When Kierra Johnson heard about the recent U.S. Senate victories in Georgia, she was elated. “I must have grinned so hard, my cheeks were hurting,” says the native of Valdosta, Georgia. “I felt like I had a cramp in my cheeks.” For Johnson, the victories by Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff felt like a “vindication” of something she’d been saying for years. “I have been on my soapbox for almost 25 years now about the divestment in the South and Midwest by progressives. It has been a conviction of mine that there are a lot of progressive people who care about social justice issues sitting in the Deep South and sitting in the Rust Belt. And when we divest from organizing, from community building, from training, we’re not tapping that source of energy.”