Georgia (U.S. state)

 

 

 

 

 

• Georgia has prospered because we have refused to be divided. We have worked together, and the nation and the world have taken notice. We are where we are today, the envy of other states, because decades ago our leaders accepted change while others defied it. In the long run, it has paid us handsome dividends.
  • Roy Barnes, speech to the Georgian House of Representatives (24 January 2001)

• Our people do not need to bleed the color of red Georgia clay.
  • Roy Barnes, speech to the Georgian House of Representatives (24 January 2001)

• We have a great deal to be proud of as Georgians. Our history, our heritage, our state's great natural beauty. But, nothing should make us prouder than the way Georgia has led the South by focusing on the things that unite us instead of dwelling on those that divide us.
  • Roy Barnes, speech to the Georgian House of Representatives (24 January 2001)

• What will be the result to the institution of slavery, which will follow submission to the inauguration and administration of Mister Lincoln as the President of one section of the Union? My candid opinion is, that it will be the total abolition of slavery... I do not doubt, therefore, that submission to the administration of Mister Lincoln will result in the final abolition of slavery. If we fail to resist now, we will never again have the strength to resist.
  • Joseph Brown, letter (7 December 1860), as quoted in Secession Debated, pp. 145–159

• Atlanta is one of the world's most peculiar cities. It has the requisite pointy skyscrapers and if you ask for a small Coke in a Taco Bell, it still comes in a bucket. This is America.
  • Jeremy Clarkson, Born to be Riled (1999), p. 196

• Where Gladys Knight took the Midnight Train; the birthplace of Martin Luther King.
  • Darion Crawford, "Georgia" (9 October 2005), Light Poles and Pine Trees (20 June 2006), New York City: Geffen Records.

• Georgia, where the peaches grow. They drink lemonade and speak real slow.
  • Richard B. Cronin, "Summer Girls" (1999), LFO, Arista Records

• The town in Georgia's got a law on the books / Says if we all got guns then we won't have crooks / Now what could make them think that way?
  • The Dead Milkmen, “Right Wing Pigeons“, Big Lizard in My Backyard (1985)

• I do not think we have to discriminate against anyone to protect the faith based community in Georgia of which my family and I are a part of for all of our lives.
  • Nathan Deal, remarks on HB 757 (March 2016)

• If now you young people, instead of running away from the battle here in Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, instead of seeking freedom and opportunity in Chicago and New York—which do spell opportunity—nevertheless grit your teeth and make up your minds to fight it out right here if it takes every day of your lives and the lives of your children’s children; if you do this, you must in meetings like this ask yourselves what does the fight mean? How can it be carried on? What are the best tools, arms, and methods? And where does it lead? I should be the last to insist that the uplift of mankind never calls for force and death. There are times, as both you and I know, when "Tho’ love repine and reason chafe, There came a voice without reply, ‘Tis man’s perdition to be safe, When for truth he ought to die."
  • W. E. B. Du Bois, "Behold the Land" 20 October 1946

• “Behold the beautiful land which the Lord thy God hath given thee.” Behold the land, the rich and resourceful land, from which for a hundred years its best elements have been running away, its youth and hope, black and white, scurrying North because they are afraid of each other, and dare not face a future of equal, independent, upstanding human beings, in a real and not a sham democracy. To rescue this land, in this way, calls for the Great Sacrifice. This is the thing that you are called upon to do because it is the right thing to do. Because you are embarked upon a great and holy crusade, the emancipation of mankind, black and white; the upbuilding of democracy; the breaking down, particularly here in the South, of forces of evil represented by race prejudice in South Carolina; by lynching in Georgia; by disfranchisement in Mississippi; by ignorance in Louisiana and by all these and monopoly of wealth in the whole South. There could be no more splendid vocation beckoning to the youth of the twentieth century, after the flat failures of white civilization, after the flamboyant establishment of an industrial system which creates poverty and the children of poverty which are ignorance and disease and crime; after the crazy boasting of a white culture that finally ended in wars which ruined civilization in the whole world; in the midst of allied peoples who have yelled about democracy and never practiced it either in the British Empire or in the American Commonwealth or in South Carolina.
  • W. E. B. Du Bois, "Behold the Land," 20 October 1946

 

• Defendant Donald John Trump lost the United States presidential election held on November 3, 2020. One of the states he lost was Georgia. Trump and the other Defendants charged in this Indictment refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump. That conspiracy contained a common plan and purpose to commit two or more acts of racketeering activity in Fulton County, Georgia, elsewhere in the State of Georgia, and in other states.
  • The State of Georgia v. Donald J. Trump, et al.

