Racist policies are bad for business, as the state’s own history can attest.
The National Center for Civil and Human Rights, which opened, to great fanfare, in June of 2014, is housed in an austere wood-fibre-and-glass structure in downtown Atlanta. It is situated at 100 Ivan Allen, Jr. Boulevard, a street named for the late mayor who, on his first day in office, in 1962, removed the “White” and “Colored” signs from city hall. The civil-rights center—like the nearby King Center and streets around the city that have been renamed for the architects of the movement—is a step in the continued institutionalizing of Atlanta’s history as a theatre of the struggle for racial equality. Its permanent exhibits, ever mindful of the nation’s enduring racial inequalities, are nonetheless a kind of exultant retrospective: the objects on display there are artifacts of a moral triumph. Across town, in the state capitol, however, a different type of historical preservation has taken root, a campaign designed not to remember the ugliness of the past but to resurrect it. Earlier this month, both of the Republican-controlled chambers of the Georgia legislature passed bills that would impede voting, particularly for African-Americans. The House bill proposes to shorten the period of early voting, prevent ballots from being mailed out more than four weeks before an election, reduce the use of ballot drop boxes, further criminalize giving food or water to those waiting in line to vote, and severely restrict early voting on Sundays, when many Black churches take their congregants to polling places. The Senate bill would cut mobile voting facilities, end no-excuse absentee voting, and require people who are qualified to vote absentee to provide a witness’s signature on the ballot envelope. Additional proposals would end, among other things, automatic voter registration at the Department of Driver Services. All these measures are meant to diminish turnout and undo the state of affairs that led to Democrats winning the Presidential race in November and both Senate runoff races in January. The capitol sits in the state’s Fifth Congressional District, which Congressman John Lewis represented until his death, last year. Lewis helped lead the fight for the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
