Say Their Names

by Curtis Bunn

  “It’s a magnificent time to be a Black woman.”

  The Rise of Georgia Black Voters

  By Curtis Bunn

  In Georgia, the Black vote did not always matter—at least to the Black voter in Georgia. African Americans in the state overwhelmingly cast their ballots for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, and Obama made history by becoming the first Black president of the United States.

  For Black Georgians, the exhilaration of his victories surmounted the reality: Obama did not win Georgia, and in the archaic Electoral College—which counts state votes and not the popular vote—their ballot did not help Obama achieve history. Hence, the feeling that their vote did not matter.

  “Psychologically, that messed with me a little bit,” Jackie Joseph Brown, a Columbus, Georgia, native, said. “My friends in New York and Chicago and California were all saying, ‘We did it. We did it.’ And here I was in Georgia, and…with the way the system is set up, we didn’t do it. It was a weird feeling to be so excited and proud about President Obama, but, technically, my vote didn’t help put him in office. And I think a lot of Black people struggled with that over the years.”

  The emotions were far different in 2020 than they were in 2016, when Trump won the state. Black people were decisive in Biden turning the traditional Republican red state Democratic blue. It was the first time a Democrat won Georgia since President Bill Clinton in 1992.

  “Biden winning here in Georgia was definitely a sigh of relief,” Atlanta native Amber Holmes said. “I felt like I helped make a difference. I voted for him, and I persuaded two of my friends, who never voted in the past, to participate in the election. I also, unfortunately, had to stop being friends with someone who tried to convince me that Trump was the best candidate for the Black community. So, that election was very emotional for me, and a lot of other people in Georgia. With Biden’s win, I felt a small sense of satisfaction and accomplishment, which I didn’t get when President Obama won because we didn’t win Georgia.”

  That feeling of satisfaction subsided quickly, however, and turned into pressure. Two Georgia Senate seats were set for a runoff two months later, seats that would sway the balance of lawmaking power. The Democrats needed the Reverend Raphael Warnock to become the first Black senator of Georgia and Jon Ossoff to become the first Jewish senator from the state to avoid a Republican Senate majority and obstructionism toward Biden’s agenda. They were pitted against Kelly Loeffler, a billionaire Trump loyalist who had been appointed senator to replace Johnny Isakson, who stepped down because of illness, and David Perdue, a conservative also closely linked to Trump.

  For Black voters, there was another call to action, and with it a burden.

  “I received so many calls from people around the country who told me they wished they could vote in the Georgia Senate runoff,” Brown said. “Everyone was so excited. But that was also another way of telling me how important it was for us to get out there and do it again. They were counting on us. Some friends weren’t subtle. They’d say, ‘Y’all gotta take Georgia.’ ‘We need both those Senate seats.’ ‘Y’all need to get it done.’ At first it was cool that we were in the middle of an election that the whole country was watching. But as it got closer, the pressure mounted.”

  “That pressure was real, even though I was just one vote,” Holmes said. “Racial tensions were high. Black people had turned Georgia blue and we had to turn around and do it again. This was an election where your vote could make the difference. We literally had to save democracy, as they called it. I knew I needed to vote early; I was concerned that the runoff election would fall prey to more voter suppression. But as the pressure turned up, I could feel that we took pride in being a political force. We came out. Our votes mattered in Georgia. And we turned two elections in two months.”

  How galvanized were Georgia voters for the Senate races? There were more than 100,000 people in the state who cast a ballot in the Senate runoff but did not vote in the November presidential election.

  Warnock, the eloquent preacher from Savannah, understood the magnitude of the occasion. “I’m really proud of Georgia in this moment,” he said, “because we built a multiracial, multiethnic, multigenerational coalition, which ushered into office at this defining moment in America a young, Jewish man who is the son of an immigrant and interned for John Lewis, and an African American man, the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Dr. King served.

  “This is a representation of the best in America. That old [Southern] strategy, where politicians came to office by dividing people, [is over]. Jon and I are coming into office by bringing people together.”

  Warnock’s ascension marked an exciting new era of Georgia politics, a significant cultural and demographic transition. Black voters sought and achieved an alternative political vision from its conservative past through a statewide power base with roots in local governance.

  Warnock went from a powerful voice in the pulpit to a power player in the Senate. He took over as lead pastor of famed Ebenezer Baptist Church in 2005, seemingly always with an eye on a political career. From the lectern, he shared his strong views on social issues and community concerns in earnest, and the notion was floated back then that he had designs on D.C. He acted on his impulses in 2020, anchored in his faith.

  “I preached in my campaign the same message I have been preaching for years,” Warnock said. “I’ve been trying to point us toward the highest ideals in our humanity and in the covenant we have with one another as American people—that all of us deserve an opportunity to create a prosperous life for us and our families.”

  John Lewis inspired Warnock, who often spoke of his intention to work hard to have the John Lewis Voting Rights Act passed in the Senate. In 2017, Warnock was arrested in the U.S. Capitol as he protested the GOP health care proposal.

