The last time I visited my grandparents’ hometown, I was researching an article about lynching. In 1918, a white mob tore through Valdosta, Georgia, and the neighboring county and murdered at least 11 Black people, including Mary Turner, who was eight months pregnant and found suspended by her ankles and disemboweled. My cousin is a history buff and offered to show me around. Crossing town in his pickup truck, we drove down a leafy street where, according to local lore, the mob went door-to-door looking for a Black man accused of killing his white employer and allegedly shot residents who failed to disclose his whereabouts. The goal of my story was to investigate a personal connection. One of the lynch mob’s victims, Eugene Rice, shared my family’s name and was hanged less than 20 minutes from where my maternal grandmother grew up. “You see that house over there?” my cousin asked, pointing next door. “The lady who lives there, they say her great-uncle was in on it.”
There’s a lot that feels unprecedented about today’s electoral crisis in Georgia, and there’s earnest concern that we may never recover from Donald Trump’s damage to democracy. On December 5, the president went to Valdosta to engorge his ego, prattling on for close to two hours before a crowd of roughly 10,000 fans about imaginary voter fraud. The outcome of the purported “fraud” was his loss in the November election — the first time a Republican presidential candidate had surrendered Georgia since 1992. Its mechanism, according to Trump, included criminality and corruption innate to Atlanta, a Black city of reliably blue votes whose suburbs he had tried to entice by vowing to preserve their segregation. Days earlier, death threats were made — likely by Trump voters — against Georgia’s election administrators, who are overseen by a secretary of state from the president’s own party. “This has to stop,” Gabriel Sterling, the voting-system-implementation manager with Secretary Brad Raffensperger’s office, said during a press conference, nearly breaking down in tears. “It’s un-American.”
Continue reading here at New York Magazine, courtesy of Zak Cheney-Rice.