What Danyelle Christmas remembers most about growing up without a dad was how normal it felt. Her father, Dan Bright, left for Louisiana’s Angola prison when she was a baby, so she never got to know him well enough to miss him. And many of her schoolmates in New Orleans’s Ninth Ward were in the same boat. “Almost every one of them had a parent in jail,’’ she says.
Yet Christmas understood, even as a child, that her father was no typical inmate. He had been sentenced to death for a murder he had not committed after a witness misidentified him. By the time lawyers and Innocence Project New Orleans convinced the state to set Bright free, in 2004, Christmas had lost nearly a decade with him.
Now 30, Christmas is running for New Orleans City Council in hopes of securing just outcomes for residents of her district, from the wrongfully detained to kids at risk and workers struggling to pay bills. Christmas is tired of the status quo, and she isn’t shy about saying so. Tired of the trauma that’s become numbingly normal in her community. Tired of local CEOs profiting at workers’ expense. And tired of old-school politicians whose promises wilt under pressure.
Christmas’s campaign, run in snippets of time between her work shifts as a dental assistant, is part of a broader Democratic movement fueled by righteous indignation — a movement with no use for slick glad-handers or $500-a-plate donor dinners.
“We have the option to change government. We really, really do,’’ she says. “We just have to get these incumbents out, these corporate ladder-climbers.’’
Christmas, a single mother of four, decided to enter the political fray in 2024 when she saw an Instagram ad from Run for Something, a progressive organization that backs first-time candidates. Founded in 2017, Run for Something has helped more than 1,000 Democratic contenders secure seats in state and local offices; alumni include US representatives Jasmine Crockett of Texas and Sarah McBride of Delaware. Though Run for Something’s success fluctuates with the electorate’s mood, it channels a grass-roots energy top lawmakers are finding hard to ignore. The organization has recruited more than 50,000 people to run for office since November.
And while some established Democratic leaders have distanced themselves from the new progressive wave, Senator Bernie Sanders — sensing that 2024’s anti-progressive backlash has faded — recently partnered with Run for Something to help train prospective candidates.
‘What I’m fighting for — I’ve lived it.’
From her earliest years, Christmas sensed she was on the wrong side of invisible social divides. Through age 7, she lived in the Ninth Ward’s Florida public housing project, where bullets whistled past buildings and kids stepped around used needles. Christmas moved in with her grandparents when her mom grew ill, and once a month, her aunt or grandmother would take her to Angola Prison (now Louisiana State Penitentiary) to see her dad. Each time she asked him when he was coming home, he would say “soon,’’ despite not knowing if he would ever be set free.
The injustice weighed heavily on his young daughter. “It was embedded in my system,’’ Christmas says. “I was considered a bad kid, because I didn’t talk. I began to isolate myself.’’
Years later, Bright’s attorney Clive Stafford Smith would outline how cops and prosecutors had stacked the case against his client — in part, he argued, because police knew Bright was dealing drugs and wanted him off the street. “The might of law enforcement,’’ Smith wrote, “ultimately dictated what they considered was right.’’
After Bright was released, he became an activist for the wrongfully convicted, taking his kids along with him when he could. At an Innocence Project New Orleans event with Bright at age 11, Christmas glimpsed what she hoped would be her future: helping to restore justice where it had been denied. “I saw all these people’s stories on the wall,’’ she remembers. “I’m like, ‘This is what I want to do.’’’
Initially, Christmas wanted to be an Innocence Project attorney and made plans to take prelaw classes after high school. But as bills and family commitments mounted, she opted to get dental assistant training to better support herself and her kids. Despite the challenges of making rent, Christmas held on to the dream she’d had as a preteen, though its contours were shifting. She began to think that she could make a bigger difference on the political stage than in the courtroom.
As soon as Christmas saw the Instagram ad from Run for Something, she was intrigued. She reached out to its organizers, and they sent her a list of upcoming races to consider. When she spotted the soon-to-be-contested City Council seat, she got fired up thinking about serving close to home. “I’m like, ‘Bingo. I’m running for this, because this is where I grew up.’’’
To set herself apart in a nine-candidate field, Christmas has built her campaign around securing justice for vulnerable residents. “The City Council has a $1.8 billion budget,’’ she says. “Let’s just put that up in your face. What can we do with that?’’ She’s pushing for a city cap on home rental costs to make housing more affordable, as well as city ownership of public utilities to stop energy price hikes. She also wants to create new after-school and support programs for local kids, including the children of inmates, partnering with organizations like Step Up Louisiana that promote quality education in Black communities.
Christmas’s stand against wrongful detention has taken on new urgency amid immigration crackdowns across her city and the country. One of her top priorities is making sure New Orleans immigrants know their rights and can access the legal assistance they need. “When we put money toward local organizations, they can teach this stuff,’’ she says.
Though Christmas signed up to run before President Trump was reelected, the 2024 results — and the protests that later erupted around the country — convinced her she’d made the right decision. In the face of government intimidation and attacks on civil liberties, “people from different walks of life [were] like, ‘We don’t like that sh-t. We don’t like this, so we’re going to march,’’’ Christmas says. “I thought, OK, I actually have a shot. We just need to reach the right people.’’
The thought of leading the charge powers Christmas through a daily schedule that would exhaust an Olympian. She gets up at around 5 a.m. so she can drop her younger children off at school by 7:30 and clock in to work by 8 a.m. Then she works from 8 to 4 p.m., with a midmorning break to take her autistic son to therapy. By the time she’s picked her kids up in the late afternoon, it’s time to cook dinner, help them with schoolwork, and go to bed so she can do it all again.
Campaign work often happens in the evenings, on weekends, and in pockets of time between kid drop-offs. Yet it helps recharge Christmas by connecting her with the people who inspired her to run. At one recent event, she zipped around New Orleans on a yellow cruiser bike with dozens of local riders, spotlighting her bid to make road conditions as good for cyclists and pedestrians as they are for drivers.
As Christmas chats with residents, she looks for ways to connect her plans to their particular struggles. When she asks them “Are you paying too much for energy?’’ and they say yes, she can explain that she’s running for office to bring prices down. “When I talk to people as a human being and a tired resident, they’re very receptive,’’ she says. “What I’m fighting for — I’ve lived it.’’
That reality struck her with new force this June, when her father, who’d cycled in and out of rehab for years, died of a drug overdose. Dan Bright “lived with the ghosts of Angola,’’ Christmas says, referring to abuse he suffered in prison that consumed him from within.
Watching, and enduring, the slow erosion that follows trauma drives Christmas to upend the conditions that foster it. “I can’t die knowing I didn’t take this leap of faith for my children, for myself,’’ she says. In place of the long-reviled school-to-prison pipeline, she pictures the kind of continuum her dad helped create, one oriented toward justice and growth for neighborhood residents. It might be the work of several lifetimes, but she — unlike scores of past lawmakers — has the lived experience to take it on.