THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONALMONDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2020 N Aances about the board and made plans to
keep up pressure.
Mounting anxiety about race was soon
apparent in public meetings. In one, a white
mother told the board that while she be-
lieved in diversity, the board had made her
children feel as if they “were less impor-
tant” for being white. At one point, a parent
accused Black board members of conven-
ing in secret to make decisions. One of the
white board members suggested an investi-
gation by the district attorney. Weeks later,
the D.A. ordered a grand jury to look into
the dealings of the board.
Around that time, Mr. Pless, a board
member, said his supervisor at the college
where he was employed received a letter
from angered parents calling for him and
two other Black board members to be fired
from their teaching jobs at the technical
school.
“These individuals are destructive and
evil,” said the letter. “They are racists and
should not be affiliated with the college.”
Ms. Whitehead said her boss at the Depart-
ment of Juvenile Justice received a similar
letter.
The Americus Sumter Observer, the
county’s Black-owned newspaper, began to
vilify the board’s white members, at one
point publishing complaints about Dr. Bus-
man, the former chairman, from a patient
who claimed he had mistreated her.
The Americus Times-Recorder, a white-
owned broadsheet, attacked Ms. Green and
Ms. Whitehead, referring to the other Black
members as “their gang” in editorials.
“There is a movement afoot that must be
crushed now,” read one editorial. “If it is not,
it will continue to grow and fester and its
evil tendrils will push into every crack and
crevice of our school system.”
Ms. Whitehead saw racial undertones in
the attacks, especially those calling her a
gangster. “We were probably the most edu-
cated board Sumter County ever had, we all
had college degrees,” she said.
In March 2012, Ms. Whitehead was called
to testify before the grand jury. The board
had become so divided at that point that its
Black and white members arrived in sepa-
rate groups to speak, she said. Of the 10
grand jury members listening to her testi-
mony, only one was Black.
The grand jury returned a report urging
the school board to adopt the new voting
map. But ultimately, it didn’t matter. In the
case of Shelby County v. Holder, which was
decided in June 2013, the court removed
federal preclearance for the voting maps.
For years, the Black board members had
stopped the state from adopting the new
map by refusing to submit it for federal ap-
proval. But after the Shelby decision, none
was needed. Georgia’s legislature and Re-
publican governor quickly signed the map
into law.
Mr. Braden, the attorney now defending
the map, noted that many Black legislators
voted for the map at the time, undermining
the theory that it was discriminatory.
Among the Black lawmakers who voted for
the changes was Stacey Abrams, who led
Democrats in the Georgia House of Repre-
sentatives and narrowly lost the 2018 gov-
ernor’s race by less than two percentage
points.
Ms. Abrams said she regretted the vote.
But she said that without federal review,
there was no way for lawmakers to single-
handedly vet voting maps for Georgia’s 159
counties.
“While ignorance is not a defense, it’s cer-
tainly an explanation,” she said.Much More WhiteWith the new map in place, the election in
2014 changed the Sumter County Board of
Education again. This time, it was much
more white: Only two Black incumbents
still held their seats after the vote.
Ms. Whitehead had served more than two
decades on the board, and after seeing her
new district become packed with white vot-
ers, retired before the election. Mr. Pless’s
district also had more white voters, and he
chose instead to run for one of the at-large
seats, where he was defeated.
“The first vote they took was to get rid of
me,” said Mr. King, the attorney.
Some of the racial tensions were appar-
ent to the white board members, too, like
Sylvia Roland, a former teacher who wonher seat under the new map. “There were
five whites and two Blacks, and it took us
months for us to jell as a board and get each
other’s trust,” she said.
The agenda also included some polariz-
ing items, among them an agreement with a
proposed charter school to begin operating.
Many parents had complained about stag-
nant test scores in the existing public
schools.
“I saw what was going on in the high
school, and I didn’t think kids were getting a
quality education,” said Ms. Roland, who
had taught there.
