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Democrat Jared Williams, a Black lawyer, defeated Republican incumbent Natalie Paine in the 2020 election for district attorney of the Augusta judicial circuit, a three-county area on Georgia’s border with South Carolina. Williams was the circuit’s first Black DA ever and the first Democratic DA in 20 years.
Williams, then 32, responded to his victory with Obama-esque good will: “It was my prayer life and my work ethic,” he said, “and the fact that I didn’t take anything for granted. It didn’t matter to me when someone had a Trump sticker on their car or a Biden mask, I was going to go up and tell someone who I was and what I stood for.”
Nonetheless, Williams’s win was quite the upset, and so upsetting to the white conservative power structure that they quickly moved to undo it. This is a common trend down South.
Reporter Justin Glawe details in The Guardian how the day after the election, before the results were even certified, Republican state legislator Barry Fleming sent a text to Doug Duncan, the county commission chair for Columbia, one of the three counties in the circuit and by far the whitest.
The text asked, “Does the board of commissioners want to be there [sic] own judicial circuit.” (No one has time for spelling when they’re busy screwing democracy!)
Duncan thought this was swell, so by December, he’d officially asked the area’s lawmakers to introduce legislation separating Columbia county from the judicial circuit that also included Richmond and Burke counties. Fleming was obviously on board with his own idea and his bill later passed with bipartisan support. Thus was created Georgia’s first new judicial court in almost 40 years.
Last year, the Georgia Supreme Court, perhaps not surprisingly, dismissed a lawsuit filed by the Black Voters Matter Fund, which charged that the split disenfranchised Black voters in the former circuit, who voted for Williams specifically because of his policies, which included significant but hardly radical criminal justice reforms.
Instead, Black voters in Columbia county received the political equivalent of egg noodles and ketchup: Their prosecutor is now Bobby Christine, who was appointed by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. Christine was previously a Donald Trump-appointed US attorney. The far-right, “pro-cop” Natalie Paine now serves as Christine’s chief deputy.
The split, as previously mentioned, had bipartisan support. Richmond county is majority Black, and State senator Harold Jones, who’s also Black, had argued Richmond’s 200,000 residents should have their own circuit because of the high workload. He failed to make any progress until Republican lawmakers found it politically expedient. Jones should’ve considered what motivated his new “allies.”
Republicans have actively pushed back against prosecutors, such as Williams, who don’t embrace supposed “tough-on-crime” policies. (MAGA has demonstrated lately how little it believes in actual “law and order,” given its continued defense of Donald Trump’s daylight crime sprees.) It’s one thing to fight criminal justice reform at the ballot box, but Republicans are outright rejecting election results they don’t like.
Gov. Ron DeSantis, the less-charming Napoleon of Florida, fired a duly elected prosecutor who disagreed with him politically and has promised to punish prosecutors who don’t promote his fascist agenda if he’s elected president. White Republican leaders in Mississippi created a majority-white judicial district with hand-picked judges and law enforcement to oversee a majority-Black city. Such blatant racism is a critical fact not a theory.
“There was a time when as [Black people] started to win these elections, white people would leave,” said Cliff Albright, executive director of Black Voters Matter Fund. “But now they’ve figured out, we don’t actually have to leave, we can just change the jurisdiction. It is a way, even when the political minority is losing, to hold on to the mechanism of coercion through the courts and law enforcement.”
Augusta is very much the old South. It’s the home of the once racially restricted Augusta National Golf Club, where the Masters tournament has a less than honorable tradition of racism and sexism. When I was in college, back in the far-away 1990s, a classmate interned at the Augusta Chronicle newspaper. Her experience was quite different from her white peers. She was both Black and a woman, and her time there was so hellish, she considered abandoning journalism entirely.
Jared Williams’s election in 2020 briefly made me believe Augusta had changed since my youth. I was wrong. Jim Crow-style apartheid has never truly ended in the South.
[The Guardian / Augusta Chronicle]
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