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      Activists push for referendum to put ‘Cop City’ on ballot in Atlanta

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      A broad coalition of groups in Atlanta has launched a referendum to give voters a chance to say whether they want the controversial police and fire department training center known as “Cop City” built in a forest south-east of the city.The effort requires organizers to collect about 70,000 signatures from Atlanta registered voters in 60 days. Then the question of the city canceling its agreement with the Atlanta Police Foundation to build the $90m center can be added to municipal election ballots in November.The push comes after an estimated thousand people who showed up at City Hall on 5 June proved insufficient to stop Atlanta’s city council from approving about $67m for Cop City. Meanwhile, machines have already begun clear-cutting trees on the project’s 171-acre footprint in South River Forest.The referendum faces what one organizer called “an atmosphere of repression” – including two activists being charged with felonies last week while putting up fliers, bringing total arrests since December to 50.The largest group of arrests, on 5 March in a public park in the forest near where the project is planned, was followed by local government closing the park, in effect shutting off tree-sitting protests by “forest defenders” that had gone on for more than a year.“We’re at the stage where they’ve pushed people out of the forest, they’ve arrested people … they’ve fenced off the forest, they’ve even begun clear-cutting,” said Kamau Franklin, founder of local group Community Movement Builders. “We’re at the stage where the most direct, legal mechanism to stop this project is by referendum.”Cop City came to global attention after police shot dead Manuel Paez Terán, an environmental protester, in a January raid on the forest – the first incident of its kind in US history. The state says Paez Terán shot first and a special prosecutor is evaluating the case.Meanwhile, the movement opposing the project has drawn a wide range of people locally, nationally and internationally who oppose police militarization, urban forest destruction amid climate change and environmental racism. Most residents in neighborhoods surrounding the forest are Black.Most of the organizations driving the referendum are also Black-led, including the regional chapter of Working Families Power, Black Voters Matter and the NAACP. Officials from the Georgia governor, Brian Kemp, down to the mayor have consistently referred to opposition against the center as the work of white “outsiders”.“That narrative is false,” said Britney Whaley, regional director of Working Families Power. “This has been national, but it’s also been community-grown for a few years now.”Ashley Dixon, an Atlanta-area organizer, has led canvassing efforts to inform neighborhoods around South River Forest about the center for nearly a year. Her team has spoken to more than a thousand people. About 80% opposed the project once they knew about it, she said.The only academic poll on the issue to date, from Atlanta’s Emory University, showed slightly more Black respondents opposed the project than supported it, with the opposite being true for whites. Atlanta’s population is 48% Black.The idea for the referendum came from one that succeeded in stopping a spaceport from being built in coastal Georgia, said Will Harlan, founder of Forest Keeper, a national forest conservation organization. “To me, Cop City is the most important issue in conservation in the south-east,” Harlan said. “A referendum is the smartest, most democratic solution … [and] a way to find resolution and closure.”Although the 2022 spaceport referendum affected a county of only 55,000 people, similarities between the two controversies point to the role voters can play when other efforts fall short.In that case, local officials “dug their heels in” and stopped responding to press requests or providing transparent information to the public, said Megan Desrosiers, who led the referendum. In the case of Cop City, the Atlanta Police Foundation has stopped answering press requests for at least a year, and the city of Atlanta was recently discovered to be understating the project’s cost to taxpayers by about $36m.The project is planned on land the city owns that is located in neighboring DeKalb county. Because of Atlanta’s ownership, only Atlanta voters can participate in the referendum.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAlthough the city’s voters haven’t seen an effort like this before, California has a long record of asking voters to decide on environmental issues, said Keith Mako Woodhouse, author of The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism.Over time, industry and political opponents have wielded tactics ranging from creating competing propositions to airing ad campaigns to discredit environmentalists, he said.“There’s always going to be scary counter-arguments. It’s a matter of coming up with clear messaging” to be successful, he added.Organizers of the Cop City referendum pointed to the state’s heavy-handed approach to protesters as a primary concern. There have been 42 domestic terrorism charges to date. A bail and legal defense fund’s members were also arrested and the state added fundraising to its criminal description of the training center’s opposition.In that context, it took about a dozen attempts at finding a legally required fiscal sponsor for the referendum, which may need as much as $3.5m to reach success, said spokesperson Paul Glaze.Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter – one of two organizations that agreed to take the sponsorship role – said the recent Atlanta Solidarity Fund arrests were done “to send a message, in hopes it would have a chilling effect. We’re not naive about what the threats are – but we believe our community cares about this issue.”Getting into Atlanta’s communities will take a massive campaign, said Mary Hooks, national field secretary for Movement for Black Lives and part of the team overseeing the signature gathering. Hooks hopes to get canvassers into at least 200 of the city’s 243 neighborhoods, and said more than 3,000 volunteers had already signed up.“This is an opportunity to protect direct democracy … when so many people are being left out,” she said. More

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      Atlanta approves funding to build ‘Cop City’ despite fierce opposition

