Beyond voting rights, Georgia wrestles with Southern identity

Writing from her desk at Andalusia Farm, Southern writer Flannery O’Connor once recalled witnessing a Ku Klux Klan gathering on the courthouse steps here in Milledgeville, Georgia.

O’Connor’s eye zeroed in on a searing detail. Since it was “too hot for a fiery cross,” the robed mob brought one draped “with electric light bulbs.” 

In December, Mary Parham-Copelan, the city’s first Black female mayor, took her second oath of office on the same courthouse steps. She won her first election by five votes. This time she ran unopposed.

Mayor Parham-Copelan’s success here in a town once defined by segregation is a reflection of a state in political flux. A growing Black electorate and a shifting sense of Southern identity is bucking a power structure that has historically been white, male, and rural.

“It hasn’t been the easiest, because people had to adjust to having a female mayor,” says Mayor Parham-Copelan, who is also a preacher. “For so much of our time, it has felt like things were going backward. But now here we are and it’s moving forward. I think people are voting their own conscience now. ... We just don’t know who is capable and what that person can do unless they’re given an opportunity.” 

The central Georgia region to which Milledgeville belongs remained a “racist police state” up until the 1970s, says Hamilton College historian Ty Seidule. “The violence wasn’t just racism. It had a political purpose. It was about enforcing white political power.” 

The state is today in the throes of a less violent, yet related struggle, where majorities of both parties believe democracy is at risk of failing. As Georgia voting rights activist Stacey Abrams seeks to become the nation’s first Black female governor in a tough year for Democrats, Republicans are scrambling to control access to the ballot box in the name of election integrity.

Georgia’s gubernatorial election marks not one, but two, high-profile matchups that will be closely watched nationwide. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who drew former President Donald Trump’s ire by refusing to overturn his state’s election in 2020, is facing a primary fight with the Trump-backed David Perdue, who lost the Senate runoff election to Jon Ossoff. Whoever wins that contest will then face Ms. Abrams, who lost her first bid for governor by a little over 1% in 2018.

That all puts Ms. Parham-Copelan’s Georgia at the center of a national struggle over identity, power, and the halting evolution – and potential hobbling – of American democracy.

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris plan to be in Georgia on Tuesday for the president’s voting rights address.

In a speech last week commemorating the violent bid by Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, to overturn a free and fair election, Mr. Biden said that “new laws are being written not to protect the vote, but to deny it.” 

A recent NPR/Ipsos poll found that 64% of Americans think U.S. democracy is “in crisis and at risk of failing.” Even though 61 lawsuits, numerous recounts, and President Trump’s own attorney general found no evidence of widespread fraud, two-thirds of Republican respondents believe that “voter fraud helped Joe Biden win the 2020 election.” Three of those recounts, including one by hand, affirmed President Biden’s victory in Georgia.

In that way, Georgia represents how the country has entered a “new phase” in the struggle between voting rights and voter mobilization, says Domingo Morel, a political scientist at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey.

“Elections are really governed at the county and local level. So what are the ways that the state is going to come in and usurp power from the local community at the local level?” says Mr. Morel. In a state like Georgia where liberal ideology seems ascendant, “there are ways that that growing political power – ... that electorate – doesn’t get to actually exercise their power commensurate with their numbers.”

He adds, “The undermining of democracy, in my view, really works away in the shadows.”

“It’s almost never a slam-dunk”

Georgia and her 10 million residents are a study in contrasts, bound by history. 

It is a state where last week a judge sentenced three white men to life in prison for the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man jogging in their neighborhood. In 2020, voters here chose a Democrat – Joe Biden – for president for the first time since 1992. Then, fueled in part by efforts by President Trump to overturn the election, Democrats outpaced Republicans in a runoff, sending Raphael Warnock and Mr. Ossoff – a Black pastor and a Jewish filmmaker – to the U.S. Senate the day before Trump partisans stormed the Capitol.

Today, Mr. Trump remains under investigation for a phone call in which he was recorded asking Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” over 11,000 votes to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory, a potential violation of state election law. Yet, signs along rural roadways here still proclaim “Trump won.” 

Those statewide races were largely decided in Georgia’s urban and suburban counties, where some Republicans, believing Mr. Trump that the vote would be fraudulent, stayed home while Democrats came out in droves. But of the state’s 159 counties, some 120 qualify as rural based on population.

In rural Georgia, “you get this interesting mix of Trump supporters, country club Republicans, and then you have Black voters, who are overwhelmingly Democratic,” says Scott Buchanan, a political scientist at Georgia College, in Milledgeville. “What does that mean? It means that someone like mayor, sheriff, whomever, they really try to stay in the middle, politically speaking, to attract voters from across the spectrum. Because it’s almost never a slam-dunk one way or the other.”

And political scientists say it’s the rural regions that may come to define Georgia’s role in a broader voting rights debate.

