Heather Cox Richardson:

From Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Now & Then. I’m Heather Cox Richardson.

Joanne Freeman:

And I’m Joanne Freeman.

Heather Cox Richardson:

We are thrilled today to welcome back our friend and colleague, Professor Carol Anderson. Carol is a professor of African American Studies at Emory University. She’s written books on voter suppression in White Rage, and her most recent book is The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America.

Joanne Freeman:

Now, Carol is joining us today to talk about the legacies of racism and resilience in the state of Georgia. This should not be a topic that is of any surprise to anyone who is listening, given Senator Raphael Warnock’s recent victory in Georgia and all of the challenges and controversy that led to that victory.

Heather Cox Richardson:

In addition to that, though, as we will welcome Carol, the truth is that she is an expert on so many things in which is why on paper we have her here. But the truth is, she is the most fun guest and a very dear friend. When we had the opportunity to do anything we wanted with this last podcast of this year, we both said, “Let’s have Carol. Carol.” And around that we said, “Oh, and Georgia seems to be a pretty big topic.”

Joanne Freeman:

Exactly, it all came together. And Carol, we are really, really happy to have you here.

Carol Anderson:

I am so happy to be here. The moment the invite came through, that was an easy, easy yes.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So before we begin, a quick reminder for our listeners, and Carol, I don’t know if you know this, that Now & Then has been nominated for a big award, a Signal Award. So, we ask you to keep on voting for Now & Then in the Signal Awards because we’ve been nominated there for the Best History Podcast.

Carol Anderson:

Wow.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Pretty cool, right?

Joanne Freeman:

So, please head to vote.signalaward.com, go to the search bar and type “Now & Then”, and that’s “Now & Then”. Voting closes December 22nd at midnight, Pacific Time, so vote now. And it’s listener’s choice, so it’s actually a wonderful award because it’s based on what you folks think. And now we are going to segue seamlessly into this special year-end episode. I guess I just exposed the seam there, didn’t I? Sorry about that.

So the race, the Runoff race in Georgia, which so many people around the nation were focused on, took place the first week of December. And we have interesting polling data here, and of course it’s very imperfect, but it raises interesting ideas about who’s voting how. And those ideas and questions about that are certainly going to be some of what we’re addressing in today’s episode. Who’s voting how and who’s letting who vote. According to these figures from an ABC exit poll, Black voters voted 90% for Raphael Warnock, Asian voters 59%, Latinx voters 58% for Warnock, white voters 70% for Walker. Carol is making a face, we’re going to come back to this.

By age, 18 to 29 year olds voted 63% for Warnock, 30 to 44 year olds went 56% for Warnock, and then 45 to 64 year olds went 53% for Walker and 65 and over for Walker. So, older white people voted for Walker based on these statistics. And we are not going to say in this episode that you can necessarily draw an absolute straight line from the past to the present, but you can draw a wiggly line that has some pretty straight themes through about how voting, how elections, how voting rights have played out in Georgia and the ways in which this election really highlights, really casts and bold relief what has happened in Georgia in the past and what can happen when people stand up.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So what were your reactions, Carol, to the Georgia runoff between Herschel Walker running as a Republican and the Reverend Raphael Warnock running as a Democrat?

Carol Anderson:

My reaction to the runoff was that I was disgusted to see Herschel Walker as the Republican nominee. And that runoff should even be a runoff, just really to me spoke to the dichotomy, the split that’s in Georgia. It is this Janus-faced thing that has been at war with itself since at least after the Civil War, during the Reconstruction Era, because you’ve got this one section of Georgia that is committed to white supremacy. And yes, you can have a Black man as the face of white supremacy and you’ve got this other face that is committed to a vibrant democracy. And those two components have been at war on the battleground of Georgia for over a century.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Reverend Warnock actually talked about that in his victory speech, did he not? Where he said in a sense, “I am Georgia.”

Carol Anderson:

Yes, he did. Yes, he did. He really embodied that struggle for that multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual, vibrant democracy and all of the harrowing roadblocks that have been put in the way to make that happen. But he was like Tony Morrison, “And still I rise.”

Joanne Freeman:

I just want to read the two or three sentences that Warnock gave in his victory, speech because Carol, you put it so beautifully, but these handful of sentences, a lot of that speech would make a historian happy.