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      The Atlanta city council early on Tuesday approved funding for the construction of a proposed police and firefighter training center, rejecting the pleas of hundreds of activists who spoke for hours in fierce opposition to the project they decry as “Cop City”.Some Cop City opponents have faced unprecedented arrests during which police have accused them under a state domestic terrorism statute, prompting a legal challenge which argues that the protesters are being unduly targeted over their constitutionally protected free speech.Tuesday’s 11-4 vote just after 5am is a significant victory for Atlanta’s mayor, Andre Dickens, who has made the $90m project a large part of his first term in office, despite significant pushback to the effort. The city council also passed a resolution requesting two seats on the governing board of a foundation dedicated to raising funds for Atlanta police.The decentralized “Stop Cop City” movement has galvanized protesters from across the country, especially in the wake of the January fatal police shooting of Manuel Paez Terán, a 26-year-old environmental activist known as “Tortuguita” who had been camping in the woods near the site of the proposed project in DeKalb county.For about 14 hours, residents again and again took to the podium to denounce the project, saying it would be a gross misuse of public funds to build the huge facility in a large urban forest in a poor, majority-Black area.“We’re here pleading our case to a government that has been unresponsive, if not hostile, to an unprecedented movement in our city council’s history,” said Matthew Johnson, the executive director of Beloved Community Ministries, a local social justice non-profit. “We’re here to stop environmental racism and the militarization of the police … We need to go back to meeting the basic needs rather than using police as the sole solution to all of our social problems.”The training center was approved by the city council in September 2021 but required an additional vote for more funding. City officials say the new 85-acre (34-hectare) campus would replace inadequate training facilities and would help address difficulties in hiring and retaining police officers that worsened after nationwide protests against police brutality and racial injustice three years ago.But opponents, who have been joined by activists from around the country, say they fear it will lead to greater militarization of the police and that its construction will exacerbate environmental damage. Protesters had been camping at the site since at least last year, and police said they had caused damage and attacked law enforcement officers and others.The highly scrutinized vote on Tuesday also comes in the wake of the arrests last week of three organizers who lead the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, which has provided bail money and helped find attorneys for arrested protesters.Prosecutors have accused the three activists of money laundering and charity fraud, saying they used some of the money to fund violent acts of “forest defenders”. Warrants cite reimbursements for expenses including “gasoline, forest clean-up, totes, (Covid-19) rapid tests, media, yard signs”. But the charges have alarmed human rights groups and prompted both of Georgia’s Democratic senators to issue statements over the weekend expressing their concerns.The Democratic US senator Raphael Warnock tweeted that bail funds held important roles during the civil rights movement and said that the images of the heavily armed police officers raiding the home where the activists lived “reinforce the very suspicions that help to animate the current conflict – namely, concerns Georgians have about over-policing, the quelling of dissent in a democracy, and the militarization of our police”. More

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      Atlanta shooting part of alarming US crackdown on environmental defenders

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      Atlanta shooting part of alarming US crackdown on environmental defenders Twenty states have enacted laws restricting rights to peaceful protest, as environmentalists are increasingly criminalized The shooting of Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, believed to be the first environmental defender killed in the US, is the culmination of a dangerous escalation in the criminalization and repression of those who seek to protect natural resources in America, campaigners have warned.The death of the 26-year-old, who was also known as “Tortuguita” or “Little Turtle,” in a forest on the fringes of Atlanta was the sort of deadly act “people who have been paying attention to this issue assumed would happen soon, with no sense of joy”, according to Marla Marcum, founder of the Climate Disobedience Center, which supports climate protesters.“The police and the state have a callousness towards the lives of those on the frontline of environmental causes and I hope this is a wake-up call to those who didn’t know that,” she said. “I hope people take the time to notice what’s going on, because if this trajectory of criminalization continues, no one is going to be safe.”Terán was shot and killed by police as officers from an assortment of forces swept through the small camp of a loose-knit activist group defending the urban forest on 18 January. Police say Terán shot and injured a Georgia state trooper with a handgun first, but the Georgia bureau of investigation has said the shooting was not recorded on body cameras, prompting calls for an independent investigation.Locator map of Atlanta, Georgia with South River forest colored in red.State and local authorities have reacted aggressively to protesters trying to stop 85 acres of the forest being torn down to build a sprawling, state-of-the-art, $90m police training complex – dubbed “Cop City” by opponents as it will feature a mock city for “tactical” exercises.Nineteen forest defenders have been charged with felonies under Georgia’s domestic terrorism laws since December. Authorities have detailed the alleged acts of so-called terror by nine of those facing charges, which include trespassing, constructing a campsite and sitting in the trees of the woodland, a 300-acre wedge of land that once contained a prison farm but is now one of the largest urban forests in the US.Brian Kemp, the Georgia governor who declared a state of emergency and mobilized 1,000 members of the national guard over the protests, has blamed “out-of-state rioters” and a “network of militant activists who have committed similar acts of domestic terrorism across the country” for the troubles.Georgia’s response to the protests follows an alarming pattern of environmental and land rights defenders across the US being threatened, arrested and charged with increasingly drastic crimes, including terrorism, for opposing oil and gas pipelines or the destruction of forests or waterways, advocates claim.‘Assassinated in cold blood’: activist killed protesting Georgia’s ‘Cop City’Read more“This was meant as a chilling deterrent, to show that the state can kill and jail environmental defenders with impunity. It reflects a trend towards escalation and violence to distract from the real issue of advancing corporate interests over lands,” said Nick Estes, author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance.The current crackdown on environmental and land rights defenders can be traced back to the aftermath of 9/11 and the expansion of the definition of terrorism which sparked a wave of arrests known as the “green scare” targeting so-called eco- terrorists.This then spurred the subsequent proliferation of state legislation criminalizing – or at least attempting to criminalize – all kinds of civil disobedience including Black Lives Matter protests and opposition to fossil fuel projects like gas pipelines, defined as critical infrastructure, essentially to protect business interests over environmental and Indigenous sovereignty concerns.“The criminalization of land and water protectors and Indigenous nations using critical infrastructure security laws can be traced back to the Patriot Act. This has contributed to the current escalation as it allows the definition of terrorism to be more vague and expansive, which is intended to have a chilling effect on peaceful protesters,” said Kai Bosworth, author of Pipeline Populism and assistant professor of geography at Virginia Commonwealth University.The 2016-17 uprising against the Dakota Access oil pipeline (DAPL), which cut through the Standing Rock reservation in North and South Dakota and threatened tribal lands, burial sites and water sources, sparked a brutal response by authorities that can be seen as a before and after in how environmental defenders are policed.Law enforcement used automatic rifles, sound cannons, concussion grenades and police dogs against protesters, leading to hundreds of injuries as personnel and equipment poured in from over 75 agencies across the country. Indigenous leaders and journalists were among hundreds of arrests – including 142 on a single day in October 2016 – with scores facing felony charges and hefty fines.Cartogram of the US, with the 20 states that have enacted laws restricting the right to protest peacefully highlighted in red.Since then, a total of 20 states have enacted laws that impose harsh penalties for impeding “critical infrastructure”, such as making trespass a felony offense, or have brought in vaguely defined domestic terrorism laws that have been used to target environmentalists and Indigenous communities. Overall, 45 states have considered legislation restricting peaceful protests, and seven currently have laws pending.These laws have “been successful in really tamping down dissent and sowing fear among people”, said Marcum. Much of this fear has been fueled by the labeling of protestors as “terrorists” by senior elected figures such as Kemp, according to Elly Page, senior legal advisor at the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, which has tracked the anti-protest bills.“We see autocrats around the world use rhetoric like that to clamp down on dissent,” Page said. “The widespread demonization of protestors we’ve seen from politicians who call them terrorists or a mob is incredibly harmful. I think that creates an environment where violence against protestors is not unlikely and that more of these tragedies will take place.”This lawyer should be world-famous for his battle with Chevron – but he’s in jail | Erin BrockovichRead moreMany of the states’ legislation shares language drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), a rightwing group backed by fossil fuel companies.In Florida, South Dakota and Oklahoma, for example, a “riot” is considered to be any unauthorized action by three or more people, while in Florida, Oklahoma and Iowa drivers who injure protestors blocking traffic, a common tactic used by environmental activists, are given legal immunity.In Arkansas, an “act of terrorism” is considered to be anything that causes “substantial damage” to a public “monument”, which could include graffiti. Across 17 Republican-controlled states, protesters face up to 10 years in prison and million-dollar fines for offences.The broad application of these laws, as well as accompanying legislation that criminalize people and organizations that support allegedly dangerous protestors, “chill activism and make it riskier for people to be involved in their right to protest”, said Page.“Many of the laws have language so broad it makes constitutionally-protected speech illegal,” she said. “It gives authorities discretion to apply the law to an activity they don’t like … We know fossil fuel interests are promoting these sorts of laws.”As the criminalization of peaceful protesters has spread, so has the rollout of new fossil fuel projects projects under both Democrat and Republican administrations – despite the escalation of costly and destructive extreme weather events caused by the climate breakdown.“There have been no effective federal efforts to help protesters or defend against criminalization,” said Charmaine Chua, assistant professor of global studies at the University of California. “If you’ve been paying attention at the way cops indiscriminately kill people and the virulent antipathy towards protest movements trying to solve climate change, it’s hard to be surprised at Manuel’s death but still it does feel unprecedented.”Indigenous tribes tried to block a car battery mine. But the courts stood in the wayRead moreSabine von Mering, one of around 900 protestors who were arrested for opposing the Line 3 pipeline that moves oil through Minnesota, said she was “deeply shocked” to hear of Terán’s killing but that she hoped it will galvanize more people to get involved in climate activism. “Any criminalization of protest is an attack on our democracy,” said von Mering, an academic at Brandeis University.“At Line 3 there were several cases of police being extremely aggressive and violent, it was traumatizing to witness it and I’m an old white lady – I didn’t experience the worst of it. The charges were used to intimidate and quell protest.”To critics of the fossil fuel industry, the Line 3 protests are a prime example of its ability to shape the law enforcement that is increasingly cracking down on its opponents. In 2021 it emerged that Enbridge, the Canadian company behind the pipeline, reimbursed US police $2.4m for arresting and surveilling hundreds of Line 3 demonstrators. The payments covered officer training, police surveillance, wages, overtime, meals, hotels and equipment.Steven Donziger, an attorney who was embroiled in a long-running legal battle with Chevron on behalf of Indigenous people in Ecuador, said the payments are part of a “dangerous trend” of fossil fuel influence over the functions of government and the law.“As we get closer to tipping point of no return on climate change, the effort to silence advocacy to have clean energy transition is intensifying,” Donziger said. “To attack young people who are trying to preserve a forest with a military-style assault is totally inappropriate but is unfortunately a sad reflection of where the country has gone.“For weeks these people were called terrorists, which is a complete misuse of the word. The police have been conditioned to believe these people are terrorists and what do you do with terrorists? In the US you kill them. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”TopicsEnvironmental activismUS policingAtlantaGeorgiaUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Could Trump be charged for racketeering? A Georgia prosecutor thinks so

