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Testifying in a 2002 voting rights case, Rep. John Lewis said:

 “We have changed. We’ve come a great distance. I think in-- it’s not just in Georgia, but in the American South, I think people are preparing to lay down the burden of race….There has been a transformation…It’s altogether a different world…”

Lewis, of course, had put his life on the line marching for basic black enfranchisement in 1965; he knows we live in a “different world” today.

Under contract with us, two distinguished scholars--Charles S. Bullock III, the Richard B. Russell professor of political science, and Keith Gaddie, professor of political science at the University of Oklahoma--have documented that transformation in Georgia.  Their main points:

• Georgia had a terrible history of black disfranchisement, but in the most recent presidential elections, black participation rates actually slightly exceeded those of whites. And if one compares Georgia to states outside the South, black registration is slightly higher and turnout is roughly the same.
  
  
• At ever-increasing rates, blacks are being elected to public office in the state. Between 1973 and 2005, 29 congressional races were won by blacks, 13 of them in majority-white districts. Four out of thirteen members of the state’s current delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives are black—a uniquely high number in proportion to the state’s population. Thirty-four officeholders in Georgia are elected statewide, and currently nine are black—a figure just short of proportional racial representation. 
  
  
• By 2001, the black leadership in Georgia had become convinced that the election of blacks to office no longer depended on the creation of overwhelming majority-minority districts. An expert hired by the black attorney general had concluded that African-American candidates did not even need majority-black districts in order to be elected. The legislative black caucus, in signing on to the 2001 plan, was assuming substantial white crossover voting--an assumption based on experience.
  
  
• White support for black candidates in Georgia today is higher than black support for white office-seekers. Moreover, blacks often determine the outcome of the Democrat primary. But with the movement of whites into the Republican Party in the 1990s, neither white nor black Democrats attracted a majority of white votes. In 2004, white Democrats running statewide did no better than those who were black. In fact, looking at the four most recent elections, black candidates running statewide had a success rate of 71 percent, while the white rate was only 41 percent.
  
  
• In sum, blacks in Georgia are now fully enfranchised. There was reason in 1965 to target Deep South states like Georgia for extraordinary federal oversight over election procedures. But we live in a different world in 2005.

Edward Blum is a visiting fellow at AEI. Abigail Thernstrom is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.