3/29/21
Gov. Brian Kemp and a slew of Georgia Republican lawmakers sped a sweeping election bill into a Jim-Crow-like law Thursday, imposing new voting restrictions in the battleground state. The law, wrongfully dubbed The Election Integrity Act of 2021, is a poorly disguised attack against the state's minorities following President Joe Biden's victory last November. So, sports leagues with teams in Georgia should go back to the future, emulating the time when they stopped giving cities and states huge events (Super Bowls, Final Fours and league All-Star Games) that stimulate the local economy, even before political wokeness became a thing. As activists and leaders grapple with these actions, industries and groups including the sports world can join the fight. Atlanta likes getting sports stuff. Just stop giving Atlanta sports stuff. Why Atlanta? Well, Georgia Republican lawmakers know the state's whole economy begins and ends with Atlanta, home of the state capital and the main target of these voter suppression laws since voters in predominately Black counties around Atlanta, such as Fulton and Clayton, did much to elect Georgia's first Black senator (Raphael Warnock) and first Jewish senator (Jon Ossoff).
We can start by stripping Atlanta of Major League Baseball's All-Star Game, which is set to take place in the city in July. Major League Baseball Players Association executive director Tony Clark told the Boston Globe Friday that he "would look forward" to discussing moving the game from Georgia. Sound familiar? In 2017, the National Basketball Association moved its own All-Star Game from Charlotte, North Carolina, in response to the state's HB2 law. Not only that, but if Georgia keeps its new voting law, the National Black Justice Coalition urged the Professional Golf Association Tour to keep major tournaments out of Georgia, starting with next week's Masters Tournament. Good. We need more of that. Treat Atlanta and Georgia the way the NFL did Arizona during the early 1990s, when the league yanked a Super Bowl away from the state after its citizens voted not to support the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, even though it was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan. Treat Georgia like the National Collegiate Athletic Association does to all of those states refusing to remove anything resembling the Confederate flag as their state flag, like they did last year in Mississippi.