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      Could Trump be charged for racketeering? A Georgia prosecutor thinks soFani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney, appears poised to use the states’s Rico law to convict the ex-president An Atlanta prosecutor appears ready to use the same Georgia statute to prosecute Donald Trump that she used last year to charge dozens of gang members and well-known rappers who allegedly conspired to commit violent crime.What is Georgia’s Trump election inquiry and will it lead to charges?Read moreFani Willis was elected Fulton county district attorney just days before the conclusion of the 2020 presidential election. But as she celebrated her promotion, Trump and his allies set in motion a flurry of unfounded claims of voter fraud in Georgia, the state long hailed as a Republican stronghold for local and national elections.Willis assumed office on 1 January 2021, becoming the first Black woman in the position. The next day, according to reports, Trump called rad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, urging him to “find” the nearly 12,000 votes he needed to secure a victory and overturn the election results.The following month, Willis launched an investigation into Trump’s interference in the state’s general election. Now, in a hearing on Tuesday, the special purpose grand jury and the presiding judge will decide whether to release to the public the final report and findings of the grand jury that was seated to investigate Trump and his allies.Willis, who has not shied away from high-profile cases, has made headlines for her aggressive style of prosecution. Willis was a lead prosecutor in the 2013 prosecution of educators in Atlanta accused of inflating students’ scores on standardized tests. More recently, Willis brought a case against a supposed Georgia gang known as YSL, including charges against rappers Yung Thug and Gunna.Though the cases of teachers forging test scores and the alleged crimes of a local gang may, on their face, seem to have nothing to do with the alleged election interference of a former president, Willis is alleging that all of these cases illustrate a pattern of organized crime.The first two cases fall under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or Rico Act. Though no official charges have been brought in the Trump investigation, experts believe that Rico charges are a very real possibility for the former president.“Among the things that are considered racketeering activity in the state of Georgia is knowingly and willfully making a false, fictitious or fraudulent statement or representation in any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of state government,” said Clark D Cunningham, a professor of law at Georgia State University. “If you do that, you’ve committed a racketeering activity. If you attempt to do that, if you solicit someone else to do it or you coerce someone else to do it – it’s all considered racketeering under Georgia law.”Georgia’s Rico Act, which dates back to 1980, can be used more broadly than the more strict federal Rico statute, Cunningham said. Prosecutors can bring charges under many different state and federal laws to allege a pattern of misconduct, and convictions carry a penalty of up to 20 years in prison.In a recent interview with the Washington Post, Willis praised the utility of Georgia’s law.“I have right now more Rico indictments in the last 18 months, 20 months, than were probably done in the last 10 years out of this office,” she said.Willis’ office declined the Guardian’s request for an interview, saying she would not speak to the media in the days before the 24 January hearing. While the tools she would use if she chose to prosecute Trump are still unknown, she has reportedly said she is considering using the state’s Rico law.In 2021, she hired Rico expert ​​John Floyd to serve as a special assistant district attorney to work with lawyers in her office on any cases involving racketeering.According to Cunningham, Willis’ use of the Rico Act to prosecute Trump would be a “stroke of genius”. She is not only well-versed in what it takes to get results through the state’s vast Rico Act, but as a prosecutor and now district attorney, Willis “cut her teeth” on major, politically divisive cases using the statute.“She’s received criticism that she’s prosecuting cases that are too ambitious or that there’s too much of a conspiracy alleged, but she’s shown in these cases that she’s able to use Rico to prosecute all the way to the top,” Cunningham said.As he explains, Rico was initially established as a way to prosecute gang and organized crime activity when leaders at the top of organizations typically did not directly commit crimes themselves but instead had others of “lower ranking” do it.“There appear to be clear criminal activities, and [no matter] whether or not the person at the top, in this case, Trump, was directly involved in each activity or not, if he participated in what is shown to be a racketeering organization, which “Stop the Steal” might be, and conspired with others, participated directly or indirectly, he can be shown to have violated the Rico law,” he said.A key element of prosecution under Georgia’s Rico Act is the need to illustrate a pattern. According to an analysis from the Brookings Institution, Trump’s repeated calls to election officials, targeted written correspondence, false allegations and supposed coordinated attempts to provide fraudulent electoral certificates constitute a pattern of misconduct.“The statute recognizes that if violations of individual criminal statutes by a single person are bad, an enterprise that repeatedly violates the law is worse and should be subject to additional sanction,” the analysis states.Members of the special grand jury were able to issue public subpoenas of pivotal players in the alleged conspiracy, the only public element of the investigation so far. Some of those subpoenaed would otherwise likely be uncooperative and offer limited insight. Those subpoenaed include Trump’s former attorney Rudy Giuliani, South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, and Georgia governor Brian Kemp.Most of those subpoenaed in the case have provided significant pushback. They have cited partisan political motivation as a driving force of the case, rather than an unbiased application of the law.Though Kemp vehemently denies widespread election fraud during the 2020 election and went toe to toe with Trump to confirm the state’s election results, he has not been cooperative in the inquiry. In one of Kemp’s attorney’s filings in response to his subpoena, he accused Willis’ probe of being politically motivated, hinting at a partisan bias. “Unfortunately, what began as an investigation into election interference has itself devolved into its own mechanism of election interference,” he said.While the special grand jury proceedings are confidential, there is speculation as to how Willis will proceed following Tuesday’s hearing, Cunningham said. But given her history of using the Rico Act, he said it’s likely she will string together “all kinds of different events over the span of a number of months, which by themselves might seem innocent or not seem worthy of prosecution”, to create a “convincing narrative that this was a conspiracy to ultimately undermine American democracy”.TopicsGeorgiaAtlantaDonald TrumpUS elections 2020US politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Biden honors Martin Luther King Jr with sermon: ‘His legacy shows us the way’

