After 10 years of living peaceably in Alamance County, an overwhelmingly white-majority rural county in North Carolina between Raleigh and Greensboro, Bonnie Dobson had a serious dilemma. Should she support the anti-racism candidates she’s been working to elect by putting their signs in her front yard or not?

“I rarely put my views out there for fear of retaliation against my children,” says Dobson, an African-American mother of three in her 50s. “There’s people I associate with and talk to and may even socialize with, but they don’t know how I feel about social issues. I don’t talk about it because it’s not welcome.”