Black People

Subterms

    More stories

    • 75 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      The Spectacular Fall of Lori Lightfoot

      by

      It was a stunning rebuke. On Tuesday, Mayor Lori Lightfoot of Chicago, the first Black woman and first openly L.G.B.T.Q. person to lead the city, failed to advance to a runoff, earning just 17 percent of the vote and becoming the first incumbent mayor in 40 years to lose a re-election bid.Four days before the election, I interviewed Lightfoot in her Chicago office. The space, with its soaring ceiling, was a clash of aesthetics, like many government buildings, displaying a kind of prudent grandeur, evoking the gravitas of the office without signaling excess, much like Lightfoot herself, who settled her small frame, dressed in a smart gray suit, into a large chair.During our nearly hourlong interview, she choked up and fought back tears when discussing the sacrifices her parents had made for her and her siblings. A smile lit her face when she talked about all the memes that had made her a folk hero in the early days of her term, and she puffed up with pride when discussing her proudest moments as mayor, including how she and her team had dealt with the Covid-19 crisis.But those weren’t the reasons I’d trekked to the frigid city on the lake. I’d come because Lightfoot belongs to a group of recently elected Black mayors of major American cities, including Eric Adams in New York, Sylvester Turner in Houston and Karen Bass in Los Angeles.In those cities, Black people are outnumbered by other nonwhite groups, and in New York City and Chicago their ranks are dwindling.Each of these four mayors was elected or re-elected around the height of two seismic cultural phenomena — Black Lives Matter and the pandemic. Of the four, Lightfoot would be one of the first to face voters and test the fallout. (Turner is term-limited and can’t run again.)It clearly did not go well.On one level, the results of Tuesday’s election speak to how potent the issue of crime can be and how it can be used as a scare tactic. Lightfoot said that it was absolutely used as a political tool in her race: “You’ve got people who are using it as a cudgel against me every single day. You’ve got the only white candidate in the race who’s acting like he’s going to be a great white savior on public safety.”That white candidate is Paul Vallas, who finished at the top of the crowded field on Tuesday with 34 percent of the vote. Vallas had run a tough-on-crime, law-and-order campaign in which he told one crowd that his “whole campaign is about taking back our city, pure and simple.”Lightfoot called the remark “the ultimate dog whistle.”In our interview, she was brutal in her racial assessment of Vallas: “He is giving voice and platform to people who are hateful of anyone who isn’t white and Republican in our city, in our country.” She is also surprisingly candid about how race operates in the city itself: “Chicago is a deeply divided and segregated city.”It is that division, in her view, fomented by candidates who see politics in the city as a zero-sum game, that provided Vallas with an opening to win over the city’s white citizens. As she put it, “People who are not used to feeling the touch of violence, particularly people on the North Side of our city, they are buying what he’s selling.”Indeed, Vallas won many of the wards in the northern part of the city, while Lightfoot won most of the wards on the largely Black South Side.But two things can be true simultaneously: There can be legitimate concerns about rising crime, and crime can be used as a political wedge issue, particularly against elected officials of color, which has happened often.In this moment, when the country has still not come to grips with the wide-ranging societal trauma that the pandemic exacerbated and unleashed, mayors are being held responsible for that crime. If all politics is local, crime and safety are the most local. And when the perception of crime collides with ingrained societal concepts of race and gender, politicians, particularly Black women, can pay the price.In 2021, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta chose not to seek re-election, becoming the city’s first Black mayor to serve only a single term, after wrestling with what she called the “Covid crime wave.” Mayor LaToya Cantrell of New Orleans is facing a possible recall, largely over the issue of crime in her city, and organizers said this week that they have gathered enough signatures to force a recall vote.Even in cities where Black mayors aren’t likely to be removed from office, their opponents are searching for ways to limit their power, using criminal justice as justification.The Mississippi House recently passed a bill that would create a separate court system and an expanded police force in the city of Jackson, one of the Blackest cities in America. The new district “would incorporate all of the city’s significantly populated white-majority neighborhoods,” as an analysis by The Guardian pointed out. Jackson’s mayor, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, said the plan reminded him of apartheid.Crime often comes in waves, but a question lingers about how people, even liberals, respond when a crest arrives under Black leadership: Are Black mayors too quickly and easily blamed for rising crime, and if so, why? Because of an unwillingness to crack down on criminals or because of a more insidious, latent belief in ineffectual Black leadership in times of crisis?Lightfoot told me she understood that as a woman and as a person of color, “I’m always going to be viewed through a different lens, that the things I do and say, that the toughness that I exhibit, is viewed as divisive, that I’m the mean mayor, that I can’t collaborate with anyone.”Even so, she conceded, “If you feel like your life has been challenged because of the public safety issues coming to your doorstep, it doesn’t matter what the numbers are — you need to feel safe.”But feelings on issues of politics, crime and race also tap into our biases, both conscious and subconscious. In that vein, Lightfoot may be a harbinger, or at least a warning, for the other big-city Black mayors: As the Covid crime wave wears on, will their mostly non-Black citizens feel that their safety is being prioritized and secured under Black leadership?The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More

    • 75 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Reader Mailbag: Bots and Other Business

      by

      Answering questions on topics including polling, independent voters and Black turnout.Voters in College Park, Md., in November. There are still some things to review about the midterm elections. T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York TimesWe’ve gotten a lot of great questions and feedback over the last few months, and I think we’re inclined to make a mailbag a regular feature, especially during the off-season. If you have a question, send it to dear.upshot@nytimes.com.Bots in pollingLet’s start with a question on an issue that I’d already been mulling:Mr. Cohn, you mentioned “bots” in passing as a potential issue for nonprobability polls. Which makes me wonder, how easy/hard would it be for a malign outside actor to interfere in the polling and make Donald Trump’s chances look better than they are? Because if that would be possible, I’d say countries with an interest in a divided U.S. (Russia and China come to mind) would certainly be tempted to pull that off. — Moritz, ViennaThis is a serious question. A Pew Research study a few years ago used a few simple techniques to find that 4 percent to 7 percent of respondents to nonprobability surveys were “bogus,” to use their term. These “bogus” respondents took the survey multiple times, took the poll too quickly, stated that they lived outside the United States, or offered nonsensical answers in open-ended questioning.Anecdotally, I’ve heard more complaints about these kinds of issues from pollsters. I routinely hear about pollsters who toss as many as half of their respondents for data quality issues. It is reasonable to assume that the better-known pollsters take these challenges seriously, but we don’t know much about their practices, let alone whether they work.Could this be part of Donald J. Trump’s strength in online panel polls? It’s hard to prove, but one emerging pattern has caught my attention: Mr. Trump has fared quite poorly in two online nonprobability polls linked to voter registration files, which require the panelist to provide personal information that matches a real registered voter.Or put differently: Mr. Trump has done quite poorly in the nonprobability polls where there’s an extra layer of confidence that the respondents are human. It’s the pattern we would expect if bogus respondents were a factor.Still, I wouldn’t get too excited about this emerging pattern if you’re a Ron DeSantis fan. It’s just two polls, after all. And Mr. Trump’s poll numbers have gone up over the last few weeks, including in telephone polling. So perhaps these voter-file-matched polls are really the outliers. As we’ve written before, voter-file-matched polls like these can be biased in other ways.I’ve asked a few smart and well-positioned pollsters to look into the “bogus” respondent question in their own data. If you’re a similarly well-positioned pollster interested in digging in, you know where to find me.The tilt of independent voters in the midtermsWe’ve written that Republicans enjoyed a pretty meaningful turnout advantage in the midterm elections, but a few of you thought we overlooked one important group in this analysis: independents.It’s always the independents who determine who wins. How did they vote?— Ed from Calhoun, Ga.Article does not mention the impact of the growing number of independent voters who choose not to vote in the primaries but decide final elections.— Julio Stieffel, MiamiDemocrats did quite well among independent voters, and that’s partly why the party held up despite a Republican turnout advantage.Nationwide, self-identified independent voters backed Democrats by two percentage points, according to the network exit polls. It doesn’t sound so impressive, but it is by the standards of recent midterms, when the president’s party has tended to lose independent voters by double digits.And in the high-profile statewide contests — think Senate races in Pennsylvania and Arizona — the Democratic candidates fared even better among independent voters than that, allowing Democrats to win marquee races by unusually wide margins.Black turnout before ObamaOn a related midterm note, we observed that the Black share of the electorate was the lowest it has been since Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008. That left an important question unaddressed:I am interested if the Black voter turnout, which has dropped, is higher or lower than historical norms before the 2008/2012 increase in turnout due to Obama. Thank you. — Lisa Pate, Birmingham, Ala.It depends a bit on how you measure it.By the simplest measure — the proportion of Black adult citizens who vote — Black turnout actually remains slightly higher than it was before Mr. Obama’s historic campaign in 2008.The catch, however, is that turnout is higher across the board than it was before 2008. As a result, the racial gap in turnout in 2020 — that is, the difference between the share of eligible Black voters who turn out, compared with the share of eligible white voters who do — returned almost exactly to what it looked like in the 2004 presidential election. Based on what we’ve seen so far, the racial turnout gap in 2022 will probably look like 2006 or 2002.There’s one last twist to consider: the Black share of the electorate. Oddly enough, the Black share of the electorate has usually remained above pre-Obama levels, even though the gap between white and Black turnout is basically the same as it was back then. That’s because white voters, who turn out at higher rates than Black voters, have dipped as a share of eligible voters, while Hispanic and Asian voters, who turn out at lower rates than Black voters, have increased their share of eligible voters.Put it all together and the Black share of the electorate in 2020 was about halfway between where it was in 2004 and 2012.Alternatives to BidenWe haven’t done much to touch on the possibility of a Democratic primary, but that hasn’t stopped many of you from asking about it:Here is a question my friends and I keep wondering: Is there are any Democrat who could stand a chance if Mr. Biden decided not to run? Thanks much!— The Rev. Lorenzo LebrijaWhoever wins the Democratic nomination will at least stand a chance, and probably more than a chance if Mr. Trump is the nominee. Whether there’s a Democrat who would do as well as or better than President Biden is a slightly different question, and it’s really quite hard to say. I hope you don’t ask me that next time!Mrs. Clinton?Believe it or not, the most frequent question we received was about this sentence I wrote:“After all, most modern presidential nominees — Joe Biden, Mrs. Clinton, George W. Bush, Bob Dole, John McCain, John Kerry, Mitt Romney, Al Gore, to name eight recent ones — were not exactly superstar political talents distinguished by soaring oratory, made-for-television charisma, clap-backs on social media or dominant debate performances.”Here’s one (nice) version of the question it raised:“Can you please explain why you thought it was appropriate to list each male you were referring to with their full name (first and last) and list Hillary Clinton as Mrs. Clinton?” — Maura FitzgeraldThe answer is actually quite mundane. The Times uses people’s full names when they’re mentioned for the first time, but they typically receive courtesy titles, like Mr. and Ms., when mentioned again. In this case, Hillary Clinton had already been mentioned, but the male presidential candidates were being mentioned for the first time. Consequently, Mrs. Clinton, who prefers Mrs. to Ms., received her courtesy title while the male candidates got their full names.I see how it ended up looking a little weird in this case, so we adjusted the sentence after publication. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      ‘Different From the Other Southerners’: Jimmy Carter’s Relationship With Black America

