Trump's accusations of fraud in Georgia echo decades of racial violence
Georgia's Black voters are carrying on the fight their parents and grandparents started.
By Kevin M. Kruse
As the 2020 election season draws to a merciful close, all eyes remain on Georgia. The state voted Democratic in the presidential election — for the first time since 1992 — with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger officially certifying the vote for President-elect Joe Biden on Friday. Now, control of the U.S. Senate depends on a pair of runoff elections on Jan. 5.
No single factor adequately explains the rise of the new “blue Georgia,” but the role of Black voters there, especially in the younger generations, stands out as a fundamentally important development, one that has the potential to cement the changes there for decades to come. And given the history of suppression of the Black vote in Georgia, the emergence of this key demographic is nothing short of remarkable.
Ever since African Americans first secured the right to vote in Georgia, white supremacists have worked to take it away from them.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, white Georgians crafted an elaborate series of new rules and regulations to block Black voting, including a cumulative and costly poll tax, an impossible-to-answer “literacy test,” and property qualifications. (Poor whites who might have been barred by these restrictions had their voting rights restored through the so-called grandfather clause.) Most significantly, Georgia made the Democratic Party’s primary — the only primary that mattered at all in the one-party “Solid South” — a purely whites-only affair.
By the end of World War II, however, much of the official structure of disfranchisement had been dismantled, due to rulings by federal courts and changes in state laws. As their legal schemes of suppression unraveled, white supremacists resorted to extralegal programs of intimidation and violence to block Black voting. In 1946, Gov. Gene Talmadge was asked how they might keep African Americans away from the polls. The demagogic Democrat picked up a scrap of paper and wrote a single word on it: “Pistols.”
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Posted By: Dea. Ron Gray Sr.
Sunday, November 22nd 2020 at 12:04PM
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