The
DEAP
Roots
Report.
A weekly newsletter on digital equity for Black people in the South.
A lot can happen in a week, especially when billions of dollars, new infrastructure and public policy are moving at the same time.
Each Monday, we break down the decisions that shaped the previous week across nine Southern states: Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, North Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee and Virginia. We follow the broadband money, the data center approvals, the policy changes and the numbers behind them, then ask the question that often gets skipped: What does this mean for Black communities?
We also track the national decisions influencing what happens across the South.
“All of this is on account of we want to register, to become first-class citizens.”
Fannie Lou Hamer, of Ruleville, Mississippi
Testimony before the Credentials Committee, Democratic National Convention, Aug. 22, 1964. Transcript via American RadioWorks.
The week in one minute
- A federal audit found nobody has verified the maps that route broadband money.
- NTIA reopened BEAD for addresses the first round missed, using about $21 billion in savings.
- Rural electric cooperatives warned publicly that the program is pushing them out.
- Louisiana published parish-by-parish buildout numbers.
- Digital Inclusion Trailblazer applications are open through Oct. 13.
- Virginia joins the coverage area, and the data center corridor comes with it.
- The regional grid auction came up 6.8 gigawatts short. PJM blames data centers, mostly in Virginia.
- The Census survey behind our county numbers still has no release date.
Federal
Nobody has checked the map.
The Government Accountability Office reported in August that federal agencies decide which places need broadband money using maps built from what internet providers say about their own coverage, and that the Federal Communications Commission has not done the outreach that would test those claims.
The audit covered nine federal programs holding more than $50 billion. It did not estimate how much of the map is wrong, only that the checking has not happened.
Money from the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program flows to all nine states based on those maps. An address marked as served does not get funded, and no routine process would catch the error.
The audit is worth citing for anyone building a coverage challenge, since GAO is an auditor rather than an advocacy group.
Black Belt counties are exactly where a provider's self-report is least likely to get challenged, because there is no local broadband staff, often no local paper, and no organized process for a resident to say the road is not actually served.
The error compounds from there: undercounted need becomes underfunded buildout, and the next map still looks fine.
The number those maps produce. The FCC's own Section 706 report says 99.7% of the U.S. population can get broadband once satellite service is counted, Penn State's Christopher Ali noted in a Sept. 3 post for the Benton Institute. The figure comes from the same provider-reported pipeline the audit flagged, and it treats satellite as equivalent service.
This is the number quoted to say the problem is solved, and Louisiana's own plan puts 8.4% of its addresses on low-earth-orbit satellite. Counting that as equivalent to fiber is how a coverage gap disappears on paper without anybody's service changing, and rural counties and parishes are where satellite gets counted as service. Across the Black Belt and the Delta that means Black households are marked served while nothing changes at the house.
BEAD watch
NTIA reopened the program. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration issued a notice Sept. 3 letting states fund addresses the first round missed or that became newly eligible, drawing on roughly $21 billion in savings.
States get seven days to publish revised address lists. Then broadband providers, local governments and nonprofits get 30 days to challenge, and the state has 30 days to rule, with no rebuttal round. Each state's funding is capped using the average cost per address in its approved final proposal. The Benton Institute estimates the process adds nine months or more.
Households across these nine states have been waiting since 2021. Nine more months pushes that wait into 2027, and the people still holding it are in the Black Belt and the Delta.
The supplemental location list deserves attention before the challenge window opens. Under NTIA’s notice, broadband providers, local governments and nonprofit organizations have 30 days after publication to submit evidence that a listed address already has qualifying service or qualifying planned service. That process can remove addresses, but it cannot add an address left off the list.
Rural cooperatives pushed back the next day. The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association said delayed implementation, shifting guidance, cost constraints and unrealistic funding assumptions have slowed progress and discouraged participation, and warned that BEAD "risks leaving rural America behind."
In many Black Belt counties the electric cooperative is the only provider willing to build.
In much of the Black Belt the electric cooperative is the only builder willing to go down a dirt road for 40 houses, and if cooperatives walk, no national carrier picks those addresses up.
Cooperative boards are elected by their members, which makes them one of the few utility decision points a community can actually contest.
One widely repeated figure is a year old. Estimates that roughly 1.1 million addresses and $5.6 billion to $9.3 billion are in play traced back to an October 2025 analysis by the Advanced Communications Law and Policy Institute at New York Law School, which counted 1,063,812 unserved addresses outside current plans. The estimate predates the notice it is being used to describe.
Worth keeping in mind: if someone quotes 1.1 million unserved locations at you in a meeting, that figure is from last October and predates the rules now in force.
Louisiana
Parish numbers, out in public.