      by

      How a white politician from the South who once supported segregationist policies eventually won the enduring support of Black voters.ATLANTA — Without Black voters, there would have been no President Jimmy Carter.In 1976, African Americans catapulted the underdog Democrat to the White House with 83 percent support. Four years later, they stuck by him, delivering nearly identical numbers even as many white voters abandoned him in favor of his victorious Republican challenger, Ronald Reagan.This enduring Black support for Mr. Carter illuminates two intertwined and epochal American stories, each of them powered by themes of pragmatism and redemption. One is the story of a white Georgia politician who began his quest for power in the Jim Crow South — a man who, as late as 1970, declared his respect for the arch-segregationist George Wallace in an effort to attract white votes, but whose personal convictions and political ambitions later pushed him to try to change the racist environment in which he had been raised.The other is the story of a historically oppressed people flexing their growing electoral muscle after the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 removed obstacles to the ballot box. Certainly, for some Black voters, candidate Carter was simply the least bad option. But for others, the elections of 1976 and 1980 were an opportunity to take the measure of this changing white man, recognizing the opportunity he presented, and even his better angels.“His example in Georgia as a representative of the New South, as one of the new governors from the South, was exciting, and it was appealing,” said Representative Sanford Bishop, a Democrat whose Georgia congressional district includes Mr. Carter’s home. “It carried the day in terms of people wanting a fresh moral face for the presidency.”Mr. Carter’s support for Black Americans sheds light on the political evolution of the man, who at 98, is America’s longest living president. (Mr. Carter entered hospice care earlier this month.)Mr. Carter at an event in Georgia during the fall 1976 presidential campaign.Guy DeLort/WWD, via Penske Media, via Getty ImagesMr. Carter greeting supporters in New York City in 1976.Mikki Ansin/Getty ImagesThe foundation of his relationships with Black voters and leaders was built in his home base of Plains, in rural Sumter County, Ga. Its Black residents can recall his efforts to maintain and then later resist the racist policies and practices that targeted the majority Black community.Jonathan Alter, in his 2020 biography “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life,” noted that Mr. Carter, as a school board member, had made a number of moves to accommodate or uphold the local segregationist system of the 1950s, at one point trying to shift resources from Black schools to white schools in the name of sound fiscal management.But Bobby Fuse, 71, a longtime civil rights activist who grew up in Americus, Ga., a few miles from Plains, recalled that Mr. Carter had also shown moments of real character. Among other things, he noted Mr. Carter’s objection to his Baptist church’s refusal to allow Black people to worship there.“I wouldn’t have voted for anybody running against Jimmy Carter, more than likely,” said Mr. Fuse, who said he had first voted for Mr. Carter in his successful 1970 governor’s race. “Because I knew him to be an upright man different from the other Southerners.”There were seeds of this difference early in the life of Mr. Carter. But as a young politician, it did not always translate into action. And the repressive environment of the mid-20th century meant that he had no Black voters to woo when he started his first foray into electoral politics with a 1962 bid for a South Georgia State Senate seat. Due to racist restrictions, hardly any Black people were registered to vote in his district at the time.Mr. Carter waved to the crowd as he and his wife, Rosalynn, arrived at Plains Baptist Church to attend services in 1976.Associated PressPresident Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, with former President Bill Clinton and Mr. Carter at a ceremony commemorating the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington.Doug Mills/The New York TimesHistorians say that Mr. Carter, early in his career, was both a creature and a critic of the strict segregationist system he had been born into. He largely kept his head down as civil rights advocates fought and sacrificed to change the status quo, with serious, and sometimes dangerous, protests and crackdowns flaring up in Sumter County.Later, once he had achieved positions of power, he was outspoken about renouncing racial discrimination, seeking means to redress it and trying to live up to those principles. During his presidency, he famously enrolled his daughter, Amy, in a public school in Washington, D.C. Decades after leaving the White House, he offered a full-throated rebuke of Barack Obama’s Republican critics, calling their attacks racism loosely disguised as partisanship during his presidency.“He saw his role as an elder statesman,” said Andra Gillespie, an associate professor of political science at Emory University. “The fact that you have an elderly white president, from the South, who is there saying, ‘Look, the emperor has no clothes; that argument has no weight; that dog won’t hunt,’ is something that he didn’t necessarily have to do.”Mr. Carter had grown up with Black playmates in the tiny community of Archery, Ga. As a boy, his moral and spiritual north star had been a Black woman, Rachel Clark, the wife of a worker on the Carter property. He slept many nights on the floor of her home when his parents were out of town. Mr. Alter, the biographer,  wrote that she had taught him about nature and had impressed him with her selflessness. Mr. Alter wrote that Mr. Carter had even been teased in his all-white elementary school for “sounding Black.”Traffic in Warm Springs, Ga., as visitors arrived to hear Mr. Carter speak in 1976.Gary Settle/The New York TimesRachel Clark, the wife of a worker on the Carter family’s farm, whom Mr. Carter credited with teaching him morals.National Park ServiceBy the mid-1950s, Mr. Carter returned from a stint as a naval officer and settled in Plains, where he built on the family’s successful peanut business. The Brown v. Board of Education decision, which dismantled the old separate-but-equal regime for American schools, had inflamed white Southerners. Despite his efforts to appease white parents while on the school board, he was also, Mr. Alter notes, “the only prominent white man in Plains” who declined to join the local chapter of the racist White Citizens’ Council.After winning his 1962 State Senate race, Mr. Carter, a man of searing ambition, set his sights on the governor’s mansion but was defeated in 1966. He ran again and won in 1970, with a campaign full of unsubtle dog whistles to aggrieved white voters that included promises to restore “law and order” to their communities and, according to Mr. Alter, the dissemination of a “fact sheet” that reminded white voters that Mr. Carter’s Democratic opponent, former Gov. Carl Sanders, had attended Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral.In the Democratic primary, Black voters took notice: Mr. Sanders, in the runoff, garnered roughly 90 percent of their votes. But by the general election, Mr. Carter was campaigning heavily in Black churches.The dog-whistle strategy had generated its share of bitterness and criticism. But a course correction followed, in the form of Mr. Carter’s inaugural address.“The time for racial discrimination is over,” he said.Mr. Carter’s supporters at the Democratic convention.H. Christoph/Ullstein Bild, via Getty ImagesMembers of the Concord Baptist Church congregation listening to Mr. Carter speaking in Brooklyn in 1980.Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times“It was really dramatic for all of us, because he said it in that forum, as he was being sworn in,” Mr. Fuse recalled. “And hopefully we were going to see some activity from that.”They did. Mr. Carter expanded the presence of Black Georgians in state government, from senior officials to state troopers, and welcomed civil rights leaders to the governor’s office.Black skeptics were converted into allies in other ways. In an interview this week, Andrew Young, the civil rights leader who would serve as ambassador to the United Nations under Mr. Carter, recalled having “a real prejudice to overcome” when the two men first met as Mr. Carter was running for governor.When the matter of Fred Chappell, Sumter County’s notoriously racist sheriff, came up, Mr. Carter called him a “good friend.” Mr. Young was taken aback: Mr. Chappell had once arrested Dr. King after a protest. When Dr. King’s associates tried to bring him blankets to ward off the cold, Mr. Chappell refused them and turned on the fan instead.Later, however, Mr. Young said he had gotten to know Mr. Carter’s family, including his mother, Lillian. Mr. Young, too, came to trust him. “I decided that he was always all right on race,” Mr. Young said. “He never discriminated between his Black friends and white friends.”Mr. Carter, as president, meeting in 1977 with his commission for the appointment of Black Americans to the federal judiciary in the Fifth Circuit.Harvey Georges/Associated PressAndrew Young, right, campaigning for Mr. Carter in Boston in 1976.Mikki Ansin/Getty ImagesIt went the same way with other influential civil rights leaders in Georgia, including Dr. King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, and his father, Martin Luther King Sr. According to the author and journalist Kandy Stroud, the elder Mr. King sent a telegram to voters lauding Mr. Carter’s appointment of Black judges and his support for a fair housing law, among other things. “I know a man I can trust, Blacks can trust, and that man is Jimmy Carter,” he wrote.By the time Mr. Carter started his 1976 bid for the White House, it was these leaders who spread the message beyond Georgia voters that Mr. Carter was worthy of their trust. They helped bolster the “peanut brigade,” the nickname for the team of staff members and volunteers spread across the country to campaign for him, making it a mix of Black and white Carter supporters.“They had to tell these people in the rest of the country, ‘Yeah, he’s governor of Georgia, but he’s a different kind of governor of Georgia,’” Mr. Fuse said.In a recent interview, the Rev. Al Sharpton recalled that the King family had lobbied him to support Mr. Carter in 1976. That went a long way, he said, but so did Mr. Carter’s presentation. “A Southern guy that would stand up and talk about racism?” he said. “This was the kind of guy that my uncle trusted down South. And he connected with us for that.”As a presidential candidate, however, Mr. Carter again showed his propensity for trying to have it both ways in a racially divided country.George Skelton, a Los Angeles Times columnist, recently recalled covering the candidate as he campaigned in Wisconsin and watching as he seemed to give contradictory messages on school busing to separate groups of Black and white voters within the span of a single day.Mrs. Coretta King accepting the Presidential Medal on behalf of her late husband, Dr. Martin Luther King, in 1977.Associated PressMr. Carter, second from right, shaking hands with Black seniors at the Watts Labor Community Action Council in Los Angeles, in 1976.Reed Saxon/Associated PressAnd in a speech about protecting neighborhoods, Mr. Carter used the phrase “ethnic purity,” creating a mini-scandal. Soon after, Mr. Young told him that the use of the phrase had been a “disaster for the campaign.” Mr. Carter issued an apology.But Mr. Carter also found common cultural ground with Black voters nationwide, many of whom shared his Christian faith. They saw how comfortable he was in Black churches. “‘Born again’ is the secret of his success with Blacks,” Ethel Allen, a Black surgeon from Philadelphia, told Ms. Stroud at the time.As president, Mr. Carter sought “to mend the racial divide,” said Kai Bird, another Carter biographer. Mr. Bird noted that food aid was significantly expanded under Mr. Carter, benefiting many poor Black residents in rural areas. Mr. Bird also noted that the Carter administration had toughened rules aimed at preventing racially discriminatory schools from claiming tax-exempt status.If that explains why Black voters stuck with Mr. Carter in 1980, it may have also sown the seeds of his defeat. “I think all of these decisions were too much for white America,” Mr. Bird said. “Ronald Reagan came along and appealed much more to white voters.”Mr. Fuse agrees. All these years later, he still laments the fact that Mr. Carter was denied a second term. Instead of focusing on the problems that plagued Mr. Carter’s time in office — the inflation, the energy crisis, the American hostages stuck in Tehran — Mr. Fuse spoke, instead, about that hope that Mr. Carter had engendered in 1976, and not just for Black voters.“When this white man comes along who’s grinning with a broad smile after Watergate, he lifted our spirits,” Mr. Fuse said. “He lifted everybody’s spirits.” More

