Departments

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Georgia

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    12/5/2022

    The Racist Origins of Georgia's Runoff System

    by Steven F. Lawson

    Runoff elections were installed in Georgia to ensure that Black voters could not elect their preferred candidates, allowing white voters a second chance to consolidate support around white candidates. 

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    10/13/2022

    Charles Sherrod: An Unheralded Giant of the Civil Rights Struggle

    by Ansley L. Quiros

    "Charles Sherrod is the most important civil rights figure you've never heard of"--fighting for six decades in southwest Georgia, persevering through incremental gains after the publicity of the Albany Movement faded. 

  • SOURCE: Savannah Morning News
    8/16/2021

    The Odd Place of one Savannah Neighborhood in the History of Redlining

    by Todd Michney

    The history of the Cuyler-Brownville area shows that HOLC risk assessments and Federal lending practices were responsive to local banks' perception of lending risk and desire for profit, factors which resulted in the rarity of an African American community retaining a "green" rating. 

  • SOURCE: Public Books

    Under Columbus, Georgia: What Folklore Erases

    by Bryan Banks

    Subterranean tunnels under Columbus, Georgia have been repurposed as part of dramatic stories of crime, emancipation, and war, tales which obscure the more prosaic and violent aspects of the town's history. 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    7/4/2021

    Her Family Owned Slaves. How Can She Make Amends?

    "For almost three years now, with the fervor of the newly converted, Ms. Marshall has been on a quest that from the outside may seem quixotic and even naïve. She is diving into her family’s past and trying to chip away at racism in the Deep South, where every white family with roots here benefited from slavery and almost every Black family had enslaved ancestors."

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    5/6/2021

    If It’s Not Jim Crow, What Is It?

    by Jamelle Bouie

    NYT Columnist Jamelle Bouie relies on the historical writing of J. Morgan Kousser, who showed that disenfranchisement after 1877 affected African American and poor white southerners, was implemented through color-blind means, and had partisan, rather than simply racial, goals. But it was still Jim Crow, and the comparison to Georgia's new law is fair and valid. 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    3/31/2021

    The Painful History of the Georgia Voting Law

    by Jason Morgan Ward

    The new wave of vote suppression bills, like the one in Georgia, reflect a less obvious but important aspect of Jim Crow law: the use of superficially race-neutral language to keep specific groups from voting. The danger is that courts today will similarly fail to see these bills for what they are.