Tag: Spelman College

The “October surprise,” that peculiarly American tradition of a last-minute revelation intended to alter the course of a political campaign, has typically hinged on an act of unsavory behavior. Trump won, anyway. Similarly, in early November of 2000, news broke of George W. Bush’s decades-old D.U.I. On Monday, photographs surfaced showing Stacey Abrams, the Democratic nominee, participating in the burning of a Georgia state flag, in 1992, when she was a sophomore at Spelman College, in Atlanta. An attempt to change the flag nearly derailed Governor Zell Miller’s political career, in 1994, and, eight years later, Governor Roy Barnes lost his bid for reëlection partly as a result of his having successfully removed the Confederate elements from the flag. Elements of the Confederate flag had been incorporated into the Georgia flag in 1956, as part of that state’s massive resistance against the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Fifty-three years ago, Lester Maddox, an entrepreneur who had failed in two previous attempts to be elected to public office, launched a quixotic campaign for governor of Georgia. Maddox won his first political campaign, and was sworn in as governor. The playbook of racist populism that was so key to the victory of Donald Trump in 2016 was perfected in the South—Trump, in effect, treated the entire country as if it were the South in 1966—and the governor’s race is another testament to its durability. It is likely that a part of the state’s population will consider the burning of a Confederate-tinged flag twenty-five years ago to be an act of outrage that is disqualifying for the governorship.