    • 175 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Jennifer McClellan Wins in Virginia and Will Be State’s First Black Woman in Congress

      by

      Jennifer McClellan, a state senator, will fill the seat held by Representative A. Donald McEachin, who died in November.Jennifer McClellan, a veteran Democratic state senator, won a special election for Virginia’s Fourth Congressional District on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, making her the first Black woman to represent the state in Congress.Ms. McClellan, 50, will fill the seat formerly held by Representative A. Donald McEachin, who died Nov. 28 of colorectal cancer. She has cited Mr. McEachin as a mentor and was highly favored to win in the safely Democratic district, which stretches from Richmond, where she is based, to the rural counties along Virginia’s border with North Carolina.She defeated Leon Benjamin, a Republican Navy veteran and local pastor. Mr. Benjamin lost to Mr. McEachin by nearly 30 points in November.Virginia Democrats, including the party’s entire congressional delegation and many local and statewide officials, were quick to coalesce around Ms. McClellan’s candidacy during the primary in late December. Even though the accelerated election calendar set by Gov. Glenn Youngkin left her campaign with less than two weeks to turn out primary voters, she still won with nearly 85 percent of the vote, according to the state party.Ms. McClellan centered her campaign on legislation she spearheaded as a state senator — issues she championed, like voting rights, environmental protection and abortion access, often dovetailed with the national Democratic platform.“I passed legislation to protect our right to vote and our right to a clean environment. I led the fight for our reproductive freedom,” Ms. McClellan said in a television ad. “I’ll take that same fight with me to Congress.”In a January opinion essay for Essence magazine, Ms. McClellan also said that her identity as a Black female lawmaker would help shape her policy positions.“This election isn’t just about my lived experiences, it’s about elevating the experiences of so many whose voices have not been heard in our government,” she wrote.Ms. McClellan, a lawyer who is also the vice chair of the Virginia legislature’s influential Black caucus, has been frequently promoted as a rising star among state Democrats. This is her second run for statewide office: In 2021, she fell short in a crowded primary for governor.Susan Swecker, chairwoman of the Democratic Party of Virginia, said in a statement on Tuesday night: “Jennifer McClellan’s history-making victory as the first Black woman to be elected to Congress from Virginia will have ripple effects across the Commonwealth.”“Her leadership will expand upon the outstanding progress and advocacy for which we remember Congressman A. Donald McEachin — I cannot think of a better way to honor his life and legacy than with the new generation of leadership that Congresswoman-elect Jennifer McClellan will bring to Washington.” More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Black Mayors of 4 Biggest U.S. Cities Draw Strength From One Another

