Beyond voting rights, Georgia wrestles with Southern identity
Writing from her desk at Andalusia Farm, Southern writer Flannery O’Connor once recalled witnessing a Ku Klux Klan gathering on the courthouse steps here in Milledgeville, Georgia.
O’Connor’s eye zeroed in on a searing detail. Since it was “too hot for a fiery cross,” the robed mob brought one draped “with electric light bulbs.”
In December, Mary Parham-Copelan, the city’s first Black female mayor, took her second oath of office on the same courthouse steps. She won her first election by five votes. This time she ran unopposed.
Mayor Parham-Copelan’s success here in a town once defined by segregation is a reflection of a state in political flux. A growing Black electorate and a shifting sense of Southern identity is bucking a power structure that has historically been white, male, and rural.
“It hasn’t been the easiest, because people had to adjust to having a female mayor,” says Mayor Parham-Copelan, who is also a preacher. “For so much of our time, it has felt like things were going backward. But now here we are and it’s moving forward. I think people are voting their own conscience now. ... We just don’t know who
