For a dozen or so elections since 2020, I have worked as a poll worker in Cobb County, Georgia. It has been an eye-opening experience that has made me more certain than ever that the voting process, at least what I’ve seen of it in my slice of the state, is safe, secure, and fair. Which makes me believe there’s little reason to question it anywhere else in the country, despite what the election deniers say.

Georgia has changed a lot over the years. I live with my husband and kids in a suburb about 30 minutes northwest of Atlanta. Our area is both hyperlocal and big-box, historic and modern: from Marietta Square—site of a Civil War training ground and military hospital turned walkable plaza with upscale mom-and-pop businesses—to, five miles up the road, a commercial district anchored by Target, Home Depot, and IHOP. It is an area that used to be very white, and very conservative. In the 1994 congressional election, voters in the nearby 6th District had to choose between Newt Gingrich and the actor who played Cooter from The Dukes of Hazzard. Gingrich handily won.

My family is proudly part of the browning and purpling of this rapidly growing area, which gets more diverse (by some estimates, Cobb County’s white population has fallen below 50% of the total) and more college-educated (16 percentage points greater than the state average) each year. Living in a swing state (and in possibly the swingy-est county of that swing state) means, perhaps by definition, experiencing life as a study in contrasts. Already in this fast-moving 2024 election, metro Atlanta hosted a rally for the Harris-Walz ticket the same day that the Georgia State Election Board, dominated by known election deniers, approved a new rule codifying a means for delaying—and potentially denying—the outcome of voting here in 2024.

This push-and-pull has been ongoing. In 2018 and 2020, the 6th District elected Lucy McBath, a Black gun control advocate, as their representative. Then the Republican-dominated state legislature redrew the maps and effectively gerrymandered her out of office. In 2022, she switched to the adjacent, Democrat-friendly 7th District and went on to win her primary and general elections.

I first got interested in working at the polls in 2018, when Stacey Abrams, a Black, progressive, up-and-coming state representative, was running for governor against Brian Kemp. Kemp was then Georgia’s secretary of state—basically, in charge of our elections—and refused to step away from the role during the campaign. To me, this seemed to be such a gross conflict of interest, I wasn’t sure I could trust the election. So I decided to learn for myself how the process worked. In that way, I’d be doing my own small part to ensure any portion of the election I participated in was handled fairly.

I filled out an application and emailed it to the county elections office, which informed me that my name would go into a database and that there was no way to know when I’d be called to work. Sure enough, it wasn’t until 2020 that an area supervisor contacted me to let me know where I’d work and how to sign up for training (where I’d learn voting procedures, how the equipment works, and what to do if a voter doesn’t have ID, is at the wrong precinct, has pending citizenship status, and so on).

COVID made things a bit more complicated, but on Election Day, we successfully aided voters as we had been trained: confirming their identity and eligibility, showing them how to use the touchscreens and where to insert a printout of their choices into a scanner that delivered a satisfying “Ballot Successfully Cast” notification. We sent each voter on their way with a cheery “Thank you for voting!” and an “I’m a Georgia Voter / I Secured My Vote” peach sticker.

I’ve worked multiple elections since that first year, and it has utterly transformed my faith in our system. Voters are in charge, every step of the way. Poll workers are there merely to guide or to answer questions. Our training is ongoing, thorough, and frequently updated. Everyone I ever worked with at the polls was committed to a fair election—taking it upon themselves to ensure that every eligible voter got to cast a ballot and feel confident it would be counted. Our personal beliefs were a non-issue. With a couple of exceptions, I don’t even know my poll coworkers’ politics.

The experience has made me a proselytizer for voting. I encourage everyone I know to make sure they vote (Are you registered? Do you have a valid picture ID? What is your plan for casting your ballot? Do you know the location of your polling place and the options for voting early and/or absentee?). And my neighbors and local friends know they can reach out to me if they have any questions about the process. If I don’t know the answer, I will find out for you!

Happily, most voters I encounter at the polls seem to trust the process, too, though every election, there are people who grumble that the system is inherently unfair or that voting doesn’t matter. No explanation or reassurance seems to sway them.

This year, I worked the polls for Georgia’s primary and will also work the general election. I’m excited to prove once again that our elections are conducted in a fashion that is fair and completely aboveboard. I only hope the voting public is equally confident in the results.

I feel less certain about what color our purple state will turn this time around. As optimism rose among Democrats this summer after Kamala Harris moved to the top of the ticket, I couldn’t help but remember the Abrams-Kemp election, when many rallied around a strong Black female candidate, only for her white male Republican opponent to win by a comfortable margin.

For all the yard signs, prophetic think pieces, and high-spirited rallies, there is no relaxing into hope, no blithe belief in its inevitability. For every positive sign, there’s a reminder that no outcome can be taken for granted.

The post In Georgia I Trust appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Former president Jimmy Carter, who will be 99 this Sunday, October 1, was only 46 when he first popped up on the national political radar. After declaring in his 1971 inaugural address as governor of Georgia that “the time for racial discrimination is over,” Carter followed through by increasing the number of Black people on state boards and commissions from three to 53, boosting Black employment in state jobs by 25%, and hanging a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. in the state capitol.

Media-wise, such moves secured Carter’s place within an emerging cohort of racially enlightened “New South” governors, including South Carolina’s John C. West and Florida’s Reubin Askew, who were also elected in 1970. Liberal optimists hailed their victories as the undoing of the Republican “Southern strategy” of relying on racially coded appeals to win over once-reliably Democratic white voters angered by their old party’s pro-civil rights stance. By the time Carter won the presidency in 1976, he personified a vision of a risen, racially redeemed South that captured the American imagination in the final decades of the 20th century.

Yet this sunny perception of Carter’s journey to the presidency obscured the reality of how he had managed to take the all-important first step.

Regardless of his actions after becoming Georgia’s governor, Jimmy Carter had captured that office in 1970 not by thwarting the Southern strategy but by following it very nearly to the letter in repeated campaign appeals to racial and class prejudice. Once they got him where he wanted to be, he quickly disavowed such tactics, which, in his mind, amounted to nothing more than purely pragmatic nods to political reality necessary to achieving his more idealistic aims.

The apparent incongruity between the method Carter employed to become governor and the measures he implemented in office can be traced in part to the way he reacted to the contrasting racial attitudes of his parents. Despite having myriad interactions with Black people as a landlord, grocer, and financier, Carter’s father Earl was no less adamant about their inferiority to whites than any but a tiny handful of his white contemporaries. Ironically, one of these rare exceptions was his wife Lillian, whose sympathy for Black neighbors and readiness to invite them into her home might have prompted more than quiet disapproval, had her husband been a less prominent figure in the community.

Young Jimmy’s awareness of the peculiarity of his mother’s racial views—and the near-ubiquity of his father’s—shaped the distinct blend of realism and idealism that defined his early political career. When his father died in 1953, he resigned his post as a naval engineer, to assume control of the family’s agribusiness enterprises. His budding political aspirations surfaced when he assumed his father’s old seat on the county school board in 1955, only a year after the Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation in the public schools in Brown v. Board of Education. With thousands of white Southerners scurrying to join the defiantly segregationist White Citizens’ Councils, Carter stood out as the only white man in Plains to decline membership in the Sumter County chapter. Later, when the congregation of the Plains Baptist Church, where Carter was a deacon, overwhelmingly rejected the idea of allowing Black people to worship there, his family cast three of only six dissenting votes.

Still, despite his efforts to improve Sumter County schools, Carter made no overt effort to encourage compliance with Brown. In his 1992 book, Turning Point, the best he could say for himself as a candidate for state senate 30 years earlier was that he had been “at least moderate” on segregation.

Carter’s first run for statewide office began with his belated entry into the 1966 Democratic gubernatorial primary against former governor Ellis Arnall, a racial moderate of longer standing, and the unrepentant segregationist Lester Maddox. Maddox won, courtesy of his strong appeal with blue collar whites, and with Arnall capturing the bulk of the Black and more affluent white vote, Carter came in a disappointing third. Still, the stinging defeat educated him to a stark reality: Racial moderation was not yet a winning strategy in Georgia politics. Nor would it be in the 1968 presidential race, when race-baiting virtuoso George Wallace easily outdistanced both Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon in Georgia.