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      Biden honors Martin Luther King Jr with sermon: ‘His legacy shows us the way’ President gave sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta and spoke about the need to protect democracy Joe Biden marked what would have been Martin Luther King Jr’s 94th birthday with a sermon on Sunday at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, celebrating the legacy of the civil rights leader while speaking about the urgent need to protect US democracy.There’s one winner in the Biden documents discovery: Donald TrumpRead moreBiden said he was “humbled” to become the first sitting president to give the Sunday sermon at King’s church, also describing the experience as “intimidating”.“I believe Dr King’s life and legacy show us the way and we should pay attention,” Biden said. He later noted he was wearing rosary beads his son, Beau, wore as he died.“I doubt whether any of us would have thought during Dr King’s time that literally the institutional structures of this country might collapse, like we’re seeing in Brazil, we’re seeing in other parts of the world,” Biden said.In a sermon that lasted around 25 minutes, the president spoke about the continued need to protect democracy. Unlike some of his other speeches on the topic, Biden did not mention Donald Trump or Republicans directly.The GOP has embraced new voting restrictions, including in Georgia, and defended the former president’s role in the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January.“Nothing is guaranteed in our democracy,” Biden said. “We know there’s a lot of work that has to continue on economic justice, civil rights, voting rights and protecting our democracy.”He praised Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who noted at a ceremony after she was confirmed it had taken just one generation in her family to go from segregation to the US supreme court.“Give us the ballot and we will place judges on the benches of the south who will do justly and love mercy,” Biden said, quoting King.Biden preached in Atlanta a little over a year after he gave a forceful speech calling for the Senate to get rid of the filibuster, a procedural rule that requires 60 votes to advance most legislation, in order to pass sweeping voting reforms.“I’m tired of being quiet,” the president said in that speech.A Democratic voting rights bill named after John Lewis, the late civil rights leader and Georgia congressman, would have made election day a national holiday, ensured access to early voting and mail-in ballots and enabled the justice department to intervene in states with a history of voter interference.But that effort collapsed when two Democrats, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, refused to get rid of the filibuster. Sinema is now an independent who caucuses with the Democrats.Since then, there has been no federal action on voting rights. In March 2021, Biden issued an executive order telling federal agencies to do what they could do improve opportunities for voter registration.The speech also comes as the US supreme court considers a case that could significantly curtail Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the 1965 law that was one of the crowning achievements of King and other activists. A ruling is expected by June.Biden’s failure to bolster voting right protections, a central campaign pledge, is one of his biggest disappointments in office. The task is even steeper now Republicans control the House. In advance of Biden’s visit to Atlanta, White House officials said he was committed to advocating for meaningful voting rights action.“The president will speak on a number of issues at the church, including how important it is that we have access to our democracy,” senior adviser Keisha Lance Bottoms said.Bottoms, who was mayor of Atlanta from 2018 to 2022, also said “you can’t come to Atlanta and not acknowledge the role that the civil rights movement and Dr King played in where we are in the history of our country”.This is a delicate moment for Biden. On Thursday the attorney general, Merrick Garland, announced the appointment of a special counsel to investigate how Biden handled classified documents after leaving the vice-presidency in 2017. The White House on Saturday revealed that additional classified records were found at Biden’s home near Wilmington, Delaware.Biden was invited to Ebenezer, where King was co-pastor from 1960 until he was assassinated in 1968, by Senator Raphael Warnock, the senior pastor. Like many battleground state Democrats in 2022, Warnock kept his distance from Biden as the the president’s approval rating lagged. But with Biden beginning to turn his attention to an expected 2024 re-election effort, Georgia can expect plenty of attention.Warnock told ABC’s This Week: “I’m honored to present the president of the United States there where he will deliver the message and where he will sit in the spiritual home of Martin Luther King Jr, Georgia’s greatest son, arguably the greatest American, who reminds us that we are tied in a single garment of destiny, that this is not about Democrat and Republican, red, yellow, brown, black and white. We’re all in it together.”In 2020, Biden won Georgia as well as Michigan and Pennsylvania, where Black votes made up much of the Democratic electorate. Turning out Black voters in those states will be essential to Biden’s 2024 hopes.The White House has tried to promote Biden’s agenda in minority communities, citing efforts to encourage states to take equity into account under the $1tn infrastructure bill. The administration also has acted to end sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine offenses, scrapping a policy widely seen as racist.The administration highlights Biden’s work to diversify the judiciary, including his appointment of Jackson as the first Black woman on the supreme court and the confirmation of 11 Black women judges to federal appeals courts – more than under all previous presidents.King fueled passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. Members of his family attended Biden’s sermon. The president planned to be in Washington on Monday, to speak at the National Action Network’s annual breakfast, held on the MLK holiday.TopicsJoe BidenBiden administrationUS voting rightsUS politicsCivil rights movementMartin Luther KingRacenewsReuse this content More

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      Can Democrats lock down Atlanta’s immigrant vote – or will Georgia slip away?

