[Politico] COLUMBUS, Ga.‐Ed Harbison remembers Jim Crow. The segregated schools, the no-go theaters, the colored-only water fountains. The white supremacist siege of the First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, where Martin Luther King, Jr., was trapped inside, and Harbison was, too. The white folks telling his mother she couldn’t vote unless she could answer how many beans were in a jar, or how wet water was.Harbison is now a Democratic state senator from Georgia, and the Deep South has changed radically in his 72 years on its soil. Sometimes, though, he reflects on how it hasn’t changed‐like when he reflects on the high-profile race for governor pitting Stacey Abrams, a progressive African-American Democrat who used to run a voting rights nonprofit, against Brian Kemp, the conservative white Republican secretary of state who is mired in multiple voting rights controversies. Harbison is rooting for Abrams to become the first black woman governor of any American state, and Kemp’s efforts to purge voter rolls and challenge voter registrations in ways that disproportionately affect minorities bring back painful memories of the bad old days. "It’s a different time, but it feels like the same game plan," Harbison told me after an Abrams rally at Columbus State University.
Georgia is at the epicenter of a national movement for stricter voting rules in Republican-controlled states, and its battles over the ballot have become a national story about race and power in the South. But while Harbison is concerned that Republicans may be disenfranchising some black voters, perhaps even enough to swing a too-close-to-call governor’s race to Kemp, he thinks far more black voters disenfranchise themselves, sitting out elections they suspect are pre-determined to ratify the white power structure’s status quo. He tells his constituents, especially young ones, about the blood that’s been spilled to secure their right to vote, but many of them don’t believe their vote will count.