  “I’ve always tried to leverage the moral truth to create moral good,” Warnock said. “My whole life has been about service. And that doesn’t end at the church door; it starts there. My ideals are driven by my faith and what has caused me to fight for access to affordable health care, the dignity of work, and voting rights. I think your vote is your voice, and your voice is human dignity. And we’ve got to make sure everyone has a voice in our democracy.”

  Black voters’ voice resounded in 2020. Receiving less fanfare than Warnock’s triumph but indicative of the Georgia Black voter influence were changes in other local positions in and around Atlanta, the ubiquitous capital of the New South.

  In November 2020, Black voters helped supplant five incumbent Republican district attorneys and elected Black candidates in four of those races. In Cobb County, an Atlanta suburb where Black voters turned out in large numbers, Democrat Flynn Broady defeated incumbent district attorney Republican Joyette Holmes, a Black woman who was assigned by Kemp to prosecute three white men charged in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery. Her unsteady handling of the tragic incident dissatisfied many Black voters.

  Also, in Brunswick, incumbent district attorney Republican Jackie Johnson, who many thought initially mishandled the Arbery case, was voted out of office, too.

  Black voters made important changes in Fulton County, the largest voting bloc in the state, made up of mostly African Americans. Paul Howard, first-elected Black prosecutor in the state, in 1997, was voted out after allegations of financial misconduct (which he denied), replaced by Fani Willis, a Black woman and first of her kind in Fulton County. It was that way around much of the state—Black voters voting their interests and making a difference.

  “As a native of Atlanta, of Georgia, it’s inspiring to see Black people using their vote to make change,” Holmes said. “It hasn’t always been this way. There was a time when we didn’t necessarily feel like our vote mattered. But it’s a new day.”

  The Need for Fair Legislation

  By Curtis Bunn and Michael H. Cottman

  A Missouri state senator proposed a bill in January 2021 that crystallized how Black people in general and the Black Lives Matter mo
vement, in particular, were demonized by the white political construct.

  Republican Rick Brattin sponsored a law that called for the use of deadly force by law enforcement against protesters on private property to be legal, and to grant immunity to people who run over with a vehicle demonstrators who are blocking traffic.

  The paradox was astounding: Deadly force by law enforcement could be officially sanctioned on people peacefully demonstrating against deadly force by law enforcement.

  The irony was also deeply troubling and emblematic of legislation throughout history that has placed Black people in harm’s way or at a sizable disadvantage. Brattin’s proposed bill did not have a strong chance at becoming law. The Missouri ACLU decried it, as did many Democrats. But that was less the point than the notion that he would present something so blatantly violent, a direct response to the BLM protests, making it a racially charged initiative.

  Remarkably, Florida passed a law similar to Brattin’s proposal, potentially making Black protesters roadkill.

  One consequence of such a law would be that the white man convicted of murdering Heather Heyer, who was killed at a protest when a white supremacist drove his car through a crowd in Charlottesville four years earlier, would not have been charged or prosecuted. Heyer was a white woman—the message being not only Black people who fought against systemic racism were in the line of fire, but also white people who supported them.

  Remarkably, Iowa and Oklahoma also were among the states that actually made running over protesters with cars legal—a direct assault on BLM marchers. Under the new provisions, a driver would not be liable for striking—or even killing—a person if the driver is “fleeing from a riot…under a reasonable belief that fleeing was necessary to protect the motor vehicle operator from serious injury or death.”

  Additionally, the violent measure created new penalties for protesters who obstruct streets or vehicle traffic, including fines of up to $5,000 and as much as a year in jail.

  The insidious laws were Republican–pushed and supported, despite the fact that the Washington Post reported that 98 percent of the largest protests in U.S. history resulted in no injuries to “participants, bystanders or police.”

  Translation: In 2021, edicts reminiscent of Jim Crow laws that abused Black people were in play.

  “Totally preposterous,” U.S. District judge Susan Davis Wigenton said of the proposed bill. Wigenton’s dismay with the bill was matched by the urgency she feels about the need for legislation overhaul if Black people are to experience any measurable change—and fairness—in America.

  Wigenton, a product of historically Black Norfolk State University, said Black America’s civil liberties had been most recently under assault during the Trump administration, and adhering to the 1964 Civil Rights Act would be a start to leveling democracy.

  “When we talk about civil rights, most of the time, we’re talking about people of color,” said Wigenton, who is from New Jersey and was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2006. “Legislation is lovely. Let’s be clear. If you want to prosecute someone, there are already laws in existence to do it.”

  And many of those laws, too many, are to the detriment of Black people, especially as they relate to law enforcement. The Obama administration worked to counter bad laws. After the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson and subsequent racial justice demonstrations, Obama established a task force to examine better policing practices. His administration also investigated patterns or practices of misconduct in police departments, entered into court-binding agreements that require departments to correct misconduct, conducted reviews of various police departments, and put monitors in place to ban racial profiling by federal law enforcement agencies.

