Dr. Carol Anderson was quoted in two recent CNN articles produced as part of a series on voter suppression. The articles examine legislation in multiple states, including Georgia, that observers see as meaningfully restricting voting access and curbing voters’ rights. Anderson explains how this legislation echoes voter suppression tactics from the Jim Crow era.

Dr. Anderson is Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies, Department Chair, and Associated Faculty in the History Department. She is the author of One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2018). Read an excerpt from Anderson’s contribution to the first CNN article below, along with the full versions of each: “Republican state lawmakers look to empower partisan poll watchers, setting off alarms about potential voter intimidation” and “A short history of the long conservative assault on Black voting power.”

“Carol Anderson, an historian and professor of African American Studies at Emory University, said the new proposals build on a history of voter intimidation that long has targeted people of color. ‘What’s built into this is the inequality of the system itself,’ she said. ‘You know that somebody who is Black or Hispanic will not be able to go up into an all-White precinct and start challenging those voters without having a massive law-enforcement response.’ She called the wave of new laws ‘infuriating.’ ‘It’s infuriating because we’ve done this dance before,’ Anderson said. ‘We know what a Jim Crow democracy looks like and the damage it does to the United States of America and to its people.'”