There has never been a major city in the United States that has enjoyed more time as America’s “Black Mecca” than Atlanta.
More than 40 years have passed since the city had a non-black mayor.
“This here is Wakanda. It is sacred It must be protected, “rapper TI infamously said last month during a press conference That was done to quell the unrest after the Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd murders.
And while the quote was hilarious, it showed how many African Americans see Atlanta. That is why it is so frustrating that the city belongs to a state that has become the greatest example of voter repression.
But, the city basketball team is trying to change that.
The Atlanta Hawks have been allowed to turn State Farm Arena into a polling place for the upcoming state runoff elections on August 11 and for early voting for the general election scheduled for November 3. According to reports2.1 million people participated in early voting in the 2018 Georgia midterm elections.
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“We were just brainstorming casually as our whole world revolved around what we can do internally as an organization,” said the Hawks coach. Lloyd Pierce told ESPN. “We were trying to figure out how we can take care of the house first, and [CEO Steve Koonin] launched the idea. “
State Farm Arena is located in a very black area of Atlanta, despite the gentrification that is taking place around it. Having a polling place of that size is a game changer, as the building has a 680,000-square-foot interior where several hundred voting machines are expected to be installed.
The Hawks’ decision is a blessing, given what happened in Georgia’s primary election earlier this month. According to The atlanticDue to the closure of two nearby polling places, voters in the city’s Midtown area were forced to vote at Park Tavern, a restaurant in Piedmont Park, as it became the polling place for 16,000 people to vote . Some waited in line for more than three hours, while others simply gave up and left. And because of the coronavirus, more than 80 polling places in the Metro Atlanta area were closed or consolidated, as the order voting machines in the new states were useless.
Leah Aden, an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, told The Atlantic that, on average, black voters wait 45 minutes longer to vote than white voters, while Latino voters have to wait 46 more minutes in the United States. .
Georgia became the face of voter suppression in 2018 due to his governor’s career when current Republican Governor Brian Kemp waited until the last moments of the race to step down as Secretary of State, who put him in charge of overseeing state elections. Her Democratic opponent, Stacey Abrams, was trying to become the first black governor in the history of the United States.
Kemp marked some 53,000 voter registration applications due to “exact match“Which requires Georgians to submit information identical to that recorded with the Department of Driver Services or the Social Security Administration. Something as simple as a misplaced hyphen or accent may suffice to put a voter on the list. waiting. According to The Associated PressIn 2018, 70 percent of the voters included in the list were black. Between 2012 and 2017, Kemp was accused of purging millions of voter registrations.
On Election Day 2018, was reported that hundreds of voting machines were not used while sitting in a government warehouse. And according to election officials, the lack of voting machines and high voter turnout led to some of the longest lines in years at the polls.
“When we saw what we saw on June 9, it was extremely clear that we have a real problem in the state of Georgia and especially here in Atlanta,” Pierce said. “And we felt that we had the opportunity to do something special. It was encouraging that we were able to think outside the box and make this idea a reality. ”
As conversations about how the NBA and players will tackle racial and social issues during their “scheduled” restart next month in Orlando, it’s great to see that at least one team is using this moment to bring about change that addresses the ills of the past and last. Possible positives of the future.
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