Carter took the lessons of both these campaigns to heart when he again sought the Democratic nomination for governor in 1970. This time, his chief opponent was former governor Carl Sanders, who had once declared himself “a segregationist but not a damn fool” and generally lived up to his own billing by presiding over Georgia’s grudging but relatively orderly retreat from segregation between 1963 and 1966. Sanders was a senior partner in a high-powered Atlanta law firm, with a smooth, urbane persona. Dubbing him “Cufflinks Carl,” and playing to both racial and class resentments, Carter’s ads portrayed Sanders hobnobbing in air-conditioned comfort with his closet liberal country club pals while the good working folk of Georgia, including a certain peanut farmer from Plains, sweated and strived to make ends meet.

In a naked appeal to Wallace supporters, Carter opposed bussing and defended the rights of white Georgians to preserve racial homogeneity in their neighborhoods. His campaign circulated photos of Black members of the Atlanta Hawks basketball team showering Sanders with champagne, and spread word that he had furtively attended the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. While Carter’s racial machinations won him the endorsement of outspoken segregationist politico Roy V. Harris, more than eight in 10 Black voters opted for Sanders, who barely made it into a runoff election, where Carter bested him by 20% before trouncing his Republican opponent in the general election.

As governor, Carter melded his idealism with a more practical-minded engineer’s approach to problem-solving in an ambitious plan to rid state government of corruption, mismanagement, and waste, although when he announced his presidential candidacy near the end of 1974, he was still better known and appreciated for his efforts to do right by Black Georgians.

His carefully cultivated personal ties to influential ministers and civil rights leaders only bolstered Carter’s standing among Black voters. Yet he knew that his success depended on winning substantial support from Southern whites as well.  To this end, he revamped his old Southern strategy, playing this time to regional rather than racial antagonisms. One of his campaign ads noted that after suffering years of ostracism and indiscriminate stereotyping as rednecks and hillbillies, “only a Southerner can understand what Jimmy Carter as President can mean.” Boasting an improbable duo of advocates in George Wallace and Martin Luther King Sr., Carter picked up more than half the electoral votes he needed to defeat Gerald Ford by carrying all of the old Confederate and border states except Virginia.

Still, despite his earnest courtship, Carter failed to win over a majority of white voters in the South, leaving him all the more indebted to the close to 90% support he enjoyed among Black voters in the region. As the ultimate political realists, they seemed to accept Carter’s pandering to Wallace voters in 1970 as merely a situational concession to political reality necessary to achieving the racially equitable and humane ends he secured upon taking office. Ironically enough, historically high Black participation in a presidential election had been critical to putting a white Southerner in the White House. Meanwhile, reeling from the military failure in Vietnam and the moral failures of the Watergate affair, white voters above the Mason-Dixon line also proved surprisingly receptive to the drawling Carter’s disarming smile, downhome folksiness, and earnest assurances that he would bring honesty and humility back to the White House.

Though he had not been above a bit of political charade along the way, once in office Carter appeared to revert to the somber, moralizing Southern Baptist he had always been at heart. With the economy faltering in the face of soaring inflation, he sermonized from his bully pulpit about Americans’ addictive consumerism and their habit of defining themselves not “by what one does, but what one has.” To hardly anyone’s surprise, his gospel of restraint seemed downright heretical to a generation who saw instant gratification and unbridled acquisitiveness as their birthright. Carter’s habit of foregrounding “pain” over “gain” in laying out the ramifications of his decisions led his vice president, Walter Mondale, to observe that “the worst thing you could say to Carter if you wanted him to do something was that it was politically the best thing to do.” Somewhat akin to Henry Clay, once in office Carter seemed to signal that he would “rather be right than [continue to] be president.”

Beyond the substantial economic challenges he faced, the crowning blow to his prospects of retaining that office was his failed—and now, reportedly, sabotaged—effort to resolve the Iranian hostage crisis; the abortive desert rescue mission with its abandoned, sand-clogged helicopters became for many a metaphor for his failed and inept presidency. He was easily out- distanced in 1980 by Republican Ronald Reagan, whose vows of a military buildup and gospel of permanent plenty played far better than Carter’s calls for sacrifice and self-denial. So much for securing the Camp David Accords, bailing out Social Security, deregulating the airlines, preserving the Alaskan wilds, and a number of other stellar accomplishments.

Yet, despite his overwhelming rejection at the hands of American voters, Carter left Washington in 1981 at age 56 with his idealism not only intact but less encumbered by political constraints. His boundless energy also demanded an outlet. By 2002, he had already gained such a reputation as a global peacemaker, humanitarian, and champion of human rights, that awarding him the Nobel Prize for Peace was less a question of “if” than “when.”  With his moral certitude now reaffirmed, he seemed even less concerned with the political consequences of his forthright manner, as he indicated in 2007 by likening Israeli practices in the West Bank to a form of apartheid. Unmoved by the ensuing outcry, Carter soldiered on in his one-man war on human suffering and injustice, even inquiring about his ongoing Guinea worm eradication project after entering hospice care in February 2023.

As the longest-lived of all U.S. presidents, Jimmy Carter hardly stands out as the only one of them who ever sacrificed principle to political expediency. He has no rival among them, however, in dedicating himself upon leaving that office to a higher, more transcendent ideal of human service and remaining faithful to it even as the end of his days draws nigh.

The post Jimmy Carter’s Pragmatic Path to Power appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Why are so many Georgians still supporting Herschel Walker’s bid to replace Democrat Raphael Warnock in the U.S. Senate?

The easy answer seems to be the vast reservoir of good will that derives from Walker’s legendary exploits on the gridiron at the University of Georgia (UGA) in the early 1980s.

But the lingering afterglow from what he accomplished 40 years ago is not what’s keeping Walker competitive in the face of multiple disclosures of the sort that have torpedoed many a political campaign. Instead, conditions on the ground in Georgia and survey data suggest the key to understanding Herschel Walker’s staying power lies in the shifting demographic and political landscape that has left Georgia Republicans fiercely determined to defend the increasingly shaky ground they occupy.

Walker hasn’t made it easy for his supporters. His off-the-wall takes on air pollution in the U.S. (China foisting its bad air on us) and on evolution (the mere survival of the ape proves that Charles Darwin had it wrong) should amount to major alarm bells in and of themselves. Then come the outright fabrications he has offered concerning his achievements in education and business, his civic and charitable contributions, and, most notably, his personal life. Beyond that, it now appears that despite his stern public stance against abortions, in 2009 he persuaded a woman he impregnated to have an abortion and footed the bill for it. Walker’s son Christian blasted his father’s efforts to dismiss this allegation, accusing him of serial adultery and numerous threats to harm him and his mother, who had already described Walker holding a gun to her temple. For his part, Walker links his violent impulses to a multiple “identity disorder” that he has since overcome.

The standard campaign tale about overcoming adversity plays out in a candidate’s early years. Walker has one of these stories too, and it’s a doozy: a variation on the theme in which, rather than eventually discovering that he’s a swan, the bullied and shunned “Ugly Duckling” forces himself to become one.

Walker, who grew up in tiny Wrightsville, Georgia, has described himself as an awkward, overweight child, taunted for his stuttering. He exchanged fat for muscle through a physically extreme daily regimen of thousands of situps and pushups and exhausting sprints down a dusty path near his house. Equally relentless verbal drilling took care of the stuttering.

The payoff for his superhuman exertions was superhuman speed and strength and a physique so stunning that, by the time Walker was 17, a sportswriter reckoned it was as if “God just reached down and chiseled this guy differently.” At 6 feet 2 inches and 220 pounds, Walker was a monumental mismatch for hapless high-schoolers and later collegians, whose numerous contusions bore witness to the rigors of bringing him down. In only three seasons at Georgia, Walker broke 11 NCAA and 16 Southeastern Conference rushing records, led his team to a national championship in 1980, and put it in position to claim another in 1982. As a junior, he won the Heisman Trophy that many thought should have been his as a freshman. So deep was the gratitude of the University of Georgia faithful that he was even forgiven for forgoing his senior season to sign a precedent-breaking, multi-million-dollar contract with the New Jersey Generals of the newly minted United States Football League. There he would make the acquaintance of one Donald J. Trump. Meanwhile, his marriage to a white UGA coed caused barely a ripple in a state where interracial unions had been illegal only a decade before.

