Nationwide — Meet Miracle Butler, 14, Keniah Washington, 13, Keyanna Grant, 13, Tyreek Nash, 14, and Kaitlyn Archie-McDonald, 14 (absent from photo). This bright young cohort started as the 1st group of students taking college dual enrollment classes at Icon Preparatory School in Tampa and Jacksonville, Florida. They just finished their first year of college as well as three years of high school at the ages of 13 and 14. The youngest of the group Keniah and Keyanna began taking college courses at 12 years old.

Icon Preparatory School is a private school in the cities of Tampa and Jacksonville, FL that educates over 800 students. Icon Prep is open to any student in the state of Florida and committed to closing the achievement gap among its scholars and more affluent peers. With a belief that a student’s zip code does not determine their destination, Icon Preparatory School empowers its students to reach their maximum potential, preparing them for life in college and beyond.

Five of Icon Prep’s six founders are alumni of Florida A&M University, a historically black college that prides itself on excellence with caring among its students. The leaders of Icon Prep aim to use the knowledge obtained from their HBCU experience to significantly impact their student population that is 99% African American and Hispanic.

The dual enrollment scholars anticipate obtaining their Associate’s Degree within the next year from Saint Leo University. They will then transfer to another four-year university as juniors to complete their bachelor’s degree.

Nationwide — Jeremiah Armstead, a 19-year-old teen from Los Angeles who was homeless while in high school, has been accepted at Fisk University, an HBCU in Nashville, Tennessee, and will play basketball for its team.

“Any type of adversity that I went through, for the most part, it motivated me and pushed me,” Armstead said he felt after seeing his acceptance letter, according to ABC News.

In the past 3 years, Jeremiah has lived mostly in cars and domestic violence shelters with his mother and siblings.

“I’m not surprised Jeremiah is where he’s at today,” his mother Mindy Brooks said. “I’m not surprised because he’s always been a good person.”

Jeremiah says that getting into Fisk was not easy for him as he juggled his studies and the effects of homelessness. But he managed to push through as he received a lot of support from his family, coaches, and organizations like We Educate Brilliant Minds and Sisters of Wyatt.

“I was bringing smarts, of course, but it was hard to do that being homeless and juggling everything, like domestic violence situations, just stuff like that,” he said. “Living in a shelter, living in a car — it was hard to think, go to school, worry about my mom or my brother, my sister.”

A graduate from Long Beach Polytechnic High School in Long Beach, California, Jeremiah is now a college student studying kinesiology. He has joined Fisk University men’s basketball team under the guidance of team coach Kenneth Anderson, who was a formerly played for the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers.

Jeremiah pursuing higher education has motivated his younger siblings to dream big and go to college as well. And he wants other people to see it, too. “That’s all I ever needed in life was a chance,” he said. “I just want to show people that’s in my circumstances like ‘don’t stop’. Don’t ever think of giving up because just like that, stuff could change.”

Nationwide — Andrea A. Hayes Dixon, M.D., FACS, FAAP has made history as the first Black woman dean of the Howard University College of Medicine in the institution’s 154-year history.

“I am truly honored and humbled to lead the outstanding Howard University College of Medicine,” said Dixon, according to The Dig. “The responsibility of educating the nation’s next generation of leaders in medicine is an enormous responsibility that I take very seriously. I am excited to engender allies and friends to join me in the journey of moving Howard forward.”

In 2021, Dixon became the first woman chair of the Department of Surgery at Howard University. Just a year later on October 3, Dixon was officially appointed dean of the university’s College of Medicine, succeeding Hugh Mighty, MD, MBA, FACOG, who previously held the position since 2015.

Now, Dixon is one of the 11 women serving as academic deans at Howard University.

