A14 N THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONALMONDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2020
Election
more liberal than the average Georgian —
she voted for Mr. Obama in 2008 — but she
said her views were discounted because of
her race in the largely Black school district.
Sumter County, 130 miles south of Atlan-
ta, was also undergoing a demographic
shift. When the Voting Rights Act was
passed, white families had been the major-
ity in the area and handily won all of its po-
litical posts. But some white residents left in
the early 2000s, and Black residents were
beginning to overtake them among voters.
“When we look at elections there, they
look very much like a racial census,” said
Bernard Grofman, a professor at the Uni-
versity of California, Irvine, who was ap-
pointed by the court to redraw the voting
map.
New Black candidates arrived on the
school board, often urged by the N.A.A.C.P.
The group also encouraged protesters to at-
tend meetings.
The complaints seemed less about spe-
cific school policies than the fact that there
were too many white members on the
board, Ms. Minich said. One man, she said,
repeatedly arrived with a sign calling her a
racist and would shout down white board
members when they spoke with cries of
“yes, Master.”
“I was afraid to walk to the parking lot”
after meetings, she said. At one point, Ms.
Minich called the district attorney to ask for
help, fearing someone carried a gun.
Before long, her seat was up for grabs,
and she became an election target. In 2010,
Kelvin Pless, a Black educator at the techni-
cal college, challenged Ms. Minich and won.
For the first time, the school board would be
majority Black.
“I was viewed as a hero,” Mr. Pless said.
“At the time, though, I didn’t think it was a
big deal since it had been a fair fight.”
He added: “But when we got in, all hell
broke loose.”A Little Coup’Maurice King Jr., a lawyer, said he knew
trouble was on the horizon. For years, Mr.
King had represented school boards in
other parts of the South that had becomemajority Black — and saw the fierce fights
that followed. The battles often had to do
with redrawing the voting map in a way that
diluted the African-American vote, he said.
In fact, before leaving office, Ms. Minich
had advanced a new voting map for the
county that would end up doing exactly
that.
“That was my parting shot, this little
coup, before I went off the board,” she said.
Ms. Minich said that the map was not an
effort to get rid of a Black majority. The size
of the board was too costly for a rural
county, she said, and it would be easier on
voters if the number of school board dis-
tricts was the same as the number of county
commissioners.
The plan included five districts and two
“at large” seats, to be voted countywide,
shrinking the board from nine to seven
seats. The countywide seats should have fa-
vored African-Americans, whose popula-
tion in the area had risen to 52 percent in the
last census, said Ms. Minich.
But Mr. King, who was recently hired as
the board’s first Black attorney, warned
that, in his view, Black voter turnout was far
lower than white turnout in the South be-
cause of the long history of voter suppres-
sion. African-American candidates stood
little chance to win countywide seats, he ar-
gued.
On Mr. King’s advice, the board discarded
the voting map. The majority also began to
steer a new path, replacing the board’s
white chairman, Dr. Michael Busman, with
Edith Green, a retired educator who is
Black. They also fired the superintendent
who had been hired by the previous board.
Many of the votes were now split along ra-
cial lines.
The decisions angered Ms. Minich, espe-
cially the firing of the superintendent, who
she believed was doing a good job. She
asked what might be done now that she was
no longer on the board.
“That’s why we formed ‘the group,’ ” she
said.
In early 2012, a group describing itself as
Sumter County’s “concerned citizens” ral-
lied 200 attendees, mostly white, at a local
elementary school. The parents aired griev-African-Americans. Two seats were creat-
ed that Black candidates were unlikely to
win.
“I felt like we were going to have prob-
lems getting elected because of how the
lines were drawn,” Ms. Whitehead said of
the board’s Black members.
And they did.
The map became a front in a decade-long
struggle in this corner of the Deep South
that began with schools but became about
race; a fight that for African-Americans
echoed the showdowns over voting rights
of the 1960s, and for many white residents
brought out the anxiety, made manifest by
the Trump era, of keeping power over insti-
tutions while lacking the votes to do so.
Angered white parents packed meet-
ings, declaring that their children were not
wanted in the county’s schools.
Even the local newspapers were split on
racial lines: The Black-owned broadsheet
defended Ms. Whitehead, while the coun-
ty’s largest paper, white-owned, backed
Ms. Minich and called the African-Ameri-
can members of the school board “a gang.”
When the new map was installed, the
Black majority that ran the school board
vanished. The six seats controlled by Afri-
can-Americans became a minority of two.
“We once had to count jelly beans in a jar
to vote in this county,” said the Rev. Mathis
Kearse Wright Jr., the head of the local
N.A.A.C.P. chapter, who filed a lawsuit in
federal court saying that the map violated
the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits ra-
cially discriminatory voting practices. “Un-
der this map, we are now fighting that same
battle all over again, the one we were fight-
ing when I was a young man in the 1960s.”
Not since the civil rights era has the way
Americans vote been more contested dur-
ing a presidential election. The pandemic
has upended how Americans can cast bal-
lots. President Trump has started a cam-
paign to undermine confidence in the elec-
tion unlike any seen in recent memory.