The special place Walker occupied in the hearts of so many white Georgians of that era was not based entirely on his athletic achievements but also on a carefully crafted public persona marked by a disarming humility and a deafening silence on all matters pertaining to race. As an already-famous high school senior in 1979, he frustrated fellow Black students at Johnson County High School by refusing to join their outcry against the alleged racial insensitivity of the school’s white principal. At the same time, he steered clear of any involvement, either as participant or peacemaker, in Black-white community confrontations. He said he did not feel the need to “represent my people”; he had been raised to believe he “represented humanity,” rather than any particular segment of it.

His views may have endeared him to whites, but did not play well with Black people in Wrightsville, where even today, reportedly, the only Black residence displaying a Walker campaign sign is his mother’s. Statewide, Black support for him hovers around 5%.

Meanwhile, demographics alone suggest Walker’s storied athletic career is not the primary reason why so many white Georgians refuse to abandon him. Nearly half of the state’s current residents were born elsewhere, and regardless of where they hail from originally, scarcely a third of them are old enough to remember his glory days. Trump’s endorsement doesn’t explain Walker’s staying power either. His anointed candidates for the Republican nominations for governor and secretary of state of Georgia failed miserably in the primary election. Only one in five of those who support Walker tell pollsters they are doing it out of loyalty to the former president.

These and other findings in recent polls by CBS and Monmouth University suggest that many likely voters are not buying into efforts to put Walker’s warm and fuzzy side forward. Nor are they willfully blinding themselves to his shortcomings. In the CBS and Monmouth surveys Walker is viewed unfavorably by roughly 48% of respondents compared to 44% for his opponent. Meanwhile, 58% say that they like the way Warnock handles himself personally, while the same share say precisely the opposite about Walker. A similar disparity shows up on questions of moral character. In fact, six in ten Warnock backers profess to be voting for him primarily because they like him, while only one in five who support Walker make this claim.

To understand why this race is still so close, we need to flash back to 2020. Although Democrat Stacey Abrams lost the 2018 gubernatorial race by just 1.4%, Georgia Republicans seemed utterly dumbfounded when Joe Biden carried the state in November 2020 and Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff unseated the state’s two GOP senators in a January 2021 runoff. Less than three months later, an angered and energized Republican majority in the state legislature pushed through SB 202, arguably the most sweeping suffrage-restriction measure enacted anywhere since the 2020 election.

SB 202 signaled that those Democratic victories left Georgia Republicans not only smarting, but scared. Census figures indicate that persons of color account for more than 90% of the 1.6 million-person increase in the state’s voting-age population between 2010 and 2020. The Republicans’ majority in the lower house of the state legislature shrank from 66% to 57% between 2014 and 2020, while their margin in the upper house dropped from 20 to 12. Painfully aware of how quickly Georgia turned purple, they aren’t sitting idle as it trends blue.

In the CBS survey, 86% of Walker’s supporters—more than four times the percentage of Walker supporters who say they actually like him—say they are voting for him primarily to help Republicans regain control of the Senate. A similar share say they see voting for him as voting against President Biden. A squad of nationally prominent GOP politicians will be arriving shortly to shore up these sentiments.

Should Herschel Walker still manage to eke out a win in November, he will owe it to voters who acted out of blind loyalty, not so much to the greatest Georgia Bulldog ever, but to the party that made him their standard bearer despite his manifest unsuitability for the position he would be assuming.

The post Herschel Walker Is a Football Legend. But That’s Not Why Republicans Are Sticking With Him appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Zócalo Poetry Prize has been awarded since 2011 to the U.S. writer whose original poem best evokes a connection to place. After nearly two years of on-and-off sheltering in place, the prize’s subject is front and center for many of us; this year, writers from all walks of life submitted more than 1,000 poems for consideration. Place and poetry have long been important elements of how Zócalo fulfills its mission to connect people to ideas and each other, exploring the ground on which we all stand and the human condition we share. The Zócalo Poetry Prize is awarded in conjunction with the Zócalo Book Prize, for the best nonfiction book on community and social cohesion. The 2022 literary prizes are again generously sponsored by Tim Disney.

Rathburn is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Still Life with Mother and Knife, winner of the 2020 Eric Hoffer Book Award in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, the Southern Review, the Atlantic, and other journals. In 2019, she was appointed the poet laureate of Georgia. She teaches at Mercer University and lives in Macon with her family.

Zócalo is delighted to share Rathburn’s winning poem and an interview about her connections to Miami, the Southern poets she admires, and the role of place in her work. She will be honored alongside author Heather McGhee at the Zócalo Book Prize event on June 1, 2022, and will also receive a $1,000 prize.

8 a.m., Ocean Drive

The morning opens like a shell
under steam, but that’s too warm
a metaphor for early March
on Miami Beach, where despite the breeze
and gentle sun the streets are empty
except for delivery trucks
and trash collectors and people waiting
for the bus. What I mean to say
is there’s a gradual unfolding,
everything golden and green: sunlight
on the palm trees and hibiscus,
parking spots glittering like gifts.
The drunks who stood outside my window
at 4 a.m. shouting across
the imagined chasm of the alley
are still asleep. The tourists are
just now rising. And I, neither
tourist nor citizen, walk the streets
I used to know looking for landmarks,
matching buildings to memories,
or trying to: the galleries
and boutiques years gone, guessable
only by the curve of a wall here,
a design laid into a terrazzo floor.
Around me the work that makes the dream
possible: trucks unload into kitchens
and bodegas, waiters scour tables,
men mop floors. Even the sidewalks
are freshly hosed. By afternoon,
these streets will be impassable,
the sidewalks too, with so much splendor,
such conspicuous leisure, but now
there’s room to notice the valets idling
and how, in the alley between hotels,
past dumpsters and service doors, a man
carries an armful of fallen palm fronds
carefully off like a bouquet.

The post Chelsea Rathburn Wins the 2022 Zócalo Poetry Prize appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But most of all, Georgia’s notoriety is due to a series of controversial so-called “election integrity” measures put in place by the state’s Republican-run legislature. The most infamous of these is the Election Integrity Act, also known as Georgia Senate Bill 202, passed in March of this year. SB 202 is basically an assemblage of changes to the administration of voting, put in place purportedly to increase election integrity and security. The new law calls for additional ID requirements for voting by mail. It stops the practice of automatically mailing ballots to voters. It gives the state election board added power to take over any county election office for “underperforming”—giving the state board, currently fully controlled by the Republican legislative majority, power to unilaterally disqualify ballots across the state. It’s not hard to understand why handing so much power over local election authorities to any political party is so worrying.

SB 202 also includes a stunning prohibition against passing out water or food to voters standing in line. By equating this practice to electioneering, legislators turned a kind act into a misdemeanor, punishable by arrest.

Much has been said and written about the overall impacts of the law. Some, including Abrams, have called it “Jim Crow 2.0.” Others believe the bill was intended to do nothing more than appease Trump supporters who believe the 2020 general election was stolen. But there hasn’t been enough public conversation about the implications of this criminalization of kindness. Over the last few years in Georgia, as part of my work as a faith-based community organizer, I’ve recruited more people of faith to pass out water, snacks, ponchos, and crossword puzzles to Georgia voters standing in long lines than anyone else; some 300 volunteers across the state, from Savannah to Macon to Rome, have participated in this act of civic kindness. That’s why it is particularly heartbreaking and infuriating for me to see this prohibition become a law in our state.

