Gun safety is a cornerstone issue for all members of Elder Youth. Frost, for his part, has long said that he first felt compelled to get involved with politics after the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting in 2014. He worked with March For Our Lives as the gun safety organization’s national organizing director before running for office himself.
Last year, after a shooting at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill left one professor dead, Clayton, 26, called Jones, who had just come off a spring and summer of rallying against gun violence, to ask for help hosting a demonstration for gun violence prevention. “I was like, ‘Will you come? I need help. I don’t know what to do, I don’t know how to do this, I don’t know what I’m doing.’ And he was like, ‘I’ll be there,’” she says.
Clayton has reached out to members of the group at different times for their support, and says their rapport is incomparable. “Annie was there for that [rally] as well. Maxwell came for my Young Democrats of North Carolina convention,” she says. “It’s one of the best support systems I’ve got in this job. It’s them.”
Others feel similarly. While working for an LGBTQ rights group in Florida, Wolf asked Frost for a hand running counter-programming for an event that former President Donald Trump was hosting in Orlando. “Maxwell, of course, rescued the whole thing,” Wolf, 35, says. Not only did Frost come for the event, but “the icing on the cake,” as Wolf describes it, was that Frost, a percussionist and music aficionado, DJed the event himself.
It’s not lost on any of the group’s members that the majority of them are from and represent diverse communities in the South, an area that many political pundits have written off as unwinnable for Democrats, forever beholden to conservative ideologies. “The Southern segregationists would say that the South will rise again, and I’ve rejected that,” Jones, 28, says. Pointing to himself, Clayton, and Frost, each of whom are the youngest in their respective positions, he adds, “we represent a new South that is multiracial, multigenerational, multi-faith, that is pro-immigrant, pro-economic justice, and anti-systemic racism and homophobia.”
Like the others in the group chat, he believes in the value and importance of representation. “Having people like us in these spaces is critical. We’ve been told to fall into nihilism about the South, but I really believe that the reason we’re seeing so much repression and attack in the South is because there is so much resistance and revolutionary activity to quell.”