Louisiana will finish construction on nearly 15,000 addresses across 23 parishes by the end of March 2027, ConnectLA said, using part of the state's $1.36 billion BEAD allocation. The state also cleared federal environmental review for more than 50,000 addresses, the first in the nation to do so.
The parish breakdown is public. Swyft Fiber holds the largest share at 5,830 addresses across Jefferson Davis, Rapides, Sabine, St. Landry and Tensas parishes. REV has 2,434 across East Baton Rouge, Livingston and St. John the Baptist. Cajun Broadband has 2,221 across Iberia, Plaquemines and Vermilion. Nextlink has 2,041 across Bienville, Bossier, Caddo, Natchitoches and Webster. Pelican, Skyrider and Star Communications hold the rest.
Two cautions belong with those numbers. The 15,000 and 50,000 are addresses, while ConnectLA's separate figure of more than 450,000 Louisianans who gained access since 2023 counts people, and access there means service reached them, not that they subscribed. Light Reading also puts the statewide target at 127,108 addresses against ConnectLA's "approximately 124,000."
Louisiana’s published parish breakdown gives residents a way to check who is building, where and by when. Other state broadband offices could publish comparable county-level tables.
A resident of Tensas or St. Landry parish can find out who is building, how many addresses, and by when.
Being able to check that is the difference between a program a community can hold accountable and one it cannot. It is also a concrete ask: publish the parish or county table, the way Louisiana did. In the Delta parishes that ask is the difference between Black residents being able to check the work and being told to trust it.
The broadband director moved into health. Gov. Jeff Landry appointed ConnectLA Executive Director Veneeth Iyengar to the state's Rural Health Transformation Program advisory council on Sept. 3. The program is drawing roughly $208 million in federal funding and is positioned for more than $1 billion over five years. Broadband and rural health delivery now sit at the same table in Louisiana.
Where rural hospitals have closed, telehealth is the fallback being offered, and telehealth needs upload capacity that satellite and older fixed wireless do not deliver reliably.
A broadband director sitting on the health council is the place to raise that before the money is committed. Where the hospital has already closed in the Delta, telehealth is what Black residents are offered in its place, and it does not work on a connection that cannot carry upload.
Data centers
Virginia is where the power question gets decided.
Virginia joins the coverage area with this issue, and the reason is the data center corridor. Northern Virginia holds the largest concentration of data centers in the world, and the fights over who pays for the electricity they need are now running through the General Assembly, the State Corporation Commission and half a dozen county boards.
Loudoun County, Virginia, moved to end grandfathered approvals. Supervisors voted unanimously Sept. 2 to have the county attorney research whether they can revoke protections that let data center applications filed before Feb. 12, 2025 skip board review and get approved at staff level. Loudoun Now reports roughly 18.4 million square feet of data center development sitting in the county's pipeline. The attorney reports back in October.
Counts square feet of proposed floor area, not built capacity · Loudoun Now, Sept. 2The regional grid came up short, and data centers are named. PJM Interconnection's July auction fell 6.8 gigawatts short of the capacity needed for the 2028-29 delivery year, The Richmonder reported Sept. 6. PJM projects electricity demand across its territory will rise 32 gigawatts between 2024 and 2030, and attributes 30 of those gigawatts to data centers, primarily in Virginia. Average wait to connect to Dominion's grid is running about seven years.
Separately, Lt. Gov. Ghazala Hashmi opened an energy-cost listening tour in Loudoun on Sept. 2. Reporting from that event puts data centers at 28% of Dominion's Virginia power supply.
The load sits in one place and the bill lands in another. The facilities and the tax base concentrate in Loudoun and Prince William, while the generation gets sited elsewhere and the rate increases spread across every Dominion customer in the state, including households in Richmond, Petersburg, Norfolk and Portsmouth that will never see a dollar of data center tax revenue.
This is the same structure as the broadband story above: somebody else's infrastructure decision, priced into your monthly bill and decided in a proceeding you were not invited to.
A three gigawatt gas plant is proposed in Cumberland County. It would be the second largest in the country, Virginia Mercury reported Sept. 3, and residents are split. The developer projects roughly $500 million in tax revenue over 35 years. A study commissioned by the Southern Environmental Law Center projects three to seven premature deaths a year, about seven new asthma cases, and 410 days of lost work annually. A proposed transmission line near the site would carry power north to meet data center demand.
Cumberland has just under 3,000 Dominion customers, and the plant would serve load 100 miles away. When somebody tells you data centers are a Northern Virginia issue, that is the answer: the generation and its exhaust get sited in rural counties that had no part in creating the demand, while the bill spreads to every Dominion customer, including Black households in Richmond, Petersburg and Hampton Roads that will never see a dollar of the tax revenue.
Americans like data centers least of anything you could build near them. A Public First survey for the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation found 26% of American adults would support a new data center in their community and 46% would oppose one. For comparison, 58% supported new housing, 48% a road or highway, and 47% a solar farm. Nearly half said they would rather nearby land stay undeveloped.