I began showing care to voters in long lines in 2010, when I was the pastor of an Atlanta congregation that also happened to be a polling precinct. On election days, lines to get into the fellowship hall where people voted sometimes stretched down the church’s long educational wing hallway onto the outside sidewalks. Whenever that happened, the church staff and I passed out water and offered chairs to voters. We also passed out umbrellas when it rained. Obviously, this was not our responsibility as a polling site. But I had experienced the horrors of Georgia’s long voter lines when I waited 8-and-a-half grueling hours to vote in 2008’s general election. I’ll never forget arriving at my polling place at 8:30 a.m., thinking I’d be in and out in a couple hours max, and ending up in a several hour battle to cast my vote, with only water from a public fountain to drink and candy from a nice lady next to me in line to eat. From then on, I saw it as my duty to help make the process more bearable.

It’s worth noting that the main reasons for these long lines in our state are poor election administration and intentional neglect. Georgia has experienced rapid population growth, but the secretary of state and boards of elections have failed to add more polling places. In fact, they’ve actually sought to close polling sites in some of these high volume and under-resourced precincts—many of which are in Democratic-leaning, non-white communities. This is why many see long lines as the result of GOP voter suppression.

Whatever the cause of the long lines, many people have stepped up to make standing in line easier, as a matter of humanitarian necessity. I started to expand my efforts in 2018, as director of faith and civic organizing for the New Georgia Project, a nonpartisan organization founded by Abrams and led by noted civic leader Nse’ Ufot, that has registered and engaged Georgians since 2013. I built up a large network of faith leaders who provided care to voters all over metropolitan Atlanta. Clergy showed up at crowded, overwhelmed polling precincts to pass out water, snacks, ponchos, fans, and books. We instructed volunteers to pass out only comfort-related resources, and to tell voters nothing more than, “Thank you for coming.” Talking about candidates, political platforms, or parties was always strictly prohibited.

By the 2020 elections, our voter care program was well-known and well received. We partnered with organizations and prominent ministers from several denominations to expand it, sending hundreds of people of faith to the polls to provide these resources for Georgia voters. We conducted several trainings for volunteer poll chaplains in Georgia, and in several other states as well. People who attended our trainings never heard anything remotely close to electioneering. Instead, we emphasized that this was a faith-inspired, nonpartisan act of civic engagement. To my knowledge none of our volunteers, or any other faith-based groups, ever violated this principle.

Now that SB 202 is law, care providers will have a much harder time helping voters in long lines. Undoubtedly precinct managers and state election officials will be zealous to enforce the new prohibitions. They may try to drive voter care providers farther and farther away from election lines, overpolicing polling sites and causing unnecessary conflict. All this happens as Atlanta, the state’s largest city, prepares for a hotly contested mayoral election this November and statewide elections in 2022 that will feature a U.S. Senate race between Warnock and a Republican challenger—and, most likely, a gubernatorial rematch between Abrams and Gov. Brian Kemp.

With blockbuster elections like these around the corner, you can see why temperatures are rising in our state around voting rights. The stakes are high, with lasting implications for state and national politics! But there are also moral implications at stake. If people of goodwill can’t show compassion to fellow citizens in onerous voter lines, what does that say about the moral state of our society? Has political identity and beating the other side become more important than showing common decency? And what are people of faith to think about a system that would rather jail people for committing faith-inspired acts of kindness than fix an obviously broken system?

To be clear, I don’t think SB 202 was intended to target clergy and people of faith. We are simply unintended collateral damage in a broader voter suppression effort. I believe the originators and supporters of this law view all organized efforts to give relief to voters in long lines to be part of the Georgia Democratic Party turnout machine—efforts that don’t serve their interests as Republican lawmakers. As a result, they see no problem with criminalizing a benign act of civic kindness, without taking time to understand the citizens of goodwill it will negatively impact. They reply that groups like mine can still hand out water 150 feet away from the polling precinct. The problem with that rule, which already applies to partisan groups at polling sites, is that some polling officials bend the rules, extending the boundary well beyond 150 feet if they so choose. What’s more, once voters are in line they cannot step out to receive resources without losing their place. Effectively, we can no longer help them.

Despite my disappointment I’m encouraged by the response of the faith community to what amounts to a war on kindness. Many leaders who have passed out water to voters in long lines in the past, such as longtime activist Pastor Timothy McDonald, are vowing to continue the practice in coming elections as an act of civil disobedience. Pastor McDonald and the Concerned Black Clergy of Atlanta have also joined with Bishop Reginald Jackson of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and a group of ministers in Dekalb County (the state’s largest predominantly-Black county) to form a coalition that’s calling for boycotts, public demonstrations, and legal action in resistance to the new voting law. Others, like myself, are focusing our efforts on putting public pressure on the federal government to intervene and stop this discriminatory and suppressive new law. The Department of Justice’s decision to sue the state of Georgia over its voting laws may be a sign that our efforts are bearing fruit. Regardless of what happens, people of faith will not soon forget how their efforts to show compassion at the polls were attacked and maligned for petty partisan gain.

The post You Can’t Hand Out Water in Georgia Voting Lines Anymore. What Does That Say About Us? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Joe Biden won the state by running up huge totals in metropolitan counties that have been among the most popular destinations for African Americans migrating to Georgia in recent decades. Not long after that triumph, New York Times columnist Charles Blow, having himself relocated from the Big Apple to Atlanta, urged Black Northerners to move south to enhance Black political power, and inspire similar political earthquakes across the region.

The election results, and Blow’s widely discussed invitation, represent the latest chapter in a long and circular story about domestic migration and its impact on the dynamics of American politics.

Between 1900 and 1940, 2 million Black people abandoned the South. They were pushed by extreme poverty and racial persecution, and pulled initially by the prospect of filling jobs in northern and midwestern cities left vacant by World War I-era disruption of European immigration. Not only were these migrants leaving the South, where they couldn’t vote, for larger cities where they could, but also, they would be casting their ballots in states where the electoral vote payload was more substantial. Northbound Black Southerners not only contributed to the shift of the majority of Black voters into the Democratic column in the 1936 presidential election, but by sheer numbers alone, they helped to push the party into a more sympathetic stance on civil rights.

Slow and grudging as it was, the Democratic Party’s move to combat racial discrimination in the South ultimately led to a mass exodus of white Southerners in 1964. Between the turn of the century and the mid-1960s, more than 10 million southern whites, seeking higher-wage factory jobs in and around cities like Detroit or Akron, headed north. By and large, these white migrants did not appear to divest themselves of the racism, religious fundamentalism, and suspicion of new ideas that had been imbued in them back home. As both voters and organizers, they would contribute to Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s surprisingly strong showings in northern presidential primaries in 1964 and 1968. They also helped to infuse elements of the traditionally Democratic northern white working-class with a newfound conservatism that left them ripe for Republican plucking.

By the end of the 1960s, however, those northward migrations, by Blacks and whites alike, started to reverse themselves.

Once a magnet for southern émigrés, the northern manufacturing states were then beset by a devastating combination of obsolescent technology, rising foreign competition, and continuing union pressure on wages. The resulting “Rust Belt,” stretching from Michigan to Connecticut, began to hemorrhage jobs and people to the more inviting meteorological and economic environs of the “Sun Belt.”

Predictably, Florida was the biggest beneficiary of the Rust Belt exodus, followed by Georgia and North Carolina, both of which gained nearly 12,000 new residents from the decaying Industrial North in 1973-74 alone. The first, predominantly white wave of northern newcomers seemed to find the region’s political climate strikingly attuned to their own priorities and values. So much so that worried liberals were soon warning that, ironically enough, a second Yankee invasion was rapidly enhancing the staunchly conservative South’s influence on national politics to the point of fueling the ominous rise of a far-right “Southern Rim.”

Northern population losses became the South’s political gain, as its share of the 270 electoral votes needed to capture the White House rose from just below 50 percent in 1968 to 63 percent after the 2010 census. Population increases also translated into a net gain of 29 congressional seats.

Yet, by the early 1970s, white Republicans weren’t the only ones heading South. That decade saw the once unthinkable reversal of the migration patterns of Black Americans (4.5 million whom had fled the South since 1940 alone). With the demise of Jim Crow and an accompanying surge in economic opportunity, net migration by Black Americans to urban and metropolitan areas in the South swung positive and stayed that way.