• More than a century ago, the legendary muckraking African American journalist Ida B. Wells risked her life when she began reporting on the epidemic of lynchings in the Deep South...She wrote: Georgia heads the list of lynching states." Some things never change: the American Bar Association has singled out Georgia's racial disparities in capital-offense sentencing, saying that it has allowed inadequate defense counsel and been "virtually alone in not providing indigent defendants sentenced to death with counsel for state habeas proceedings."
  • Amy Goodman Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America (2017) p 156

• Other arms reach out to me
  Other eyes smile tenderly
  Still in peaceful dreams I see
  The road leads back to you.
  Georgia, oh Georgia, no peace I find...
  Just an old sweet song
  Keeps Georgia on my mind.
  • "Georgia On My Mind" (1960), lyrics by Stuart Gorrell and Hoagy Carmichael

• The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates, and the world, the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slaveholding confederate States, with reference to the subject of African slavery... The party of Lincoln, called the Republican party, under its present name and organization is of recent origin. It is admitted to be an anti-slavery party, while it attracts to itself by its creed, the scattered advocates of exploded political heresies, of condemned theories in political economy, the advocates of commercial restrictions, of protection, of special privileges, of waste and corruption in the administration of Government; anti-slavery is its mission and its purpose.
  • Georgia Declaration of Causes of Secession (January 1861)

• When no candidate receives a majority of votes in the general election, a runoff between the top two vote-getters is required. The runoff election will be Tuesday, December 6, 2022. Statewide, voters will decide between incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock and his challenger Herschel Walker for U.S. Senate. Some counties have down-ticket races as well. CHECK YOUR VOTING STATUS
  • georgia.gov Georgia Election 2022 (Runoff) (2022)

• Social equality is impossible. The schools are not going to be mixed, come hell or high water.
  • Samuel Marvin Griffin, Sr., as quoted in "The Strategists" (12 July 1954), Time

• Started in Atlanta, then I spread out with it. South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi. On to North Carolina, Philadelphia, and Virginia. From down in Miami where it's warm in the winter. On up to Minnesota where it storms in the winter.
  • Clifford Harris, "We Takin' Over"

• The presidential election of 1864, occurring after the spectacular Union military successes at Mobile Bay and in Georgia and the Shenandoah Valley, reaffirmed the northern majority's commitment to the suppression of the rebellion in the South and the restoration of the Union without slavery. Arguably, Abraham Lincoln's victory owed more to the Northern rejection of the Democratic Party's war-failure platform and its call for an armistice preparatory to a national peace convention than to the voters' confidence in the president's leadership.
  • William Harris, as quoted in "The Hampton Roads Peace Conference: A Final Test of Lincoln's Presidential Leadership" (2000), Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, pp. 30-61

• The three States of Georgia, Florida and South Carolina, comprising the military department of the south, having deliberately declared themselves no longer under the protection of the United States of America, and having taken up arms against the said United States, it becomes a military necessity to declare them under martial law. This was accordingly done on the 25th day of April, 1862. Slavery and martial law in a free country are altogether incompatible; the persons in these three States — Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina— heretofore held as slaves, are therefore declared forever free.
  • David Hunter, General Order No. 11 (9 May 1862), Department of the South

• I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. And some of you have come from areas where your quest -- quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends. And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today! I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of "interposition" and "nullification" -- one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today! I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; "and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together." This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with.
  • Martin Luther King Jr., I Have a Dream speech (1963)
• Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!
  • Martin Luther King, Jr., "I Have A Dream" (1963), Washington, D.C.

• We're on the grind in Georgia, all the time. It ain't nothing no my mind, but Georgia.
  • Shawn T. Johnson, "Georgia" (9 October 2005), Light Poles and Pine Trees (20 June 2006), New York City: Geffen Records

• Calling up my homeboy, Daddy Ray. Hey Ray, what's up with the girls in GA?
  • Sir Mix-a-Lot, "Jump on It" (1996), Return of the Bumpasaurus, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Universal Music Publishing Group, Kobalt Music Publishing Ltd., Regent Music Corporation
• Georgia's Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger says it's been "smooth sailing" so far for the state of Georgia and voters are in and out at most locations in under 10 minutes. Raffensperger told reporters that more than 1 million voters are expected to vote today and most results would be known from the larger counties by 8 p.m. although it may take smaller counties a little more time to report. Additionally, Raffensperger said officials believe the bomb threats received this morning were from Russia and said "Russians are not our friends."
  • Brad Raffensperger according to Georgia Election Day Live Updates | Several polling stations to stay open late after threats (Nov 5, 2024)

• In 1956, as a reaction to the requirement to integrate, the Georgia Assembly changed the state flag to incorporate the Confederate Battle Flag. As Denmark Groover, the legislator who guided the bill to passage, said at the time, "The Confederate symbol was added mostly out of defiance to federal integration orders." While I lived in Georgia, the white supremacist Confederate Battle Flag dominated the state flag. In 2003, Georgia changed its flag, losing the Confederate Battle Flag and returning to a version of the flag first introduced in 1879. The current flag is an homage to the first Confederate national flag, the Stars and Bars. White southerners continue to focus on a four-year period when they fought a rebellion to create a slave republic and lost badly.
  • Ty Seidule, Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause (2020), p. 81

• While lynch mobs in Virginia murdered 84 people according to exhaustive reporting done by the Equal Justice Initiative, my adopted home state of Georgia was far more violent. Georgia lynch mobs murdered 589 people between 1877 and 1950. Most of the attacks in Northern Virginia and Walton County came after accusations of Black men raping white women. Several lynchings occurred because African American men did not act in a docile manner, upsetting the racial conventions demanded by white society.
  • Ty Seidule, Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause (2020), p. 84

