Savannah Homelessness: A Moral Issue

By Ariana Daniels|May 23, 2023|7 min

Savannah’s homelessness issue has become so prevalent that the mayor noticed it and felt the need to comment on the severity of the situation. Mayor Van Johnson said, “There has been a proliferation of homeless people, roofless neighbors in our community, in our…

Home Is Where the Disruption of the Status Quo Is: A Conversation with Shemeka Frazier Sorrells on A Better Glynn’s takedown of a Confederate symbol

By Catherine Maddox
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May 20, 2023
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5 min

“I wasn’t always sure,” Shemeka Frazier Sorrells says of moving with her family last October to her hometown of Brunswick, Georgia, the place of Ahmaud Arbery’s 2020 slaying by white supremacists. The subsequent mismanagement of the case by local officials,…

Thoughts on the 2023 Legislature

By Krista Brewer|August 10, 2023|7 min

The 2023 Georgia legislative session is over, and the legislators are off on spring breaks, back to their day jobs, or recovering in bed. But advocates who care about good policy in this state are assessing what just happened, what bills passed or failed…

Two ways to protect the Okefenokee

By Krista Brewer|February 27, 2023|10 min

This article first appeared in Political Peach News My family’s budget is a plan to match our expenses with our income. The money going out can be divided into two buckets: what we must spend on essential necessities like food, shelter, and clothing, and discretionary…

Our state’s budget: A few things to know

By Krista Brewer|February 20, 2023|8 min

This article first appeared in Political Peach News My family’s budget is a plan to match our expenses with our income. The money going out can be divided into two buckets: what we must spend on essential necessities like food, shelter, and clothing, and discretionary…

Cop City: How did we get here?

By Krista Brewer|February 1, 2023|7 min

This article first appeared in Political Peach News The growing tensions around the planned Atlanta police training facility have sadly escalated resulting in the death of a protestor, the wounding of a state patrolman, and property damage in downtown Atlanta. This…

Scorecard developed for Georgia’s electric membership cooperatives

By Krista Brewer|February 1, 2023|3 min

Georgians get their electricity in one of three ways. Most receive electricity from the investor-owned utility, Georgia Power which is regulated by the Public Service Commission. Others are served by a utility that is owned and operated by a municipality, for example,…

Georgia Public Service Commissioners put profits over people

By Krista Brewer|January 16, 2023|6 min

This article first appeared in Political Peach News Almost half a century ago, when I was a local news reporter for the Great Speckled Bird, we frequently wrote scathing news articles about Georgia Power and the Public Service Commission (PSC). Sadly, the story…

Black (Voting) Power in Georgia: Plaintiff Brionté McCorkle discusses Victory in Rose v. Raffensperger case

By Catherine Maddox|September 2, 2022|9 min

Following the cascade of Supreme Court decisions, stripping away federally protected rights from bodily autonomy to proving one’s innocence, a group of Black voters from Georgia took a Voting Rights Act case all the way to SCOTUS and won. “I was stunned,” Brionté…

Voting within the Carceral System: A Conversation with Shaun Smith on the Future of Democracy

By Catherine Maddox|August 25, 2022|7 min

When Shaun Smith, founder of the Black Push organization, whose core mission is advocacy for society’s most vulnerable, with a focus on ex-offenders, talks about becoming a minister, he speaks at once of a vocation he loves and of an internal conflict born from a life…

Not Just Telling Stories: Forsyth Coalition for Education Promotes Student First Amendment Rights

By Catherine Maddox|August 24, 2022|7 min

Before her current role as organizer and board member of Forsyth Coalition for Education, an organization that has successfully reversed a book ban despite having existed for less than a year, the biggest book controversy Pat Wall contended with in Forsyth County…

Voters Demand Accountability Among Those Responsible for the January 6th Capital Attack and Conspiracy to Overturn 2020 Election Results

By The Peach Pit Staff|August 8, 2022|3 min

The January 6th Capital Insurrection was and continues to be a defining moment in U.S. history and for democracy. Recently, the Defend Democracy Project and Public Policy Polling partnered together to conduct polling research to measure public sentiment on the January…

The Right’s Silent Coup: GOP tactics to maintain control of a diversifying country, one county at a time

By Catherine Maddox|July 15, 2022|7 min

Although the events of January 6th, 2021, were eventually subdued- after blood was shed and much of the country was horrified – Republican state legislators nationwide persisted in a concerted effort to subvert the will of voters in their own backyards. Georgia, the…

Unprecedented: Reproductive Justice Activist and Lawyer Megan Gordon-Kane, on the Dobbs Decision

By Catherine Maddox|July 7, 2022|9 min

In the years leading up to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Megan Gordon-Kane says that she and other reproductive justice activists felt like Kassandra, the mythological priestess gifted with predicting the future, while at the same time cursed, never to be believed….

Who’s Regulating Who?: Facing climate disaster, Georgia activists and constituents urge, plead, and demand for the Public Service Commission to do their job

By Catherine Maddox|June 24, 2022|6 min

Amidst a U.S. national crisis in which the highest court in the land is restricting the regulation of carbon emissions at the federal level, the public interest advocacy staff of Georgia’s own regulatory body, The Public Service Commission, has declined Georgia…

One Thousand Georgians Rally for Abortion Rights in Downtown Atlanta

By Catherine Maddox|May 4, 2022|5 min

“I’m here today to tell you that it is okay to be angry,” one of the speakers, who declined to provide their name, told the crowd, who gathered in Atlanta Tuesday night to protest a draft Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the day after its unprecedented…

Georgia lawmakers continue to defund schools in the midst of COVID-19 pandemic

By Catherine Maddox|April 29, 2022|6 min

The significant presence of children from private Christian schools at the signing of Kemp’s education bills Thursday, was notable for two reasons, according to progressive activists who showed up to sign the wave: firstly, because these religious institutions showed…

Skin in the Game

By Catherine Maddox|April 21, 2022|5 min

A Conversation with District Attorney Anita Howard on the Failure of SB 504, Criminal Justice Reform, and the Future of Public Safety

Universal Free Lunch Comes to a Screeching Halt

By Ariana Daniels|April 18, 2022|5 min

June 30th, 2022 is the last day that students across Georgia and the United States will receive free lunch. Free lunch waivers were distributed at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 and it was a big help to families struggling during the pandemic. These…

A Closer Look at “Divisive Concepts”: – A Term Coined by the Georgia GOP

By Catherine Maddox|April 14, 2022|9 min

Q&A with Senator Elena Parent on HB 1084 Interview took place on April 11, 2022 Around midnight on Sine Die, and just a few blocks away from where the Walking Dead zombies once dragged themselves around Georgia State University campus, a zombie bill was in the…