Raphael Warnock:

My roots like the roots of those oak trees go deep down into the soil of Savannah and Waycross and Scriven County and Burke County. I am Georgia. I am an example and an iteration of its history, of its pain and its promise of the brutality and the possibility. But because this is America, because we always have a path to make our country greater against unspeakable odds, here we stand together. Thank you, Georgia.

Joanne Freeman:

And there you have both halves of that long history of voting in Georgia.

Carol Anderson:

Yes, yes. I loved the way that he laid that out so powerfully, just like the preacher that he is. And I also loved how he then segued into how, because so many came out to vote that you had the voter suppressors talking about, “How can there be voter suppression? Look at all of these people voting. This isn’t suppression if you have all of these people voting.” And he laid it out.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Watching Senator John Ossoff, the Jewish Georgian, walking with his arm around Raphael Warnock, the Black Georgian was such an encapsulation of the extraordinary work that Jewish Americans did to promote Black civil rights in the South after World War II and the Black struggle to make American democracy come real. That moment of watching the two of them walk together, Senator Warnock in his meticulously crafted suit and John Ossoff knot was just such a great moment that encapsulated so much of what this country could be.

Carol Anderson:

Yes. And in that runoff election that they had in 2021, January, 2021, 92% of African American voters voted for Ossoff as well as warnock. I mean, so this shows that sense of the power of a multiracial, multiethnic, multi-religious, multilingual democracy, that’s the vision, that’s what’s at stake here, and that’s what we are fighting for.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, exactly, that’s the vision, that’s the power, and that’s prompting people to resist it. Because it’s powerful, because it’s there, and they’re trying to prevent it from coming forward. And we can push and we can act and we can find our way to a better, more multiracial, multi-everything future, which is how a democracy should be.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So let’s go back to the beginnings of the relationship between voter suppression and hope in Georgia. Because one of the things that I love about Georgia is the degree to which in many ways it’s a microcosm of the country, and that really comes through in the reconstruction years.

Carol Anderson:

In Georgia during reconstruction, there was a new constitution put in place in 1868, and that constitution was drafted by Republicans and by those who basically had come in from the North. And so you had a large body of Georgians who were committed to the Confederacy, who hated this constitution. Because one of the things this constitution did was to say that all eligible males could vote, which meant that Black men could vote. Wow.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So the constitution is not written just by Black people, though it’s actually Black men and white men who are willing to try and build a new multiracial coalition. And they write this constitution and the, Joanne’s really going to appreciate this, and the entire state of Georgia says, “This is great. We are a hundred percent on board.” And she’s going to appreciate that because I do that to her once an episode.

Joanne Freeman:

Carol, she does that to me all The time. All the time. She’s like, “And then this person signed it and everything was hunky-dory and that’s the end of our story. Now it’s aimed at you.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So they write the new state constitution and the attempts to ratify that state constitution and then to elect people to serve in the new state legislature under that constitution create an incredibly violent backlash of people determined to stop that both through terrorizing their neighbors in a disorganized fashion, but then also through the violence of the Ku Klux Klan, which sets out to destroy the idea of this new multiracial coalition.

Carol Anderson:

What you see is that there were 336 cases of murder or assault with intent to kill on Black Georgians from January one through November 15th, 1868. 336, so that’s almost like one a day. It’s giving you a sense of the terror that is raining down on Black folks to get them to say, “No, I do not want to be a citizen of the United States. I want to be driven back into the era of chattel slavery. I do not want my rights. I want to be able to live as a second and third class non-citizen.” I mean, that is what that terror is designed to do.

Joanne Freeman:

Absolutely. Well, it’s terrorism, and absolutely the intent of that always, terrorism, is to encourage people to sit down and shut up and not demand what’s rightfully theirs and just get out of the way. And so yeah, here are people who have every right to exercise their rights as citizens and to vote. But given what you just said, Carol, almost a person a day being murdered, it would make absolute sense for people to think twice about what they’re going to do in regard to the vote. And that’s the purpose of Ku Klux Klan terrorism.

