My public high school in Natchez, Mississippi had an official prom, which all the kids called "Black prom," and an unofficial "White Prom" in a hotel downtown. I graduated in 1994.

Natchez is a tourist town with riverboats and antebellum houses. Every year they have a Confederate Pageant where the white high society people dress up in hoop skirts, dance and promenade and anoint a king and queen.

Black people were not invited to participate. So, a pageant about pre-Civil War life in Mississippi that completely erases slavery.

In 2015, they wanted the daughter of best selling author Greg Iles to be the pageant queen. He is the biggest celebrity in the state after John Grisham.

Iles and his daughter Madeleine used his celebrity as leverage to demand that black people be invited to participate and that the pageant acknowledge the realities of slavery. 2015! https://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2015/04/05/author-iles-reworks-natchez-pageant/25338913/

I think most people who haven't lived in the South don't understand that there's basically a Black Prom and a White Prom within the Democratic Party in most states, and the Black Prom is completely disenfranchised. They're "friends at school."

A good way to learn about this divide is through @replyall's "The Real Enemy" podcasts about the split in the Democratic Party in Alabama. @newsmanual did an excellent job reporting the story. https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/llhd33

I'm very privileged to have been able to leave and build a life outside of that hellhole, and at the same time I feel incredibly guilty that I didn't stay down there and work to make it better, like my dad and mom did.

The work black Democrats did in Georgia is truly against every obstacle put up by the Republican party, which has gerrymandered the legislative districts in all of those states so that black Americans' votes are watered down and they are underrepresented in the state legislature.

This why these seemingly "Red States" consistently go for Democrats nationally and Republicans locally, because the lines are drawn locally to divide black communities up so their votes are split off into adjoining, majority white communities.

Georgia is 30% black, and they just elected their FIRST Black US Senator. It took 55 years since the 1965 Voting Rights Act, fully 150 years after the Fifteenth Amendment gave Black men the right to vote.