into people’

Bell was made for this task. Born to a 19-year-old single mother, she was named by an uncle who gave her the name Yterenickia, which means “defender of honor” in Swahili. She was raised by her grandparents in a sprawling house with her eight aunts and uncles, who were mostly still teens while her mother lived and worked in a nearby town. In the close, nurturing, inquisitive family, “It was kind of like Thanksgiving every Sunday,” Bell said.

Bell’s grandfather worked for one of the vast chalk mines in town, and her grandmother worked at the county Department of Juvenile Justice, passing on her passion for criminal justice and supporting young people to Bell.

“She always told me, ‘People are not bad people, YT, they just make bad decisions,’” Bell said, using the nickname she still goes by. “So that is the framing that I see people through. Everybody makes mistakes. Some of us get caught and some of us don’t. The only difference between me and you is, you got caught speeding and I didn’t, because I’m imperfect as well. And so that’s how I kind of lean into people.”

Despite her happy childhood, the specter of racial injustice was never far away. One town over, Bell recalled, stood trees where her grandparents remembered Black people being lynched. Local norms were such that when Bell was a high school student, she said white people would sit on one side of popular Sandersville restaurants and Black people on the other.

Eager “to get as far away from Sandersville and the rural part of the state as I could,” Bell parlayed an excellent high school record into a place at Georgia State University in Atlanta, becoming the first person in her family to go to college.

There, she quickly became a star student, earning bachelor’s degrees in both criminal justice and political science and then two master’s degrees, in social work and public administration.

“Why did she stick out amongst my students across 27 years of teaching? My initial answer is that she made sure of that, because of her passion and drive she and her ideas stood out,” said Elizabeth Beck, a professor of social work at Georgia State. “YT has always been a go-getter, and she’s always been a networker, and she’s always had brilliant ideas and a profound amount of energy for social change. … I just saw her as a professional and an advocate from the start.”

A communicator

At first interested in the law, Bell turned instead to policy and advocacy work, seeking, she said, greater impact than she could have representing individual clients. 

She was a volunteer for AmeriCorps for a year, working at a school in Brooklyn and forming deep relationships with individual immigrant students struggling to learn English. She moved on to key roles with Planned Parenthood Southeast; GA Engaged, an umbrella of progressive outreach organizations; and at the National Domestic Workers Alliance/Care in Action. Throughout, said Nicole Robinson, political and research director at Fair Fight Action, Bell built a reputation for understanding the needs of the people she battled for, people from a broad variety of backgrounds who faced different sorts of discrimination.

In one instance, Robinson said, she sat in on meetings Bell was holding with an organization that worked in the Asian American community and with another one working to turn out Black voters.

In each case “she just kind of asked them, ‘What are you trying to do?’ And then she would go and work on making sure that they had the best field plan, the best voter education plan possible,” Robinson said. “But it wasn’t like she did the plan and gave it to them. It was, what are you trying to do? How do you want to do it? What are your strengths? What do you feel like you’re lacking? And then she helped edit their plan, or revise it, not craft a plan for them.

“Being a communicator means actually listening, and that’s something I think YT is really great at, actually listening. But the thing about YT is, she listens because she just cares a lot about Georgia.”

Picture at top: Yterenickia Bell, the SPLC’s state office director for Georgia, works to get out the vote on Election Day in Mableton, Georgia. (Credit: David Naugle)