Counts adults surveyed · Measures stated support and opposition · Sample size not published in coverage · Route Fifty, Sept. 1Around the states
Virginia has signed 19 of its 22 BEAD winners. Broadband Breakfast reported Sept. 4 that the state executed agreements with 19 of 22 subgrantees by early August. The same office stripped RiverStreet Networks from several state-subsidized projects that had been intended to reach more than 30,000 rural customers.
Counts subgrantee entities, and customers targeted rather than served · Broadband Breakfast, Sept. 4Hampton University opened an AI center. The university announced a Digital Artificial Intelligence Immersive Experience, opened Aug. 18 inside its Workforce Development Enterprise, alongside a planned Hampton Artificial Intelligence and Technology Center and a new bachelor's degree in artificial intelligence and machine learning.
The data center items above are about who pays for this buildout; this one is about who gets to work in it. Virginia is building the physical infrastructure of AI at enormous scale, and the question of who gets trained to work in it, and who only gets the electric bill, is being answered right now. Hampton is a historically Black university, and its students are the answer to the first half of that question. The second half is being answered on everybody else’s power bill.
Arkansas expects money from a Meta settlement. The Arkansas Advocate reported Aug. 31 that the state anticipates millions of dollars from its social media case against Meta, with other states' suits still pending. Not a broadband story, but it is state money touching platform accountability in one of the nine, and where it lands is worth asking about early.
Settlement money is discretionary, and people in a room decide where it goes. Digital literacy and youth online safety work in Black communities is an eligible use if somebody asks early, and a much harder ask once the allocation is drafted.
Six states published nothing. Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee produced no broadband or digital equity data in this window. The most recent Alabama item, a report on coverage versus cost, dates to Aug. 11. The silence is itself a finding.
Negative result · Sweep of 10 trade and research sources, Aug. 31 to Sept. 7Cost and access
The affordability picture in one place. Ali's Benton post collected several figures worth having together: a median broadband bill of $78 a month, more than 50 million households that qualified for the Affordable Connectivity Program before it ended, and an estimate that 49% of households earning under $50,000 a year are "subscription vulnerable," meaning they lose service when money gets tight. New York's Affordable Broadband Act requires a $15 plan for 25 megabits per second.
These are secondhand within his essay and the data years are not stated. Treat them as a map of the argument until we pull the originals.
Across much of the region the wire already runs past the house, and what keeps the household offline is the $78 a month. The part that gets missed is that an affordability problem is sitting inside what gets counted as a coverage problem.
Building fiber to a home that cannot afford the subscription produces an availability win and no change in who is actually online. Availability programs are funded, while affordability programs are not. In Black neighborhoods where the build already happened, the wire running past the house is exactly where the divide moved to.
States are behind on website accessibility. Some 69% of states report they lack the staff or money to fix all their websites and applications, and 51% describe their repair capacity as limited, according to a survey by the National Association of State Chief Information Officers. Half say they cannot help their local governments at all.
Compliance is due April 2027 for jurisdictions above 50,000 people and April 2028 for those below. In the rural South, that means county websites stay broken longest.
If the county site does not work on a phone or with a screen reader, the barrier is the same as having no internet at all, and it lands on the people with the least margin for a failed application: unemployment claims, Medicaid renewal, SNAP recertification. In Black Belt counties those are Black families applying for benefits they already qualify for, on a county site nobody has tested. Ask your county who last checked theirs on a phone.
New York's numbers preview an argument we cannot yet make here. The city's chief digital equity officer put the share of New Yorkers without full connectivity at 25%, Government Technology reported Sept. 3. The city's Racial Equity Plan finds household broadband subscription gaps near 40% in parts of the Bronx and other high-poverty neighborhoods, and more than a third of households headed by Black or Hispanic New Yorkers not fully connected.
No equivalent breakdown exists for Atlanta, Memphis, Birmingham or Jackson.
New York can say more than a third of Black-headed households are not fully connected. Atlanta, Memphis, Birmingham and Jackson cannot say anything, because nobody has produced the number.
That absence is a choice, and it is why arguments in those cities fall back on state averages, which average away the neighborhoods we work in.
Device programs are a budget line, and budget lines get cut. New York is winding down a $320 million contract for 350,000 LTE-equipped Chromebooks that ran about $3.5 million a month to T-Mobile, New York Focus reported Sept. 2. Whatever the merits of that deal, device and connectivity programs go first in a tight budget, and most of ours are smaller and less defended.
When a device program ends, the households that lose access are the ones that never had a second computer. The program is a line item to a budget office and the only machine in the house to everybody else. In Black communities across these nine states that one machine is often the household’s only way to file a claim, apply for a job or finish homework.
