The headlines today are all about the U.S. Senate runoffs in Georgia. Why are they so important? The outcome will determine control of the Senate and prospects for the successful roll-out of the Biden-Harris agenda. Whether you’re a liberal or a conservative, if you care about national politics, you care about the Georgia election.
But if you live in Georgia, these special elections mean even more. The future senators will shape federal legislation on issues that affect the everyday lives of Georgians: racial justice, health care, economic revitalization, COVID vaccine distribution, pandemic preparedness, and climate change.
Democrats Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff are vying to unseat Republican incumbents Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue respectively. Polls suggest both races are nail-biters.
In the run-up to the November election and now the runoffs, I’ve been texting with my cousin Matt, who lives in Decatur, a community “inside the perimeter,” or ITP, the perimeter being I-285. In other words, he lives in an inner suburb of Atlanta, in one of the two counties in which Atlanta resides. Matt, who has lived in Georgia his entire life, was thrilled when Biden won his home state. But with these Senate elections, he’s thinking about issues that matter on-the-ground: pandemic mitigation to save lives and help small businesses and clean energy to reduce pollution in Atlanta. He’s especially concerned about matters of racial justice: ending voter suppression, elevating the Black Lives Matter movement, and expanding the work and fortunes of Stacey Abrams. He views Rev. Warnock as the “spiritual successor to MLK Jr.”
If you live in Georgia, or follow Georgia politics, or know even a little about Georgia history, you know that something incredible is happening in Georgia. Black citizens are exercising their voting rights like never before, and a visionary group of Black women is leading the way.
The most well-known is Stacey Abrams, who founded the voting rights organization Fair Fight after losing the 2018 gubernatorial race to Brian Kemp, who suppressed the Black vote in his role as secretary of state. Before that, she had led the New Georgia Project, which focused on health care and voter registration and engagement, now led by the indefatigable Nse Ufot (listen to her being interviewed on the first episode of the amazing new podcast Gaining Ground: The New Georgia). LaTosha Brown, of Black Voters Matter, and co-founder Cliff Albright have traveled tirelessly across the state for most of the 2020 election season getting Black residents to register and engage our political moment.
Abrams, Ufot, and Brown are just three of many Black women who have done the back-breaking, grassroots organizing required to overcome Georgia’s long, violent history of suppressing and obstructing the Black vote.
As I noted in an earlier letter, Henry W. Grady—managing editor of the Atlanta Constitution and namesake of UGA’s journalism school—was the chief architect of white supremacy in Georgia and devoted the final years of his short life promoting the the disfranchisement of Black voters in his home state and across the South.
In the white supremacist South, which began being constructed before Reconstruction was even over, all kinds of tools were used to disfranchise the Black community, including, in Georgia, the cumulative poll tax, literacy tests, and the grandfather clause. But the worst tools existed beyond the legal frameworks of state constitutions and statutes. The violent practice of mass whippings—known as bulldozing, after the brutal bullwhip used—was particularly popular to intimidate Black men from voting before elections. In 1870, the same year the Fifteenth Amendment was adopted (giving voting rights to the formerly enslaved) a white mob whipped hundreds of Black men east of Atlanta to keep them from voting in the upcoming election.
Let’s be clear: bulldozing was a form of racial terror. As was the convict leasing system. As was lynching. Grady excused and normalized all of this anti-Black violence designed to keep Black Georgians from gaining political and economic power. (BTW, how is it OK that a premiere Southern journalism school in 2021 is named for a newspaper editor who died in 1889 and has this ignominious legacy?)
This is just part of the bleak legacy Black voters in Georgia have had to overcome.
In the wake of the 2013 US Supreme Court decision gutting key voting protections in the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Georgia experimented fast and furious with new voter suppression tactics targeting Black and Brown citizens. The “exact match” system—which requires the name on a voter’s registration document to match exactly the name in a government system—has prevented more than 50,000 people from voting. The closure of polling sites, most in Black communities, creates long lines and discourages voting. And then there have been mass purges of the voter rolls (over 500,000), engineered by Brian Kemp, now governor.
Black turnout in early voting in Georgia has been significant, accounting for 34 percent of the early tally, up from 31 percent in the November election. Black voters constitute a third of Georgia’s electorate and nearly half of the electorate’s growth since 2000. Biden won Georgia by a hair with a 0.2 percent margin, and he has Black voters to thank for that victory.
Black organizers and Black voters deserve a huge and forever thanks from everyone in the country who cares about the future of liberal democracy and a multiracial America. We should also be grateful to those members of the press who have featured their work and amplified their voices.
But most of all, no matter the outcome of the special elections: Black Georgians have helped us all, as James Baldwin wrote in 1962, to “end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.”
Best, Kathy