But charter schools — privately run
schools that are funded with public money
— were long controversial among Black
residents in Sumter County. Many still re-
membered the creation of Southland Acad-
emy by white families, using buildings and
buses that belonged to the public schools.
In 2015, approval was granted for the new
Furlow Charter School, named after a Con-
federate colonel whose name had appeared
on other buildings in town.
Furlow was run by an independent board
that was nearly all white. And while any stu-
dent in the county could apply, when classes
began, Furlow’s student body was majority
white. It was the first time in decades there
had been a white-majority school in Sumter
County that wasn’t Southland, according to
state statistics.
“I think part of the reason some people
opposed it was because it was seen as the
‘white flight school,’ ” said Ms. Minich,
whose daughter-in-law is a board member.
But Ms. Minich said the school had many
Black students and was making efforts to
become more diverse.
It was now Black parents who were mak-
ing complaints to the school board that their
children were being discriminated against
in the public schools.
One incident that caused a stir involved
Nacharlesia Floyd, the high school’s saluta-
torian in 2017, who planned to give a speech
that described the struggles of African-
American students in the school. A white
teacher told her not to mention the Black
students, according to Ms. Floyd’s mother,
Ti’erra Snead-Floyd.Ms. Floyd gave the speech anyway. Her
microphone was cut off mid-speech and offi-
cials threatened disciplinary action. Among
those who took note was John Lewis, the
late congressman who protested in Sumter
County in the 1960s. Mr. Lewis spoke to Ms.
Snead-Floyd one day when they bumped
into each other at the airport, she said.
“He said we’d gotten into ‘good trouble,’ ”
said the mother, recalling a line Mr. Lewis
used throughout his civil rights campaigns.The Judge’s MapThis year, Judge Louis Sands of Georgia’s
Middle District federal court ordered a new
voting map to be drawn and voted on in No-
vember
The map, produced by Mr. Grofman, the
university professor appointed by the
court, signified a major reversal of the last
one: Four of its seven seats would be in
places where African-Americans were
more than 60 percent of the population. It
was the kind of map Mr. Wright, the head of
the local N.A.A.C.P. branch, had long
sought.
Ms. Roland, the school board member,
was torn about the change. The new map
eliminated her at-large seat, which she had
won twice. Ms. Roland, who is white, now
had to run in a district whose voting-age
population is 61 percent African-American.
Still, she said she wanted to run anyway,
even if people would most likely split along
racial lines.
The new map won’t permanently settle
the matter. Next year, after the 2020 census,
Georgia’s legislature will approve maps for
its 159 counties based on the new data.
“It took years for this case to be won,”
said Sean J. Young, the legal director of the
Georgia American Civil Liberties Union.
“And there’s nothing to stop them from
drawing the same discriminatory map all
over again.”
Ms. Whitehead, long retired from the
board, still thinks of the two clashes that
have haunted the county nearly all of her
life — voting and schools — and wonders if
she will ever see them resolved.
“It’s been a long struggle,” she said. “And
my family members still talk about it from
time to time; it’s been contentious from my
school years up until now.”
Ms. Minich, the white former school
board member, no longer follows the debate
over the map like she used to. She said she
was still confused and hurt over the fight
that took place.
“For me, this was all mind-boggling,” she
said. Ms. Minich said she missed the times
when she and Ms. Whitehead talked as their
children played soccer together.
The two women haven’t spoken in years.
“Things were under the surface all along,
and they erupt in their own ways, like they
did with the school board,” she said.A Map Opened Racial Fissures
Photographs by
AUDRA MELTON for
The New York TimesAmericus-Sumter
County High School
was caught in a strug-
gle for the county
school board that
became mired in race.
The school district is
70 percent Black, but
a voting map adopted
in 2014 made it hard-
er for Blacks to be
represented on the
board.‘I think part of the reason some people opposed it was
because it was seen as the ‘white flight school.’
DONNA MINICH, whose daughter-in-law is a board member. She said the
school had many Black students and was making efforts to become more diverse..