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      Can Democrats lock down Atlanta’s immigrant vote – or will Georgia slip away? Georgia in focus: A fragile coalition around Atlanta helped shift the state’s politics, but as the midterms loom the cracks are showing“Very normal” is how Rupal Vaishnav describes his experience as an entrenched resident of Atlanta. He moved to the city at the age of nine, after immigrating to the US from India in the late 1970s. When his parents settled in Clayton county – a suburb south of downtown that’s now home to the world’s busiest airport – it was still largely populated by white families living in 60s-era bungalows; before that, it was the fictional setting for Gone With the Wind.Vaishnav was one of two Indian kids in school – the other was his brother – and a strict vegetarian who spoke Gujarati at home. But he joined the school’s air force junior reserves, studied mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech and earned his law degree from Georgia State. For the past five years, he’s worked in the local district attorney’s office and this year he ran to be a state judge in Forsyth county, once infamous for its lynchings. “The biggest thing I struggled with growing up and that I still see in my son are the identity conflicts,” Vaishnav says, now 50. “Are you American? Are you Indian? You have to get comfortable knowing the two cultures. It’s a balancing act that you get better at over time.”The ‘all-out’ effort to overcome Georgia’s new restrictive voting billRead moreImmigrants like Vaishnav have played an important role in what has been a remarkable shift in the demographics of Georgia, and politics with it. Georgia went blue in the 2020 election – and Asian American voters could well decide whether that was an accident or the new normal. Between 1970 and 1980 roughly 80,000 people immigrated here, many from Asia, where they settled in the suburbs of Atlanta – counties like Clayton, Fulton and Forsyth, which gained national infamy in the 1980s as a sundown town after a spate of Klan attacks against civil rights activists. As Atlanta’s Black population has gradually recovered population share, wealth and civil rights after decades of domestic terrorism and redlining policies, the city’s Asian American population has exploded, too.As of the most recent census, Asian Americans comprised nearly 5% of metro Atlanta’s 6 million residents, putting them nearly level with the city’s Latino population. Most hailed from India and Pakistan, enticed by the city’s booming academic, medical and tech industries. The city is more obviously international now than it has ever been: the Confederate banners and whites-only placards have long since been replaced by Ethiopian restaurants, West Indian markets and businesses touting Spanish proficiency. In a 2021 essay, author Sanjena Sathian, whose critically acclaimed novel Gold Diggers follows an Indian-American teen in Atlanta, characterized her hometown as “a surprisingly Whitmanesque experiment in pluralism, in which unpoetic concrete strip malls substitute for lyrical spears of summer grass”. On television, Atlanta’s prosperous non-white coalition is reflected in programs such as Married to Medicine, in which an Indian-American plastic surgeon and his fashion blogger wife feature prominently within the show’s Black American ensemble.She’s Georgia’s great blue hope – but can Stacey Abrams win a crucial race?Read moreRecently, that non-white majority has played a pivotal role in overturning Georgia’s Republican control, registering to vote in the hundreds of thousands. After close defeats in the 2016 presidential election and Senate race, the Democrats finally squeaked to victory in 2020, winning Georgia for Joe Biden and wresting control of both Senate seats for the first time since the mid-1970s. The drama of election night came down to ballots being counted in Fulton, DeKalb, Gwinnett and Cobb counties – Atlanta suburbs that have all seen large population growth among people of color.That flip, from red to purple, doesn’t happen without Stacey Abrams, who avenged her narrow loss in the race for governor in 2018 by whipping together a coalition of voters of color, a long game that made her a national hero on the left. Another national figure to emerge is Raphael Warnock, who won the special US Senate election in 2020 against Kelly Loeffler, an outspoken critic of the Black Lives Matter movement, after players on the Atlanta Dream basketball team she co-owned led an insurrection campaign against her.But Georgia’s diverse voting bloc is fragile. Two years on, Abrams and Warnock are struggling in their Senate and gubernatorial races. And Democrats are finding that even the South Asian label is a broad one. “Even just in India, there are so many varieties of people,” says Ketan Goswami of Hindus of Georgia Pac, a bipartisan group that aims to build coalitions through religion. “Lumping us all together in this South Asian identity is, in my mind, actually very criminal.”Even the Democrats’ big sell to the immigrant coalition, a smoother or at least shorter path to citizenship, seems a careless enticement. Many of the Indians in Georgia, reckons Vaishnav, are temporary visa holders in specialty occupations who would vote for immigration reform – but cannot. The residents who can vote, on the other hand, often have homes and families and six-figure incomes to protect – at which point tax cuts and more cops on streets become priorities. “Once you get here”, Vaishnav says, “I think you’re sensitive to the idea that what you have you should share with others.”Mobilizing this coalition has its challenges, too. “There’s embedded historical resistance toward electoral civic engagement,” says Berenice Rodriguez of the Atlanta chapter of Asian Americans Advancing Justice. “The biggest gap is disinformation and language accessibility, which really affect the older generations.”Republicans won’t commit to honoring vote results this fall. That’s troubling | Robert ReichRead moreMeanwhile, Republicans are hitting back. Georgia’s GOP-controlled state legislature passed a sweeping voting law last April that cracks down on absentee balloting and voter identification, in part to short-circuit the Democrats’ hold on immigrant Atlanta. The White House also did its Georgia candidates few favors while entertaining the 2022 championship-winning Atlanta Braves, the last team with a Native-themed name in major pro sports besides hockey’s Chicago Blackhawks; press secretary Karin Jean-Pierre stopped short of calling for the team’s name to be changed, but said: “We should listen to Native Americans and Indigenous people who are the most impacted by this.” Robert Cahaly, a pollster and founder of the Atlanta-based Trafalgar Group, found that more than 70% of locals wanted the Braves to remain the Braves, and noted the political risk of arguing otherwise, pointing out that the Democratic senators “Warnock and [Jon] Ossoff did not make a comment on whether the Braves should change their name – and two Republicans said they should not.”More broadly, the conservative positions of the Republicans resonate with immigrant groups who value family and generational wealth – which is why efforts to court their support have suddenly become so intense. “A lot of money has funneled into the state to allow us to expand the work we’ve been doing for a long time,” says Rodriguez. “But I do fear that once the spotlight is gone, if Georgia doesn’t become a swing state, that funding will stop.”Vaishnav’s parents borrowed money from friends to start a printing business; Mr Quik Copy has been a fixture of Dekalb county, a former civil war battleground, for almost four decades. “The county gave them a proclamation for having it in the same location since ’85,” Vaishnav said. A similar sense of permanence for Democrats, though, will be much harder won.“People like to say South Asians are either all Democrat or all Republican,” Vaishnav says. “But I can tell you, there’s so much variety.”TopicsUS midterm elections 2022GeorgiaUS politicsAtlantafeaturesReuse this content More

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      Stacey Abrams helped swing Georgia for the Democrats. So why is she trailing?

