Nearing the end of her uphill battle to win the Georgia governor race, Stacey Abrams rallied supporters in Atlanta Saturday afternoon, urging them to call everyone they know to get out and vote on Election Day.
The gathering at The Eastern, a theater in the city’s hip Reynoldstown neighborhood, felt like a party. Hip-hop music blared for most of its three hours, including performances by EarthGang and 2 Chainz, both from Atlanta. The latter is a big deal as a rapper, former radio disc jockey Justin Kase told The Epoch Times. 2 Chainz went after Abrams at the event, not before.
Popular 2 Chainz songs include lyrics about selling and using illegal drugs, murder, explicit descriptions of sex acts, and degrading treatment of women.
Between rally speeches by Abrams supporters and down-ticket candidates, people danced on the theater’s audience floor, which doesn’t have seating.
Young women, some white but mostly black, were abundant on the main floor, which held perhaps 250 or 300 people during the rally.
But there were hardly any black men, perhaps a dozen or so. There were far more black men working the event at The Eastern than in the actual crowd: photographers and techies, guards and folks working the doors, several candidates, and nonprofit heads who spoke.
Lack of enthusiasm among black men has been a problem for Abrams, who has steadily lagged her opponent, incumbent Republican Governor Brian Kemp, in the polls.
Kemp did not respond to a request for comment.
Scheduling this event at the same time as one of college football’s biggest events of the year and one with local interest, that in nearby Athens, Geogria, between top-ranked Georgia and number-three Tennessee, probably didn’t help her on the male side of the equation. The event was scheduled to start at 3 p.m., while the game kicked off at 3:30 p.m.
Speaker after speaker pumped up the crowd to go out and campaign. They didn’t lack for heated rhetoric.
“Right now, there’s a bunch of haters out there,” Dolores Huerta, 92 but still spry, told the crowd. As co-founder of the United Farm Workers, she’s something of a legend. California celebrates her birthday, April 10, as a holiday.
“I’m gonna say this word. It’s an F word. Not the one you think. The word is ‘fascism.’ We know we heard about fascism in Germany, where they killed millions of Jews, gypsies, disabled people, people of color, okay. That’s what we have here in the United States right now. How do we know that?”
Huerta accused the US of having more prisoners than either China or India, which have larger populations.
“How can it be that we have more people in prison? Black, brown, poor white. Those are the ones who are in prison. That is what fascism looks like. That word fascism. What does it mean? It’s a German word. It means to hurt and to punish. And these are the people out there that are trying to take over our country. And we know one thing, we are not going to let them because they are haters.”
Fascism, according to Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, is derived from the Italian word “fascismo.” That, in turn, derives from the word “fascio,” meaning “a bundle” and usually meaning a bundle of sticks with an ax head, a symbol dating back to the Roman Republic. It is translated in English as a “fasces.”
Giving and improvising some on her stump speech, Abrams talked about her Mississippi grandparents voting for the first time in the 1968 presidential election. Getting ready to go to the polls, her grandmother froze up and wouldn’t come out of the bedroom even when her husband, Abrams’ grandfather, came to get her.
She later told her granddaughter, Abrams related, “I wasn’t afraid of the guns and the hoses, I wasn’t afraid of the billy clubs or the dogs. I was afraid of the power.”
“What if we had the power to change our lives? What if we had the power to change our future?” Abrams said. “That’s a power that’s almost terrifying. It’s paralyzing. But I’m here to tell you: we got the power, Georgia. We got the power to get this done.”
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