Benson: We must “offer an alternative vision for what government can be, an entity that actually improves your life, that shows up when you need it, and then gets out of the way when you don’t.”

New reporting from The 19th highlights Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate Jocelyn Benson’s path to public service from Selma to Michigan, her commitment to protecting Michiganders’ rights and freedoms, and how she’ll deliver for Michigan as governor. 

Jocelyn has been clear that as governor, her priority will be getting government to show up when Michiganders need it and then get out of the way. She is the only candidate in the race with a track record of transforming government to save Michiganders time and money, and stand up to anyone who comes after citizens' rights and freedoms. 

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The 19th: She followed a civil rights hero to Alabama. It shaped her path to power.

[Grace Panetta, 03/24/2026] 

More than 30 years apart, two women separately set forth on long drives south to Alabama. Their backgrounds were different, their mission the same: to join an existential fight for the soul of American democracy. 

Viola Gregg Liuzzo, a White 39-year-old married mother of five from Detroit, went first. In 1965, she was appalled by images from Bloody Sunday, when state troopers tear-gassed and brutalized voting rights activists who were attempting to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge on a march from Selma to Montgomery. When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis asked Americans to come to Selma to join them for their third try in March, Liuzzo answered the call.

Jocelyn Benson, a 19-year-old inspired by Liuzzo’s story, made the same journey in 1997. Right out of college, she worked as a volunteer researcher and undercover investigator at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the nonprofit legal and advocacy organization that researches white supremacists and far-right hate groups.

Benson’s time in Alabama helped set her on course to effect change by running for political office. After being elected to two terms as Michigan’s secretary of state, the state’s chief election official, she’s now the Democratic front-runner for the open governor’s race, set to be among the most competitive and consequential in the nation.

“I left this experience thinking my contribution to the work would be making sure I was a public servant,” Benson recalled in an interview outside the Civil Rights Memorial at the SPLC’s headquarters in Montgomery, where she got her start nearly 30 years ago.

“That’s all I’ve ever wanted to be, alongside being someone who would have the courage of those who were on the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge,” she added.  

[...]

After Benson first learned of Liuzzo’s story as a student studying political science at Wellesley College in the late 1990s, she traveled to Montgomery during the spring break of her junior year to visit the SPLC and the Civil Rights Memorial. 

She graduated early, then borrowed her grandparents’ 1985 Buick and drove to Montgomery, she writes in her 2025 memoir “A Purposeful Warrior.” There, she waited tables at an Italian restaurant to pay her bills during her unpaid internship at the SPLC.

[...]

Benson views it as her life’s mission to carry on the work that Liuzzo would have continued had she lived and gone back to Detroit.

“I wanted to learn from everyone who was actively trying to answer this question of, ‘What is the unfinished work of the Civil Rights Movement today?’” Benson said. “And that was 30 years after Selma when I was here. So now here we are, over 60 years later, still trying to pick up that baton and say, ‘How can I honor all the lives that were lost in this work by continuing the work they would have done had they lived?’”

[...]

[As Secretary of State] She found herself facing down violence and threats when she defended the integrity of the 2020 election against President Donald Trump’s false claims of election fraud and attempts to overturn his election loss in Michigan and other key battleground states. Months of attacks from Trump and his supporters culminated in angry, armed protesters showing up at her home, where she was inside with her young son, in December 2020. 

“I had this moment where I was like, ‘Oh, this is part of that work, too.’ You have to be prepared to have the moral courage to not run when it gets particularly scary, when your life is threatened,” Benson recalled. “And that, and being here, in many ways, prepared me to walk through the fire, especially in the Trump era.”

[...]

Benson planned this year’s trip to Alabama with Democratic state Rep. Morgan Foreman, who grew up steeped in the history of the Civil Rights Movement from her older family members, some of whom had lived in the South at the time. 

[...]

Foreman said she was “very moved” by Benson’s affinity for the history of the South. 

“I’m just really appreciative of her time and her love for this country and her love for the movement, because the movement never stopped. It’s changed. It looks different, but it hasn’t stopped at all,” Foreman added. 

[...]

“To me, this work is not just the unfinished work of the Civil Rights Movement,” she said. “It’s the required work of state leaders right now to see the dysfunction in the broken system that is recklessly leading our nation and offer an alternative vision for what government can be, an entity that actually improves your life, that shows up when you need it, and then gets out of the way when you don’t.”

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