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      She’s Georgia’s great blue hope. Can Stacey Abrams win her crucial race? Georgia in focus: Despite being hailed as architect of Georgia’s political transformation, Abrams is still an underdog in her rematch with Governor Brian Kemp for reasons that make Democrats nervousStacey Abrams was a high school senior the first time she was invited to the Georgia governor’s mansion. It was for a ceremony honoring the state’s class valedictorians, and Abrams was her school’s top academic achiever. At the time, her family did not own a car, so Abrams and her parents rode the bus from their working-class suburb to the stately mansion in downtown Atlanta.When they arrived, Abrams recalls a guard emerging from the security booth. Eyeing the bus, he told them: “This is a private event. You don’t belong here.” Never mind that her invitation was tucked into her mother’s handbag or that her name was second on the list of invitees.Ginni Thomas still believes Trump’s false claim the 2020 election was stolenRead moreA terse exchange ensued between her father and the guard, who grudgingly checked the guest list and let them in.“The thing of it is,” Abrams said at a recent campaign stop in Atlanta, “I don’t remember meeting the governor of Georgia. I don’t remember meeting my fellow valedictorians from 180 school districts … All I remember is a man standing in front of the most powerful place in Georgia, looking at me, telling me I don’t belong.”But the story doesn’t have to end there, Abrams tells supporters as she campaigns to become the first Black female governor in American history. With their help this November, she promises, they will “open those gates wide” and “win the future for Georgia”.Four years ago, Abrams came within a hair of it. She lost the Georgia governorship to Republican Brian Kemp by fewer than 55,000 votes, in a race dominated by allegations of voter suppression, which Kemp, then the secretary of state overseeing the election, denied.In her near-miss, national Democrats saw a promising leader – and the potential to reclaim the southern state that had long ago slipped away. Successive Democratic wins in the years that followed validated her work expanding the electorate, a decade-long project aimed at mobilizing the disillusioned and the marginalized.Abrams was even considered a potential running mate for Joe Biden in 2020, a prospect she welcomed. But she always kept her sights on the governor’s mansion, declining pleas to run for the Senate. Now, her second chance has arrived.Yet Abrams, hailed by Democrats as the architect of Georgia’s political transformation, enters the final weeks of her rematch with Kemp an underdog.Polls consistently show the 48-year-old Democrat trailing Kemp, now a relatively popular governor with the advantage of incumbency. The latest Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) poll found that the governor had significantly expanded his lead over Abrams, 50% to 42%. And while Abrams has stronger support among her base than Kemp, according to a Monmouth University survey, it concluded that her path to victory was “much narrower”.But Abrams is refusing to be counted out. A Yale-educated tax attorney, she says she trusts her math better than the polls. In the fast-growing and diversifying battleground state, she notes that as many as 1.6 million new voters have been added to the rolls since 2018, many times Kemp’s margin of victory that year.“Every success I’ve ever had in politics has been about building the electorate I need – building the electorate we should have, which is an electorate that’s much more reflective of the state,” Abrams said during an interview at a coffee shop in Atlanta.Georgia is nearly evenly divided between the parties, and in many ways, Abrams and Kemp embody the dueling factions of the state’s polarized electorate. Abrams, a former state house minority leader and prominent voting rights advocate, is working to mobilize Black, Latino and Asian American voters along with young people in Atlanta and its sprawling suburbs. While Kemp, a staunch conservative who easily defeated a Trump-backed primary challenge earlier this year, draws overwhelming support from white voters in the rural and exurban parts of the state.“This is 100% the battle of the bases,” said Nsé Ufot, leader of the New Georgia Project, a group founded by Abrams to register and engage young people and voters of color. “And it’s 100% going to be determined by who shows up to vote and whose votes get counted.”Canvassers with the New Georgia Project are pounding the pavement to register and turn out voters this cycle. Their goal is to knock on at least 2m doors by election day. Though some Democrats have expressed doubts about Abrams’ expansion strategy, Ufot said it has already proven effective by paving the way for Biden’s victory in 2020 and the election of two Democratic senators in 2021, which delivered the party control of the chamber.“Now is the time to double down, not to second guess ourselves,” she said.Despite a deeply loyal base, surveys suggest Abrams has become a more polarizing figure since her last campaign. Supporters say it is not surprising, after four years of being vilified by conservatives as a far-left extremist who views the governorship only as a stepping stone to the presidency.But it may be making it harder for Abrams to attract the vanishingly thin slice of independent and moderate Republican voters whose discomfort with Trump pushed them toward Democrats in recent elections. A Marist Poll found that 11% of Georgians who voted for Biden in 2020 plan to back Kemp for governor, while just 5% of Trump voters favor Abrams.“If Abrams looks to be more than a contender and she wants to win,” said Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta, “she really is going to have to shake the tree and find a few more Democratic voters.”Meanwhile, Trump loyalists who were once wary of Kemp have largely aligned behind him, persuaded by his conservative record and their fear of an Abrams victory.