Carol Anderson:

To me, one of the other components of this is that this level of violence didn’t hold consequences for the Klan. So that you’ve got a system in place where the violence is reigning down, but there’s no judicial consequences for the perpetrators of that violence. And so it’s really sending a signal about the vulnerability. And so you have Black folks figuring out, “How do I get less vulnerable in this system?” And that is where the power of the vote comes in. That is where being able to choose your representatives, being able to choose the judges who will hold this terrorism accountable, that there will be consequences. And so the vote is really seen as a mechanism for bringing about the recognition of Black folks humanity.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But not so fast, because in fact, 33 Black Georgians are elected to the legislature despite that reign of terror in 1868. They were known as the Original 33.

Joanne Freeman:

There were 30 in the Lower House, three in the State Senate. They were among the first African American state legislators in the United States. And 24 of them were ministers, which tells you about the power of community, right? Community and standing behind people and putting people forward.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So Carol, they stayed in the legislature and made great new laws.

Joanne Freeman:

And everything was lost hunky-dory.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And everything was hunky-dory, right?

Joanne Freeman:

Now, Heather, you have me doing it to poor Carol.

Carol Anderson:

Okay. Right. And so this is what I call the “Rick Santorum School of History”, where he talked about Europeans came to this empty land and we built this and everything was fine, that’s what this, and all was right with the world. And what happens then is that, it flattens. It so flattens the struggles for equality, the struggles to make… We hold these truths to be self-evident, to make them real, to make them something more than aspirations, but to make them reality. That’s the history of America are these battles. And when you flatten it out and so that everything was just fine, “33 were elected. Ta-dum. Aren’t we good? Aren’t we great? Did you see what we just did there?”

Joanne Freeman:

So what happens is that almost immediately the white members of the legislature vote to expel those 33 legislators under the grounds that the state constitution didn’t explicitly say that Black Americans could hold office. And this is one of my favorite scenes in American history because as they leave the State House, one of the men very pointedly wipes the dirt off his boots. He cleans the dirt off his boots as he leaves the State House.

And the profoundness of saying, “I’m going to go back in the streets, and the dirt here is less than the dirt that’s inside that State House,” is I think it’s incredibly powerful. And I will submit that the sign of what a powerful statement that legislator made is the fact that it’s 2022 and I am now saying this over technology that couldn’t even have been imagined in those days. We don’t necessarily remember the taunts exactly what they were of those people, yelling at him or throwing him out, but we remember him wiping the dirt off his boots as he left the State House.

Carol Anderson:

Yes. That is that defiance. That is that, “I will not be defied. I will not be denied.” And it is that inexorable quest for democracy, for justice, for citizenship that is a driving force. And that frankly scares the bejeebers, and that’s the scholarly term, from these white supremacists. The way they think it should be because they have crafted this narrative of this weird duality of criminality and docility, that if we hit these criminals hard enough, then they will know their place and they will stay docile and quiet and stay in their place. And Black folks refuse to stay in that place.

Joanne Freeman:

And some of these 33 legislators say explicitly precisely what you just said, Carol, which is, “Yeah, you think I’m going to bow down here. Really?” Henry McNeal Turner is one of the 33, and he says in a final speech when he’s preparing to leave, “I shall neither fawn nor cringe before any party, nor stoop to beg for my rights. I am here to demand my rights and hurl thunderbolts at the men who dare cross the threshold of my manhood.” That is, first of all, amazing, but also the nightmare of the terrorist and the bully, right? That’s precisely what they don’t want to happen. And that’s a moment where just as what you just described, Heather, someone is standing up and making such a strong statement simply by standing up that it’s highlighting what’s going on there.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And I’d like to point out that he was a Civil War veteran. So he is literally a man who has defended the United States against the very men who were throwing him out of having a right to have a say in it. And part of what is tangled up in Georgia in those years and from then on is, what does it mean to be an American? Who gets to be an American? And what does this government mean? Which is one of the reasons Georgia is so interesting in so many ways. And of course after the expulsion of the legislators, political violence against African Americans does not end. In fact, it becomes in many ways a picture of what happens over the whole rest of the American landscape for the next couple of generations.

Carol Anderson:

So one of the key pieces that you have, for instance, is the Camilla Massacre, which happened in 1868, and there was an election. And so you had Black folks coming into Camilla with Republicans because we have to back up to remember that since Lincoln was a Republican, Black folks were really like, “Oh, the Republican party. They get us. They get us.” And the Democrats, “Boo this. Boo this.” Those are the white supremacists. Those are the Confederates.