“If you’re white in rural Georgia, those are dyed-in-the-wool Trump supporters,” says University of Georgia political scientist Trey Hood. “But of course there is the Black Belt area. ... We are a closely divided state and pretty fractured in some ways. It all sort of depends on who decides to show up. That’s your electorate.” 

Such narrow margins in Georgia and other key battlegrounds have put the focus on voting rules. Last year, nearly three dozen laws were passed in 19 states that make it more difficult to vote and in some cases threaten election officials with criminal proceedings, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

Georgia lawmakers passed SB 202, a law that put new requirements on absentee voting, allowed the legislature to appoint new election administrators when fraud was suspected – rather than proved – and barred people from handing out water at polling places.

In 2020, there were 331 fewer polling places in Georgia than in 2012, despite the state’s growing population. Lincoln County, which is one-third African American, has plans to go from seven precincts to one in the next election, to make voting “easier and more accessible,” according to a press release. The moves, critics say, go beyond efforts to secure the vote to actively discouraging Black voters, who largely are Democrats, from casting ballots.

“We pull it off, mostly”

Like most of Georgia’s 139 rural counties, Morgan County is solidly conservative: Four of five county commissioners are Republicans. But Democrats here are energized. In last year’s Senate runoff, party leaders delivered 98% of their voters to the polls; Republicans managed 92%.

A few months later, a Republican county commissioner named Ben Riden led an effort to scrap the bipartisan Board of Elections, calling it “dysfunctional.” Five other counties joined suit.

Democrats are concerned that such efforts are laying the groundwork to reverse the will of the people if power continues to slip away from white conservatives.  

But the fight over election administration in Morgan County has also highlighted real problems.

That debate is healthy, says Morgan County voting rights activist Jeanne Dufort. The challenge, she says, is how to rebuild the kind of public trust that democracy requires to function.

“It is absurd to imagine a democracy that isn’t full of robust debate and big fundamental differences. The miracle is, we pull it off, mostly, except for when we have a civil war or an insurrection,” says Ms. Dufort. But when lawmakers “decide that power is the only governor of whether you can do something or not – raw power – then you are going beyond” founding values.

For Mr. Riden’s part, he says most folks in the county aren’t interested in preserving a racial order, but a rural dynamic. 

In fact, Mr. Riden, who is white, says he recruited a Black Democrat to sit on the new Board of Elections. Though party affiliation wasn’t on the application, the new board has the same political dynamic as the old one: three Republicans, two Democrats.

“Let’s face it, voting is pretty easy,” says Mr. Riden. “Some people think what we did was intended to suppress the vote. It wasn’t. It’s really to protect the integrity of the vote to make sure that only legitimate people vote.”

“We have to swallow the past”

For Michelle Gilley, a white voter, how those in power define “legitimate people” represents the broader challenge over the right to vote. 

Last summer, Ms. Gilley bought a house on a creek on the Walton County line. 

Soon after, her daughter, Audrey, learned about the 1948 lynching of two African American couples in what is now their backyard. The lynching at the Moore’s Ford Bridge came after Gov. Herman Talmadge made a fiery campaign speech warning that blood would run in the streets before Black people would vote in the Democratic primary.

Audrey is building a small commemorative cross for the site. 

“As grown-ups in the South, we have to swallow the past, to never forget it but also make sure that our children do better,” says Ms. Gilley. “I think we are learning how to lead with love.” 

But as part of that reckoning, the South is undergoing another broad shift – one of what it means, beyond race, to be Southern. 

Take November’s election of Winsome Sears, a gun-toting Black conservative woman, to lieutenant governor in Virginia. North Carolina’s current lieutenant governor is African American; he is also a “Make America Great Again” devotee.

That is partly why Ms. Abrams has resisted labels like progressive and moderate. In her last campaign for governor, she visited all 159 counties to talk about Medicaid expansion and saving rural hospitals.

“The power of the Black vote has been significantly less than the power of the white vote, and that’s what reminds us that there’s so much at stake,” says Mayor Preston Blakely of Fletcher, North Carolina. He’s the 27-year-old Black leader of a Southern town that is nearly 90% white. “It’s about a voice in government ... and having people that look like us represent us in this ever-changing country and in our ever-changing communities.”

In that context, efforts in Georgia and across the South to expand Black leadership, at least in part, “is African Americans reclaiming what was rightfully theirs: the mantle of Southernness,” says Christopher Cooper, co-author of “The Resilience of Southern Identity: Why the South Still Matters in the Minds of its People.” “It is a reckoning in how we are thinking about and experiencing our history. It’s about the politics of the past and the politics of Southern memory as much as anything.” 

In Milledgeville, Ms. Parham-Copelan navigates that landscape of memory by focusing on today’s problems. She ran unopposed in large part because of her popularity. 

For her, the focus is on character and capability.

“My race speaks volumes,” says Ms. Parham-Copelan. “People didn’t know what to expect. Now they realize that I’m truly the community’s mayor.”