• The sustained legal campaign of subjugation, called Jim Crow, plus targeted law enforcement, lack of education resources, and limited economic opportunity, resulted in "the Great Migration." Starting in the first decade of the twentieth century, more than a million African Americans left the racial violence and poverty of the South for the industrial cities of the North and West. In 1900, Georgia's Black population was over 47 percent of the total. By 1970, the figure had dropped to just over 25 percent. In the 1910 census, Walton County recorded 25,393 people. The next time it would reach that level was in the 1980 census, the year I graduated from high school. By then, Walton County benefited from its proximity to a booming Atlanta. The racial terror and Jim Crow laws decreased Georgia's population and retarded its economic potential for generations. Racism isn't just morally wrong; it's economically stupid.
  • Ty Seidule, Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause (2020), p. 90-91

• It is unknown how many slaves were freed in Virginia as a reward for military service, but in neighboring Georgia, Austin Dabney was the only one. Purchased by the legislature from his owner, he also received a land grant as well as a federal pension.
  • Robert A. Selig, "African-Americans in the Continental Army and the State Militias During the American War of Independence", Reflections-->

• I can make this march, and I will make Georgia howl!
  • William Tecumseh Sherman, telegram to General U.S. Grant (1864), as quoted in Conflict and Compromise: The Political Economy of Slavery, Emancipation, and The American Civil War (1989), by Roger L. Ransom

• If the people raise a howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war, and not popularity-seeking. If they want peace, they and their relatives must stop the war.
  • William Tecumseh Sherman, Letter to Henry W. Halleck (September 1864)

• By the original compact of government, the United States had certain rights in Georgia, which have never been relinquished and never will be... Allow the Union and peace once more to settle over your old homes at Atlanta.
  • William Tecumseh Sherman, letter to the members of the city council of the City of Atlanta (12 September 1864)

• I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the City of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty guns and plenty of ammunition, also about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton.
  • William Tecumseh Sherman, as quoted in telegraph to Abraham Lincoln (December 1864), as quoted in Southern Storm: Sherman's March to the Sea (2008), by Noah Andre Trudeau, New York: HarperCollins, p. 508

• Still on the whole the campaign is the best, cleanest and most satisfactory of the war. I have received the most fulsome praise of all men from the President down, but I fear the world will jump to the wrong conclusion that because I am in Atlanta the work is done. Far from it. We must kill three hundred thousand I have told of so often, and the further they run the harder for us to get them.
  • William Tecumseh Sherman, letter to wife

• Down near the Florida border, Georgia could give South Carolina lessons in heat and humidity.
  • Harry Turtledove, The Great War: Breakthroughs (2000), Chapter 14, (ISBN 0-345-40563-3, p. 329)

• I was watching the news reports from Baltimore and hearing all the condemnations from some about being kept down and the lack of jobs, opportunity, good schools; then why do these blacks keep voting for the same people? And this isn't a phenomenon isolated to Baltimore. Every single major urban center in America is run by Democrats; more specifically, liberal progressives, black or white. The morass that became Detroit. The killing fields of Chicago. The depravity of Washington, D.C. The shame of South Dallas. And yes, even the place that was once my home, Atlanta, even with all the successful black entertainers. Now, I remember the first black mayor of Atlanta, Maynard Jackson. That guy was a leader and even spoke at my high school Baccalaureate. But today, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed has done such a bang-up job that the Atlanta Braves are moving to Cobb County! Just do the assessment yourselves, who are the elected officials heading up the urban centers? And where does one find the most dire socio-economic statistics?
  • Allen B. West, "The dirty little secret no one wants to admit about Baltimore" (18 May 2015), National Black Republican Association.

• Hurrah! Hurrah! We bring the jubilee! Hurrah! Hurrah! The flag that makes you free... So we made a thoroughfare for freedom and her train, sixty miles in latitude, three hundred to the main. Treason fled before us, for resistance was in vain, while we were marching through Georgia... Yes and there were Union men who wept with joyful tears, when they saw the honored flag they had not seen for years. Hardly could they be restrained from breaking forth in cheers, while we were marching through Georgia.
  • Henry Clay Work, "Marching Through Georgia" (1865)

(in Chronological order)

• The management of Georgia elections has become an embarrassment for our state
  • Raphael Warnock & Kelly Loeffler according to [https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/09/politics/georgia-runoff-key-dates/index.html ( 9 November 2020)

• RINOS @BrianKempGA, @GeoffDuncanGA, & Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, will be solely responsible for the potential loss of our two GREAT Senators from Georgia, @sendavidperdue & @KLoeffler. Won’t call a Special Session or check for Signature Verification! People are ANGRY!
  • Quoted by Jeffery Martin (7 December 2020), "Trump Says 'RINOS' Kemp, Raffensperger 'Solely Responsible' If Loeffler, Perdue Lose Election", Newsweek 

• Doorknock for Warnock vote your oss off
  • Campaign slogan according to Peter Doocy on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, (January 3, 2020)

•   Encyclopedic article on Georgia (U.S. state) on Wikipedia
•   Georgia (state) travel guide from Wikivoyage