Joanne Freeman:

It’s a different Republican party from the present.

Carol Anderson:

Whoa. And one of the expelled legislators, Phillip Joiner, led a march of several hundred Black men and white reconstruction leaders from Albany, Georgia to Camilla in the southwestern part of the state to attend a Republican political rally. And some of the men were armed with rifles containing birdshot for self-defense. And so let me just stop right there, because we tend to understand that in the midst of violence, you have the right to self-defense. Part of what this is saying is that Black folks do not have the right to self-defense. And so we need to understand how these components are all merging in there together, “You don’t have the right to vote. You don’t have the right to self-defense. You don’t have the right to association.”

All of those things that we think are bedrock. “You don’t have the right to freedom of speech.” All of those things that we think are bedrock in America’s constitution. It is saying again, “Black people, you do not have these rights.” And so as the group approached Camilla, Mitchell County Sheriff Mumford S. Poore met the assemblage and told them that he would not allow them to enter the town with firearms. So they’re getting ready to get disarmed, but the white folks who have firearms are not getting ready to get disarmed. And so when they entered Camilla, they encountered a man named James Johns at the town drunk who ordered the Republican group’s band to stop playing, so you can’t even play music. And so when the band continued, Johns fired his gun into the bandwagon.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And stop just there because this is such an important moment, I think, and such an important way to understand our present. Johns is that guy. Everybody knows that guy. And this is one of those things where, when we get to the civil rights movement and in the 20th century, there’s so many white people who thought of themselves as being allies, and they would say, “Well, I would never do such a thing.” People would look at Mr. Johns and say, “Well, I’m not the town drunk. I wouldn’t behave this way.” But so long as you are protecting the town drunks ability to do whatever the hell he wants, so long as you are protecting the ability of sheriffs to put out the eyes of returning veterans. So long as you are protecting that, which is what the system of white supremacy does, it races to the lowest common denominator. And Mr. Johns can do exactly what Carol’s about to say. He’s not the town lawyer, he’s not the town businessman, he’s the town drunk. And you all know that guy.

Joanne Freeman:

That’s why it’s so convenient, right? Well, he’s that guy. He does those things. And in this case, as you’re suggesting, Heather, silence is an act. Meanwhile, what’s happening is the simple presence of this group of Black Americans is about to lead to something really ugly, which is made possible by the fact that people are entirely stepping back and saying, “Well, this is that guy. It’s not us. This is that guy.”

Carol Anderson:

This is that guy. But now we’re getting ready to put the power of our citizenry, the power of the state behind that guy and his villaining because we are now rewriting the script about how this mess jumped off. We are rewriting the script about who started this. We’re rewriting the script about culpability. In rewriting that script. We’re going to make the folks, the Black folks and the white reconstructionist in Camilla the instigators of this violence. Because what it’s saying is, “If they had only stayed in their place…” Place is such a powerful denominator in American history. It is when folks don’t stay in their place, that you see this crush of institutional power being rained down on them and this institutional power being instigated by these actors like the town drunk, like the thug who’s beating up on the civil rights worker, like the folks who stormed the capitol.

I mean, so you’ve got all of these mantras that keep coming back. They said that Mark Twain said that, “History may not repeat itself, but it show do rhyme.” So much of what we’re looking at are the rhymes in American history. You know, you would keep hearing the beep, Ba-bump-bump, ba-bump-bump, ba-bump-bump. And here we go again. So he shoots into the bandwagon and there’s an exchange of gunfire. And the Republican group fled into the nearby woods. The sheriff sent a posse after them now. So these folks were defending themselves from the town drunk shooting at them. They then leave the scene.

Joanne Freeman:

And they fled, right?

Carol Anderson:

And they fled, right? They left, but they’re like, “No.” And so they go charging after these folks. And the white Camilla men pursued the group for several days, ultimately killing at least nine Black people, including a mother and her infant child. In the aftermath of the massacre, the southern and northern press both position the Republican rally as the cause of the violence. So this is where you get the media crafting a narrative, crafting a script that makes this violence acceptable, that normalizes it. That then says that, “These folks, if they had stayed in their place, there would’ve been peace, there would’ve been calm. But no, they thought that they could go to a Republican rally.” Whoa, the nerve.