The Supreme Court is deciding questions
of voting rights even as votes are being
cast, issuing rulings allowing Pennsylvania
more time to tally votes and Alabama to bar
curbside voting.
But long before these cases reached the
justices, another court decision set into mo-
tion a series of events that would come to
engulf this small county where cotton fields
still dot the landscape.
At the heart of the Voting Rights Act of
1965 was a requirement that areas with a
history of racial discrimination seek fed-
eral approval for any changes made to how
people voted. Known as “preclearance,” the
rules applied to nine states, largely in the
South, and were meant to ensure that the
region’s white supremacist history did not
repeat itself.
But in the 2013 case of Shelby County v.Holder, the court threw out the preclear-
ance requirement. In the 5-to-4 ruling, con-
servative justices said the rules held the
South to an unfair standard.
Almost immediately, officials in several
states began to test the decision, making
changes that would have previously re-
quired federal approval.
North Carolina and Alabama introduced
new ID laws, and are among 36 states that
now have them on the books. Texas began
closing polling stations, shutting an esti-
mated 750 of them since 2013.
And in Sumter County, where officials
had not gotten federal approval for the map
that Ms. Minich was supporting, the court’s
decision suddenly made that blessing un-
necessary.
“It was kind of a ‘Hallelujah’ moment,”
said Ms. Minich, who added that the voting
map never had anything to do with race.
Since 2014, that voting map stood as Rev.
Wright’s lawsuit made its way through the
courts. African-Americans remained in the
minority running the district of 4,500,
where Black students are nearly three-
quarters of the student body.
But in January, a federal judge ordered a
new election for the entire board, having de-
termined that the previous map was dis-
criminatory. Next week, Sumter County will
vote for school board members with a map
that was yet again redrawn.
African-American candidates have now
entered in every district — challenging not
only white incumbents, but also the board’s
two Black members. Campaign signs dot
front yards along the highway as every seat
is up for grabs.
E. Mark Braden, a lawyer for the county,
argued that the old map was fair.
African-American politicians, including
Barack Obama, had won Sumter County in
the past, Mr. Braden said, and officials be-
lieved the court’s findings that Black voters
had been discriminated against were based
on a faulty statistical analysis of the popula-
tion.
But for many in Sumter County, the math
raised a more basic question: Should a
school district that was 70 percent Black be
governed by a board that was 70 percent
white?Two Mothers, One Board
The Sumter County of Ms. Whitehead’s
youth was once a civil rights crossroads.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was
jailed there in 1961. And after the Voting
Rights Act became law, county officials al-
lowed Black residents to vote, but tried to
keep them in segregated lines.
“It always seemed like there were racial
issues and tensions in this county that
stopped them from doing the right thing,”
said Ms. Whitehead, who is now 58, recall-
ing years where local leaders resisted inte-
gration.
Nearly as fierce a dispute was waged
over the county’s public schools. As the fed-
eral government enforced classroom inte-
gration, a group of white families in Sumter
County established an all-white private
school. Southland Academy was opened in
1966 and became one of a fleet of so-called
segregation academies that still dot the
South.
Among Southland’s biggest boosters
were the county school board and city offi-
cials, who transferred a public school build-
ing to the private upstart, then sold buses
and furniture to it at a discount, according to
Bobby L. Fuse, a local community leader.
Officials lowered rates on taxes — which
were used to fund the public schools — so
white residents could more easily pay for
private tuition, he said.
This left the public schools with predomi-
nantly Black enrollment.
“The building had been condemned, but
the students were allowed to attend,” Ms.
Whitehead said of her own high school.
By 1990, Ms. Whitehead had a son and
wanted to make a difference in his educa-
tion. The N.A.A.C.P. recruited her and an-
other Black candidate to run for seats on the
county school board. Both women won, be-
coming the first African-Americans to join
the board.
Around that time, Ms. Minich settled with
her family in Sumter County for a job with
Habitat for Humanity, in the county seat of
Americus. She came with memories of her
own segregated youth, where she’d gone to
an all-white high school in a part of Illinois.
When a Black family moved in one town
over, she said, they were told that firefight-
ers might not come if someone set fire to
their house.
“I knew things had to change for us,” Ms.
Minich, 68, said.
In Sumter County, her son played soccer
with Ms. Whitehead’s son Clayton, and both
children attended the public schools. Ms.
Minich’s husband was the coach. In the
early 2000s, she decided to join Ms. White-
head on the school board, so she ran for a
seat and won.
Holding a political post left her surprised
by how racial issues she thought society
had overcome were still on the minds of Af-
rican-Americans. She considered herselfVoting Rights Battle in a School Board ‘Coup’:
Above, from left:
Furlow Charter
School, named after a
Confederate colonel,
was approved in 2015.
Kelvin Pless won a
seat on the school
board in 2010, ce-
menting its Black
majority at that time.
A Black-owned news-
paper and a white-
owned paper joined
the fight. Sylvia Ro-
land, a former teacher
who won her seat
under the new map.
African-American
candidates have now
entered to run in ev-
ery district.From Page A‘I felt like we were going to have problems getting
elected because of how the lines were drawn.’
CAROLYN WHITEHEAD, former Sumter County Board of Education member
who saw the map as a potential threat to African-Americans.
.