Election 2020 and the Capitol Riot
The Associated Press | Published Novemeber 2020 — January 2021
Black churches mobilizing voters despite virus challenges
NEW YORK (AP) — For the Rev. Jimmy Gates Sr., the 2008 presidential election year was one to remember — and not just because it yielded a historic result as the nation elected its first Black president.
The pastor of Zion Hill Baptist Church in Cleveland recalls how, on the last Sunday of early voting before the general election, he and his congregation traveled in a caravan of packed buses, vans and cars to the city’s Board of Elections office and joined a line of voters that seemed to stretch a mile.
“What a sight to see,” Gates said. “Seniors, middle-aged people, young people.”
In recent election cycles, Black church congregations across the country have launched get-out-the-vote campaigns commonly referred to as “souls to the polls.” To counteract racist voter suppression tactics that date back to the Jim Crow era, early voting in the Black community is stressed from pulpits nearly as much as it is by the candidates seeking their support.
But voter mobilization in Black church communities will look much different in 2020, due in large part to the coronavirus pandemic that has infected millions across the U.S. and has taken a disproportionate toll on Black America.
Churches have organized socially distant caravans with greatly reduced transportation capacity for early voting and Election Day ballot-casting. Church volunteers are phone-banking and canvasing the homes of their members to ensure mail-in and absentee ballots are requested and hand-delivered to election board offices or drop boxes before the deadlines.
But outreach has been complicated because many churches have been holding services virtually for months, with some having only recently resumed worship in-person.
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George Floyd’s brother rallies voters on Election Day
NEW YORK (AP) — The murmurs spread quickly among the poll workers late Tuesday morning at a Brooklyn neighborhood station: George Floyd’s brother was present.
A few came up to Terrence Floyd, whose brother George died at the hands of Minneapolis police, sparking protests for racial justice across the nation. “Keep the fight going,” one Black woman urged. Others asked to take their photos with Terrence.
Since the death of his older brother on May 25, Terrence has been thrust into a spotlight he did not seek. A 42-year-old school bus driver in New York, Terrence is normally a quiet man, deeply attached to his three children. But now, he feels under constant pressure to relay his brother’s voice — especially on this Election Day, when, as he sees it, race and racial justice are on the ballot.
“Ever since then, I’ve felt like he was talking to me,” he says of George’s death. “He was saying, ‘Little bro, just speak for me. Walk for me. Love for me. Get these people to understand what happened to me can happen to anybody.’”
On Tuesday, Terrence’s black hoodie and face mask included the words “I can’t breathe,” “Justice for George,” and “8:46,” the number of minutes and seconds authorities initially said a white officer held a knee to his brother’s neck until he became unresponsive.
After famously urging calm as anger spilled onto the streets over his brother’s death, Terrence planned to spend Election Day following up on a less-noticed part of his emotional plea to protesters: please vote.
The names George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and Rayshard Brooks, all killed by police or vigilantes, re-energized the Black Lives Matter movement this year and put race and justice at the center of the election. As voting wraps up coast to coast, their loved ones awaited signs that their public grief and loss of anonymity weren’t in vain.
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Democrats face a turnout test in Georgia’s Senate runoffs
ATLANTA (AP) — In the first week of early voting for Georgia’s Senate runoff election, Casie Yoder parked at a polling location in Cobb County and loaded miniature hand sanitizer bottles, knitted hats, hand warmers and face masks into a collapsible wagon cart.
Her goal: to help voters stay in line in frigid temperatures and cast their ballots in a pair of high-stakes runoff contests that will determine which political party controls the Senate next year. The runoffs will also test whether Democrats can again pull together the diverse coalition that propelled President-elect Joe Biden to victory in Georgia in November and cemented the state’s status as a political battleground.
“We’ve never had an election happen like this in December,” said Yoder, the Georgia state captain for the Frontline, a nonpartisan electoral justice project of the Movement for Black Lives and other partner organizations.
For Democrats to win control of the Senate, Georgia’s Black communities, as well as the state’s smaller Hispanic and Asian communities, likely need to vote in the Jan. 5 runoff election by history-making margins. There is hope that the candidacy of the Rev. Raphael Warnock, the Black senior pastor of the church where Martin Luther King Jr. once preached, might help spur Black votes for both him and fellow Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff over the Republican incumbents, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue.