Joanne Freeman:

And once again, not us. It’s not us, right? I mean, “We’re just doing what we should be doing and protecting ourselves as citizens. And whatever’s going on here, it’s the fault of the people who ran away into the woods when we shot at them.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

So one of the things that is really important to me about this moment is that one of the reasons that this massacre as so many of the massacres in the American South after the Civil Wars reported the way it is because we have new national newswires and the people, the stringers in the south are former Confederates. So the former Confederates are the ones laying down this story, that if in fact the Republicans had stayed at home, they wouldn’t have provoked this disturbance, which completely was an assault on the white people in the town.

And the reason that that to me is interesting, first of all, is because of the way it shows the importance of who does the reporting. And that’s a piece of the reconstruction story most people don’t know. And the implication is that the violence is coming from the Black people, but the reality is the violence is raining down on the Black people and it’s this weird projection of, “Ooh, there’s going to be trouble.” Like, “You need to protect yourself against trouble by causing trouble.”

Joanne Freeman:

I also want to just make a really quick point here because you mentioned the stringers and the fact that you have the ability for communication to travel much more quickly and for new kinds of communication, basically connecting people with new speed and that is, and I raised this only because of the echoes that it has in the present day, is that changes in technology dramatically shape democracy. They shape what people see, they shape what people know, they shape, who gets to say it, they shape the speed of which people know about it. So, if you have these people in the South telling a certain story, and it’s a certain story that can get out to a wide audience really quickly, that’s a power and that is a fundamental way, and you can see this across all of American history in which technology shapes democracy in ways that might seem either invisible or might be hidden beneath, “Uh, look at the progress.” And yet, what’s happening is some stories are getting told and other stories are getting erased.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So one of the things that happens after this, of course, is the Congress steps in and first of all passes and sends off to the states for ratification the 15th amendment to the Constitution in 1870, but also establishes the Department of Justice, which is designed to stop this kind of crap from happening in the South. And that starts a really interesting and important shift in the country over racial issues coming from places like Georgia, which begin to say, “Oh, we don’t have any racial issues. The problem down here with voting is not about race, it’s about class.”

Carol Anderson:

What they’re working on is how do we stop Black folks from voting without writing a law saying we don’t want Black folks to vote. And so they use the legacies of slavery as one of the key components and one of the key elements of the legacy of slavery is endemic poverty. When you have had centuries of unpaid labor and then you’re coming out and you’re into a sharecropping system, what it means is that you don’t have wealth, you don’t have generational wealth. And so then you make it sound like what you’re doing is protecting democracy. And so you say, “Ah, democracy is expensive, holding all of these elections, having to have people who are taking the ballots, people who are counting the ballots, having places where those ballots are, all of that cost us. And so if you really believed in democracy, then you would be willing to pay a small fee, a poll tax, in order to be able to make sure that this democracy runs smoothly.

What Georgia did was to set up a cumulative poll tax. And so what that meant was you had to pay a small fee before the election. And it was like well before the election, they had timed it so that people would not have money, you would not have cash, but you had to pay with cash. And cumulative meant that you know could vote at 21. Say you weren’t able to pay the tax until you were 41, you owed 20 years of back poll taxes before you could vote. What this means, for instance, when Mississippi pulled this stunt, Mississippi said, “It’s just a small fee.” That small fee given the legacies of slavery amounted to 2 to 6% of a Mississippi farm family’s annual income. Imagine paying that to be able to vote, 2 to 6% of your gross annual income.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well now, wait, Carol.

Carol Anderson:

Yes.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It applied equally to white farmers and Black farmers, right? Yeah,

Carol Anderson:

Because all was right with the world. Okay,

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, the reason I’m emphasizing this is because I hear all the time people saying, “Wait, that rule is equally applied. I don’t understand why you’re saying it’s suppressing any vote.” And it’s so helpful to go back to these early years and look at the things that we can now see as being overtly discriminatory and at the time people making the same arguments. “Well, wait a minute, it’s white people and Black people have to pay the poll tax. It is absolutely not in the law that Black people have to pay it and white people don’t.” However…

Carol Anderson:

However. There’s always that “however”, that if-then-but clause. And so there were these outs for the payment of the poll tax. One of the outs was the Grandfather Clause. And so the Grandfather Clause said that, “If your grandfather could vote before 1867, then you too could vote.” Now, they did pick that date out of thin air. That date had such a specific rationale behind it. 1867 is the Reconstruction Act that says that Black men can vote. So basically it’s saying, “If you’re Black people, we know that most of you could not vote before 1867, so that’s going to wipe your tail out.” But most white folks, their grandfathers could vote before 1867. So that’s the loophole that we’re going to be able to get white folks through. Another one of the big loopholes was the power of the registrar, for instance, on a thing called the “literacy test”.