Of the roughly 347,000 new Black residents gained by net migration in the entire South between 1995 and 2000, Georgia accounted for nearly 40 percent. These new Black Georgians, like their counterparts in other states, were younger, more affluent, and better educated than the resident Black population overall, meaning they were also more likely candidates for political mobilization.

Accordingly, since the year 2000, the Black share of Georgia’s eligible voter population has grown by 5 percent, while the white share has shrunk by 11 percent. During the same period, the state’s growing Latino and Asian populations saw their portion of the electorate increase by more than 200 percent.

The political implications of these demographic shifts became strikingly apparent in 2018 when African American Democrat Stacey Abrams came within slightly more than 50,000 votes of defeating her GOP gubernatorial runoff opponent, Brian Kemp. The core of Abrams’s support was the Atlanta suburbs, where people of color accounted for more than 46 percent of the population, as opposed to a national suburban average of 28 percent.

Alanna Madden, of the moving consultant firm, MoveBuddha, has offered a timely and gratifyingly precise new analysis of interstate moving patterns during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. It shows that Georgia’s most popular destinations for in-migrants between March and November were the four largest suburban Atlanta counties: Fulton, Gwinnett, DeKalb, and Cobb. Among them, only Cobb, at 49 percent, fell short of a majority nonwhite population. Together, these counties accounted for half of Joe Biden’s vote gains over Hillary Clinton’s 2016 showing in Georgia.

Madden acknowledges that much of the credit for the Democratic victories here belongs to the massive effort by Stacey Abrams and others to curb voter suppression and expand minority registration. Even so, based on data amassed by MoveBuddha, Madden ventures that recent in-migrants may have been critical to the breakthroughs as well. Her detailed analysis of survey information from 4,474 households who moved to Georgia during this period shows that 75 percent came from traditionally Democratic counties in other states. The data also show that a corresponding share of the new arrivals settled in Georgia counties with a recent history of voting Democratic as well.

The Democratic bastions of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, and San Francisco were the top five cities contributing to the outsider influx into Georgia. But even many of those coming from red states like Texas and Florida hailed from Democratic enclaves like Houston and West Palm Beach. Overall, 15 of the top 20 municipal destinations for all of Georgia’s newcomers were in counties that went for Biden in November 2020.

In-migration has been tied to Democratic advances in metropolitan counties in other southern states as well. For some time, a large stream of new arrivals from outside the South has emptied into the cities and large suburban counties of Texas, which attracted more than 82,000 former Californians in 2019 alone. This inflow helped Democrats pick up 14 seats in the legislature in 2018. One of the nation’s hottest destinations for domestic in-migrants is Williamson County, just north of Austin, which has gained some 160,000 new residents in the last decade. The county went to Donald Trump by nearly a 10-point margin in 2016, but flipped to Biden four years later, while Trump’s statewide margin shrank from 9 percent to 4 percent, as well.

North Carolina has also been a magnet for in-migrants, many from predominantly Democratic areas in other states, which have provided 4 in 5 of its new residents over the last five years.

Current in-migration patterns in these states may augur well for the Democrats in future national elections. But in-migration also stands to intensify internal political conflicts as the cities and suburbs become not only more Democratic and diverse, but also richer and more powerful in the bargain.

In Georgia, the MoveBuddha analysis reveals some striking imbalances in political clout between counties that benefit from in-migration and those not attractive to newcomers. Just seven of the 11 metropolitan counties boasting the 20 most popular localities for in-migrants gave Biden 242,000 more votes than the state’s 152 remaining counties combined.

Meanwhile, though Georgia’s 129 Trump counties may show up on an election map as a menacing ocean of red threatening to overwhelm 30 islands of Biden blue, the reverse is actually closer to reality. The 80 percent of Georgia’s counties that went for Trump may be home to 70 percent of its white voters, but many of those counties are in economic decline and steadily losing residents to Biden counties, which already account for 55 percent of Georgia’s registered electorate.

Such imbalances can readily ignite bitter resentment among those who find themselves losing ground both politically and economically—and trigger a defiant, knee-jerk rejection of any proposed changes in law or policy, no matter how minute.

For example, the recent, striking swerve to the right among North Carolina’s Republican legislator represents more than a xenophobic reaction to an influx of Latino immigrants. It also reflects a backlash against a domestic invasion of young, diverse, highly educated, and more liberally disposed professionals drawn to dynamic metropolitan areas like Charlotte and the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill triad, where President Biden ran up huge margins in November.

With in-migration likewise fueling the concentration of political firepower in the dynamic cities and suburbs of Texas and North Carolina, these states may ultimately follow Georgia into the blue column in national politics. But within the respective states, the potentially transformative political effects of such an influx stand to be delayed or blunted to some extent by the chronic overrepresentation of sparsely populated and deeply conservative rural counties so common to southern legislatures.

Meanwhile, an ongoing procession of newcomers into metropolitan areas promises to leave these already embattled rural counties at an even greater economic and demographic deficit. As a result, the struggle for partisan advantage within the increasingly polarized political interiors of these states is likely to be both bitter and intensely competitive for some time to come, regardless of what their exterior colors in presidential contests might suggest.

The post How Domestic Migration Keeps Changing American Politics appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

At the midpoint of the 20th century, prospects for Gwinnett, situated some 30 miles northeast of Atlanta, seemed little brighter than those of any other outlying county. It was largely rural, with just 32,000 inhabitants, more than 95 percent of them white. Scarcely 2 percent of the residents had completed four years of college, and only 25 percent of the workforce held professional or managerial jobs. Even the most prescient observer could hardly have imagined that today, Gwinnett County would be home to nearly 950,000 people, and one of the most diverse counties in the United States.

Its path would be shaped by nearby Atlanta, which lost 162,000 white residents between 1960 and 1980, on its way to becoming a majority Black city around 1970. Many of the whites fleeing Atlanta resettled in Gwinnett, which saw its white population swell by 102,000 over the same period. As time went on, the county also grew with the arrival of thousands of white migrants from elsewhere in the nation, drawn there by the dynamic metropolitan Atlanta economy. By 1990, some 357,000 people, more than nine out of 10 of them white, lived in Gwinnett County.

Growth in Gwinnett would accelerate, even as the new arrivals became more diverse. By 1990, metro Atlanta, including suburban counties like Gwinnett, was becoming a top destination for African Americans on the move from other parts of the U.S. Meanwhile, in keeping with a national pattern, the allure of the suburbs was accelerating the outmigration of upwardly mobile Black people from Atlanta itself, which eventually spilled over into Gwinnett from closer-in Dekalb County. As a result, the share of Gwinnett’s population that was African American more than doubled in the 1990s, and the Black population grew by 140 percent in the decade that followed. With this influx continuing, and many Gwinnett whites heading off to the decidedly whiter exurbs like Barrow and Walton counties, by 2020, 30 percent of Gwinnett residents were Black.

This is only part of the story of Gwinnett’s diversification. The explosion of construction jobs spawned by the 1996 Olympic Games, in combination with a falloff in employment in the Texas and Louisiana oilfields, exerted a push-pull effect on Latino in-migrants, so that today, Latinos constitute 20 percent of the county’s population. The heated pursuit of foreign investment, reflected in a current count of more than 600 foreign-owned companies in the county, also drew a steadily expanding stream of Asian and Asian American workers, who liked the county’s highly touted schools and relatively low living costs. By 2020, residents of Asian descent accounted for 13 percent of Gwinnett’s population.

These arrivals have made Gwinnett more prosperous and diverse, but they were not universally welcomed by the increasingly outnumbered white population, which stubbornly resisted ceding influence over local affairs. While Gwinnett officially became a majority non-white county by around 2007, it wasn’t until 2018 that non-white representatives first managed to win seats on the county commission and the board of education.

