When Omaha native Rebekah Caruthers considers her work for Washington D.C.-based Fair Elections Center, she’s satisfied to know she’s continuing a history of family activism. Since 2021 she’s served as executive vice president of the nonpartisan center, which does advocacy, litigation and poll worker recruitment. FEC is the plaintiff in cases opposing restrictive voting laws. In July, she will transition to the CEO role.
“Being a Black woman running a national voting rights organization is a big deal,” Caruthers said. “Not only am I a Black woman but I’ve also worked in different regions with so many different voters across the country. I understand what some of the real world impacts are. I have some first-hand experiences. I have observed experiences my family’s had. That lens is what I bring. As our country tries grappling with some foundational things in this moment, I think it’s important to have someone whose family experienced certain things during post-reconstruction.
“As a Black woman descended of slaves, I will not tolerate encumbrances. They’re going to have a fight on their hands if they try to take my freedoms from me.”
Long before training as an attorney and turning political consultant and strategist managing campaigns for John Ewing and Chuck Hassebrook, or commenting on “Roland Martin Unfiltered,” she grew up watching her late mom, Mary Henderson Caruthers, work with voter registration efforts in north Omaha. Her parents encouraged her and her sisters to pursue higher education, achieve and participate.
“That’s an environment we thrived in and we continue to thrive because of the foundation our parents created,” she said.
Her precocious interest started as a young girl watching gavel-to-gavel network television coverage of the Democratic and Republican conventions.
“I got the bug early and other experiences built on it,” Caruthers said. “I knew my mom registered people to vote. I witnessed civic engagement and community building, I remember going where Black moms got their hair braided. They would read African fables like ‘Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters’ to us. It was very much cultural enrichment but also community. That is part of how I define civic engagement – ways to connect and create community. To me, that’s so important.”
Douglas County Treasurer John Ewing, a 2025 Omaha mayoral candidate, has seen Caruthers shine.
“I’m extremely proud of the work she is doing nationally and the work she is doing to carry out her late mother’s legacy,” he said. “Omaha should be proud of this talented, hardworking woman.”
Caruthers was influenced by the emergence of Brenda Council as an Omaha political force. Seeing someone who looked like her on the city council and school board and narrowly losing bids for mayor made an impression.
Council admired Caruthers from near and far, noting how impressed she is with her knowledge “of all of the systems and players involved in federal campaigns.”
“While I was disappointed we couldn’t keep this amazing talent in Omaha, I’m extremely proud of the difference she is making on the national level.” Council said.
Encouraged by the example of Council and Metropolitan Community College Board member Chris Rodgers, she ran for the MCC board at 20 while still a Creighton University undergrad. Years later, at the height of the pandemic, her genealogical searches uncovered an ancestral through line to making “good trouble.”
“I discovered my great-great-great grandfather, Henry Caruthers, founded a town after slavery that still exists – Pelham, Texas. We had no idea,” she said.
One of several freedmen’s towns founded by former slaves, it’s been recognized by Texas as historically significant. It hit close to home for her when she visited there.
“I decided to introduce myself to residents as probably being related to the town’s founder, and they said, ‘Hey, cousin. Everyone with roots in this town is related to each other,'” she said.
“I started to learn the connection between Juneteenth and the freedmen’s towns in celebrating emancipation,” Caruthers said. “Politicians would show up trying to get the vote of newly eligible Black male voters. There would be speeches and events. All these years later I’m doing these same things. That to me is so incredible and amazing. My why isn’t just my experience, my why is also my family roots, and for me it’s really wild to connect that.”
She laid the groundwork for a beltway career working at the local, state, national levels. While a University of Nebraska Law School student, she interned in the Omaha Mayor’s Office. She organized a group of law students to volunteer in post-Katrina New Orleans.
She followed closely “the role college students played in pressuring the American government, corporations and higher ed institutions to divest from apartheid South Africa.”
When the opportunity came to spend a semester there via a Howard University School of Law study abroad program she jumped at the chance to see first-hand.
Her experience came less than a decade after that nation’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
“It was a case study of how restorative justice is milquetoast without actual accountability,” she said. “The country was still largely segregated on the basis of economic class (tied to the old racial caste system). South Africa, much like America, struggles now because economic and punitive damages (reparations) weren’t paid to those who suffered… There has to be an economic solution.”
The sports law major and avid sports fan worked at the NCAA.
“I was either going to go into politics or sports – whichever path was opening up at the time,” Caruthers said. “I find a lot of similarities between sports and politics. My interest was in understanding the business side of college athletics. Definitely learned and experienced a lot.”
She worked in Democratic Party politics in Louisiana while Barack Obama won election as America’s first Black president in 2008. She was a public policy fellow for the late congressman John Dingell of Ohio.