Prior to joining Howard University, Dixon was a surgeon-in-chief and division chief of pediatric surgery, and professor of pediatric surgery and surgical oncology at the University of North Carolina (UNC) Children’s Hospital. Moreover, among Dixon’s historic achievements were being the first Black woman in the US to become a board-certified pediatric surgeon in 2004 and the first surgeon in the world to ever perform a high-risk surgery that saved the life of a teen with a rare form of abdominal cancer in 2006.

Richard F. Doner

Goodrich C. White Professor (Emeritus) of Political Science, Emory University

In the rash of election reform laws enacted after former President Donald Trump’s false claims of fraud during the 2020 presidential election, few were tougher than SB 202 – the Election Integrity Act – passed in 2021 in Georgia, a state long known for its history of suppressing  the Black vote, especially in response to growth in Black political influence.

Media attention focused on SB 202’s shortened runoff periods from nine to four weeks, limits on who can turn in absentee ballots and a partial ban on offering food or water while waiting in line to vote.

But other parts of SB 202 have drawn especially strong charges of racism from Black voters, Democrats and voting rights activists.

Details of the new Georgia law

One part of the law restricts the use of drop boxes, used most extensively by voters of color.

A second involves the State Elections Board, the state agency charged with administering elections in a nonpartisan way. The Board, now composed of four Republicans and one Democrat, is subject to review by the GOP-controlled state legislature and has the authority to take over election boards, including in counties with Democratic majorities and large populations of Black and other voters of color.

Finally, the new law allows any Georgia voter to challenge an unlimited number of other voters in their county. That provision already led to consequences after the state’s May 24, 2022, primary and foreshadows potential problems after the upcoming midterm elections.

According to the New Georgia Project, a voting rights group that is tracking the impact of the new law, about 64,000 challenges were filed statewide – with about 37,000 of them in the Atlanta area alone – and at least 1,800 mostly Black or Democratic voters’ names already have been removed from the voter rolls.

While the state Board of Registrars upheld the voting rights of the vast majority of challenged voters, voting experts disagree on how voting rules impact voter turnout or erode public trust, especially in a state with a history of discriminatory voting laws that affect people of color.

SB 202’s supporters argue that the overhaul expands voting hours and does not suppress Black voting.

Critics counter that the 98-page bill, similar to others across the country, was a thinly disguised effort to target voters of color because it restricts voting mechanisms used most extensively by Black voters, especially in reaction to the recent growth in political power by Black Georgians.

Georgia’s growing Black political power

For the last 20 years, Georgia has seen a shift in its state politics, largely the result of an influx of Black Americans who have moved back to the South since 2000 and tend to vote Democratic.

Black voters accounted for half of the state’s 1.9 million increase in eligible voters between 2000 and 2019.

With close to 700,000 more voting-age Black Americans moving to the Atlanta area of Fulton County since 2000 – and another 200,000 to nearby Cobb and Gwinnett counties – Black voters in 2018 helped Democrat Stacey Abrams come within about 55,000 votes – 50.2% to 48.8% – of becoming the first Black person and first woman of any race to become Georgia governor.

She lost the race to GOP incumbent Brian Kemp, whose victory withstood several legal challenges filed by Abrams alleging election irregularities.

Georgia Democrats had much more success in 2020. Black turnout helped Joe Biden win the state in the presidential election and saw two Democrats – Raphael Warnock, a Black man, and John Ossoff, a Jewish man – win the state’s two U.S. Senate seats.

Critics suggest that SB 202’s passage following this rise in 2020 Black turnout mirrors a historical pattern of voter disenfranchisement after a rise of Black voter strength. This pattern, which began right after the Civil War, contributed to historian Laughlin McDonald’s conclusion in his “A Voting Rights Odyssey: Black Enfranchisement in Georgia” that “no state was more systematic and thorough in its efforts to deny or limit voting and officeholdings by African-Americans after the Civil War.”

Backlash after the Civil War

In 1868, Black citizens were 44% of the state’s population, and voting-age Black men outnumbered white men in 65 of Georgia’s 137 counties.

