In the south Georgia of my youth, black people didn’t vote. They didn’t register to vote. Doing that made them “uppity,” and in a state where lynching was not just a bad memory, obviously few people wanted that label attached to them.
Things are a bit better now. But not only are old times there not forgotten, there are also some people who weren’t even born then who would like to bring them back. In opposition are others who fight for justice and equality.
One of the latter is Olivia Pearson, a 55-year-old African American in Coffee County. She believes in the power of the vote to change things. And she’s spent a lot of time trying to nudge, cajole, arm-twist, and otherwise get her fellow African Americans, including members of her own family, to register and get to the polls, often ferrying them there herself. One of those was her nephew. Hoping to instill in him a favorable lifelong attitude regarding the importance of voting, she persuaded him to cast his first vote ever in 2012 for Barack Obama.
But now, years after that election, she’s one of five people being prosecuted for alleged voter fraud. The state is claiming she crossed the line and gave her nephew and others more assistance in voting than the law allows and signed an affidavit falsely stating the assistance was needed. She denies this. Because of the impending trial, Pearson can’t talk about the specifics. But she says she only showed her nephew—and over the years, dozens of other voters—how to use the voting machines, but never touched them herself, nor told anyone who they should cast their votes for while assisting them.
Joel Anderson reports on how this former parole officer, civil rights activist, and grandmother could become a felon serving a five-year term if convicted: