My favorite giphy on the web last night was a tweet of a defiant Cookie Lyon from Empire exiting a room in a mighty stroll. It read: “Black women leaving the polls. You're welcome Doug Jones.”

We deserve a moment to celebrate the fact that black women turned up and turned out in Alabama Tuesday to ensure that their state didn’t send a Donald Trump clone to Washington.

But the most important message wasn’t how black women – and men - voted, the fact that their support truly elected Jones notwithstanding. The most important message - and I can’t believe I’m writing this out loud - came from an unlikely Alabaman: Charles Barkley.

The former NBA star, television commentator and Alabama native worked as hard as any celebrity to help Jones’ upset victory over Roy Moore, the judge facing accusations of sexual abuse of young girls he thought he was dating and a man who said America was great when we had slavery.

But it was what Barkley said after the victory that we must heed. He called the victory a “wake-up call" for the Democratic Party, which has taken black voters for granted for decades.

"It's time for them to get off their ass and start making life better for black folks and people who are poor," Barkley said of Democrats who may or may not have been listening. “They've always had our votes, and they have abused our votes, and this is a wake-up call. We've got them in a great position now, but this is a wake-up call for Democrats to do better for black people and poor white people."

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That is the lesson for Michigan and for America.

And the Democratic Party now has an opportunity to literally change the course of America – if it, as Barkley decreed, gets off its duff and takes seriously that it can no longer do business as usual.

It's is not news that the Dems have counted on the black vote without having to work for the black vote for a long time. Last November’s election provided the clearest evidence yet that the old strategy won’t keep working. Hillary Clinton couldn’t pull the same percentage of black voters as Barack Obama, and she lost a slew of young voters to Sen. Bernie Sanders – not because he was a curiosity but because he wasn’t really a Democrat. He wasn’t a relic of the old ways.

If the Democratic Party wants Doug Jones’ victory to be the beginning rather than a fluke, it has a lot of work to do to keep voters in the tent who haven’t felt connected for some time. That begins with fighting the kind of voter suppression tactics that Alabama thought might get Roy Moore elected despite his affection for young girls. Black civil rights activists were beaten and brutalized fighting to vote. I cast my votes in the name of Fannie Lou Hamer and my grandparents every time.

Alabama's voter suppression efforts included the state closing 31 DMV offices two years ago including all the offices in eight of 10 counties with the highest percentage of nonwhite voters, forcing voters to travel long distances to get licenses or ID cards, according to The Atlantic magazine. The state was forced by public pressure to reopen some offices and only for a few hours.



There is still confusion from state to state on whether citizens returning from prison can vote. And GOP supporters of candidates across the board still employ intimidation techniques that reek of 1957 rather than 2017.



Yet, if we expected the Democratic Party to announce any initiative today to challenge voter suppression, we are as deluded as anyone who thought Roy Moore would go quietly into that good night Tuesday.



It shouldn’t take Charles Barkley to remind the Dems that if they don't respect their African American base and fight for its right to vote, it could lose that base, not to the Republican Party, but to a third party, to the next Bernie Sanders-like politician – or to apathy, something that is contagious in large cities like Detroit, where mayors are still elected by less than a quarter of the electorate.



The work didn’t end for Democrats Tuesday. It just began.

If the Democratic Party doesn’t embrace new and younger leadership, fight for those who have looked to it to do what the GOP won’t do – to ensure America for minorities and the poor, victories like Doug Jones’ nail-biter Tuesday won’t matter.



As Barkley is fond of saying, “I might be wrong, but I doubt it.”

Contact Rochelle Riley: rriley99@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @rochelleriley. Order her book "The Burden: African Americans and the Enduring Impact of Slavery" (Wayne State University Press, 2018) from Wayne State University.