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What
should have dominated the news cycle of January 6, 2021 as the most
stunning set of political victories in the history of Senate
elections - Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff of Georgia - was eclipsed
by the most violent insurrection and assault on the Capitol since the
Battle of Bladensburg in 1814, infamously known as the Burning of
Washington. This recent invasion was domestic in origin, and one
branded with symbols of hate, among them, the Confederate flag, a
noose, and clothing reminiscent of the concentration camps of
Auschwitz. Though the elections were obscured by the insurrection,
make no mistake about it, what happened in Georgia was serious -
history book serious.
Warnock,
an African American, and Ossoff, a Jew, are the racial and ethnic
descendants of two groups with intertwined histories whose shared
experiences with racism and anti-Semitism overlap, while unfolding
and illuminating two of the ugliest chapters in the history of
Georgia and America. This was an election of redemption for Georgia,
shaped by the demographic cul-de-sac mobilized by architect Stacey
Abrams, bringing new political meaning to the term “New
South,’’ first coined in the late 19th century by Henry
Grady, editor of The
Atlanta Constitution.
It called for a modernization of southern society, prescribing an
economic future based on the model of the industrial revolution
rather than the antebellum slave-based economy. Despite the wide
acclaim of the term, it did not envision any political role for
Blacks in Georgia. It was grounded in white supremacy. “The
superiority of the white race of the South must be maintained
forever,” wrote Grady, “because the white race is the
superior race.”
Jewish
people were a small percentage of the New South in 1913 when Leo
Frank, a Jew, was arrested in Atlanta for the murder of Mary Phagan,
a 13-year-old white factory worker, where Frank was employed as a
superintendant. He was sentenced to death by hanging following a
sensational trial. There were numerous unsuccessful appeals,
including to the U.S. Supreme Court, before Georgia’s Governor
commuted his sentence to life imprisonment.
This
happened against a backdrop of intolerance and bigotry, when books,
plays, and especially newspapers routinely depicted Jews with vulgar
and gross stereotypes. For example, prominent Georgian, Tom Watson,
publisher of The
Jeffersonian,
saw his paper’s circulation soar when editorializing with
anti-Semitic rhetoric that Jews were not white people, while lending
his support for the guilty verdict. As an ironic and baffling
indicator of the low status and hatred of Jews, Frank had been found
guilty by an all white jury based on the testimony of a Black man,
whom evidence suggested may have himself committed the crime.
Because
the white Georgia press and public were incensed by the Governor’s
commutation decision, Frank was abducted from prison by a mob in
Milledgeville on August 16, 1915 and driven 175 miles to Marietta,
near the home of Mary Phagan. The next morning he was savagely
brutalized and lynched in front of a menacing and approving crowd of
thousands. Members of the mob and on-lookers demonstrated excitement
in a carnival-like atmosphere, taking photographs of the corpse,
tearing pieces of his clothing as souvenirs, and taking a vote to
determine whether his body would be returned to his family or cut to
pieces.
No
one was arrested. Georgia’s leaders and leading newpapers
which, during this period, also considered Jews to be a non-white
racial group, argued that justice had prevailed. Outside of the South
the lynching was uniformly condemned, receiving more news coverage
and expressions of outrage than Black lynchings, which were more
common occurrences, though Blacks, too, through their newspapers,
leaders and new organizations such as the NAACP joined the chorus in
railing against all lynchings.
Half
of the Jewish population of roughly 3,000 fled the state after the
event, while others exercised safety precautions by concealing their
Jewish identity. Since that time, the Frank lynching has anchored the
Jewish commitment to eliminating hate crimes. Largely because of the
heinous nature of the crime, and the anti-Semitism surrounding it,
and in response to widening attacks of violence on Jews, the
Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was founded in late September of 1913 by
B’nai B’rith. The conviction of Frank was mentioned by
Adolph Kraus when he announced its creation.