And what that literacy test did was it said, “You had to read a small portion of the constitution in order to be able to vote.” They would give whites a really simple one, almost like if you’re reading the Bible, the one, “Jesus wept,” so you had a really short little sentence there. For African Americans, they would have these huge complicated paragraphs to have to be able to go through. Also, the discretion of the registrar meant that the registrar could say for white folks, “What color is the sky?” for instance, but for Black folks, “How high is up?” So the registrar could change what kinds of questions were being asked and to which group. And so this is how you were able to create these loopholes for whites. And so although the law does not say we don’t want Black folks to vote, the way that it is operationalized is we don’t want Black folks to vote. And so that pattern then is the pattern we see now.

Joanne Freeman:

One of the things that’s fascinating about this to me is that what we’re seeing then and what we see now is people who are acknowledging that elections have to happen and there needs to be something credible happening for them to have power. So they do all of these things that enable them to claim, “Well, they’re equal laws. There’s nothing here on the record that looks wrong.” Once again, “It’s not us. We didn’t do anything wrong. It’s all legally seems correct.” And yet, the impact is to entirely undermine an election. So these are people who are clinging to the fact that elections are happening and using the elections as a way to mask that suppression. I think rigging elections hides this very basic fact, which is it’s not just rigging elections, it’s clinging to the fact of the election and masking all of the corruption beneath the actual fact of the seemingly functional election.

Carol Anderson:

And I think it’s because one of the things that they realize is that Americans value democracy, and having that democracy means that you’re having elections. What doesn’t get in there though is not only are they masking their destruction of democracy by holding these elections where they’re disfranchising, but they’re saying that the reason why these folks can’t vote is because they are corruptors to that democracy, and so, “What we’re doing here is to protect democracy.” And you see how that protection of democracy, it’s like how the white community has to be protected and stabilized. It’s the same way of looking at voting that the white community has to be protected from Black voters because Black voters do something to this democracy that is untoward for the white community.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So Carol, it is my understanding that Georgia has these runoffs in part because of this legacy system. I mean, what on earth is going on with those runoffs?

Carol Anderson:

And so you got to look back at racism to understand the runoffs. So Georgia had a thing called the “county unit system.” And what that did was it was like the Electoral College, but it gave enough points to… Small counties got two points, so 121 counties got two points. 30 counties were called town counties, and they got four points. And eight counties were larger counties, like where Atlanta is, and they got six points where you had to have so many points to win a statewide election. So even though you could win the popular vote, if you didn’t get the county unit votes, then you didn’t win the election. That comes out of the 1868 Constitution as a way to amplify the white rural counties, because if you’ve got massive disfranchisement of Black voters in the rural counties and you only have white voters voting, you’re able to amplify their voices.

And then as you have African-Americans beginning to move heavily into Atlanta and into the other urban areas, you’re able to dilute the power of their voices. So at a certain point in 1963, there was a Supreme Court case, Gray v. Sanders, that said that the county unit system violated the constitutional standard of one person, one vote. Denmark Grover, who was a segregationist in the legislation, looked up and he was like, basically he did a Fred Sanford clutch in his heart, “Oh, Liz Beth, Liz Beth,” as he thought about, “Oh, all the masses of folks from Atlanta, the Black folks from Atlanta, they’re going to take over the State.” This fear of Black voters. And so he came up with the runoff system, which said that you had to win more than 50% of the vote, like 50.1% of the vote in order to win the election.

