Changes in Klan Lands | Georgia can co …

Although Joe Biden would no longer need Georgia’s 16 voters to win the presidency, his partial victory in the state transcends more than one meaning. Atlanta, its capital, is the cradle of civil rights in the United States. In the city where Coca Cola and CNN are headquartered, Martin Luther King was born. In Clayton County, which is part of the city, supporters of the black leader who led the March on Washington in 1963 defeated Donald Trump. As great as John Lewis’ anger against the president, King’s collaborator and follower of his thought, who died on July 17 at the age of 80. He had his reasons for hating the sore loser who still did not accept the result. In the countryside, the tycoon had called his hometown of Clayton “horrible” and “infested with crime”. Democratic and African American voters have not forgotten the affront. With a barrage of votes, they caused the state ruled by Republican Brian Kemp to change hands in a way that has not happened since 1992, when Bill Clinton won. So far, since the count is still absent for the close final between the two septuagenarian candidates.

In Georgia, 100% scrutinized, Biden leads Trump by 1,557 votes. He added 2,450,194 (49.4%) votes against 2,448,637 (49.37%). If there is a country divided in the middle, by almost symmetrical halves, that nation is in the fourth state that joined the United States and the ninth most populous, according to the 2010 census. The same is true afterwards. the civil war, he was the last to be readmitted to the Union on July 15, 1870, five years after the end of the civil conflict. The stubbornness of its politicians of the time, slavers of all slavery, had challenged the victors of the industrial north. They did not want to ratify the 15th Amendment to the Constitution. The one for which any man, major and whatever his racial status, could vote in the second half of the 19th century. Women would only get this right for the first time in 1938.

Georgia, just as it was an embryo of the struggle for civil rights, is also a bulwark of racial discrimination in the United States. Its strongest signifier is the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). The criminal organization is still healthy in the state. She was not intimidated by the conquests of the black population, nor by the struggles of characters like King and Lewis, nor by the Black Lives Matter movement, nor by the cinema of the prestigious Spike Lee, originally from Atlanta, who has always skillfully depicts this world of deep injustices. committed against his African-American brothers.

Gone with the Wind, the title of the famous 1939 film, whose novel was also written in Atlanta, was not racism, but rather Trump’s victorious claims. The state’s history accurately explains the tensions that spilled over to the rest of the country during the current president’s tenure. Although the KKK was born in neighboring Tennessee, its first group was neutralized until the acronym Hooded Men resurrected in the Georgia capital in 1915. It was then that the Democratic Party still represented the interests of cotton landowners and defeated southern slavers. in the civil war.

On Thanksgiving night that year, several members of the order climbed Stone Mountain and set a cross on fire. This is how they proclaimed the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan 105 years ago in the heart of Georgia.

In 2020, the black militias of the I don’t fuck with the Coalition (NFAC), which in Spanish means something like “Coalition we are not fucking”, took the same place in defying the supremacists. An image that has changed times and of which the African-American community is no longer afraid of them. On the contrary, he challenges them to a mountain engraved with the images of three Confederates with a slave past: Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Thomas Stonewall Jackson.

The geological layers of the struggles against racism in the state are understood by another piece of its educational history. Until the early 1960s, all schools were separate. White children went to theirs and black children to others designed for them. Apartheid reigned not only in South Africa, but also in the suburbs and thick forests of Georgia.

Clayton County, perhaps the most democratic in the state, is enjoying its revenge at the polls, almost a vindication of the figure of Lewis, its maximum benchmark, congressman and collaborator of King. In the House of Representatives since January 3, 1987, he has always been reelected. Fourteen times until his death, he was surprised in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic, despite having died of pancreatic cancer.

The black chef already has a street named after him in Nashville, the capital of Tennessee. Because his political activism transcended the borders of any state in the Deep South. He was born in Alabama in 1940. His public fights with Trump were widespread. Lewis left this world almost four months ago. If his days had lasted until today, he would have remembered Trump as a desperate idiot.