“We definitely cannot have a Stacey Abrams governorship in Georgia,” said Salleigh Grubbs, chair of the Cobb County Republican party, which censured Kemp in 2021. “That’s a very scary proposition.”Kemp’s refusal to overturn Biden’s victory in Georgia during the turbulent weeks after the 2020 election infuriated Trump. In the months that followed, he made Kemp the target of a vengeance campaign, even once musing that Abrams would make a better governor.But since Kemp’s strong primary showing, Trump has mostly stayed away from the governor’s race. And Republican allies say Kemp’s independence will probably help him win back disaffected suburban voters.Abrams is vocal in her view that Kemp deserves no credit for withstanding pressure to subvert a free and fair election.“While I’m glad that he didn’t commit treason, that is not a reason to lionize him,” she said in the interview. “He simply did not do one thing and he has used that to cloak every other bad behavior.”Kemp, Abrams argues, has been relatively silent on Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, even as the former president’s stolen-election myth continues to resonate deeply with conservatives in the state. He also backed an overhaul of the state’s voting laws that critics said was rooted in Trump’s groundless claims of widespread fraud.“Kemp is a Maga Republican who has done everything in his power to align himself with not only Trump’s values but Trump’s behavior,” she added. “He has just done it in a more subtle way.”In Georgia, like elsewhere, Democrats face a challenging political environment. Voters have soured on the president amid widespread economic malaise and anxiety about the rising cost of living.With the economy top of mind for voters, Kemp has sought to tie Abrams to Biden and warned that her economic plans would deepen inflation. At the same time, he is campaigning as a steward of Georgia’s bustling economy, which includes record-low unemployment and a record $21.2bn in state-tracked business investments.According to the AJC poll, Georgians were significantly more pessimistic about the direction of the country than the direction of their state. On the campaign trail, Kemp attributes the rosier outlook to his decision to reopen businesses after they closed during the earliest months of the pandemic. He also approved of popular policies that boosted teacher pay, provided tax rebates to families and suspended the state’s gas tax.“The courage that we have seen from Governor Brian Kemp has been extraordinary,” said Nikki Haley, the former Republican governor of South Carolina, during a campaign appearance with Kemp at a burger joint in Atlanta. “First state in the country to open up after Covid – he was vilified for it, and it turns out that he’s the one that saved the economy, saved our businesses … and allowed people to get back to work.”Abrams has sought to paint a starkly different picture of the economy under Kemp, one in which the wealthiest have profited while the poor have been left behind. At the center of her economic agenda is a plan to fully expand Medicaid, which she argues is critical to stopping a wave of hospital closures across the state, including a major trauma center in Atlanta that has become a flashpoint in the campaign.But it is a brewing national backlash to the supreme court decision overturning the federal right to an abortion that Abrams and Democrats believe could change the tide. In ads and on the campaign trail, Abrams has lashed Kemp for signing a 2019 law that bans abortion as early as six weeks in Georgia, before many women know they are pregnant. The law was allowed to take effect in the aftermath of the high court’s ruling.According to recent polling, most voters in Georgia disagree with the supreme court decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization and more than half say the state’s abortion laws are too strict.“The No 1 issue that people talk about when I’m on the campaign trail is abortion rights,” said Nabilah Islam, the Democratic nominee for a competitive state senate seat in Gwinnett county.Islam, who has put abortion access at the center of her campaign, pointed to the rise in voter registration among women since the Dobbs decision. “There’s a feeling of helplessness,” she said, “but also hope because people are so angry that they’re organizing at levels unseen before.”Abrams is also working to shore up her base. Black voters are the cornerstone of the Democrats coalition in Georgia. While they still overwhelmingly prefer Democrats, there are some signs the party is struggling to motivate Black voters at the levels needed to win in Georgia.The trend is particularly pronounced among Black men, who have edged toward Republicans in recent years. In several polls, Kemp has notably improved his standing among Black voters from 2018.Ron DeSantis changes with the wind as Hurricane Ian prompts flip-flop on aidRead moreAbrams says she is taking no vote for granted. As part of her campaign’s outreach to Black men, she has hosted a series of conversations called “Stacey and the Fellas” to discuss how her initiatives on issues like healthcare and housing will benefit their communities.At one such event over the summer, she was blunt: “If Black men vote for me, I will win Georgia.”Andrekay Askew is among the roughly one in 10 Black voters who remain undecided in the state. The 27-year-old said he is skeptical of Democrats’ economic policies but was open to learning more about Abrams’s platform.Ultimately, he said, his decision would be guided by: “Who is better with the money?”Listening from the porch, his mother shook her head in disagreement. Laqua Askew, who works in special education, is a lifelong Democrat who voted for Abrams in 2018 and plans to do so again this year. She is worried about a lack of public school funding, as well as gun violence and crime, all of which she said takes a heavy toll on the low-income students she works with.“Kemp had the opportunity to make a change but he hasn’t,” she said. “We’ve got to try something else.”In a state as closely divided as Georgia, much could still change before election day. Kemp and Abrams will face off in a public debate that could help sway the critical few undecided voters. And if neither candidate wins a majority of the vote, the contest proceeds to a runoff election.Speaking at the AFL-CIO Labor Day picnic last month, Abrams asked supporters to spend the final weeks of the campaign focused on the “unfinished business” before them.“I can’t get this job if you all don’t show up,” she said. “I can get this job if you all do what you did in 2018.”
      Joan E Greve contributed to this report from Atlanta.
      TopicsUS midterm elections 2022AtlantaGeorgiaStacey AbramsUS politicsDemocratsnewsReuse this content More