What that was designed to do, I mean, this stuff is always so clever, it never says we don’t want Black folk to vote, but this is really what this does. We don’t want Black folks to win and believe that if there was a Black candidate and multiple white candidates, that Black candidate would not get over 50% of the vote in a primary or in the general election. But then there would be a runoff where the top two vote getters would have to go head to head, that would allow the white vote to consolidate behind that white candidate and that white candidate would win. That was the rationale behind it. He admitted it in a deposition. He is like, “Was I a racist?” Yes. “Did the legislation that I proposed have racist meanings? Racist intents?” Yes. I mean, he just said it. And so the runoff system that led to Herschel Walker and Raphael Warnock running against each other was based on Denmark Grover’s racist policy about making sure that Black folks could not win a statewide election.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And now of course that Warnock has won twice, they’re talking about changing that system, shockingly.

Joanne Freeman:

I have to say the obvious before we move on, and that just is given everything that we just said. The victory that we just saw in Georgia is all the more meaningful, all the more powerful. I always veer between feeling hopeful and feeling doomy and gloomy. This is a big dose of hopeful. This is a big dose of, look at this one, these people stood up and fought for what was theirs. And even though this system originally was set up to prevent from happening what a lot of white supremacists and other white folk in Georgia wanted to happen, what happened was there was an election and someone won.

Carol Anderson:

And this to me is also part of that story that we are telling, from the story of Camilla all the way to Raphael Warnock’s victory. It has been the story of the Black community standing up and fighting for their rights, demanding their rights, getting hit hard and standing back up saying, “We will not be denied. I will brush this dirt off my shoes as I walk out of this State House.” Right?

Heather Cox Richardson:

The one person that I’d like people to remember from this episode is Julian Bond. And just explain to people not why he was important, because that’s too long a story, but his symbolism in Georgia’s history is something that people should know.

Carol Anderson:

So right after the Gray v. Sanders and then the runoff vote, then Julian Bond runs for office in 1965 as a Georgia State legislator, and he wins. He wins. Well, he was one of the leaders of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And SNCC came out with a anti-Vietnam war statement, which Julian Bond signed off on. The Georgia State legislature looked at that and saw it as a pretext to block him from being able to take the oath of office. And so he’s like, “What? I got elected in here. What do you mean I can’t take the oath of office?” And so they held a special election. He ran for the special election and won. They blocked him again. And so he’s like, “What?” And so they hold then the regular election. He runs again and wins. And they’re like, they block him again. He’s like, “No.”

And so we do this dance five times. You see, in the last one, they had moved his constituencies polling place downtown away from their neighborhoods where they lived. And so they set up buses and carpools to get folks to the polls. But you saw that resiliency, you saw that defiance, you saw that we will not be denied coming through in Julian Bond running again and again and again to take his rightful place in the Georgia State legislature.

Joanne Freeman:

It ends up going to the Supreme Court.

Carol Anderson:

Yes, the case goes all the way up to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court rules on two grounds. One is that, Lord, he does have First Amendment rights. And so if he says that there’s something wrong with the Vietnam War, you can’t block him because he says there’s something wrong with the Vietnam War. And two, that equal protection under the law, the component that allowed his constituency, there were like 6,500 voters, eligible voters, registered voters in his district, 6,000 of whom were African American, so this was denying their right to representation by just blocking him every time. So the Supreme Court said, “Uh-huh, you can’t do this.” And Bond got to take his seat, his rightful seat. But this is again, using the levers of power that are available in this system, also using the will and the defiance to figure out how do you maneuver around all of these blocks to equal representation.

Joanne Freeman:

And persisting to fight and organizing as a group to do that. So obviously, anyone listening now, and they don’t need any help drawing lines about the long history of voter suppression, the ways in which people who want to suppress the Black vote create all kinds of tunnels and maneuvers around elections to try, and in the case of Julian Bond blatantly, but still again and again and again, try and do things to suppress the Black vote. To me, one of the interesting things about our current moment is because politics is so polarized and because in a sense the nation is very politically engaged right now, some of what’s happening in Georgia has gotten a lot of national attention. I mean, think about the focus of attention people had on the runoff. It was all people talked about. In this particular climate, people were focused on Georgia. They saw what was going on in Georgia. They saw people pushing for what they deserved in Georgia, and they saw a positive outcome.

