The Sunday service at Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a senior pastor, is picking up steam, with the congregation punctuating their assent to the preachers and speakers on the pulpit with fervent “Yeahs!”, robust “Okays!” and the occasional “Amens!”
The church on Auburn Avenue in the US National Historic Landmark District of Sweet Auburn in western Atlanta has been at the forefront of African American socio-political engagement. Its preachers voiced visions of equality during the racially segregated era in the Southern states, provided services – such as education – that were denied to the community, and preached a “social gospel” that fueled the 1960s civil rights movement.
The pulpit-to-politics tradition carries on to this day with the Baptist church’s senior pastor, Rev. Raphael Warnock, who was elected to the US Senate in 2020, becoming the first African American to represent Georgia, and the first Black Democrat from a Southern state, to be elected to the upper house of Congress.
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With just weeks to go before the November 3 midterm elections, this Sunday sees Warnock on a roll as he leads the service.
“Alright, come on up. We need everybody to vote,” he proclaims.
“Yeah!” responds the congregation with a chorus of applause.
“A vote is a kind of prayer, for the world we desire for ourselves – and our children,” Warnock continues in the rhythmic, expressive cadence of southern preachers.
And with that, Georgia’s senator hands over the podium to Marc Morial, head of the National Urban League, a civil rights organisation that has served the Black community since 1910.
“The eyes of the nation are on the state of Georgia,” Morial tells the packed church. “When Georgia elected your pastor as its United States senator in the year 2020, many people across the nation had said that was an impossible feat. It could not be done. But Georgia made history,” he notes.
Democrats have had Georgia on their minds over the past few years as it has flipped from a reliably Republican “red” state to an uneven purple with the growth of liberal, educated suburban communities, including a “brain gain” influx of college-educated Black people returning to thriving Southern metropolises such as Atlanta from the rest of the country. But in order to maintain the hues of blue, Democrats need their traditional voter base to come out and vote.
Two years after Donald Trump won Georgia in the 2024 presidential election, and with the Republicans holding Congress, Democrats also have to stem the tide of legislative attempts to dilute the power of Black voters. As the US heads to the polls in the 2026 midterms, studies and editorials warn that the country is “on the cusp of eviscerating Black power”.
Six decades ago, the Ebenezer Baptist Church’s star preacher, Dr. King, launched a civil disobedience campaign to grant African Americans in the southern states their fundamental constitutional right to vote resulting in the landmark 1965 Right to Vote Act. The struggle has changed, but not ended, and Georgia is on the frontlines of the battle. It’s also a fight that has, once again, been largely left to the community to shoulder.
‘Jim Crow in the 21st century’
At the C.T. Martin Natatorium and Recreation Center in Adamsville, a predominantly Black neighbourhood in western Atlanta, early voting kicked off on October 13 in the spacious gymnasium serving as a polling station. A steady stream of voters lined up along walls plastered with election information and warnings such as, “It is illegal to carry a firearm”, into polling stations. Georgia’s early voting slot in the 2026 midterms runs from October 13-30, leaving the last weekend before the November 3 election day free of voting activity.
Outside, in the parking lot of the sprawling premises, a DJ belted out soul music in what was billed as a “get out the vote party”. On the sun-drenched lawn, the hosts of a community collective podcast interviewed politicians, activists and local celebrities emerging from the polling station with “I voted” stickers. At another stall, Deborah Scott, head of Georgia Stand Up, a grassroots NGO, hands out bottles of water, cookies and flyers with voting information.
“Democracy is on the line. And in this democracy fight, it's all going to start and end right here in Georgia,” she says with an infectious smile. “Georgia is going to show the rest of the country that when you organise, mobilise and work with the Black community, you can actually win. Even if they're underfunding it, even if they're not showing us love, we will show our people love.”
“Get out the vote” campaigns are strictly non-partisan initiatives where volunteers abstain from mentioning political parties and preferences.
In Scott’s case, the “love” – or lack of it – refers to a law, the 2021 Election Integrity Act, originally called the Georgia Senate Bill 202, and frequently called “SB 202” across the state.
The act was signed into law by Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp the year after the state elected two charismatic Democratic senators – Warnock and “Star of the South” Jon Ossoff – to the US Senate, and voted for Joe Biden in presidential race in 2020. Republicans say the law makes it “easier for citizens to vote and harder for anyone to cheat”. From the White House, Biden described it as “Jim Crow in the 21st century”, referring to the racial segregation laws in the southern states before the 1960s civil rights movement.
The law has been the subject of legal challenges by civil rights groups and many court rulings by justices attempting a compromise. Shortly after it passed, the US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Georgia alleging that the law is racially discriminatory. But in March 2025, two months after Trump took office for a second term, the Justice Department dropped the lawsuit, stating that it falsely accused Georgia of intentionally suppressing Black votes.
Among its many sections, the law prohibits the handing out of food and water to voters standing in line within 150 feet of a polling station. Scott believes the measure disproportionately affects minority communities. “SB 202 discriminates against black and brown people because only black and brown people were giving water to people who were waiting in lines. Our lines were longer than any other community. People were waiting in lines five, six, ten hours and they could not vote. People were passing out. We couldn't even give them a chair,” she said.
At the C.T. Center, the “get out the vote” party is safely 150 feet away from the polling rooms, but in smaller stations in densely populated neighbourhoods, it presents a challenge, says Scott. “They did that because they don't want democracy. We want democracy. So we said we're still going to do it, we're just going to do it further away. We want people to come and get their water and information before they even get in line,” she explains.