      by

      The mayors of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston have banded together as they confront violent crime, homelessness and other similar challenges.As the race for Los Angeles mayor began to tighten late last year, Karen Bass, the presumptive favorite, received some notes of encouragement from a kindred spirit: Lori Lightfoot, the mayor of Chicago.Ms. Lightfoot had successfully navigated a similar political path in 2019, becoming the first Black woman to be elected mayor of her city, much as Ms. Bass was trying to do in Los Angeles.And even though Ms. Bass’s billionaire opponent had poured $100 million into the race and boasted endorsements from celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Katy Perry, Ms. Lightfoot urged her Democratic colleague to keep the faith in a series of personal visits and text messages.“She was up against somebody who was very, very moneyed and was leaning into people’s fears about crime, about homelessness — frankly, very similar to the circumstances that I’m facing now in my city in getting re-elected,” Ms. Lightfoot said in an interview. “I just wanted to make sure that she knew that I was there for her.”Ms. Lightfoot and Ms. Bass belong to an informal alliance of four big-city mayors tackling among the toughest jobs in America. They happen to be of similar mind in how to address their cities’ common problems, like violent crime, homelessness and rising overdose deaths.They also happen to be Black: When Ms. Bass took office in December, the nation’s four largest cities all had Black mayors for the first time.The Democratic mayors — Ms. Bass, Ms. Lightfoot, Eric Adams of New York City and Sylvester Turner of Houston — say their shared experiences and working-class roots as Black Americans give them a different perspective on leading their cities than most of their predecessors.Mr. Adams visited Mayor Lightfoot last year during a fund-raising trip to Chicago.Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Chicago Sun-Times, via Associated PressIn interviews, the four mayors discussed how their backgrounds helped shape their successful campaigns, and how they provide a unique prism to view their cities’ problems.“We have to be bold in looking at long entrenched problems, particularly on poverty and systemic inequality,” Ms. Lightfoot said. “We’ve got to look those in the face and we’ve got to fight them, and break down the barriers that have really held many of our residents back from being able to realize their God-given talent.”Politics Across the United StatesFrom the halls of government to the campaign trail, here’s a look at the political landscape in America.Michigan G.O.P.: Michigan Republicans picked Kristina Karamo to lead the party in the battleground state, fully embracing an election-denying Trump acolyte after her failed bid for secretary of state.Dianne Feinstein: The Democratic senator of California will not run for re-election in 2024, clearing the way for what is expected to be a costly and competitive race to succeed the iconic political figure.Lori Lightfoot: As the mayor of Chicago seeks a second term at City Hall, her administration is overseeing the largest experiment in guaranteed basic income in the nation.Union Support: In places like West Virginia, money from three major laws passed by Congress is pouring into the alternative energy industry and other projects. Democrats hope it will lead to increased union strength.To do so can require navigating a delicate balancing act.Ms. Bass was a community organizer who witnessed the riots after the Rodney King verdict; Mr. Adams drew attention to police brutality after being beaten by the police as a teenager.As a congresswoman, Ms. Bass took a leading role in 2020 after George Floyd’s death on legislation that aimed to prevent excessive use of force by police and promoted new officer anti-bias training. It was approved by the House, but stalled in the Senate, and President Biden later approved some of the measures by executive order.In Chicago, Ms. Lightfoot served as head of the Chicago Police Board and was a leader of a task force that issued a scathing report on relations between the Chicago police and Black residents. Mr. Adams founded a group called “100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care” in the 1990s.As mayors, all now in their 60s, they have criticized the “defund the police” movement, yet have also called for systemic policing changes.In Chicago and New York, Ms. Lightfoot and Mr. Adams have pushed for police spending increases and have flooded the subway with officers. That has invited criticism from criminal justice advocates who say they have not moved quickly enough to reform the departments.“As a city, we have to have a police department that is successful,” Ms. Lightfoot said. “And to me, successful is defined by making sure that they’re the best trained police department, that they understand that the legitimacy in the eyes of the public is the most important tool that they have, and that we also support our officers — it’s a really hard and dangerous job.”Mr. Adams agreed. “We can’t have police misconduct, but we also know we must ensure that we support those officers that are doing the right thing and dealing with violence in our cities,” he said.The four mayors have highlighted their backgrounds to show that they understand the importance of addressing inequality. Mr. Adams was raised by a single mother who cleaned homes. Ms. Bass’s father was a postal service letter carrier. Ms. Lightfoot’s mother worked the night shift as a nurse’s aide. Mr. Turner was the son of a painter and a maid.Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, a prominent left-leaning group, said the mayors’ lived experience was all the more reason for them to “take a more expansive view of Black life that is expressed in their policies and in their budgeting,” and to prioritize schools, libraries, youth jobs and mental health care.“We want our communities invested in, in the way that other communities are invested in and the investment should not simply come through more police,” he said.In December, Ms. Bass became the first Black woman to be elected mayor of Los Angeles.Lauren Justice for The New York TimesThe four serve as only the second elected Black mayors of their respective cities. New York, Los Angeles and Chicago each went more than 30 years between electing their first Black mayor and the second; Houston went nearly two decades.The mayors have worked together through the U.S. Conference of Mayors as well as the African American Mayors Association, which was founded in 2014 and has more than 100 members — giving the four Black mayors an additional pipeline to coordinate with other cities’ leaders.“Because we’re still experiencing firsts in 2023, it’s our obligation that we’re successful,” said Frank Scott Jr., the first elected Black mayor of Little Rock, Ark., who leads the African American Mayors Association. “It’s our obligation that to the best of our ability we’re above reproach, to ensure that we’re not the last and to ensure that it doesn’t take another 20 to 30 years to see another Black mayor.”Of the four, Ms. Bass, a former chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, is perhaps the most left-leaning, characterizing herself as a “pragmatic progressive” who said she saw similarities between Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and herself as a young activist.“That’s who I was — that’s who I still am,” Ms. Bass said. “It’s just that, after a while, you want to begin to make a very concrete difference in people’s lives, as opposed to your positions and educating.” On her first day as mayor, Ms. Bass won praise for declaring a state of emergency on homelessness that gives the city expanded powers to speed up the construction of affordable housing. She also supports legislation by the Los Angeles City Council, known as “just cause” eviction protections, that bars landlords from evicting renters in most cases.A similar law in New York has stalled in the State Legislature, though supporters are hoping to pass it this year and have called on Mr. Adams to do more to help them.All the cities share a homeless crisis, as well as potential solutions. Houston has become a national model during Mr. Turner’s tenure for a “housing first” program that moved 25,000 homeless people directly into apartments and houses over the last decade.Now New York City is starting a pilot program based on Houston’s approach that will move 80 homeless people into permanent supportive housing without having to go through the shelter system.Mr. Turner, a lawyer who became mayor in 2016, said he called Mr. Adams after he won a close primary in New York in 2021 to offer his support. He defended Mr. Adams’s plan to involuntarily remove severely mentally ill people from the streets — a policy that has received pushback in New York.“I applaud him on that,” Mr. Turner said. “Is it controversial or some people will find controversy in it? Yes. But what is the alternative? To keep them where they are?”Mr. Turner, who is in his final year in office because of term limits, said he set out with a goal of making Houston more equitable. “I didn’t want to be the mayor of two cities in one,” he said.“I recognized the fact that there are many neighborhoods that have been overlooked and ignored for decades,” he later added. “I grew up in one of those communities and I still live in that same community.”Mr. Turner has claimed success for a “housing first” program that moved 25,000 homeless people directly into apartments and houses over the last decade in Houston.Go Nakamura for The New York TimesAnxiety among voters about the future of their cities could make it difficult for the mayors to succeed. Ms. Lightfoot, who is seeking a second term, faces eight opponents when Chicago holds its mayoral election on Feb. 28, and her own campaign shows her polling at 25 percent — well below the 50 percent she would need to avoid a runoff.Mr. Adams, a former police officer who was elected on the strength of a public safety message, has seen his support fall to 37 percent as he enters his second year in office, according to a Quinnipiac University poll.Concerns about crime are affecting both mayors. Chicago had nearly 700 murders last year, a major increase from about 500 murders in 2019 before the pandemic. In New York City, there were 438 murders last year, compared with 319 in 2019.In March, Mr. Adams met with Ms. Lightfoot while visiting Chicago for a fund-raiser at the home of Desirée Rogers, the former White House social secretary for President Barack Obama. At a joint news conference with Ms. Lightfoot, Mr. Adams reiterated his position that the communities most affected by policing abuses also tend to need the most protection.“All of these cities are dealing with the same crises, but there’s something else — the victims are Black and brown,” Mr. Adams said.Of the four mayors, Mr. Adams, in particular, has sought to align his colleagues behind an “urban agenda,” and to call in unison for federal help with the migrant crisis.Mr. Adams has also argued that the mayors’ messaging should be a model for Democratic Party leadership to follow, rather than what he called the “woke” left wing that he has quarreled with in New York.“The Democratic message was never to defund police,” he said, adding: “We’re just seeing the real Democratic message emerge from this group of mayors.” More

    • 175 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Tim Scott Weighs 2024 Run, Selling Unity to a Party Eager for a Fight

      by

      Mr. Scott, the only Black Republican senator, has many political assets. What he lacks is an obvious ability to win over voters who have embraced a Trumpian brand of us-versus-them divisiveness.CHARLESTON, S.C. — Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, openly eyeing a pathbreaking run for the Republican presidential nomination, came home Thursday night to the city that started the Civil War to test out themes of unity and forgiveness aimed at the current war in his party — and the divisions roiling the nation at large.The ultimate question is whether Republican voters who embraced Donald J. Trump’s brand of us-versus-them divisiveness are ready for the themes that Mr. Scott is selling.His speech Thursday to the Charleston County Republican Party could have been the kind of routine dinner address that all elected officials give, this one honoring Black History Month at a local college. But the television crews and reporters piled on to the risers at The Citadel military college’s alumni center were there to watch what amounted to a soft opening for a White House run by Mr. Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate. And it came only a day after a festive kickoff event for the presidential campaign of Mr. Scott’s friend, political benefactor and fellow South Carolinian, Nikki Haley.“If you want to understand America, you need to start in Charleston; you need to understand and appreciate the devastation brought upon African Americans,” Mr. Scott counseled. “But if you stop at our original sin, you have not started the story of America, because the story of America is not defined by our original sin. The story of America is defined by our redemption.”Mr. Scott has obvious political assets to bring to a potentially crowded field: a message of optimism, a disposition that has made him personally popular even with his political opponents, and the historic nature of his potential nomination.But those assets could prove to be a liability in today’s Republican primary environment, where voters rail against what they see as unfair favoritism toward people of color and where activists may be more interested in anger than optimism. Even in his home state, the third in the Republican nomination process, it is not clear that his political approach is preferable to those of the two pugnacious Floridians expected to compete for the party’s standard, Mr. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis.“I don’t see a path for Tim,” said Chip Felkel, a longtime Republican consultant in South Carolina and a critic of Mr. Trump. He said of the mood in the party, “We don’t have a lot of Republicans ready to sing ‘Kumbaya.’”Mr. Scott appears to understand that race is a major political issue at this fraught moment when the loudest voices in his party are disputing how Black history is taught, race consciousness and the once widely accepted notion that diversity should be a goal, not just happenstance. His own Senate record includes legislation to make lynching a federal hate crime and a major push for police reforms in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.Mr. Scott with a young attendee after she gave him an introduction at the dinner. Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesSo Mr. Scott has been approaching the issue from both sides, acknowledging the racism that confined his grandparents to the impoverished corners of the Jim Crow South and that still sends him routinely to the shoulders of the road for traffic stops. But he also says, invariably with a smile, that the nation is not racist. “There is a way for us to unify this country around basic principles that lead us forward and not backward, but we have to quit buying the lie that this is the worst time in American history,” he said on Thursday. “Only if American history started today can that be true.”Which Republicans Are Eyeing the 2024 Presidential Election?Card 1 of 6The G.O.P. primary begins. More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      The Relentless Attack on Trans People Is an Attack on All of Us