An Associated Press VoteCast survey of Georgia voters in November found that 22% of white voters chose Warnock and 28% chose Ossoff, compared to the 90% of Black voters who chose Ossoff and 73% who chose Warnock. Democrats also have an opportunity to capture the 15% of Black voters who chose Matt Lieberman, another Democratic candidate who competed against Warnock in last month’s race.
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Senate race thrusts ‘Black America’s church’ into spotlight
ATLANTA (AP) — For decades, the red-bricked Gothic Revival church where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached has been a monument to the history of Black Americans’ fight for civil rights and the legacy of an activist icon.
It took a high-stakes Senate race and a Trump-era cultural debate to thrust Ebenezer Baptist Church into the center of the current political debate.
Its senior pastor, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, is running for the Senate in one of two runoff elections that could decide which party ultimately controls Congress in the first years of the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden. But Warnock’s preaching has become a focal point in the debate about race and justice in the election.
His opponent, Republican incumbent Kelly Loeffler, has run attack ads using snippets of sermons Warnock preached from Ebenezer’s pulpit to accuse him of being a far left, radical socialist who doesn’t support police officers or military service members.
For King’s former church, the intense spotlight isn’t new. Its 6,000 members are accustomed to standing-room only Sunday services, due in large part to the out-of-town visitors who flocked to the church. Still, Loeffler’s criticisms have renewed attention on a pillar of Black life in Atlanta and a tradition of political activism it represents.
“The Republican attack is not just against Warnock, it’s against the Black church and the Black religious experience,” said the Rev. Timothy McDonald III, pastor of First Iconium Baptist Church in Atlanta who served as assistant pastor of Ebenezer from 1978 to 1984.
McDonald describes Warnock’s views as consistent with the church’s opposition to racism, police brutality, poverty and militarism. Loeffler’s attacks include selectively edited portions of Warnock’s sermon in which he decries “police power showing up in a kind of gangster and thug mentality,” as a criticism of law enforcement practices that have historically driven a wedge between departments and Black residents.
“I don’t care what you think about Warnock,” he said. “We’ve got to defend our church, our preaching, or prophetic tradition, our community involvement and engagement. We’re going to defend that.”
Ebenezer is “Black America’s church,” McDonald added. ”It’s bigger than any individual.”
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Black leaders cheer Georgia success, push for more progress
What started as a day of celebration for Black organizers, voters and other Georgians who helped deliver two historic Senate runoff victories was overshadowed Wednesday when a violent, mostly white mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol.
But Black leaders and organizers say the rioters’ insurrection won’t deter the momentum achieved after the hard-fought victories of Georgia Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock. Instead, it serves as a harsh reminder of the work that lies ahead for the nation to truly grapple with white supremacy and racism, which Trump’s presidency emboldened.
“It’s a little bit bittersweet because on one hand it feels like vindication that if we invest in our communities and our organizations, then amazing things can happen,” said Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, which estimates that it reached 2.8 million individuals in Georgia through text and phone banking campaigns, digital and social media advertising, door knocking and street outreach, and billboards.
“But then you come around the next day and people are literally swarming the Capitol in the name of overturning an election and trying to take away the power of Black voters,” Albright said. “So while it’s a victory that’s worth celebrating ... it’s still in this wider context of what our larger struggles are and we’ve got a long way to go.”
Despite the challenges ahead, there’s hope that the Georgia victories could serve as a blueprint to transform the Southern political landscape, which has been a Republican stronghold for decades.
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Race double standard clear in rioters’ Capitol insurrection
NEW YORK (AP) — Black Lives Matter protests, 2020: Overwhelming force from law enforcement in dozens of cities. Chemical dispersants. Rubber bullets and hand-to-hand combat with largely peaceful crowds and some unruly vandals and looters. More than 14,000 arrests.
The U.S. Capitol, Jan. 6, 2021: Barely more than a few dozen arrests. Several weapons seized, improvised explosive devices found. Members of a wilding mob escorted from the premises, some not even in handcuffs.
The key difference? The first set of protesters were overwhelmingly Black Americans and their allies. The second group was overwhelmingly white Americans who support outgoing President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud.
The violent breaching of the halls of power on Capitol Hill by the insurrectionist mob on Wednesday, which left one woman dead of a police gunshot wound, represents one of the plainest displays of a racial double standard in both modern and recent history.