The shadow of 2020
Getting out the vote is critical to Republicans and Democrats in Georgia, a state that went for Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024.
After his 2020 defeat to Biden, Trump falsely claimed he won Georgia even after three vote recounts showed the Republican candidate had lost to Biden by 11,779 votes.
The state was under the media spotlight after Trump made an extraordinary phone call to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican. The transcript of the call, which was leaked to the press, showed Trump ordering Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to hand him Georgia. Raffensperger declined.
Six years later, the impact of the Georgia alleged meddling case continues to resonate on the 2026 midterms campaign trail. In February, the FBI raided election offices in the state’s battleground Fulton County to seize sensitive voting records from 2020 in what critics called an unprecedented “instance of the federal government directly interfering in a state election”.
Ossoff, who is seeking re-election in November, was quick to slam the raid. During a visit to an Atlanta Black church, the Democratic “Star of the South” accused Trump of ordering the raid to suppress the Black vote. “The power of Black voters, and the fact that the power of Black voters ejected him from office, may outrage him more than the defeat itself. And so he tries to delegitimise your exercise of power. With elections approaching, he tries to suppress it,” said Ossoff.
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Gerrymandering battlefield lines
The suppression of the Black vote has a long history in the American South, particularly in the “Deep South”, the subregion of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina, that has a distinct historic and cultural identity.
In Georgia, African Americans make up around 30% of the state’s estimated 11 million population, comprising a critical Democratic vote base. “For any Democratic candidate running for office, given the fact that Blacks are overwhelmingly Democratic in their partisan orientation, they absolutely need high voter turnout amongst African American voters – assuming that they vote predictably Democratic – in order to really have a chance at being able to win office,” explained Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at the Atlanta-based Emory University.
But over the past few years, there has been a concerted Republican push, spearheaded by Trump, to redraw congressional districts. Last year, Trump pressed Texas legislators to pass new districting maps to gain more seats for the Republicans in the House of Representatives, where the GOP holds a narrow 220-215 majority. In April, the US Supreme Court, in a landmark ruling, struck down a majority Black congressional district in Louisiana, opening the door for more redistricting and prompting three Southern states to draw new maps.
A Bloomberg News study of congressional maps, published on October 20, found that the gerrymandering – or manipulation of electoral district boundaries to give one political party an unfair electoral advantage – “are having an outsized impact on Black voters, who are more likely to have been shifted into new congressional districts in order to create more safe seats for Republicans ahead of the US midterm elections”.
In Georgia, Republicans in the state legislature earlier this year attempted to follow the Deep South states of Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee in redrawing congressional maps. But the plan was shelved ahead of the November midterms for fear of a voter backlash against the party.
Standing on the C.T. Center lawn after casting her ballot, Shirley Clarke Franklin, a former Atlanta mayor and a veteran Democrat, credited Georgia’s progressive politicians for the pushback. “African Americans in Georgia, especially our leadership, stood up against redistricting when it was raised in our legislature. And our legislature, which is dominated by the party that wanted to do redistricting, backed down,” said Franklin, referring to state Republicans. “So, the organisational skills of Georgians, the history of fighting for our rights, serves us well in difficult times.”
The pushback may have succeeded for the moment, but analysts believe Republicans will attempt to put the issue back on the agenda after the midterms.
Gillespie notes that this year’s gubernatorial race between Republican billionaire Rick Jackson and Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms to replace Republican Governor Kemp – whose term ends in January 2027 – could play a key role.
“Redistricting is definitely not off the table,” says Gillespie. “The timing of it will depend on who becomes governor of Georgia. It's highly likely that the governor [Republican Brian Kemp] will call a special session in November or December to address redistricting so that he can sign that into law if Keisha Lance Bottoms wins and before a new legislature comes in [in January 2027]. There might be less urgency to do that if Rick Jackson is elected governor.”
The ‘gift’ of the vote
Cruising westward on Atlanta’s Martin Luther King Jr. Drive in a car loaded with cartons of his self-published book, “All Power Back to the People,” Scotty Smart is upbeat about the power of his vote.
“If we vote in this election, we have the ability to fight back and slow down some of the things that are happening across the country,” says the young Black activist.
But minutes later, Smart bristles when asked about the Black male vote for Trump in 2024. “That's a false narrative put out by certain media platforms that like to chastise Black men,” he maintains. “In 2024, Black men overwhelmingly voted Democrat. But the emphasis is always put on that one small demographic.”
He has a point. A Pew Research Center voter analysis found that approximately 77% of Black men voted for Kamala Harris, while 21% voted for Trump. Among Black women, approximately 92% supported Harris, and 7% supported Trump.
After two years of Trump’s second presidency and the Iran war exacerbating the cost of living crisis, Smart believes the Black vote will overwhelmingly stick with the Democrats in the midterms. “Truckers are ready to go on strike because the diesel prices are so high, people are upset because food is so expensive. It's gotten so bad that people are finally seeing the effects” of Trump’s policies, he notes.
Standing outside the Ebenezer at the end of the Sunday service, Kamilah Aminah Jones, a psychotherapist and licensed ecclesiastical minister at the historic church, chokes up as she draws from the past to explain her responsibility, as a citizen, to vote in the latest elections.
“It's a gift. It's really a gift. And I'm getting emotional,” she pauses briefly to collect herself before continuing. “I'm getting emotional just thinking about that … It’s a promise that my ancestors possibly prayed for, not just prayed for, there was blood, sweat and tears to have that opportunity. And I stand in that now. I have a voice. It's something I can never take for granted.”