Georgia

* Article Excerpt: ('Jim Crow 2.0')

.. SUPPRESSING THE HISTORY IS SUPPRESSING THE VOTE. Darien City Councilman Griffin Lotson.

Councilman Lotson draws a direct line between suppressing history and Kemp’s other legislative accomplishment: suppressing the vote of the descendants of the enslaved. Last year, Kemp, as he prepared for his re-match for the Governorship against Stacey Abrams, signed SB202 — what the NAACP calls “Jim Crow 2.0.”

- Among the bill’s little noticed but most threatening clauses: any Georgian can challenge the vote of an “unlimited” number of other Georgians ballot. During our research for the film Vigilante, we met one GOP county chairman who personally challenged and blocked the vote of over 4,000 voters in Columbus, Georgia, including Major Gamaliel Turner, an African-American career military specialist. The Major was assigned by the military to a base on the West Coast — and was denied his ballot because this Republican official, Alton Russell, challenged the Major on grounds the soldier was not a citizen of Georgia.

The history of the vigilante challenge law is elucidating, originally used in 1946 by Eugene Talmadge, who successfully won the Governorship by organizing his Ku Klux Klan followers to challenge Black voters en masse. Instead of white sheets, Kemp’s vigilantes use spreadsheets to challenge thousands of legitimate at the push of a button. (Note: Not a single voter challenged, out of over 168,000 challenged has been charged with attempting to vote illegally.)...

But Lotson knows his history and makes the connection. He said, “When you suppress the history, you suppress the vote.”
I thought I’d warn Councilman Lotson about making “divisive” statements in Georgia. No matter how true.
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Greg Palast’s investigation of Brian Kemp and the history of vote suppression, the documentary Vigilante: Georgia’s Vote Suppression Hitman, will have a no-charge screening this week only at VigilanteMovie.com

The film’s Director, David Ambrose, contributed research for this article.