As we know, white resistance to nonwhite political advancement is hardly confined to the South—but here, as elsewhere, it has had partisan implications. Gwinnett became a Republican stronghold in presidential elections in 1964, when its white voters joined a mass exodus of Southern whites from the Democratic Party in response to the civil rights initiatives of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Gwinnett’s voters strayed from the GOP camp only once in the next 50 years, to support fellow Georgian Jimmy Carter for president in 1976.

Over time, however, as the county’s nonwhite population grew, Democrats began to gain ground in Gwinnett during presidential elections. Democrats had long been able to count on carrying Black majority Fulton County, During the 1990s they would pick up adjacent Clayton and DeKalb counties, which also diversified and moved into the Democratic column.

Barack Obama turned heads in 2008 by running only five points behind John McCain in Georgia. He captured Newton, Rockdale, and Douglas, three more metro Atlanta counties whose nonwhite populations were on the rise. Obama maintained this suburban beachhead in 2012, and, four years later, continuing growth of suburban minority populations helped Hillary Clinton pick up three more counties, Henry, once-notoriously far-right Cobb County—and Gwinnett, which turned blue for the first time in 40 years.

With Democratic hopes buoyed by Clinton’s showing, state legislator Stacey Abrams, who is African American, ran for governor in 2018 and nearly prevailed, losing to Republican opponent Brian Kemp, who is white, by a margin of less than 1.5 percent statewide—and besting him in Gwinnett County by more than 14 percent. Abrams’s performance persuaded the national Democratic Party that it was finally time to mount a serious presidential effort in Georgia.

This time, however, instead of persisting in their perennially futile efforts to bring blue collar whites back into the fold, they would concentrate on molding a growing and more politically engaged nonwhite population into a potent political force in the state. To that end, Abrams and her allies, including a number of other Black women who are seasoned political activists, came together fight voter suppression, expand registration, and boost turnout. The effort clearly enhanced Biden’s fortunes in Georgia, where he carried essentially the same counties as Abrams two years ago, though he bested her number of votes statewide by more than 550,000.

While the Atlanta suburbs might be seen as gradually “purpling” over the last two decades, it is important to note the neck-snapping speed of this reversal in Gwinnett, which swung 27 points in less than a decade. Obama lost the county by 9 points in 2012 only to see Biden win it by 18 points just eight years later.

Yet the reasons behind that swing bear closer examination. They don’t really square with the early “hot take” that Biden owes his victory nationwide to disgusted white establishment Republicans in the suburbs, who crossed party lines rather than vote for Donald Trump but otherwise stuck with GOP candidates down ballot. Trump certainly lost some support among white suburban voters in Georgia. But ultimately, it was a racially and culturally diverse group of relative newcomers to the ‘burbs who put Democrats over the top in the state.

Sure, the pundits are right that Biden won in the suburbs—the state’s three most populous suburban counties (Dekalb, Cobb, and Gwinnett), along with Fulton, accounted for over half of Biden’s vote gains over Hillary Clinton four years ago. But it’s also true that of those counties, Cobb is the only one where nonwhites are not the majority. (And Cobb misses being majority non-white by a single percentage point.)

There are limits to what may be inferred from comparing voter registration percentages to shares of the actual vote, but in Gwinnett County the correlation is too close to ignore: whites now account for 40 percent of the county’s registered voters, and Trump won 40 percent of the vote. Likewise, in Georgia’s Seventh District, the only race where the Democrats managed to flip a House seat, Carolyn Bourdeaux’s vanquished Republican adversary effectively garnered the same share of the vote in Gwinnett as Trump.

Moreover, the perceived national pattern of white Republicans in the suburbs voting for Biden but holding the line for the GOP in other races certainly did not play out in Gwinnett. Instead, Democrats racked up large margins in the two senatorial contests, while local matchups saw more ousters of white Republicans by non-white candidates, including the election of Gwinnett’s first Black sheriff. Here—and, one suspects in Georgia’s other large, diverse suburban counties as well—Democrats didn’t raid the traditional Republican base, but simply overwhelmed it by turning out their own expanded base in force.

Despite this, Republicans in January’s U.S. Senate runoffs are doubling down on their presidential election strategy of tailoring their message to the die-hard Trumpers, and casting Democratic challengers Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock as America-hating socialists, communists, or anarchists out to destroy our way of life.

In this, they seem to be gambling that the traditional wisdom that non-white turnout fades badly in run-off elections will hold true yet again. Yet this wisdom may no longer hold true, especially in the suburbs, which are now so much more diverse than in the past. In fact, the Democrats’ chances in the runoffs may actually be enhanced because one of the Democratic candidates, Warnock, is Black.

Should Georgia Democrats prevail in these two races, they will have managed an even greater feat than the one they pulled off on Nov. 3. They will also have shown the rest of the country that the demographic forces transforming Georgia’s politics could fuel further Democratic success in rapidly diversifying suburban areas nationwide.

The post What the Remarkable Transformation of One Georgia County Means for America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As someone whose family background is of rural origins in the state, the societal divide between urban and rural is something I’ve grown to understand fondly, whilst still abhorring at times. It appears that our current governor’s propensity for catering to a specific segment of voters will be his demise in more ways than one. As someone who is a gun-carrying, mostly libertarian individual, I respect individual freedoms, but as someone with a college education and experience in corporate America, I also respect conclusions drawn from intensive data analysis and moderate decision-making. The governor’s recent decisions and lack of regard for data and logical reasoning lead me and many others to assume that he is acting as some leaders past; that is, acting with some input from ideological advisers, but without research or intellectual curiosity to draw his own accurate conclusions.

There is a sense among many in the liberal urban enclaves of Georgia that the governor is incapable of complex analysis or caring about broad societal needs. This sense will come to haunt the Republican Party in the state for years, if not decades to come.

By digging himself into the hole of core rural support only, our governor has distanced himself from the swing voters needed to maintain any semblance of political dominance in the state. He is, as Professor Cobb mentions, using a 150-year-old plan. This usage may be expediting the plan’s long overdue expiration date, coinciding with the expiration of Governor Kemp’s political party as a dominant force in the state. By veering too far to the right, he has alienated voters, such as myself, who fear that the inexplicably human need for interaction and living could be met even less over the course of the year as our state inevitably becomes an example for what not to do in a pandemic.

The post What the Persistence of Rural Georgia’s Politics Means appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This was hardly welcome news a scant five miles to the northeast, where experts at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were warning that such a move would be extremely risky until “the incidence of infection is genuinely low.” Although these same Atlanta-based experts had cautioned in mid-February that people who contracted the virus but remained asymptomatic could still infect others, Kemp claimed to have heard that early warning for the first time only on the eve of his grudging and long-overdue April 2 announcement that he was imposing restrictions in the first place.

The CDC has been in Atlanta since its beginnings in 1946. Its rise to prominence as one of the world’s most respected public health protection agencies has long been a point of pride for the city’s perennially image-polishing, growth-obsessed leaders. By the 1970s their ardent courtship of the approval and capital investments of Fortune 500 executives had led disgusted rural Georgians to complain that Atlanta had been surrendered to the Yankees yet again, and this time without a single shot being fired. 

But rural antagonism toward Atlanta is hardly of recent vintage. It has been a defining element in Georgia politics for almost 150 years. And therein lies much of the story behind the story of the Georgia governor’s apparent aloofness to the health jewel in his own capital’s crown, and to all the CDC expertise that could have helped avoid the healthcare disaster that may soon envelop his entire state.

The physical and financial devastation of the Civil War left Georgia’s farmers, white and black alike, trapped in an accelerating down swirl of dependency and debt. But by 1900, Atlanta, which had been a modest railroad hub of some 9,500 in 1860, had blossomed into a flourishing state capital and commercial and transportation center of 90,000. Atlanta was not only Georgia’s largest city. It had risen from the ashes, and proudly so. Its biggest booster, editor and orator Henry W. Grady, declared it a gleaming embodiment of a “New South.” With Atlanta as its guiding light, Grady predicted, the rest of Georgia would quickly shed its dependence on agriculture to embrace industrialization, urbanization, and commerce and soon be savoring the fruits of an unparalleled prosperity.

