The Rev. Ezekiel Holley was in his early 20s when white supremacists burned down two Baptist churches in Terrell County, Georgia. Local activists had used the spaces to organize a few years before the Civil Rights Movement won federal protections for Black Americans at the ballot box.
So four years ago, when Black Georgians in rural counties proudly marched to the polls, where they helped determine the outcome of a presidential election and sent two Democrats to the US Senate, Holley was elated.
This year, as Holley ambles with a cane through the backroads of the Terrell County seat of Dawson, knocking on doors of Black Georgians in a region where turnout is historically low, he worries he's not seeing the same level of outreach that lifted President Joe Biden to a narrow win in 2020 in Georgia, which once again has emerged as a pivotal swing state in this year's race for the presidency.
Biden won in part with the support of Black voters in rural south Georgia. That year, there were several high-profile races happening at once, which brought a flurry of activity and sparked enthusiasm among Black voters who had been historically neglected by candidates. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff - now senators - and former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams traveled to the area to help turn out Black voters across rural counties. It didn't hurt that Warnock and Abrams, both Black, have long been at ease in the rural South.
Holley, 83, remembers 2020 as the biggest mobilization effort he'd seen in the region. It helped Democrats win the state's 16 electoral votes for the first time in decades. Biden's narrow margin of victory in the state remains seared into the minds of many in part because of a call from then-President Donald Trump to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia's Republican Secretary of State. The GOP presidential candidate implored the state's top elections official to "find" enough votes - he lost by 11,779 - to change the outcome.
