ELECTION 2024: VIEW FROM AMERICUS, GEORGIA
I spent a few days in Americus, Georgia. It was the perfect place to practice on the road journalism. The kind where the journalist has no real plan and has to keep his eyes and ears open to whatever experiences come his way.
Americus is a perfect size: small, but not tiny — population 16,000 + — and it still has a downtown area where people congregate, so a stranger can eavesdrop and maybe take part in a conversation.
It also has a daily newspaper, the Times Recorder, although it only publishes a hard copy once a week it is updated online every day. I stopped into the office and was put in touch with the paper’s only reporter, Josh Windus. He texted me that he was at a meeting downtown of the NAACP, if I was interested. I was.
A group of volunteers, led by Eugene Edge, President of the local NAACP chapter, was going out canvassing in Black neighborhoods so I joined them.
Americus experienced the full drama of the Civil Rights era. If “George Washington slept here” is a claim towns make to show their Revolutionary War credentials, “Martin Luther King was jailed here” is the Civil Rights era analogy. It says a place was on the frontline in the battle for equality. Dr. King was jailed in Americus in 1961.
I recalled some this history as I went out with the volunteers but there was very little drama. The canvas was well-organized, everyone hooked up by cell-phone with lists of addresses and online forms to indicate responses. Times have certainly changed and this was more an exercise in civics than an act of defiance for voting rights.
It was also, as Edge told me, a non-partisan exercise. No proselytizing except to remind people to exercise their rights.
Americus is in southwest Georgia and is the seat of Sumter County. Joe Biden carried Sumter by about 5 percentage points in 2020. Hillary Clinton won by a little over 2 percent. But when I sat down with Eugene Edge, later that evening I was surprised to hear that he thought Kamala Harris might not be in as strong a position as her predecessors. Edge emphasized he was speaking for himself not as a representative of the NAACP
Edge is an interesting man. He grew up in Plains, about ten miles away, and did contracting work for former President Jimmy Carter for many years. We were speaking in Edge’s office in the clothing store he owns just down the block from the Windsor Hotel, one of several businesses of which he is the proprietor. Our 13 minute-long conversation is here. Some of it will surprise you, it certainly surprised me. But that’s the nature of “on the road” reporting.
This is the sixth of my dispatches from Georgia and North Carolina. Both states are critical to Donald Trump and Kamala Harris’s hopes of winning the election. And both are competitive according to opinion polls but, as you can tell, I prefer to gather my own facts.
I plan to stay here through the counting of the vote, which promises to be fraught, particularly in Georgia but I need your help to do it. Here’s how:
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