      by

      Over the past year, we have seen a sweeping and ferocious attack on the rights and dignity of transgender people across the country.In states led by Republicans, conservative lawmakers have introduced or passed dozens of laws that would give religious exemptions for discrimination against transgender people, prohibit the use of bathrooms consistent with their gender identity and limit access to gender-affirming care.In lashing out against L.G.B.T.Q. people, lawmakers in at least eight states have even gone as far as to introduce bans on “drag” performance that are so broad as to threaten the ability of gender nonconforming people simply to exist in public.Some of the most powerful Republicans in the country want to go even further. Donald Trump has promised to radically limit transgender rights if he is returned to the White House in 2024. In a special video address to supporters, he said he would push Congress to pass a national ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth and restrict Medicare and Medicaid funding for hospitals and medical professionals providing that care.He wants to target transgender adults as well. “I will sign a new executive order instructing every federal agency to cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age,” Trump said. “I will ask Congress to pass a bill establishing that the only genders recognized by the United States government are male and female, and they are assigned at birth.”There is plenty to say about the reasoning and motivation for this attack — whether it comes from Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida or Gov. Greg Abbott in Texas — but the important thing to note, for now, is that it is a direct threat to the lives and livelihoods of transgender people. It’s the same for other L.G.B.T.Q. Americans, who once again find themselves in the cross-hairs of an aggressive movement of social conservatives who have become all the more emboldened in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade last year.This is no accident. The attacks on transgender people and L.G.B.T.Q. rights are of a piece with the attack on abortion and reproductive rights. It is a singular assault on the bodily autonomy of all Americans, meant to uphold and reinforce traditional hierarchies of sex and gender.Politicians and those of us in the media alike tend to frame these conflicts as part of a “culture war,” which downplays their significance to our lives — not just as people living in the world, but as presumably equal citizens in a democracy.Democracy, remember, is not just a set of rules and institutions, but a way of life. In the democratic ideal, we meet each other in the public sphere as political and social equals, imbued with dignity and entitled to the same rights and privileges.I have referred to dignity twice now. That is intentional. Outside of certain select phrases (“the dignity of labor”), we don’t talk much about dignity in American politics, despite the fact that the demands of many different groups for dignity and respect in public life has been a driving force in American history since the beginning. To that point, one of the great theorists of dignity and democracy in the United States was none other than Frederick Douglass, whose experience in bondage gave him a lifelong preoccupation with the ways that dignity is either cultivated or denied.“Douglass observed,” the historian Nicholas Knowles Bromell writes in “The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass,” “that although dignity seems to be woven into human nature, it is also something one possesses to the degree that one is conscious of having it; and one’s own consciousness of having it depends in part on making others conscious of it. Others’ recognition of it then flows back and confirms one’s belief in having it, but conversely their refusal to recognize it has the opposite effect of weakening one’s confidence in one’s own dignity.”It is easy to see how this relates to chattel slavery, a totalizing system in which enslaved Black Americans struggled to assert their dignity and self-respect in the face of a political, social and economic order that sought to rob them of both. But Douglass explored this idea in other contexts as well.Writing after the Civil War on women’s suffrage, Douglass asked his readers to see the “plain” fact that “women themselves are divested of a large measure of their natural dignity by their exclusion from and participation in Government.” To “deny women her vote,” Douglass continued, “is to abridge her natural and social power, and to deprive her of a certain measure of respect.” A woman, he concluded, “loses in her own estimation by her enforced exclusion from the elective franchise just as slaves doubted their own fitness for freedom, from the fact of being looked down upon as fit only for slaves.”Similarly, in her analysis of Douglass’s political thought — published in the volume “African-American Political Thought: A Collected History” — the political theorist Sharon R. Krause shows how Douglass “clearly believed that slavery and prejudice can degrade an individual against his will” and generate, in his words, “poverty, ignorance and degradation.”Although Douglass never wrote a systematic account of his vision of democracy, Bromell contends that we can extrapolate such an account from the totality of his writing and activism. “A democracy,” Douglass’s work suggests, “is a polity that prizes human dignity,” Bromell writes. “It comes into existence when a group of persons agrees to acknowledge each other’s dignity, both informally, through mutually respectful comportment, and formally, through the establishment of political rights.” All of our freedoms, in Bromell’s account of Douglass, “are means toward the end of maintaining a political community in which all persons collaboratively produce their dignity.”The denial of dignity to one segment of the political community, then, threatens the dignity of all. This was true for Douglass and his time — it inspired his support for women’s suffrage and his opposition to the Chinese Exclusion Act — and it is true for us and ours as well. To deny equal respect and dignity to any part of the citizenry is to place the entire country on the road to tiered citizenship and limited rights, to liberty for some and hierarchy for the rest.Put plainly, the attack on the dignity of transgender Americans is an attack on the dignity of all Americans. And like the battles for abortion rights and bodily autonomy, the stakes of the fight for the rights and dignity of transgender people are high for all of us. There is no world in which their freedom is suppressed and yours is sustained.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Fani Willis Took On Atlanta’s Gangs. Now She May Be Coming For Trump.