Along with the power of growing Black political organizations such as the Loyal Leagues, Reconstruction led to an influx of Black Georgians to elected office in the late 1860s and early 1870s, including the “original 33” Black members of the Georgia General Assembly and members of elected boards of education.

The white-dominated Democratic party responded to these seismic shifts in political power by not only forcibly replacing Black elected school board members with white Georgians selected by all-white grand juries, but also imposing strict vagrancy laws.

These not only restricted the mobility of Black men – and thus their ability to organize – but they also led to convictions of Black men on charges of vagrancy, thus depriving them of the right to vote.

In his book, McDonald describes the reality for Black Georgians trying to vote. At the polls, McDonald writes, Black voters were required to prove that they had paid poll taxes at a time when political violence by white supremacists was a constant.

From 1867 to 1872, McDonald reveals, “at least a quarter of the state’s Black legislators were jailed, threatened, bribed, beaten, or killed.”

The pattern of violence against Black elected officials continued throughout the early 20th century. From 1908 to 1962, no Black Georgian held a seat in the state legislature.

Voting under Jim Crow

Despite those obstacles, Black political power continued to grow.

The movement of Black people to jobs in Georgia’s industrializing cities resulted in the growth of strikes and boycotts. In some cases, as in the Georgia Railroad strike of 1909, white union members resented the employment of Black, nonunion firefighters and staged numerous strikes that ultimately led to federal mediation.

But urban-based industrialization also led to the multiracial, class-based Populist Party in the early 1890s that appealed to Black voters who made up almost half of the state’s population.

The response was Jim Crow, a systematic set of restrictions that historians Suzanne Mettler and Robert Lieberman described as “changing the rules for how elections were run, in ways that would cripple the political opposition once and for all.”

Jim Crow laws included a strengthened poll tax and literacy tests, both of which aimed to block voting by Black voters,, reestablishment of the “white primary” where only whites could vote in the key Democratic Party races, and stricter residency requirements that limited Black people’s ability to organize.

The impact was significant: According to Richard M. Vallely, a political science professor at Swarthmore College, Black voter turnout in Georgia for presidential elections fell from 42% in 1880 to 33% in 1892, 7% in 1900 and 2% in 1912.

White supremacy in the 1940s

A further example of white conservative reaction to expanded Black political activity took place right after World War II. In Georgia’s 1946 gubernatorial election, the candidacy of Democratic incumbent Eugene Talmadge was threatened by a significant rise in Black registrations, from about 20,000 in 1940 to more than 125,000 in 1946.

In addition, the U.S. Supreme Court had outlawed the white primary and the poll tax. More importantly, Black-led organizations, often involving Black veterans, such as the All-Citizen Registration Committee and the Atlanta Negro Voters League, continued to expand throughout the state.

In response to the increase in Black voter registrations, Talmadge-led white supremacy forces mailed thousands of mimeographed forms to challenge and disqualify Black voters across the state.

Whereas few if any white registrants were challenged in any county, historian Joseph l. Bernd found that Blacks voters were challenged in more than 30 counties, and an estimated 15,000 to 25,000 were purged.

The result was a Talmadge victory despite the fact that his opponent – James Carmichael – won 16,000 more popular votes.

National stakes

Of course, much has changed in Georgia since the days of Talmadge.

But the almost immediate passage of new election laws at a time of growing Black political strength suggests the persistence of a white backlash in Georgia.

In a politically divided state such as Georgia, voter turnout is crucial.

Out of nearly 5 million ballots cast in the 2020 presidential campaign, for instance, Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by only 11,779 votes.

The balance of power in the U.S. Senate may rest on the outcome of the race between Warnock and GOP candidate Herschel Walker.

Though the race is still too close to call, one thing is clear: If the record turnout at May’s primaries was any indication, Georgia election officials will be swamped sorting out challenges in a replay of the state’s 1946 governor’s race. (The CONVERSATION)