PLAINS, Ga. — Former President Jimmy Carter’s hometown makes a point of celebrating democracy. American flags wave outside stores selling old campaign buttons and vintage political posters, and tourists mill around the train depot that served as his 1976 campaign headquarters.
The rural Georgia county where tiny Plains is located is also the site of historic struggles for civil rights, and it could continue to offer lessons on the costly conflicts that may lie ahead nationwide when states redraw voting district lines after the 2020 Census.
Sumter County is embroiled in a court fight over voting rights and redistricting that challenges the composition and credibility of its school board.
In the midst of it is Kelvin Pless, whose election to the board nearly a decade ago shifted control toward an African American majority. Before then, a white-majority board had governed the district where black students constitute an overwhelming majority. It also unleashed what Pless said felt like a “race war” that returned control to whites after state lawmakers intervened.
“I don’t like to use the term too much, but I think it was borne out of racism.” said Pless. “It was almost like a very mild version of terrorism.”
The board’s white chairman, Michael Busman, said the election changes that reconstituted the board had “nothing to do with race.” Instead, he called it the simplest path to shrinking the nine-member body, which he said was too large and costly for the small school district.
With a population estimated around 30,000, Sumter County is about 53 percent black and 43 percent white. Like many other Southern communities, it was run by whites until courts overturned Jim Crow laws and ordered desegregation during the civil rights era.
The county saw large-scale civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s and drew national attention for imprisoning dozens of African American girls in a squalid stockade for months and charging four other activists with treason. The first students to integrate Sumter’s schools faced violent white mobs. Their buses were pummeled by rocks and eggs, their notebooks ripped to pieces.
Today, the district — with 4,400 students — is 72 percent black, 14 percent white and 12 percent Hispanic. Many white families send children to private or public schools in neighboring counties with larger white populations.
“I come back now, and I see things virtually unchanged. It’s a city that’s still polarized, a school system that remains just as segregated today as it was decades ago,” said Sam Mahone, a veteran of the county’s civil rights movement.
Before entering state and national politics, Carter served on the school board in the 1950s.
Once a majority-black board was seated in 2011, Pless said agitated white residents crammed meetings in what felt “like a lynch mob.” The local press disparaged the new 6-3 African American majority as the “gang of six,” he said. At least two African American board members during that time say their employers received threatening letters, advocating they be fired.