      by

      Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Late on the first Sunday of 2021, news broke of President Donald J. Trump’s call with Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of Georgia, asking him to “find 11,780 votes” to help contest the 2020 election. The next morning — Monday, Jan. 4 — was Fani Willis’s first day in the office as the district attorney for Fulton County, which encompasses most of Atlanta, as well as suburbs like Sandy Springs, East Point and Alpharetta. “Not the second day,” she told me when I met with her in November. “My very first day in this office — in that conference room, it’s all over the TV.” She found herself hoping that the secretary of state might have been “in another county when it happened,” she said, laughing darkly. He was not. And so, Willis said, “I’m stuck with it.”Outside Atlanta, Willis is now best known for this singular potential criminal target. Trump’s efforts to interfere in the outcome of the election in Georgia, in both phone calls to local officials and, potentially, as part of a scheme to organize alternate electors, have been under investigation by Willis’s office since February 2021. The Trump lawyer Rudolph Giuliani and the former White House counsel Pat Cipollone have testified before a special grand jury; so have former Senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Raffensperger himself. In January, the special grand jury completed its investigatory work, submitting a report to Willis’s office and to a Superior Court judge, based on which Willis may or may not send evidence to a regular grand jury to seek criminal charges against Trump or his allies. If she does, there is every indication that she might bring one of her favorite prosecutorial tools to bear: racketeering charges, as laid out in the federal RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act, more famously used to prosecute the Mafia and criminal street gangs.Trump has attacked Willis on his Truth Social platform as a “young, ambitious, Radical Left Democrat ‘Prosecutor’ from Georgia, who is presiding over one of the most Crime Ridden and Corrupt places in the USA.” For a national audience not paying close attention to Atlanta politics, this claim might not sound fantastical. Willis, 51, is a Democrat and the first Black woman to serve as Fulton County district attorney — the first woman, period — and her victory in 2020 came amid a wave of reform-minded progressive prosecutors’ winning seats: George Gascón in Los Angeles, Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, Kim Foxx in Chicago, Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, Alvin Bragg in Manhattan.Willis (center) with her team in 2022 during proceedings to seat a special-purpose grand jury in Fulton County to look into the actions of former President Donald Trump and his supporters.Ben Gray/Associated PressBut it was evident from the outset that Willis would represent something quite different. In July 2021, six months into her tenure, she appeared before the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, which holds bimonthly public meetings in an assembly hall in downtown Atlanta, to request additional personnel. By the time she spoke, the session had already stretched over eight hours, including several public comments questioning the integrity of the 2020 election. She was joined by Fulton County’s Sheriff Patrick Labat, who wore a tactical vest that made him look as if he’d arrived straight from a hostage situation. Willis had dressed more business casual — a black V-neck blouse with bell sleeves, her hair braided and pulled back — but it immediately became clear who would be taking charge.“We have a public-safety crisis going on,” Willis began, coolly scanning her audience. Crime was rising, she said. Because of court backlogs and mismanagement by her predecessor, she argued, more dangerous individuals would end up on the streets unless she could hire more staff. Crime, she warned the commissioners, would be the primary issue in upcoming local elections. “None of your constituents is safe,” she thundered, sounding like a prosecutor facing another jury. “Not yours, Mr. Pitts — Chairman Pitts. Not yours, Commissioner Hall. Not yours, Commissioner Ellis.”Her slides piled up dire statistics: rapes up 86 percent from the previous summer, murders up 25 percent, more than 1,400 unindicted suspects who could soon be bonded out of jail. “So maybe you’re thinking, Well, this ain’t really my issue, not in my district,” she said. “But no! The murders are occurring eve-ry-where.” Photographs of victims flashed on the screen. A woman killed in April in District 1. “This young lady, she was in her 70s. My mama would say that’s young. Her tenant bludgeoned her to death.” A man killed in District 3. “He’s a high exec at U.P.S. After a hard workweek, he went to have a drink. I think that’s his right. He walked up and became a victim to gang violence. He’s dead. I’m the one who talks to his mama. Next slide.” A little girl in District 3. “Her and her mama and auntie shopping at Christmas. Anyone here don’t go to the mall around Christmas? How about dead?” A Tony Award-nominated actor in District 4. “Gets in a verbal dispute, is followed home and shot in the back multiple times. Your district.”And so it went, a virtuoso performance that had Sheriff Labat praising her, before his own remarks, as “the baddest D.A. in the country” and the commissioners offering full-throated, even profane support for her efforts. “[Expletive] the lowest millage rate!” shouted Marvin Arrington Jr., District 5’s commissioner, referring to the local tax burden. “We got to get these people locked up!” That September, the commission voted to appropriate an additional $5 million for Willis’s office.Willis has described a number of her initiatives as D.A. as progressive, including a pretrial diversion program in which individuals accused of certain crimes can avoid being indicted by agreeing to restitution and community service. But her overriding focus has been public safety, and on that front she has been an unapologetic doomsayer, employing rhetoric on violence and gang activity that can leave her sounding, at times, as if she shares Trump’s dim assessment of local crime levels. Gangs, Willis claimed at a news conference last May, “are committing, conservatively, 75 to 80 percent of all the violent crime that we are seeing within our community. And so they have to be rooted out of our community.”To that end, she quickly moved to expand her office’s gang unit. She has also pushed the Atlanta Police Department to seek more gang warrants and personally lobbied for the Safe and Secure Georgia Act, an attempt to make the state’s already-tough gang laws even tougher, imposing mandatory minimum sentences for repeat offenders and increasing the power of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Willis suggested the name for the bill, which died in the statehouse; when a reporter from the Atlanta NBC affiliate pointed out during an interview that all 25 of its initial sponsors were Republicans, Willis responded that she was “happy to work with anyone who wants to help me in this fight against gang violence and crime.”The election special grand jury inquiry is far from the only case helmed by Willis to make national news — or to open her up to criticism. In 2014, she was lead prosecutor on an infamous RICO case involving 35 teachers, principals and other educators in the Atlanta public-school system, who were accused of changing students’ answers on standardized tests for financial gain, a prosecution many observers found excessive. And since she took office, her crackdown on gangs has brought her in direct conflict with one of Atlanta’s biggest cultural exports, hip-hop music, in another series of cases that have drawn fire for potential overreach. There was a sweeping 105-count RICO indictment against 12 supposed members of various sets of the Bloods, including the Billboard-charting rapper YFN Lucci; later came gang charges and an indictment under RICO against the acclaimed artist Young Thug and 27 supposed associates (including another wildly popular rapper, Gunna), with members of the group accused of involvement in murder, armed robbery, drug dealing and witness intimidation. At a news conference in August, Willis announced the indictment of 26 supposed members of the Drug Rich gang, who were accused of attempted murder, armed robbery and a series of home invasions and burglaries targeting celebrities including Mariah Carey and the N.F.L. wide receiver Calvin Ridley. “We have a message,” she told the assembled reporters: “Get out of this county or expect to start seeing sentences that go life-plus, because I am not going to negotiate with gang members.”‘We’re just going to do that case like every other. I don’t know why it’s shocking to people. If it turns out that charges are legitimate, we’re going to bring them.’When I visited her office late last year, Willis sat behind a large desk and indicated that I should take a seat on a couch about 10 feet away. Jeff DiSantis, her media-relations chief, sat in a corner, wearing cowboy boots and rarely glancing up from his laptop. Gov. Brian Kemp had just testified before the special grand jury that morning; if not for the rain, he might have walked over from his office in the Capitol building, only blocks away. Everyone I spoke with in Willis’s office referred to her as Madam D.A., and she faced me with her arms crossed and an apprising formality, the sort of person more used to asking the questions than answering them.This steely reputation has cheered those who dream of seeing the Teflon ex-president in criminal peril. Willis has declined to discuss that investigation outside of opaque, highly disciplined statements, leaving observers searching for clues. Might she work her way up the chain, as RICO prosecutors often do, to Trump himself? Will a brazen violation of state election law turn out to be his biggest legal vulnerability? Is Willis prepared for a national partisan fight on a scale she has never experienced? “The reality is, we have a job, and the job is just to try to find the truth,” she told me, adopting the deliberate tone of a professional sharing reasonable but otherwise unexciting information. As for Trump: “We’re just going to do that case like every other. I don’t know why it’s shocking to people. If it turns out that charges are legitimate, we’re going to bring them. And if it turns out that charges are not warranted, we’re not going to bring them. We’re just going through the process.”A better way to understand how Willis operates might be to consider how she reached this position in the first place. Willis came to the district attorney’s office by navigating a very particular set of political dynamics, and by doing so at a very specific moment in the history of Atlanta, the birthplace of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and so-called Black Mecca — a moment marked by debates about crime and policing, along with roiling local protests that shaped perceptions of public order. How the politics surrounding all of these issues will play out remains an open question. But it’s one that Willis, a Black woman who ran with the endorsement of a police union, is positioned to test like few others. “I’m probably not a very good politician,” she told me. “But I’m a very good prosecutor.”Willis was born in Inglewood, Calif., just outside Los Angeles, in 1971. Her father, John C. Floyd III, was a founder of the Black Panther Political Party in Los Angeles, of which Angela Davis was briefly a member. He eventually became a criminal defense attorney, having noticed over the course of many protest arrests that the lawyers who showed up to spring him and his comrades from jail were always white. The family moved to Washington as Willis entered first grade. Her parents split up a few years later, and her mother eventually returned to California. Willis mostly stayed with her father, whose caseload — in 1980s Washington, at the height of the crack epidemic — was “murders and dope boys,” she told me. When she was a teenager, he would issue dire warnings: You can’t go there. My client killed somebody over there. “I tease him sometimes now that it was child abuse, because at 8, I was putting his criminal files together,” Willis said.From around that age, Willis knew she wanted to follow her father’s path. After graduating from Howard University, she moved to Atlanta to attend law school at Emory. Her first job was in the office of a defense lawyer named Alvin Kendall, working alongside another young Atlanta lawyer, the future Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. The volume and variety of cases — she arrived at one bond hearing only to recognize her client as the stripper from her bachelorette party — gave her confidence in the courtroom, and she eventually left to start her own practice. Not long after, “Alvin got into some trouble,” as Willis put it; in 1998, Kendall was disbarred and sentenced to prison for five years for conspiring to give a client advance warning of a criminal search. (He was reinstated in 2015.)In 2001, Willis joined the Fulton County district attorney’s office. The D.A. at the time was Paul Howard, who had gone from picking cotton and attending a segregated high school outside Augusta to becoming, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the first African American district attorney in the entire state of Georgia. Willis describes him as a brilliant man: “I wanted to please him, so I worked really hard here,” she said. In the major-crimes unit, she tried over 100 murder cases, averaging a dozen per year. Eventually she became one of Howard’s chief deputies. “She was the superstar,” Antonio Lewis, an Atlanta City Council member, told me. “If you play basketball, LeBron James is better than everybody else, right? I’m telling you, people that worked with her in the office say: ‘Oh, that’s LeBron James. She’s better than us.’”Willis’s first encounter with national headlines came in 2014, with what became known as the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal. Most of the educators involved took plea deals, but prosecutors tried the final dozen on RICO conspiracy charges, winning racketeering convictions against 11. Critics found the prosecution excessive: the use of RICO, the eight-month trial, the prison sentences for some defendants. Questions were also raised about the decision to prosecute ordinary teachers for falsifying