Pew on phone use. About 53% of American adults say they spend too much time on their phone, rising to 70% among those under 30. The finding is useful for framing how ordinary phone-first life has become. It will not carry an equity claim, because the release has no breakdown by race or income.
Phone-first is not the same as connected, and job applications, benefits forms and homework do not work well on a phone. When someone says everyone has a smartphone so the gap is closed, this is the distinction to hold. Phone-only is the shape the gap takes in Black households once the outright disconnection number gets small enough to call the problem solved.
Algorithms
A Labor Day case for using the law we already have. Former Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chair Charlotte Burrows argued in Tech Policy Press on Sept. 2 that disparate impact doctrine under the Civil Rights Act already reaches AI hiring tools, walking through Griggs v. Duke Power and a 2021 EEOC settlement over a trucking company's screening test.
The piece carries no data. It is a legal roadmap, and the clearest recent statement of what applies to algorithmic hiring without waiting on new legislation.
Hiring software screens people out before a human sees the application. Burrows's argument is that challenging it does not require a new law, because disparate impact under the Civil Rights Act already reaches it. It is the doctrine built for exactly this, a tool that produces a racially skewed result without anyone writing race into the code. A Black applicant screened out by software does not need a new law to challenge it.
On the calendar
Trailblazer applications close Oct. 13. The National Digital Inclusion Alliance opened applications for its ninth annual Digital Inclusion Trailblazers program, which recognizes local governments. Last year's class was 58 local governments across 25 states, including 37 named Visionary Trailblazers and seven that scored perfectly. Past awardees have posted close to 900 public documents, a free library of what other places actually wrote and passed.
If your city or county has done real digital inclusion work and never applied, this is a cheap way onto a national map.
What it offers is free recognition, a national peer network, and a library of documents other places already drafted and passed, and the cost is a staff afternoon. If a city or county in the region is doing this work quietly, this is how it stops being invisible. A Black-led city or county doing this work quietly is who stands to gain most from being on that map.
Web accessibility compliance, April 2027. Jurisdictions above 50,000 people must meet the federal rule by then, and smaller ones have until April 2028. Most small Southern counties fall in the second group and few are staffed for it.
Deadline · Justice Department rule, via NASCIO coveragePeople and money
Grace Tepper left Benton for Cook County, Illinois. After five years compiling the daily digest much of this field reads, she is joining the Cook County Office of Digital Equity as a community outreach specialist, and her last weekly ran Sept. 4. The digest may change, and a county digital equity office with real staff is itself a model.
Cook County has a standing digital equity office with paid staff. What it took to create one is worth finding out, because a county office outlasts a grant cycle. That matters most in the Black Belt, where digital equity work lives and dies with whoever wrote the last grant.
The FCC repaid its rip-and-replace loan. The commission returned $3.08 billion to the Treasury on Sept. 4, borrowed in March 2025 and covered by proceeds from the AWS-3 spectrum auction held in June. The program removing Chinese-made equipment from rural networks is funded through.
Counts dollars · FCC, Sept. 4A county model, wrong state. Allegan County, Michigan, completed a $65 million fiber project reaching 17,000 addresses over 1,100 miles, stacking a state program, county pandemic relief funds and private investment. Not our geography, but the clearest recent case of a county assembling three funding sources itself rather than waiting on a state allocation.
A county assembled three funding sources on its own instead of waiting for a state allocation. That is a replicable play for any county here that is tired of waiting on BEAD.
Coming up
The survey behind our county numbers has no release date.
"The release date for the 2025 ACS 1-year estimates is being determined. The Census Bureau is assessing the impact of the new departmental administrative order."
The notice went up Aug. 6 and has not changed. American Community Survey table S2801 is the source for nearly every county and state broadband figure in circulation, including the ones in this issue. If the release slips, the newest household subscription data available stays the 2020 to 2024 five-year estimates.
The Census Bureau has not said when it will decide.
Without table S2801 there is no county-level broadband number for any of the nine states. Every argument falls back to state averages, which is exactly the level at which the Black Belt disappears into the statewide figure.
What the numbers mean
You’ll see a few terms throughout this report that sound similar, but they don’t always mean the same thing. We try to be clear about what each number actually tells us.
Every figure is labeled based on what was counted or measured. And when we’re using someone else’s research instead of the original source, we’ll say that too.
- Availability
- Internet service is offered where you live. That doesn’t necessarily mean you have it.
- Subscription
- Your household pays for internet service at home.
- Adoption
- Internet service is available to you, you have it, and you’re actually using it.
- Use
- You’re getting online somehow, whether that’s at home, on your phone, at the library, at work or somewhere else.
- Location
- A physical place or address. It might be a home, business, school, warehouse or another building.
- Household
- The people who live together in a home. One household is not always the same thing as one location.