“Such an amazing man. So smart,” Caruthers said. “In addition to being chairman emeritus of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, he had the pen on the hill for the Affordable Care Act. I was up close with how that bill was drafted in countless meetings.”
Her mother’s death in 2011 prompted her to think about bucket list to-dos. Managing a competitive congressional race was near the top.
“John Ewing recruited me back to Omaha to run his 2012 Congressional campaign,” Caruthers said. “Despite being badly out-spent, Ewing lost a narrow fight to Republican incumbent Lee Terry in the general election.”
“She was extremely politically astute and ran an amazing campaign,” Ewing said. “She had tremendous insight into what it took to appeal to the voters of this district. Her ability to motivate and encourage the team speaks to her character and leadership ability. She’s someone my family and I cherish as a friend as well as a consultant.”
Nearly putting off the upset led Chuck Hassebrook to hire her as political director and deputy campaign director for his failed gubernatorial bid against Pete Ricketts. During the campaign she recruited fellow Omaha native Symone Sanders, whose career as a political strategist and pundit has mirrored her own.
Caruthers began thinking more broadly to do political work with pockets of the country she hadn’t intersected with before. For the National Democratic Training Committee she trained candidates, volunteers, officers nationwide “on everything from fundraising to communication to field work (canvassing).”
In the nation’s capitol, she worked for the Congressional Black Caucus and Democratic Caucus and in local politics.
“D.C. is definitely a tough city. It pulls no punches. It really made me dig in,” she said. “The various positions I had didn’t really pay much. When I started to lobby, that paid more.”
She lobbied for political action committees (PACs) MoveOn and EveryTown for Gun Safety. While conceding there can be bad actors in that arena she notes petitioning the government is a guaranteed right.
“Where it becomes problematic is when ordinary people no longer have a say in government and it is distilled down to a handful of people or businesses,” she said.
She echoed what many observers say in bemoaning “a loss of civility” in today’s polarized political-cultural climate.
“Even though with social media we have more ways to connect people still aren’t connecting on a human level,” Caruthers said. “People don’t know how to disagree without being personally disagreeable. What’s unfortunate is that civics is really no longer taught in school. One reason I enjoy my day job is that with our campus programs I spend time doing civic engagement on college campuses.”
She ended up at the Fair Elections Center when a corporate headhunter asked what she dreamed of doing.
“I’d spent a lot of time doing campaign work, helping raise lots of money,” Caruthers said. “As I noticed voting restrictions getting tighter and tighter – a lot of people eligible to vote being denied the ability to vote – I decided that’s what I want to work on next.”
She found the right fit at the center, which began as the Fair Elections Legal Network in 2006.
“I’ve been a candidate. I’ve worked in local, state and federal government. I’ve been on the Super Pac side. I’ve been on the candidate side. I’ve done something in almost every region of the country,” she said. “Now I’ve moved away from working with candidates to voting rights. I was so very curious and I knew you can’t just learn these things from a book, you have to experience it. It’s been an amazing adventure.”
As for being a candidate herself, she doesn’t plan to run.
“I don’t think I’ll run for office again,” Caruthers said. “It’s not from having seen too much. The impact I want to have isn’t tied to political office. I’m interested in systemic impact. I want to contribute to people being able to live their lives and to thrive in their communities. Making sure that in a country where we say we hold certain beliefs that those beliefs are able to be actualized by everyone. With the work I’m doing there are things I can do on a macro level to have impact. Few political offices are able to have that type of impact.”
The leader and advocate seeks to be a change agent.
“It isn’t good enough for me to provide information,” she said. “It’s also important to empower people. We all can make a difference but people have to understand that they can make a difference.”
Caruthers took grief for leaving the state.
“I don’t think my story would have happened if I had stayed in Nebraska,” she said. “People associate North Omaha with cycles of violence, drugs, gangs, low literacy. Those things are there. But I’ve been all over the state and those same things are also all over the state. It’s just talked about and covered differently.”
She said it was obvious to her and others that young Black professionals from Omaha were not hired or promoted at the same level as peer transplants here.
“It was very apparent something was going on,” she said. “It could be attributed to multiple things. But I knew for me where I wanted to go in life. I needed to go where I wasn’t just tolerated, but celebrated.
“There weren’t a lot of people doing what I was interested in and so I knew I needed to go in order to get some of those experiences. I didn’t always know what the next step exactly was but I knew I had to keep moving forward and be open to different opportunities.”
The sense of community she holds dear has its roots in Omaha.
“In my weekly commentary I spend a lot of time talking about community – and that’s impacted by growing up in North Omaha,” Caruthers said. “I recognize North Omaha as my community. I recognize various Black communities across the country as extensions of my community.”
She hopes for a day when no more stigma is attached to her community.