scores, rather than address systemic pressures or an overreliance on standardized tests. Willis remains unapologetic about the convictions. The prosecution “is not popular, meaning we don’t want to talk about it, but it absolutely needed to be done,” she says. “The reality is, if what they say in my obituary about me is ‘she stood up for Black children,’ then I’ll live with that.”Fani Willis speaking during a 2013 Fulton County Superior Court hearing related to the so-called Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal.David Tulis/Associated PressDespite Republican candidates’ relentless use of crime as a wedge issue in 2022, criminal-justice reform was actually a rare area of bipartisan consensus for much of Willis’s time working under Howard. This was thanks in part to former Gov. Nathan Deal, a Republican elected in 2010 who previously worked as an assistant district attorney and served as a judge. He made his case for cutting the state’s soaring prison population in both fiscal and moral terms; across his eight years as governor, there was bipartisan support for reforms addressing sentencing, juvenile justice and cash bail. Under Deal, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, prison admissions of Black inmates dropped to historic lows, prison spending fell and programs treating nonviolent offenders expanded. Tiffany Roberts, the public-policy director of the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights, told me that during those years national think tanks began “to look to Georgia for some direction”; the organization found itself working alongside not only liberal activists but also Newt Gingrich and the Koch brothers.Willis’s first run for an elected position came in 2018, around the close of Deal’s second term. By this point a divorced mother of two college-age daughters, Willis left the D.A.’s office and took $50,000 from her retirement fund to enter a race for Fulton County Superior Court judge, making it as far as the runoff election. Judge races in Georgia are nonpartisan, but she knew a number of voters would be Republicans, so she went to talk with a white Republican strategist on the north side of town. “I needed to be able to speak to that population, and I’m their perfect candidate, right?” she told me. “We’re conservative, we’re hard on crime, I’m a life prosecutor. And he told me something that was so hurtful.” She would never win those voters, the strategist said bluntly, because she was Black and female. “Your recording can’t pick up the way my face is, but I was like, ‘He don’t know what he’s talking about,’” Willis said. “That’s not the way people in my county think.” Still, that conversation, and her eventual loss, left her devastated. She remembers praying for guidance and sitting in her living room “feeling very lost.”One figure who was elected that year was Gov. Brian Kemp, who won a second term last November. He has a very different approach to crime than his predecessor, including pledges to build more prisons, increase mandatory minimum sentences for gang recruitment and tighten bail restrictions. In a campaign ad last year, Kemp accused his opponent, Stacey Abrams, of “lining her pockets with cash from defund-the-police extremists.” By the 2020 election, Tiffany Roberts says, it was “almost like a scarlet letter to take on criminal legal reform in Georgia” — a “narrative change” that has “painted anyone interested in changing these systems as a radical.”After her 2018 loss, Willis was appointed chief judge by the mayor of South Fulton, a separate city within Fulton County. She found the work boring — ruling on low-level misdemeanors in Municipal Court — but began making more money than ever before in her private practice. “I’m now representing a few athletes, they keep making babies, I’m doing family-law stuff with them,” she said. (She also represented at least one person connected with figures she would later target in a high-profile gang indictment — YSL Mondo, a Young Thug associate who, in a recent Rolling Stone interview, sounded surprised to see his former advocate prosecuting the group.) Life was good. “And then,” she went on, “Paul starts getting in trouble.”Paul Howard had been district attorney for 23 years. He was preparing to run for a seventh term when claims of misconduct began to surface. A former Fulton County human-resources administrator accused him of sexual harassment in late 2019. In February 2020, his former deputy chief of staff filed a lawsuit accusing Howard of discriminating against her after learning of her pregnancy. Howard denied both allegations, but members of the Atlanta political and legal class could see blood in the water. People began reaching out to Willis, saying she was the only person who could beat Howard and warning about a Republican governor appointing his replacement if the scandals ultimately took him down.She also heard from Mary Norwood, an independent who has run for mayor twice, served as a City Council member and lives in the wealthy, largely white Buckhead neighborhood. In the early 1990s, Norwood started one of the first robocall businesses, and she prides herself on knowing “the power of a short, simple message,” she says. One simple issue she had long been hammering was crime, despite her hailing from one of the lowest-crime districts in Atlanta. By early 2020, she had decided she wanted a new district-attorney candidate. Contrary to the meeting with the Republican strategist from two years earlier, Norwood left her meeting with Willis, a Black Democrat with a strong message on gang violence, a convert. Norwood raised funds for Willis’s campaign — “not real money, but early money,” she says — and urged her mostly Republican donors to choose a Democratic ballot in the primary and “help keep Buckhead safe” by voting in the D.A. race.Willis “absolutely” felt that she would be betraying Howard by running, she told me. But soon after the primary began, another woman came forward to accuse Howard of sexual harassment, and news broke that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation was looking into claims that Howard had improperly funneled city grant money to a nonprofit he was running. (Howard denied criminal wrongdoing, though he paid a fine to the Georgia State Ethics Commission; he declined to comment for this article. Two of the misconduct suits were dismissed, and one remains pending.) Willis came in first in the primary — with, according to Norwood, significant support from her Buckhead community. But a third candidate, another former attorney in the D.A.’s office, was running to the left of both Willis and Howard, preventing her from winning more than 50 percent of the vote. A runoff election was scheduled for that August.The race unfolded in the summer of 2020, amid one of the most volatile environments in recent history. A pandemic raged, a presidential election loomed and national protests erupted — spinning, in Atlanta and other cities, in directions that would deeply complicate people’s feelings about law enforcement and public safety. On the night of June 12, just three days after Willis’s strong showing in the first round of voting, two white police officers arrived at a Wendy’s just south of downtown, where a 27-year-old Black man named Rayshard Brooks had fallen asleep in his car while idling at the drive-through. Brooks admitted to having been drinking, and his encounter with the officers proceeded for 40 minutes in a “cordial and uneventful” fashion, per a report later issued by special prosecutors. Only when an officer attempted to handcuff Brooks did things turn: Brooks wriggled away, grabbed and repeatedly fired an officer’s Taser and tried to flee. When Officer Garrett Rolfe pursued on foot, Brooks turned and tried to fire the Taser again. Rolfe fired three shots, striking Brooks twice in the back and left buttock and killing him.This was less than three weeks after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. In Atlanta, downtown’s Centennial Olympic Park had already become a hub of Floyd protests, which Kim Jackson, an Episcopal priest and activist who had been serving as a protest chaplain since the 2014 demonstrations in Ferguson, Mo., described to me as among the most diverse she had ever witnessed in the city — old, young and “just an extraordinary amount of white people showing up.” The power of such numbers, she said, left her feeling hopeful, as if “maybe something’s going to happen.”New footage of a white officer’s fatally shooting a Black suspect in the back only a few miles away was not the something Jackson had in mind. The day after Brooks’s killing, Rolfe was fired (though he would later be reinstated), Chief of Police Erika Shields resigned and the protests moved to the Wendy’s parking lot.Antonio Lewis, now a City Council member, was running for his seat at the time; he went straight to the Wendy’s site as soon as he heard there was a shooting, unaware that the victim was somebody he grew up with. (“We actually called Rayshard Little Mac,” he told me. “Nobody where I’m from called him Rayshard.”) The mood there was initially positive, according to Jackson, the priest and activist. But when evening came she detected a shift. Families took their children home. New people arrived. Water bottles were thrown. Police officers deployed smoke canisters. That night, people set fire to the Wendy’s.Willis campaigned for the office of district attorney in 2020, amid roiling protests in Atlanta over the killing of Rayshard Brooks by a police officer.Ben Gray/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Associated PressWithin days, Howard’s office announced indictments of both police officers involved in the shooting. To Norwood, the city councilwoman from Buckhead, the indictments were motivated by Howard’s poor showing in the first round of voting: “He was looking for, ‘I’m the tough guy, and I’m going to indict the police.’ So that’s why he did it. He did it as a campaign stunt.” Willis said she was “deeply concerned” that her opponent had moved faster than the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and urged “the community and the media to keep in mind the many cases involving police use of force that Mr. Howard has lacked the courage to act upon.” Howard’s action drew stronger denunciations from other quarters: The head of a Georgia police organization said the D.A. had “just successfully set up the city for another riot,” while the Fox News host Tucker Carlson declared that Howard had cravenly decided to “bow immediately to the mob’s demands.”Willis accused Howard of tainting any potential prosecution by using footage of the Brooks shooting in a campaign ad and predicted that he would be arrested because of his financial impropriety before the end of the year. Howard, in a debate, hammered Willis for receiving an endorsement and campaign contributions from a police union and pointed out that, as she had happily spent most of her career working for him, voters might reasonably wonder, “If this guy was so bad, why did you stay with him for 16 years?” (When I asked Willis if she had been aware of any inappropriate behavior by Howard, she said curtly, “I knew there were issues.”)The site of the burned restaurant, which had held both a demonstration and a memorial, morphed into occupied territory. Parked cars and debris obstructed University Avenue in both directions. A block-party vibe continued by day: On June 19, people served barbecue from a smoker and families ate with their children in front of the charred Wendy’s, its freckled mascot smiling down from the still-standing sign. By evening, though, a young Black man marched down the street carrying a long gun, followed by another man in camouflage pants and a black SECURITY T-shirt; moments later, a 24-year-old protester was shot in the leg. The following day, a man was wounded in a drive-by shooting, and George Chidi, an independent journalist, was beaten up by armed vigilantes. Bill Torpy, a columnist at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, visited the site the next afternoon and was told by men with guns not to make any sudden moves or he would be shot. The barricades had become an armed checkpoint. Torpy witnessed two police cars approach, then drive away. Lewis, the city councilman, contends that some of the armed people were trying, in however misguided a way, to protect the space. “But what happened was they did it totally wrong. The city of Atlanta should have stepped in.”Keisha Lance Bottoms, Atlanta’s mayor and Willis’s former colleague, would later acknowledge in an interview with The Journal-Constitution’s editorial board that she had held off on sending police officers to clear the area at the behest of Joyce Sheperd, the City Council member representing the district, whom Lewis was running to replace. Sheperd wanted more time to negotiate with the demonstrators. But there was also another reason for the lack of police presence: In the days following Howard’s decision to indict, 171 Atlanta police officers out of a force of 2,000 called in sick, in what local news outlets began calling a “blue flu.”On June 23, Brooks’s funeral was held at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached; Ebenezer’s pastor, the future Senator Raphael Warnock, presided. The progressive third-place finisher in the district-attorney primary, Christian Wise Smith, would soon publicly endorse Howard, praising his former boss for embracing “the movement of the people for a more progressive and restorative justice system.”On the evening of July 4, a man named Omar Ivery approached a roadblock near University in a Jeep Cherokee owned by his friend Charmaine Turner, who rode in the passenger seat. Her 8-year-old daughter, Secoriea, was in the back. When Ivery tried to drive past the barricade, a group of armed individuals opened fire on the Jeep, striking and killing the child.The Fourth of July was a Saturday. By Monday morning, the police had peacefully cleared the site of barricades, protesters and even the Brooks memorial. At a news conference, Mayor Bottoms noted that “Paul Howard made the decision to charge the officers. Paul Howard did not consult with me. He made that decision, and people can go to the polls and express how they feel about that decision in a few weeks.”Willis had already won the most votes in the first round of the primary, but now momentum was swinging overwhelmingly in her direction. She won the Aug. 11 runoff in a landslide, with over 70 percent of the vote. No Republican was running for D.A. in Fulton County, so winning the primary sealed the general election for Willis. Six months later, she would be opening her investigation of Trump.Shortly after her election, Willis sent a letter to local law-enforcement agencies indicating that her office would be prioritizing gangs. Citing one of her new recruits — Mike Carlson, a Republican who was instrumental in the development of the state’s gang laws and is now executive district attorney for major crimes — the letter asked the police to “bring us cases under the street-gang act so we can prosecute them.” Willis told me that her approach to gangs has been a “completely different one” from her predecessor’s, “just the way I’ve manned it up, meaning put the resources in there.” She added staff and technology and trained the Atlanta Police Department on identifying gang signifiers and writing gang warrants, resulting in what she says is a 300 percent increase in the department’s gang warrants.Willis’s office would employ the Georgia gang statute in August 2021, when a grand jury indicted Julian Conley and Jerrion McKinney for their roles in the death of Secoriea Turner. (Both have pleaded not guilty.) The D.A.’s office claimed that Conley and McKinney were Bloods who had come out to support Brooks, a fellow Blood. Brooks was on probation for domestic violence and theft offenses, but his family has denied any knowledge of gang membership. According to Gerald Griggs, the president of the Georgia chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., the power structure in Atlanta seized on Turner’s killing as an opportunity to change the narrative: “You know, ‘These were gang members out here, they were supporting Rayshard, Rayshard was a gang member, we got to do something about the gangs.’ And from all accounts of the people that I’ve spoken to who knew Rayshard Brooks, there was no indication that he was a gang member.”As for Brooks, Willis requested to have herself recused from the case, and she eventually was. A final report issued by special prosecutors found that the officers reacted in an “objectively reasonable manner” by using deadly force because Brooks “posed an immediate threat of physical violence” — though Brooks was 18 feet away, running in the opposite direction and holding an unloaded Taser. Willis told me it would be inappropriate for her to comment on that decision and would say only that, in her view, Howard’s handling of the indictment had been “unfair to the gentleman who lost his life, and certainly his family, and it was unfair to the police, because they do also have a right to due process.”Sidestepping a politically messy decision on whether or not to prosecute police officers has allowed Willis to keep her focus primarily on gangs. But the size of the net Georgia’s street-gang statute hands prosecutors, and Willis’s frequent use of it, have raised concerns for critics. Carlson describes Georgia’s gang laws as “in many ways the most powerful” in the country because of provisions making earlier criminal activities as a gang member “presumptively admissible” in court. (In most criminal trials, bringing up past actions to demonstrate criminal propensity is forbidden.) Devin Franklin, who joined the Southern Center for Human Rights last March, spent the 12 previous years as a lawyer in the public defenders’ office, where, he told me, he noticed a pattern: Lower-level crimes were elevated because they were supposedly committed by a person affiliated with a gang. An individual crime like gun possession could be enhanced by gang charges on the logic that the offender was lending “credibility” to a larger criminal organization. Or, sometimes, the state would bring a case in which “a neutral body would say the evidence is fairly weak,” Franklin said, but attaching a gang charge allowed prosecutors to shift focus toward the “general violence of the gang,” forcing the accused to defend themselves “against this narrative of, ‘I’m a violent person, because I hang with quote-unquote “thugs.” ’”Willis’s approach to high-profile gang prosecutions offers a window into how she might proceed with a target like Trump. In particular, there is her unsparing deployment of RICO indictments, even as critics question their breadth. Last year’s 56-count indictment of Young Thug’s YSL group, for example — the name signifying both a record label and, per Willis’s office, an associated criminal organization — included charges of murder and armed robbery but also cited social-media posts, minor offenses like dealing marijuana and, in what has drawn the most pushback, song lyrics as examples of furthering the conspiracy. Carlson, who comes from a family of bluegrass musicians, says he is comfortable with citing lyrics in these circumstances: “Lyrics of skinhead and other white-supremacist groups have been used for decades in racketeering and gang-related prosecutions for hate crimes. Is somebody suggesting we should stop that?” At a news conference, Willis defended the practice, quoting lyrics by a Drug Rich member including “we’ll kick in the house” and “if we steal a car, we’re gonna take off the tags.” “I have some legal advice,” she said. “Don’t confess to crimes on rap lyrics if you do not want them used. Or at least get out of my county.”The rapper Young Thug during a virtual appearance before a Fulton County magistrate judge in Atlanta in 2022.Arvin Temkar/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Associated PressJury selection for the YSL case began, chaotically, in January. Young Thug was caught apparently accepting a Percocet from one of his co-defendants in the courtroom. Eight of the 28 men named in the indictment, including Gunna, have accepted plea deals; the judge estimates that the trial of the others could last between six and nine months, with Willis’s office already promising as many as 300 possible witnesses. Such a length would approach that of the longest criminal trial in Georgia’s history: the 2014 RICO trial of the educators accused in the standardized-test-cheating scheme, for which Willis served as lead prosecutor.Shani Robinson, one of the convicted teachers, co-wrote a 2019 book about her experience, “None of the Above.” She is not a fan of Willis, to put it mildly; the book describes her as “holding forth like a fire-and-brimstone preacher.” (Also, “having a penchant for dull blazers.”) Robinson’s account of Willis’s opening argument, during which she explained to jurors how RICO worked, gets at the tension between what Willis and her office see as critical tools and what critics consider overreach: “ ‘The act of one conspirator is the act of all,’ she gravely stated. She added that people don’t have to meet in person or agree on anything to be conspirators. ‘But what you do have to do is all be doing the same thing for the same purpose.’”Robinson was a first-grade teacher whose students’ standardized tests were considered practice. They did not count academically or apply toward any district targets, Robinson says, adding that she never received any kind of bonus pay. She has always insisted upon her innocence and refused to take a plea deal, despite the threat of up to 25 years in prison and a RICO prosecution that, she said, placed pressure on defendants to plead guilty and testify against others. When we met at a Starbucks in Atlanta, nine years after the original trial, her case was still making its way through the appeal process.“This is what I’ve come across, especially dealing with the media, especially dealing with the liberal media: Fani is a Black woman, a Democrat, who is going after Trump, and people just want to turn a blind eye,” she told me. “And I’m like, She’s a Black woman who is trying to send other Black women who have children to prison! She asked the judge to give me prison time even though I had a 4-month-old baby at home.” The N.A.A.C.P.’s Griggs, a criminal defense attorney who represented another of the teachers at the original trial, told me he considered the prosecution “a colossal waste of taxpayer money. I don’t think a single child benefited from the trial. I think that teachers who had nothing to do with the actual cheating that happened in Atlanta public schools were punished for things that happened at the top.”Willis remains proud of her work on a trial that was so record-shatteringly long and complicated. She left the D.A.’s office to run for judge in part, she told me, because she found herself thinking, “What case is ever going to be bigger than that?”Now she could be facing a much bigger case: the potential prosecution of a former president. Considering the known facts and Willis’s demonstrated skill at presenting juries with sprawling conspiracy cases, a lengthy RICO trial is a distinct possibility. But it’s an approach she would be choosing in the highest-pressure context imaginable — one that would require both a huge investment of her office’s resources and a political appetite for a good deal of backlash and spectacle.If Willis has ambitions beyond the office of the Fulton County district attorney, she hasn’t spoken publicly about them. From a political standpoint, her only real misstep thus far has been hosting a fund-raiser last summer for Charlie Bailey, a former colleague at the D.A.’s office who was running for lieutenant governor. Bailey’s Republican opponent, Burt Jones, was one of 16 fake Trump electors Willis’s office was investigating, and the fund-raiser drew a sharp rebuke from Judge Robert McBurney of the Fulton County Superior Court — the same judge tasked with deciding whether to make public the special grand jury’s report — who called it a “what are you thinking” moment that created “horrific” optics and disqualified Willis from proceeding with her investigation of Jones.There was a scenario in which a Democrat like Willis, with her tough-as-nails messaging on crime, could have been not entirely unlike Governor Deal before her, better positioned to deliver on some reforms the left wing of the party has been fighting for — especially considering how, over the past year, reformists have experienced backlashes in places like San Francisco and New York. Kim Jackson, the chaplain at the Brooks protests, has since been elected to the State Senate, and she told me she supported Willis with a sense of excitement: A Black woman running on an anti-death-penalty platform seemed about as progressive as she could hope for. But three months into Willis’s tenure, a horrific mass shooting occurred at multiple spas in and around Atlanta, leaving eight dead, mostly Asian women, in what appeared to be a hate crime. Not long after, Willis announced that she would seek the death penalty for the accused shooter. And though Willis campaigned on pretrial diversion in lieu of prison time as one of her major reform issues, a report released by the American Civil Liberties Union on overcrowded and unsafe conditions at the Fulton County Jail cited insufficient use of diversion and a failure to indict arrested individuals in a timely manner as two major factors.Willis told me the report was “a joke” and offered several arguments for why the data was flawed. “We’ve probably got 25 people in Fulton County Jail on a misdemeanor, and they’re there for 48 hours,” she said. “Unfortunately,” she added, “a lot of people with crimes that I think a regular citizen would say, ‘Hey, they need to stay in jail, they burglarized my house’ — that’s not even the kind of people that stay in jail here. People are given bail.”But the morning after we spoke, I sat in the back of a courtroom where the judge was holding a series of preliminary hearings for jail inmates, all Black men, who had been arrested and held since mid-July. One, accused of stealing equipment from a landscaping truck, had been in jail for 112 days; another, accused of smashing storefront windows, had been locked up for 116. It turned out that the initial police report had overestimated the amount of damage, presenting the crime as a felony rather than what it actually was, a misdemeanor.Nearly two years into Willis’s term, “I give her all the positive marks for going after President Trump,” Jackson told me. “I think it’s a courageous move. And I think it’s the right move.” She paused. “Yeah, that’s my praise.” And her criticism? Jackson sighed and said Willis had come to the State Senate to make a presentation about public safety, talking about gangs and other crime. Jackson had studied local crime statistics during the pandemic, however, and found a more complicated picture: murders up, other major crimes down. As Willis spoke, “I’m literally looking at the statistics — like, they’re on my desk right in front of me,” Jackson recounted. “So I just struggled with that,” she said. “I mean, I understand what it is to be a politician. And I understand that we have to respond to public pressure. But I don’t think we have to add fuel to the fire. And there have been times — I’m trying to be very careful here, because I respect her — but there have been times in which I felt like she added fuel to a fire that we could have easily put out.”The N.A.A.C.P.’s Griggs, who has known Willis since he was an undergraduate and working alongside her in the city solicitor’s office, calls her “a great lawyer, a consummate prosecutor,” but continues, “I just think that, you know, sometimes she’s a little too gung ho. And I think that justice is somewhere in the middle.” We met in his law office, and when I brought up Trump, Griggs pulled a book from his shelf and read aloud from Title 21, the state elections law, which bars “criminal solicitation to commit election fraud.” If you played the recording of Trump’s phone conversation to a grand jury and then read the state codes, Griggs told me, “they will indict him.” Griggs said it was interesting to find himself, in this case, on the “other side of the ‘v.’” — meaning, on the side of the prosecution rather than the defense. He didn’t say if this particular prosecutor gave him hope, but he sounded upbeat as he noted that the former president, if indicted, would receive his due process “not on Fox News, not on his Truth Social, but in a Georgia courtroom.”Mark Binelli is a contributing writer for the magazine. He last wrote about the opera director Yuval Sharon, and before that about the tangled legal aftermath of a deadly Waco, Texas, biker brawl. Nydia Blas is an Atlanta-based visual artist who is interested in storytelling through a Black female perspective. She was named one of The British Journal of Photography’s Ones to Watch in 2019. More