Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, offered analysis in TIME of voter suppression efforts in Georgia following the 2020 general election and January runoff elections for Georgia’s two senate seats. Anderson’s most recent book is One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2018). Read an excerpt from the piece below along with the full article: “After Georgia Flips Blue, Voting Rights Advocates Brace for New Voting Restrictions.”

“Some voting rights advocates and experts don’t buy that reasoning. ‘It’s bull,’ says Carol Anderson, chair of African American Studies at Emory University in Atlanta. ‘So what we’re saying is that when you know you’ve sent out XYZ millions of ballots and you know the kinds of statistical returns you’re going to have on that, that you’re not going to provide the staffing to handle it?’

“She feels lawmakers’ sudden interest in alleged fraud in mail voting is entirely politically motivated. ‘It was the use of those absentee ballots, particularly by folks who haven’t used them before that…helped flip the state blue,’ she says. ‘Let’s be real clear here. The Republicans would not be looking at this if… you hadn’t had the use by African Americans of mail-in voting absentee ballots.'”

Dr. Carl Suddler, Assistant Professor of History, recently participated in conversation hosted by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Titled “Resisting Carceral Cities: Prisons, Police & Punishment in Perspective,” the event centered on the rise of prisons and police and resistance to them in historical perspective. Suddler was joined by Garrett Felber (The University of Mississippi), author of Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement and the Carceral State (UNC Press, 2020), and Kelly Lytle Hernandez (UCLA), author of City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 (UNC Press, 2017). Suddler is the author of Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York (New York University Press, 2019). Read more about the event here.

Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, has published an opinion editorial in The Guardian. Titled “Millions of Americans have risen up and said: democracy won’t die on our watch,” the piece outlines how U.S. citizens responded to efforts at voter suppression by casting an unprecedented number of ballots in the 2020 elections. Read an excerpt below along with the full article: “Millions of Americans have risen up and said: democracy won’t die on our watch.”

While the forces arrayed against the United States looked formidable, they were not invincible. Instead, they ran into something that is even more powerful than a president, a senate, or the US supreme court. The American people themselves and their belief in and devotion to democracy.