Happy New Year’s Eve, everyone! In my inaugural letter yesterday, I mentioned Henry W. Grady’s efforts to disfranchise Black voters in Georgia and the New South in the 1880s. And last night, I made my final election season donation to help Democrats Reverend Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in the final days of their fight to win the U.S. Senate run-offs in Georgia. Both have to win for the Democrats to wrest control of the Senate from Mitch McConnell. Election day in Georgia is January 5. Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight says it’s a toss-up.
Like most of you, I expect, I’ve got Georgia on my mind.
In particular, I’m thinking about Black Georgians, who have been fighting to exercise their right to vote since the Fifteenth Amendment was adopted in 1870, five years after the Civil War, to protect the franchise regardless “of race, color or previous condition of servitude.” Stacey Abrams, founder of Fair Fight and national leader of progressive election reform, has been fighting for Black voting rights and fair elections in Georgia since she was a child. That such a fight is necessary 150 years after the Fifteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution is a heartbreaking commentary on the state of American democracy.
But it took a few decades for white Southerners to construct the anti-democratic, white supremacist New South in the late nineteenth century—a vast totalitarian regime built on racial terror and racial caste existing within the greater democracy of the United States, aided and abetted (not simply tolerated) by the rest of the country. And then this anti-democratic state within a state lasted for generations in the twentieth century, at least until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Dismantling white supremacy turns out to be hard work, and Black Americans, especially Black women, have done much of it. Today in Georgia, Abrams and her allies fight against mass purges of the voter rolls, strategic delays in voter registrations, hours-long voting lines, faulty voting machines, and other voter suppression tactics in Georgia.
The state of Georgia started disfranchising Black voters in 1877, only seven years after the Fifteenth Amendment was adopted, with a new constitution that instituted a cumulative poll tax required of all voters but enforced mostly against Black voters. By the turn of the twentieth century, less than 10 percent of Black men in Georgia were able to vote, although Black people accounted for nearly half of the state’s population. In 1908, Georgia amended its constitution, adding a literacy test and the infamous grandfather clause, exempting descendants of Confederate veterans (who were white!) from the literacy test. The disfranchisement of Black voters in Georgia was basically complete. When the Nineteenth Amendment was adopted in 1920, securing the vote for women, little changed for Black women across the South, including in Georgia.
Journalists and the news industry helped craft, build, and defend this anti-Black, anti-democratic society in Georgia that lasted for approximately 100 years. As the white managing editor of the Atlanta Constitution and the most influential New South spokesman of his era, Grady spent his final year on earth (he died unexpectedly in 1889 at 39) working to defeat to the Lodge Bill, federal legislation meant to protect Black voting rights in the South. The Fifteenth Amendment, adopted in 1870, five years after the Civil War, protected the right to vote regardless “of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” By the 1880s, white Democrats across the South were concocting anti-Black voter suppression tactics—violent intimidation, poll taxes, literacy tests, and protesting loudly in newspapers and speeches the specter of “Negro domination.”
“The supremacy of the white race of the South must be maintained forever, and the domination of the negro race resisted at all hazards—because the white race is the superior race.” Henry W. Grady, speech at the Texas State Fair, 1887
The Lodge Bill, which white Southerners derisively called the “Force Bill,” was defeated in Congress in 1890 by Southern legislators, with help from powerful white newspaper leaders like Grady.
While Grady and his friends were building white supremacy in Georgia, Black activists and press leaders organized Black conventions and used their newspapers to combat disfranchisement and all the other wrongs of Jim Crow.
So journalism, which we like to believe serves the highest ideals of American democracy, has sometimes served the most noxious anti-democratic purposes. It’s an uncomfortable truth we should all consider—especially journalists.
And now so much about the future of American democracy depends on Black organizing efforts and Black voters in Georgia. Thank you, Stacy Abrams and everyone in Georgia and beyond who are in the struggle. And while I’m at it, if you don’t know Errin Haines at The 19th, you should. Her coverage of women and politics is brilliant, and she’s an expert on Georgia politics.
Best, Kathy