“When Black people protest for our lives, we are all too often met by National Guard troops or police equipped with assault rifles, shields, tear gas and battle helmets,” the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation said in a statement.
“When white people attempt a coup, they are met by an underwhelming number of law enforcement personnel who act powerless to intervene, going so far as to pose for selfies with terrorists,” it said.
Broad and bipartisan condemnation of the insurrectionist mob came swiftly as they had a nearly unhindered, hours-long run of the Capitol building complex, the Senate chamber and the House speaker’s office. The ordeal drew expressions of bewilderment and disbelief from some observers who believed such a display was impossible in a democracy as revered as America’s.
However, the response to the mayhem is consistent with a long pattern of society’s coddling of racists and downplaying the violent white supremacist ideology that routinely places the grievances of white people above those of their Black, often disenfranchised and downtrodden countrymen and women.
Since the founding of the democracy in the blood and secession of the American Revolution, white people’s destructive and obstructionist conduct has been couched in patriotism. It’s been a fundamental part of a national myth about whose dissent and pursuit of redress for grievance is justified, and whose is not.
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Warnock condemns Capitol rioters in post-election sermon
In his first sermon since being declared a winner in Georgia’s U.S. Senate runoff election, the Rev. Raphael Warnock on Sunday addressed last week’s deadly Capitol Hill riot that all but overshadowed his historic victory.
“Just as we were trying to put on our celebration shoes, the ugly side of our story, our great and grand American story, began to emerge,” Warnock said in a 30-minute message broadcast from Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached.
On Wednesday, just hours before wins by Warnock, Ebenezer’s senior pastor, and fellow Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff helped flip the Senate to Democratic control, thousands in a mostly white insurrectionist mob breached U.S. Capitol security in an attempt to disrupt Congress from certifying the Nov. 3 election victory for President-elect Joe Biden.
A Capitol Police officer died after he was hit in the head with a fire extinguisher as rioters descended on the building and many other officers were injured. A woman from California was shot to death by Capitol Police and three other people died after medical emergencies during the chaos.
“We saw the crude, the angry, the disrespectful, and the violent break their way into the people’s house — some carrying Confederate flags, signs and symbols of an old world order passing away,” Warnock said.
When white supremacism is challenged, “sometimes it responds violently and desperately,” he said.
Before last Tuesday’s election, Georgia had never elected a Black American to represent the state in the Senate, even though close to one-third of its residents are Black. Once sworn in, Warnock will become only the 11th Black senator seated in history.
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Biden repudiates white supremacy, calls for racial justice
Rare for an inaugural address, President Joe Biden issued a strong repudiation of white supremacy and domestic terrorism seen on the rise under Donald Trump.
In his speech Wednesday, Biden denounced the “racism, nativism, fear, demonization,” that propelled the assault on Capitol Hill by an overwhelmingly white mob of Trump supporters who carried symbols of hate, including the Confederate battle flag.
“A cry for racial justice some 400 years in the making moves us,” Biden said in the nearly 23-minute-long speech promising to heal a divided nation. “A cry that can’t be any more desperate or any more clear. And now a rise of political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat.”
Compared to his immediate predecessors, three of whom attended Wednesday’s inauguration, Biden is the first president to directly address the ills of white supremacy in an inaugural speech. In his second inaugural address in 1997, former President Bill Clinton called out racial divisions as “America’s constant curse,” but stopped short of naming culprits.
Biden’s words follow months of protests and civil unrest over police brutality against Black Americans, as well as a broader reckoning on the systemic and institutional racism that has plagued nonwhite Americans for generations.
“To be perfectly clear, it was incredibly powerful,” Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, a national racial justice organization, told The Associated Press. “We shouldn’t underestimate the cultural change that had to take place, in order for that to happen on one of the biggest political stages in the world.”
“I think it’s just really important that, as a result of our movement, racial justice became a majoritarian issue this summer,” Robinson added. “Now the work begins in translating that rhetorical issue into a governing issue.”
Biden delivered his inaugural address on the very platform that the insurrectionist mob scaled two weeks ago to breach the Capitol building, vandalizing federal property and taking selfies on the Senate floor. The riot left at least five people dead, including a Capitol police officer.
The rioters, some espousing racist and anti-Semitic views and conspiracy theories, were incited by baseless claims of widespread voter fraud in the November presidential election. Some attempted to stop Congress from certifying the Electoral College results, in which Black and Latino voters played a significant role in handing victory to Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
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