  “The Obama administration did more with respect to police reform and misconduct than any administration in the modern era, and it was a personal commitment for the president and for Attorney General Eric Holder,” said David Kennedy, director of the National Network for Safe Communities at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

  But Obama’s work essentially was abandoned and aborted during the Trump administration, which eliminated the practices.

  “We have to go back,” Wigenton said. “It’s the focus of the Department of Justice that has to change. People have to understand after what happened in the summer of 2020, the focus on civil rights, equality, and justice for all has to start at the top. Not one of those officers [who harmed Black people] has been charged with a civil rights violation. It has to start at the top.”

  The Justice Department, which is responsible for defining how the law forbids discrimination, submitted for White House approval before Trump’s departure a change to how it enforced Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits recipients of federal funding from discriminating based on race, color, or national origin. The regulation covered housing programs, employers, schools, hospitals, and other organizations and programs—another attempt to remove protections for Black people.

  The Trump administration also sought to eliminate protections for groups at risk of suffering civil rights violations by law enforcement, claiming that the Civil Rights Act as passed by Congress only safeguarded against intentional acts of discrimination.

  All of this could be considered a dirty pool, a muddied pit in which Black people have waded forever. The Biden-Harris administration rolled back those changes, but hardly did that make life equitable for Black people.

  There was the issue of oversentencing legislation that Black people have had to endure as well.

  “People of color get charged with much more serious criminal offenses and the amount of time they face is different than [non-Black people],” Wigenton said.

  The inequities in legislation inspired Brittany K. Barnett, a corporate attorney in east Texas, to work to gain the freedom of oversentenced Black people. Pro bono work introduced her to cases where Blacks were serving significant federal prison time for nonviolent drug charges.

  “These cases tugged on my soul,” she said.

  She learned of the case of Sharanda Jones, a Black woman who went to trial as a first-time offender. The trial lasted a week. Prosecutors did not produce any evidence that she had possessed, bought, or sold drugs. Rather, they relied on the testimony of admitted drug abusers and dealers who were given lighter sentences for their testimony against Jones.

  In August 1999, she was convicted of one count of conspiracy to distribute cocaine base (crack cocaine). She was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

  A first-time offender was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole for conspiracy to distribute crack.

  “She is a woman who is a Black daughter of the rural South like me,” Barnett said. “I saw so much of myself in her that I decided I would fight for her life as if it were my own—because it was.”

  It was 2009 when Barnett read about Jones’s case. She showed up as an unexpected visitor at prison and told Jones she would battle for her freedom.

  “I bring a different dynamic, a different lens,” Barnett said. “I grew up in rural East Texas. My mom had a drug addiction. My mom went to prison. I dated a drug dealer. My early years of college, some involvement in drugs was the norm. You either knew somebody selling drugs, using drugs…and at the time it was something we didn’t really think that much about.

  “Having that proximity to it gave me a unique perspective.”

  And the length of time Jones received struck her. Jones had run out of appeals. Barnett did not care. She told her new client she would take her case to the White House, and she did.

  It took six years, but Barnett was true to her word—and talent. President Obama granted Jones clemency, setting her free in 2016 after sixteen years in prison.

  Barnett had the honor of placing the call to Jones. “You’re going home,” she screamed into the phone. Jones cried. (President Obama pardoned 231 individuals in December 2016, most whose cases were similar to Jones’s.)

  She is amon
g nine formerly imprisoned clients Barnett has achieved clemency for in five years—all of which were laden with extreme sentencing. “This is about poor legislation,” Barnett said. “It is critical that we look out for our own, the wrongly accused or those who receive outrageous lengths for crimes that do not call for it.”

  Barnett was part of the team that helped grant the freedom of Alice Johnson, a sixty-five-year-old grandmother who served twenty-one years in prison as a nonviolent first offender. She had been sentenced to life without possibility of parole. Trump, with urging from Kim Kardashian, granted Johnson clemency.

  “Clients are serving life sentences under outdated drug laws,” she said. “So my clients are set to die in prison, set to never breathe air with free people again. So, to be a part of the journey to help save their lives…”

  In 2020, Barnett wrote her best-selling memoir, A Knock at Midnight: A Story of Hope, Justice, and Freedom. “I wanted to tell the truth about the racial injustice that bleeds through the system,” she said. But that was not the only reason she penned her book. “For young Black girls from the South like me and hope that they will see themselves in me and see that they can do anything they set their minds to.”

  She had no idea she would be attacking legislation that contributes to the ill of mass incarceration and destroys Black families and communities and squashes potential leaders.

  “The untapped genius,” she said. “We’re locking away brilliant minds and ingenuity for decades that our nation needs to thrive. My clients are some of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met. We’re not trying to get around that selling drugs is a crime or glorify it in any way. The argument is that the punishment for the crime is entirely too severe.