Between
1877 and 1950, the NAACP conservatively documented that there were
4,000 victims of lynchings in America. A new report in 2015 from the
Equal Justice Initiative documented more than 4,400 lynchings that
took place during that same period. But none was as gruesome or
grotesque as the last Georgia lynchings which took place in Walton
County Georgia, a small farming community near Atlanta, in the summer
of 1946, known as the Moore’s Ford Lynchings.
Roger
Malcolm, a black sharecropper, was jailed in Monroe, after stabbing a
white man during an argument. On July 25, Loy Harrison, the white
farmer for whom he worked, drove to the jail with Malcolm’s
wife, Dorothy, who was 7 months pregnant, to post his bail. Riding
with them was a Black couple, George and Mae Dorsey. On the way back,
a mob of whites blocked the path of the car, abducted the 2 couples
and drove to a location near the Moore’s Ford Bridge where they
were shot more than 60 times at close range and lynched, some
reporting the unborn child being cut from the womb and stomped to
death.
No
one was arrested. When Harrison was asked by the FBI if he could
identify any of the lynch mob, he insisted that he could not. What
worried Harrison more was not the loss of the lives of four adult
human beings and an unborn child, it was the loss of farm labor. “Why
I’m as mad as anybody,” he complained, “the way
they killed my niggers. I need all of the nigger hands I can get.”
President Harry S. Truman was so outraged by the lynchings that he
established a Committee on Civil Rights, an incredibly courageous
initiative which incensed the Solid South - the Democrats of his own
political party, ultimately causing a break in the party and giving
rise to the segregationist political party, the Dixiecrats of 1948.
Coming
in the wake of WWII and the revelations of the Holocaust, the
atmosphere for the Jews in Georgia was chilling, prompting the
Atlanta branch of the ADL to publish resolutions condemning the
barbarity. No other non-Black Georgia organization openly condemned
the lynchings. In Atlanta, a 17-year-old Morehouse College student,
Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote a letter to Ralph McGill, the editor
of The
Atlanta Constitution,
then one of the few white newspapers to take a stand against
segregation, expressing his views on the immorality and racism of
lynch mobs. He was deeply disturbed by what he felt was a lack of
indignation among whites over the Moore’s Ford lynchings, and
the violence inflicted on Blacks for exercising their right to vote.
Weeks
earlier, Maceo Snipes, a WWII veteran had been fatally shot after
being the first Black to summon the braveness to vote in the Georgia
Democratic primary in Taylor County. King’s father, Martin
Luther King, Sr., would later say this was the initial “intimation
of [his son’s] developing greatness.” A generation later,
Stacey Abrams reflected to The
Washington Post
that the Snipes’ murder was “one of those stories about
oppression and about Jim Crow that those of us who focus on these
issues, especially in this region, you learn about early.”
Against
this painful and abominable backdrop, the Georgia elections for the
U.S. Senate are best appreciated and fully grasped. It is the thread
of history that connects the past with the present. History remains
the best standard for the measurement of progress and the affirmation
of faith, truth, and the continuity of struggles for social justice.
The
historic elections of Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff are about change
the once unimaginable in Georgia, and it seems almost providential
that, in tandem, an African American and a Jew would be the agents of
that change. The transformative significance of this singular change
of power in Congress should not be obscured or lost in the madness of
the insurrection and violent invasion of the U.S. Capitol. It is a
consolation of redemption for what Blacks and Jews have endured in
Georgia and the South, and may point to a Newer South of diversity,
inclusion and one distanced from the social and political traditions
that still define and mirror too many of the values and beliefs of
the Confederacy, the Old South and the New South of Henry Grady.
The
victories of Warnock and Ossoff have allowed us to envision a new
political map, one untethered to restrictions on race, ethnicity,
religion, gender, sexual orientation and zip codes, or to schemes of
voter suppression. Both owe a debt of gratitude and reverence to the
Civil Rights Movement which has positioned them - and many others who
preceded and currently serve with them in Georgia politics - for this
opportunity to serve. In many ways it is the political equivalent of
the moon landing: one large step for Georgia; one giant leap for
America.
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His books, essays, reviews and articles appear widely.
He is a frequent contributor to The Black Commentator. 