Carol Anderson:

My cousins were calling me from Michigan, from California, “What y’all doing there in Georgia? You know what you got to do? You know what you got to do.” And there was also the, “How on earth is Herschel Walker even in a runoff? What is wrong with y’all in Georgia?” And so again, you see that dichotomy, but what you also saw was this massive grassroots mobilizing that got people out to the polls in early voting, you saw where Georgia tried to use its new state law that said, “After a holiday, there can’t be any Saturday voting.” Well, that holiday was Robert E. Lee Day. Okay?

And so you had Warnock and the Democrats suing going, “Uh-huh, Uh-huh.” And the courts agreed. That Saturday 70,000 people voted. We voted on the Wednesday, which was the first day you could vote in DeKalb County, and they only had one spot for that early voting. When we got there, the line was wrapped all the way in the building and coming out the building down the ramp. When we finished voting, it was down the ramp, wrapped in the building, and across around the parking lot. People were determined to vote. They were determined to stand in those long lines. They were determined to deal with the weather. They were determined to have their voice heard.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and one of the stories I think that comes from Georgia through its history is that, in many ways the demands of those who are disenfranchised or who are marginalized, who have helped us to keep alive the dream of American democracy because white people who’ve had it tend to be complacent about it. Yeah, it’s here. It’s always here. It’s a gift we got. It’s people who don’t have it who keeps talking about how freaking important it is. And that it needs attention, and it needs to be nurtured, and it needs to be always a work in progress. And that comes through so beautifully in the Bond story. The man is elected at least at one time by 82% of the vote, and the people in power say, “Yeah, whatever.”

Joanne Freeman:

Since this is the last episode we’re going to be recording of 2022. I like the fact that one of the things that we can close by saying is, “This is a story about people who are disenfranchised, standing up, demanding what they want and getting it. It’s a story about hope. It’s a story about the power of local organization. It’s a story about using the system to demand what is rightfully yours as a citizen. Despite all of this resistance, this century of resistance. It is a story of struggle and organization and victory.” What kind of story could be more powerful at this particular moment when we’ve seen in so many ways democracy in the balance for quite some time here? This is a story about people using democracy for all the right reasons and insisting on their place in democracy.

Carol Anderson:

Yeah, this battle for democracy. This battle for opening up this system to make it real and available has consequences, powerful consequences. And so I look back at that and think, wow, thank you so much for taking on the county unit system. And in that runoff, it was that organizing that had happened over a decade ago. Stacey Abrams got in there and started doing the heavy lifting of democracy in all 159 counties, that got us to this point where even the runoff system that they had put in place could not stop.

One of the most powerful pieces in this organizing is how it is multiracial. One of the key organizations that has come through is Asian Americans Advancing Justice, which is part of a larger coalition of organizations with the Latinos, with African Americans. And Stacey Abrams had that vision, that the demographics in Georgia are changing dramatically and that this wasn’t just black or white. This was about all of us. And if we can get all of us working together for this multiracial, mulitethnic, multireligious, multilingual democracy, this multidemocracy, then the vibrancy that we could have. And so you also saw this strong voter turnout, increasing voting turnout among Asian Americans. And we saw the figure, what, 58% voted for Warnock in the runoff. Wow, that is the work of doing this grassroots organizing among multiple groups.

Joanne Freeman:

Yet again say that I’m segueing, which means it’s not seamless, because now I’m just pointing to the seam again. But you talked about thanking these people for putting up this fight, and I want to say thank you to you, Carol, for joining us for this episode. There’s no one better, first of all, as we started out by saying, we love having you here.

Carol Anderson:

Likewise.

Joanne Freeman:

Oh, thank you. Given this particular subject, there is no one better who we could have had here to talk about it. So I just want to give you big, big thanks for being here and letting us end this year of recording Now & Then episodes with you as part of our gang.

Carol Anderson:

Thank you so much. I had a blast. Thank you.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I have to say, I of course echo what Joanne says, but fingers crossed for 2023.

Joanne Freeman:

Yes.

Carol Anderson:

And one of the things that I think is so important is that folks have not let down, there’s continued mobilization. There’s a continued awareness of how precarious democracy is perched. And they’re willing to do that heavy lifting of democracy to make those aspirations real. That’s where the hope is.

Joanne Freeman:

Hope should lead to action. Yes, and that’s what we should see next year.

Carol Anderson:

Yes.