Stacey Abrams, Brian Kemp and Neo-Jim Crow in Georgia
I saw the election through the eyes of black people who had to deal with Jim Crow, who remembered the euphoria of Barack Obama’s wins and who now have to grapple with Neo-Jim Crow.
By Carol Anderson
Dr. Anderson is the author of, most recently, “One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy.”
Nov. 7, 2018
New York Times
So much has been written about the election for governor in Georgia between the Democrat Stacey Abrams, who would be the first black woman in that role, and Brian Kemp, her Republican opponent, a race that may not be over as they wait for absentee and provisional ballots to be counted.
But it was bracing to see the election through the eyes of black people who had to deal with Jim Crow, who remembered the euphoria of Barack Obama’s wins, who witnessed the hatred and obstruction he endured for eight years and who now have to grapple with the rising swamp of Neo-Jim Crow. Mr. Kemp, the man who controls the elections in the state while also vying for governor, has done everything in his power to block African-Americans from casting their ballots.
All of that was clear on Election Day, as I drove people who needed a ride to their polling stations. One of my passengers was 90 and had voted in every election since she was 18. As we pulled away from the polls, she latched onto a memory.
In Georgia, she recalled, officials at a polling station made her read something before she was allowed to vote. “Read something,” she kept repeating. She was talking about the literacy test, which had reduced black voter registration in some areas in the South to less than 10 percent and which only the legal power of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had stopped.
But since 2013, when the Supreme Court gutted Section 4 of the act, that power to prevent the use of discriminatory devices has been greatly hobbled. That was evident as my nonagenarian passenger struggled to pull out of her wallet a government-issued photo ID so that the poll workers, who have known her for decades, could allow her to vote.
In addition to voter ID laws, Georgia had implemented a program called “exact match” that a judge had previously ruled was racially discriminatory but was, nonetheless, reborn with all of its defects by the Georgia legislature and in full operation in 2018. This voter registration program was its own literacy test as it required information on the voter registration card to be an exact image of that stored in a state database or Social Security office. An accent or hyphen in one better be there in the other. In this election alone, Mr. Kemp had trapped 53,000 voter registration cards using exact match, and 70 percent of the applicants kicked into electoral purgatory were African-American, including one of my colleagues, a faculty member at Emory University.
Then there was the basic election processes that wreaked havoc at the polls. Voting machines in Snellville in Metro Atlanta arrived with no power cords. People were waiting for hours in a line that was not moving and were finally forced to leave without voting because they had to get to their jobs. This was the same area where absentee ballots were rejected at almost 10 times the state average.
Those Neo-Jim Crow barriers were rising up from Georgia’s Confederate soil like ghosts.
And I kept driving. Another one of my passengers was well into her 80s. She had a special type of wisdom. Sometimes it came like ice and other times like fire. She looked at me while we were coming back from the polls and remarked that she was proud to be able to vote for Ms. Abrams.
Then came the burn. “Stacey Abrams is smart,” she said with a smile. “Just like Obama. Smart. And,” as the smile melted away, “they will hate her just as much.”
That line stung. It embodied the bittersweet mixture of pride in black achievement and sorrow for the pain that would come, because the things this nation claims are attributes, like intelligence, actually make African-Americans targets.
She remembered how it allowed someone like the woefully inarticulate Donald Trump to believe he had the right to demand President Obama’s birth certificate and also transcripts from Columbia and Harvard.
It meant that a Republican-dominated Congress could shower down disrespect on President Obama — from Representative Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” to Senator Mitch McConnell’s unprecedented refusal to even hold hearings for the president’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland. It meant twisting Mr. Obama’s signature and lifesaving legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act, into a monstrosity of socialized “death panels.”
By Carol Anderson
Dr. Anderson is the author of, most recently, “One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy.”
Nov. 7, 2018
New York Times
So much has been written about the election for governor in Georgia between the Democrat Stacey Abrams, who would be the first black woman in that role, and Brian Kemp, her Republican opponent, a race that may not be over as they wait for absentee and provisional ballots to be counted.
But it was bracing to see the election through the eyes of black people who had to deal with Jim Crow, who remembered the euphoria of Barack Obama’s wins, who witnessed the hatred and obstruction he endured for eight years and who now have to grapple with the rising swamp of Neo-Jim Crow. Mr. Kemp, the man who controls the elections in the state while also vying for governor, has done everything in his power to block African-Americans from casting their ballots.
All of that was clear on Election Day, as I drove people who needed a ride to their polling stations. One of my passengers was 90 and had voted in every election since she was 18. As we pulled away from the polls, she latched onto a memory.
In Georgia, she recalled, officials at a polling station made her read something before she was allowed to vote. “Read something,” she kept repeating. She was talking about the literacy test, which had reduced black voter registration in some areas in the South to less than 10 percent and which only the legal power of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had stopped.
But since 2013, when the Supreme Court gutted Section 4 of the act, that power to prevent the use of discriminatory devices has been greatly hobbled. That was evident as my nonagenarian passenger struggled to pull out of her wallet a government-issued photo ID so that the poll workers, who have known her for decades, could allow her to vote.
In addition to voter ID laws, Georgia had implemented a program called “exact match” that a judge had previously ruled was racially discriminatory but was, nonetheless, reborn with all of its defects by the Georgia legislature and in full operation in 2018. This voter registration program was its own literacy test as it required information on the voter registration card to be an exact image of that stored in a state database or Social Security office. An accent or hyphen in one better be there in the other. In this election alone, Mr. Kemp had trapped 53,000 voter registration cards using exact match, and 70 percent of the applicants kicked into electoral purgatory were African-American, including one of my colleagues, a faculty member at Emory University.
Then there was the basic election processes that wreaked havoc at the polls. Voting machines in Snellville in Metro Atlanta arrived with no power cords. People were waiting for hours in a line that was not moving and were finally forced to leave without voting because they had to get to their jobs. This was the same area where absentee ballots were rejected at almost 10 times the state average.
Those Neo-Jim Crow barriers were rising up from Georgia’s Confederate soil like ghosts.
And I kept driving. Another one of my passengers was well into her 80s. She had a special type of wisdom. Sometimes it came like ice and other times like fire. She looked at me while we were coming back from the polls and remarked that she was proud to be able to vote for Ms. Abrams.
Then came the burn. “Stacey Abrams is smart,” she said with a smile. “Just like Obama. Smart. And,” as the smile melted away, “they will hate her just as much.”
That line stung. It embodied the bittersweet mixture of pride in black achievement and sorrow for the pain that would come, because the things this nation claims are attributes, like intelligence, actually make African-Americans targets.
She remembered how it allowed someone like the woefully inarticulate Donald Trump to believe he had the right to demand President Obama’s birth certificate and also transcripts from Columbia and Harvard.
It meant that a Republican-dominated Congress could shower down disrespect on President Obama — from Representative Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” to Senator Mitch McConnell’s unprecedented refusal to even hold hearings for the president’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland. It meant twisting Mr. Obama’s signature and lifesaving legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act, into a monstrosity of socialized “death panels.”
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