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Friend,
Looking down Peterson Avenue in Douglas, Georgia, it is easy to slip back in time. If you squint past the late-model cars and ignore the occasional modern building, the old brick structures and small shops that line the city’s downtown hark back to 1950s Americana.
Behind the peaceful façade, however, powerful forces are in motion. The quiet calm that envelops the streets as the sun sets counters the turmoil that the rise of Trumpian politics has brought to the region.
Just off the main drag on Ashley Street, the shell of the Coffee County Elections & Registration office is still standing, for now at least. A new building is coming to replace the boxy brown, single-story affair.
The building became infamous thanks to videos of local election officials leading “cyber sleuths” inside to access some of the county’s voting machines in 2021. The officials were seeking to find evidence of the widespread fraud they claim helped prevent Donald Trump from winning a second term as president.
But these sorts of election shenanigans are not new to Coffee County. Douglas Mayor Pro Tem Olivia Coley-Pearson, who has served on the city’s commission for more than two decades, faced two felony trials for helping a first-time voter understand how a voting machine worked in 2012. And the ongoing effort to gain equal representation for Black and Brown residents is a never-ending struggle that has become more heated as traditional conservatism has given way to MAGA extremism, especially in the deep-red rural South.
“In terms of voting rights, I’ve definitely seen regress,” Coley-Pearson said. “Back in the 1960s, we had to count the jelly beans, this, that and the other. We aren’t still there, but where we are is a more sophisticated means of voter suppression. We might have progressed some at one point in time, but we are currently moving backwards.”
Poy Winichakul, senior staff attorney for Democracy and Voting Rights at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said the systematic effort to minimize the collective voting power of communities of color in Georgia and across the South requires local leaders like Coley-Pearson to stand up.
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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