The city was the ground zero for a good part of the Civil Rights movement back in the day….
It has watched as some try rewrite the history of racism in America and others try to drag the country back to the ‘good ole day’s’….
Now they get to see a move to ‘Justice’ in their place by one of their own representing their state and America on the whole…….
And for some?
It IS a chance to strut their stuff in a city of the ‘New South’….
The state that DID vote for President Joe Biden….
Back in the day, Atlanta was the cradle of the civil rights movement, home to activist icons like Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Sr., Julian Bond, Rep. John Lewis and C.T. Vivian, a hub of Black exceptionalism. That’s a history the city wears consciously, as evidenced here by the plethora of murals, museums and streets — some named after the parents and grandparents of kids I grew up with. And now Atlanta, the so-called Black Mecca, is the epicenter of a fight over the peaceful transfer of power. As I tool around Atlanta, I encounter Atlantans who are very conscious of the significance of this trial — and of how, once again, their city will play an important role in making American history.
They’re very aware of all of this.
And they’re positively gleeful.
“We’re getting a kick out of Trump getting booked at the Rice Street Jail,” says Eddie Jewell, a 54-year-old Uber driver and lifelong Atlantan, referring to the nickname for the Fulton County Jail.
“We’re loving it,” Jewell says, with a hearty laugh. “For a long time, he’s been recklessly saying things and now he’s being called out. How are you going to call the Secretary of State and ask him to overturn an election?
“John Lewis is smiling,” he says. “Dr. King is smiling. I know [former Mayor] Andy Young in his wheelchair has a big smile on his face. … I think it’s great the birthplace of the civil rights movement is having a big part of this.
“All eyes are on us right now and not for the wrong reason. For a great reason. Dr. King said, ‘We shall overcome.’ And we are definitely overcoming.”…
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“Georgia has always been a barometer of progression in the South,” says political strategist Tharon Johnson, founder and CEO of Paramount Consulting Group in Atlanta.
“We have been trending toward a purple, navy blue state for some while,” Johnson says, thanks to Democratic mobilization efforts, which built a coalition of Black and brown voters — as well as disaffected suburban white women who previously voted Republican. If you’d told Republicans back in 2016, Johnson says, that Donald Trump, who pulled an upset by defeating Hillary Clinton, would lose Georgia in 2020, they wouldn’t have believed it.
So, as Johnson sees it, Trump’s alleged interference with the outcome of the presidential election in Georgia “is an unwillingness to accept that Georgia is no longer this solidly red conservative state.”…
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Roughly 15 minutes away from the county courthouse, on Rice Street in Northwest Atlanta, is the Fulton County Jail, affectionately — or perhaps contemptuously — called the Rice Street Jail. Police have blocked off the entrance to the jail, which, from a distance, looks like a college campus with its sprawling grounds and lush green lawns.
This is where Trump and his 18 co-defendants, including Rudy Giuliani and and Kan… — ahem — Ye’s former publicist, Trevian Kutti, will turn themselves in to be booked and processed. But will they arrive through the front entrance? Or sneak through the back? There’s no way to know, and so, to be on the safe side, TV crews erect tents outside both entrances, where they wait in the heat, practicing the time-honored art of the stakeout.
Next to the back entrance is the Jefferson Place Transitional House, a treatment center for men who’re down on their luck. A cluster of men gather outside, some in wheelchairs, sunning themselves in the Georgia heat.
They talk about Trump’s indictment with a sense of marvel: That the former president could be booked and fingerprinted in the same place where so many Black men have been locked up — including Gunna, the rapper who in December pled guilty to racketeering charges — is nothing short of amazing to them.
“He claimed to be untouchable,” says Michael Addah, a sweet-faced 30-year-old with baby dreadlocks. “But God — you know what I’m saying?— is the God of the Impossible. And Trump was able to be touched. He’s no different from anyone else. He needs to humble himself.”…