This divergence of urban and rural economic fortunes and momentum did not go unnoticed in the countryside. As the largest state by land area east of the Mississippi, Georgia already had 123 counties by 1870. Growing unease over the growth of Atlanta’s population and potential political clout helped to explain why the rural majority in the legislature took the lead in adding of another 29 counties over the next half century. But the sense that even this further dilution of Atlanta’s potential clout might be insufficient to safeguard rural prerogatives gave rise to one of the most blatant and brutally effective anti-urban political artifices ever devised.

Used informally for over a decade before it gained legal sanction in 1917, the “county-unit system” supplanted the popular vote as the means of determining the outcome of statewide elections in Georgia. This arrangement was basically a downsized and even more egregiously anti-democratic version of the national Electoral College. Under the system, each county, no matter how tiny its population, was assigned at least two unit votes, while no county, no matter how populous, was granted more than six.

The effectiveness of this device in neutering Atlanta politically was proven in countless elections, including the 1946 Georgia gubernatorial primary, when fewer than 1,100 votes cast for one candidate across three of the state’s most sparsely populated counties effectively countered more than 58,000 votes cast for his opponent in Atlanta’s home county of Fulton. The beneficiary of this particular thwarting of democracy was Eugene Talmadge, who was elected governor four times between 1932 and 1946 by appealing to rural voters with such proven stratagems as inviting them to join him on the front porch of the governor’s mansion in Atlanta so they could “piss over the rail on those city bastards.”

It was a point of pride for “ol’ Gene” that he had never campaigned in a county where there were streetcars. And he relished his studied role as nemesis to all things cosmopolitan and erudite, intimating more than once that he felt that any home boasting a Bible and a Sears, Roebuck catalog had as much of a library as it needed.

Understandably enough, as a historian of that era reported, upper-class Atlantans embarrassed and repelled by the buffoonish mockery of their refinement and expertise that emanated from the countryside were “quite evidently not proud of [the rest of] Georgia.” Such feelings were hardly a secret, and, if anything, served only to stoke the Atlanta-bashing that remained a fixture of Georgia gubernatorial politics between 1920 and 1962, when not a single urbanite managed to claim the state’s highest office.

Carl E. Sanders, who hailed from Augusta rather than Atlanta, managed to break that protracted dry spell in 1962, after the courts had finally forced Georgia to scuttle the county unit system for good. Finally free of its anti-progressive clutches, Georgia saw a rapid and vitally important expansion of Atlanta’s generally moderating political influences within the state—which, despite the ranting of rural politicians determined to preserve segregation at all costs, may ultimately have kept Georgia from joining the full retreat that wrought such havoc and horror in Alabama and Mississippi.

The demise of the county unit system seemed to point to a more sophisticated approach to statewide campaigning, but old habits die hard. Even more progressive candidates were still not above pandering to enduring anti-Atlanta, or at least anti-urban, sentiments. These included Jimmy Carter, who portrayed himself in the 1970 gubernatorial primary as just a simple, hardworking country peanut farmer, while referring to his principal opponent, former governor Sanders, as “Cufflinks Carl,” an elitist, country club liberal wholly out of touch with the common folk of rural Georgia.

Although Carter proved the exception, gubernatorial candidates who used Atlanta as a punching bag historically reserved a few licks for African Americans and other minorities as well. None in recent memory has sunk so low as Eugene Talmadge, whose deliberate attempts to inflame racial passions in the 1946 campaign set the stage for the lynching of two black couples in rural Walton County shortly after the votes were cast. Race-baiting was Talmadge’s stock-in-trade, but his rhetoric was especially heated in 1946 because, courtesy of a recent court decree, that contest was the first truly meaningful election in the 20th century in which more than a relative scattering of black people had been allowed to vote in Georgia.

Black voting would remain limited, especially in Georgia’s rural counties, until Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which quickly boosted black registration from 34 to 55 percent of the eligible population, rendering outright race-mongering a bit risky for any white candidate in a statewide contest. The Voting Rights Act also accelerated the exodus of white Georgians from Democratic Party. During the 1964 presidential election, a few months after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the state moved into the Republican presidential column for the first time. Save for three elections, two of them involving Democrat Jimmy Carter, it has remained there since, paving the way for a Republican takeover of both houses in the state legislature in 2004.

Because this political revolution was so overwhelmingly race-driven at the outset, Republican strength in Georgia has been most apparent, not in Atlanta or its immediate environs, but in the majority-white counties most geographically and culturally distant from them. Meanwhile, over a strikingly short time, metropolitan Atlanta counties have seen a massive influx of more affluent white and African American people from outside the state, and upwardly mobile black people have also left the city proper for the suburbs and even the exurbs. The result has been a decided “purpling” of these heavily populated counties adjacent to Atlanta, reflected in the Republican Brian Kemp’s meager 1.3 percent victory over Democrat Stacey Abrams in the 2018 gubernatorial election.

A former Athens businessman, Kemp appeared to reach straight back into the old Gene Talmadge playbook in that campaign, presenting himself as a rural superhero who flaunted his disdain for political correctness and other city-slicker signifiers. This persona came through vividly in his ads. One showed him, clad in cowboy boots and jeans, pointing his shotgun at his daughter’s supposed boyfriend; in another, he sat behind the wheel of the slightly dented pickup truck, which he promised to use to round up undocumented migrants.

Kemp’s calculated rusticity served him well in the 125 predominantly rural counties where he racked up an average victory margin of 38 percent, but it almost backfired on him statewide. Abrams persuaded her metropolitan base of minorities and moderate whites to turn out in large numbers. With the county unit system gone, it makes a difference that some 60 percent of Georgia’s voters now reside in the fast growing, larger metro Atlanta counties, where, on average, Abrams bested Kemp by 17 percent in 2018. Kemp’s narrow escape illustrates why he and his Republican colleagues have dedicated themselves to suppressing minority voting, a role he embraced with bravado in his previous post as Georgia’s Secretary of State. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, (another local entity not high on his list) reported that in 2017, as he prepared to run for governor, he had managed to purge the rolls of some half-million, largely black and Hispanic would-be voters.

Kemp’s hostility to immigrants seemed to put him solidly in step with President Donald Trump, at least until the governor declined to appoint ardent Trumpite Republican Congressman Doug Collins to fill the seat left vacant by the resignation of U.S. Senator Johnny Isakson. Kemp’s eagerness to get back into Trump’s good graces may help to explain why he leapt well ahead of other Republican governors to respond to White House pressure to re-open their states during the COVID crisis. Another explanation might be that much of the lobbying for the sheltering in place and restrictions on business operations came from in and around Atlanta—rather than the less populous rural counties where Kemp’s political biscuits are buttered.

Up to this point, residents of Georgia’s rural areas have been noticeably more inclined than their metropolitan counterparts to see social distancing and cutbacks in business operations as unwarranted disruptions instigated by outsiders, including scientists and liberal politicians, with no sense of the importance of maintaining the familiar economic and social rhythms of their communities. Ironically, with reported cases now on the rise in rural Georgia, it is there that the worst fears about Kemp’s decision to reopen the state early may be realized.

Rural black counties—with older and poorer-than-average populations beset by heart disease, lung disease, and diabetes, and lacking ready access to health care—have already registered death rates from the virus that are 50 percent higher than in metro areas. These same health problems are also well-known in many of the white majority counties claimed by Kemp in 2018. More than a third of these white counties are currently without a functioning hospital.

Kemp’s country cracker guise worked just well enough to get him into the governor’s office. But it also may have obligated him to artificially distance himself from the CDC. If so, his stiff-necked resolve to adhere to the Georgia political tradition of defying the Atlanta intelligentsia, rather than heeding the most informed advice available for combating an epic medical emergency, may wind up being more catastrophic for his political supporters than for those who opposed him.

The post How COVID-19 Exposed the Deep Divide Between White Rural Georgia and Atlanta appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Mary Turner, the marker’s named victim, was eight months pregnant. The mob targeted her because she spoke out against the lynching of her husband Hayes. A crowd of several hundred watched the men hang, burn, and shoot Turner, then cut out her fetus and stomp it into the ground.

