There’s a relentless focus on America’s future at the minute. Who’s going to win the November 5th presidential election? What’s going to happen in the four years that follow?
But while travelling around Georgia, you are regularly reminded about periods of the country’s past, and how dreadfully bleak, and recent, they were.
The name of Martin Luther King jnr, the civil rights leader assassinated in 1968, is borne by streets, parks and other sites across the state – from Atlanta to Augusta to Macon and beyond.
Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta, the world’s busiest passenger hub, is named after two former Democrat mayors – William Hartsfield and Maynard Jackson – who helped to shape the city. Hartsfield was once a segregationist, like most southern politicians of the mid-20th century, but he was also a pragmatist and bought in as black political power emerged. He oversaw the desegregation of policing and aimed to position Atlanta as a “city too busy to hate”.
Jackson became the first black mayor of any major southern city just 50 years ago and is lauded for encouraging minority businesses, advancing major infrastructure projects and easing racial tensions in a polarised time.
Ivan Allen jnr, another mayor, forged relationships with prominent African American activists including King jnr, urging Atlanta’s people to “inspire the world” and eliminate segregation. A boulevard named after him is home to the National Center for Civil and Human Rights.
The centre offers a sobering retrospective on what went before, with an exhibit on the Jim Crow laws awaiting on entry. These grim measures, named after a racist 19th century caricature, gave legal cover to segregation in former Confederate, and other, states until the mid-1960s. They aimed to prevent African Americans and white people mixing around education, transport, healthcare, marriage and voting.
The term ‘Jim Crow’ has been raised again 60 years on amid the hullabaloo that still surrounds Joe Biden’s razor thin 2020 election victory in Georgia. Donald Trump and some of his supporters claimed, and still do, that the election was stolen through massive voter fraud, which prompted a prolonged legal saga and the January 6th, 2021 attack on the US Capitol.
An array of measures, criticised as being an effort to restrict some people’s access to their ballot, has since followed. These include stricter ID requirements, limited availability of early vote drop boxes, less time to request and return a mail-in ballot, and voters being permitted to file an unlimited number of challenges against the registration of other voters in their county.
Trump has praised three members of the Georgia State Election Board, political appointees regarded as ‘Maga Republicans’, for their efforts to prevent further “cheating”. Biden has said the measures are “Jim Crow in the 21st century”.
Dr Adrienne Jones, assistant professor of political science at Atlanta’s Morehouse College, King jnr’s alma mater, says states, particularly Georgia, have for years “felt free to make laws that make it more difficult for people to access the polls”.
Jones says many of these primarily penalise “black voters, voters of colour”. She notes a 2013 US Supreme Court decision repealing elements of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which had required certain states and local governments to seek federal approval if changing voting rules.
“We used to have ‘Jim Crow’ voting rules, but today there are also collateral injuries to young voters, elderly voters, disabled voters – all groups that tend to vote for the Democratic Party.”
Travis Doss, executive director of the Richmond County Board of Elections in Augusta, has been at the sharp end of the Republican disgust at the 2020 result, which many party members thought would be a “foregone conclusion” due to opinion poll findings and local tradition.
This led to “a lot of doubt” about the voting system, at a time when there was major uncertainty about many things as the world grappled with a pandemic.
An audit of the near five million ballots cast across Georgia’s 159 counties was carried out at the request of the Republicans. “The results remained the same, with a margin of error of one or two,” Doss says.
Trump was entitled to, and sought, a full recount using the state’s electronic voting machines and the margin of around 11,800 votes continued to separate the candidates.
“And that’s when the conspiracy theories started coming out,” Doss says. “They were hearing reports of hidden ballots being brought in to change the totals, thousands of dead people having voted and what not ... There were lawsuits, threats and all kinds of things that never came to pass. It was never proven that anything was done illegally or incorrectly, but unfortunately the theories are still out there.”
[ Donald Trump pleads not guilty to revised US 2020 election indictmentOpens in new window ]
At the early voting centres on Warren Road in Augusta, Richard says he believes Trump did “the right thing” by going to the judicial system with his concerns about 2020′s result, but his case was “basically” thrown out.
“Now I feel like [Trump] repeating it is not accepting our democratic system ... Now people believe that when you go and cast your vote, they are being switched because of what he says. It kind of invalidates our system of government.”
Carl Payne, another early voter, says he believes “our elections are secure all the time”.
“They’ve come up with this voter fraud and there’s no fraud. We can vote in person, by mail, by absentee ballot and everything is counted and there’s no fraud, so it wasn’t on my mind,” he says.
Jeff Dunn says he had “serious reservations, like many Americans” about how the 2020 election was handled due to some of the things he saw and heard.
“People are not going to sit down and do an affidavit, to testify to something that is false,” he says. “This ought to give pause to a lot of Americans as to whether or not everything was above board and legal.”
The military veteran decided, out of a sense of civic duty, to become a poll watcher and to make sure everything is above board this time, which he believes it is. “Folks know when they walk in there, they’re not going to be intimidated or bothered by anybody, they’re going to cast their vote in secret and watch the number advance by one to know their vote is in.”
Doss says poll watchers have always had a role to play in advance voting and ought to be encouraged, as the more people there to see things, the easier it is to debunk speculation when it arises. However, he says scepticism about the voting system being manipulated persists, citing a situation involving an instance of voter error rather than voting machine error.
“The sad thing is that the actual race the person messed up on was a sheriffs’ race, but a congresswoman started hollering that it was in the presidential election,” he adds.
More than 2.6 million votes had been cast in Georgia as of Sunday, more than half the total poll in 2020, and there are five days of early voting to go. Trump has been urging his voters to get out early and in numbers as he wants to make sure the scale of his victory this time makes the outcome “too big to rig”.
“My hope with any election is big margins, that when it’s all said and done, there’s no doubt and it’s unequivocal who the winner is, as you cannot dispute a wide margin,” Doss says. “Unfortunately, if polls hold true, we’re not going to see that.”
Outside the election board’s office is another reminder of the past, a plaque marking the biggest uprising in Georgia during the Civil Rights era. In May 1970, black citizens gathered to demand an investigation into Charles Oatman (16) being beaten to death in the county jail. Tensions flared due to their call being resisted and a riot began, with police killing six people and wounding dozens of others.
Inside, Travis Doss is looking to the future. He’ll be ready to retire after the 2028 election. Four more years, as they say.
No doubt there will be a relentless focus on America’s future at that time, too. Who will win that election? And what will happen in the years that follow?
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