From 1998 to 2011, I researched and wrote a book about Mary Turner’s lynching. I examined the responses of activists, artists, writers, and local residents to this appalling act. Turner’s story has had a long, complex afterlife: a tangled mixture of shock, outrage, grief, shame, and, too often, silence. The ways we remember, forget, and erase the history of this lynching is an inescapable part of its story: Even the monument to Mary Turner’s death contains bullet holes from a Winchester .270, normally used for killing deer.

The horror of Turner’s lynching did not stay secret. During the late 1910s and early 1920s, the incident galvanized anti-lynching protest around the country. Writers and artists including Angelina Weld Grimké, Meta Warrick Fuller, Anne Spencer, and Jean Toomer saw the lynching as an example of how racial violence traumatizes individuals, families, and communities. Organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC) used Turner’s death in magazine exposés and informational pamphlets as evidence that lynching was less about punishment for black male criminality and more about the public performance of white supremacy.

The Anti-Lynching Crusaders, arguing that lynching was an attack on women as well as men, featured Turner as the centerpiece of a campaign to support federal legislation against mob violence. The Crusaders raised money and awareness for the 1922 Dyer Bill, sponsored by Leonidas C. Dyer, a Republican Representative from Missouri, which proposed to make lynching a felony. The bill passed the House but stalled in the Senate when Southern Democrats threatened a filibuster. Although Turner’s lynching was barbaric, more conventional excuses for mob violence—what Ida B. Wells called the “rape myth”—remained intractable.

In time Turner’s name became a historical footnote, as stories like those of the Scottsboro Boys, in 1931, and Emmett Till, in 1955, dominated headlines.

It was not until the late 20th century that writers and artists began to recover Turner as an example of how mainstream history marginalizes black women. The title of Freida High Tesfagiorgis’s 1985 painting about Turner, “Hidden Memories,” captures the sense of erasure that many others find in her story.

Since then, author Honorée Fanonne Jeffers has published short fiction and poetry about Turner, most notably the poem “dirty south moon” in her 2007 volume Red Clay Suite. Playwright Lekethia Dalcoe’s depiction of the incident, A Small Oak Tree Runs Red, was produced in Chicago (2016) and New York (2018). This February, artist Rachel Marie-Crane Williams brought original images from her graphic narrative in progress, Mary Turner and the Lynching Rampage, to Valdosta State University (VSU)—about 20 miles from where Turner died—for a monthlong display.

The historical marker is by the side of State Road 122 in Lowndes County, Georgia. Photo courtesy of Julie Buckner Armstrong.

For some locals, however, Turner’s story remains taboo—and an open wound. The “Lynching Rampage of 1918” occurred during a single week in mid-May and was spread out over two Georgia counties—Brooks and Lowndes. 11 victims were confirmed. Other bodies of African-American males were found but not identified, and others disappeared, never to be heard from again.

Walter White, who investigated the lynchings for the NAACP, publicly named 16 local mob ringleaders, but in fact a large swath of the population likely saw or took part in the events. Hundreds—from Brooks, Lowndes, and surrounding counties—witnessed Mary Turner’s murder, as well as those of Will Head and Will Thompson, two men accused of complicity in the death of the white farmer Hampton Smith. Hayes Turner’s body hung on a main road, just outside the town of Quitman, for a day before it was cut down. When Sidney Johnson, who killed Smith during a wage dispute, was finally captured and shot, the mob dragged his body the 20-plus miles from Valdosta to the small town of Barney, near the site of the present-day historical marker. How many people watched this terrible parade is unclear.

There is no question that the week’s violence affected victims, families, perpetrators, witnesses—and their descendants. Yet when I began researching Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching in 1998, records were almost impossible to locate. People rarely, if ever, spoke publicly about what happened. Keepers of official civic memory claimed a history of positive race relations, even though Georgia had the second-highest rate of lynchings nationally (following Mississippi). Brooks and Lowndes Counties, because of the 1918 incident, had some of state’s highest numbers.

In the early 2000s, the Mary Turner Project, a small but dedicated group based out of Valdosta State, spearheaded a coalition to erect the historical marker, hoping to end the silence. The marker went up in 2010. Within a year, someone shot a bullet right through its middle.

The approaching 100th anniversary of “Lynching Rampage of 1918” prompts me to consider what I have learned since writing about Mary Turner.

And so much of my knowledge rides on that bullet.

My son found the casing. He was 10 at the time, an eagle-eyed hunter of lizards and bugs. We drove up from our Florida home via I-75, took Exit 29 to Highway 122 heading west, and pulled onto the gravel embankment of the Little River. The book had just come out, and I wanted to make peace with an emotionally difficult project that I had carried around for more than a decade.

I already had heard about the bullet hole. A graduate student passing through for a conference had put a flower in it and snapped a picture, to show me. When the marker went up, the area was nicely landscaped with perennials and mulch. By the time I visited, the flowers were dead. I poked my finger through the bullet hole; my son wandered around in the weeds that were taking over. “Hey Mom,” he said, holding up the casing. “Is this what you’re looking for?

Since then, the marker has been shot at least three more times.

The marker’s text was the result of negotiation between the local Mary Turner Project and the Georgia State Historical Society. Photo courtesy of Julie Buckner Armstrong.

Other historical markers for racial violence have met similar fates. In Florida, the marker depicting the 1923 Rosewood massacre has been repaired multiple times. On my last visit several years ago, chunks were blown out of its protective concrete frame. In 2017, two different Mississippi markers for the 1955 Emmett Till murder were defaced—one by bullets, another by a blunt object. The marker for the 1964 murders of Mississippi Freedom Summer workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner was vandalized multiple times and eventually stolen.

Some people actively try to destroy the past. Some erase more passively, waiting for amnesia’s weeds to take over.

Others refuse to let memory die. For the scholars, filmmakers, artists, and writers who continue producing work about Mary Turner, she symbolizes a double injustice. On one level is her brutal death. On another is the way that she ebbs and flows from historical memory.

One might see artist and activist response to Turner as a forerunner of the recent Say Her Name campaign, which attempts to make sure that women are included in public discussions of violence. Decades before the social media hashtag #SayHerName, Mary Talbert’s band of Anti-Lynching Crusaders circulated pamphlets featuring Turner’s story, trying to move women from the margins to the center of a male-dominated narrative.

Turner’s lynching, although gruesome and shocking, was hardly an isolated incident. While statistics vary, a recent attempt by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) to quantify racial violence in the American South documented 4,075 lynchings between 1877 and 1950. The EJI’s report does not separate victims by gender, but University of North Carolina Wilmington criminologist David Victor Baker has confirmed there were 179 female victims. At least three pregnant women other than Turner were lynched. These numbers may be small, but they are significant.

The temptation, when reading stories such as Turner’s, is to think, “down there, back then, not me.” But that impulse is really the desire to silence: the need to place protective distance between our ideal selves and the reality that anyone can be witness, victim, or perpetrator.

Attacking pregnant women has a long and telling history. The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies documents multiple occurrences—from the Holocaust to more recent incidents in Bosnia, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)—of perpetrators singling out pregnant women for torture, mutilation, and removal of fetuses. The practice goes back to Biblical times. The book of Amos mentions God punishing Ammonites for cutting open pregnant women in Gilead during a border war. An Assyrian poem from c. 1100 B.C. glorifies a military battle where the victor “slits the wombs of pregnant women.”

Looking at Mary Turner within this long, international context reminds us that such violence can take place anytime, anywhere. The sudden ease with which a community can become a mob, or a society can degrade into political violence, is a frightening but sad fact of our shared humanity.

Shooting a hole in a marker does not change the history of Brooks and Lowndes Counties, or the long history of humanity either. Only by confronting—as individuals, communities, and societies—the truth of how we came to be the way we are today, can we make the world better for ourselves and for our children.

My son agrees. As our family drove away from the “Lynching Rampage of 1918,” he told me he hoped the shooter would one day feel remorse and try to make amends.

He said, “You don’t have to like the marker, but you should respect it.”

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