Republican Congressman Warns Black Attorney She ‘May Go Missing’ If She Tries Removing A Confederate Statue
Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.
Republican member of the Georgia House of Representatives issued a veiled threat of lynching to a black former colleague who expressed anti-Confederate memorial sentiments on his Facebook.
According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Georgia State Rep. Jason Spencer (R) did exactly that on a Facebook post when former state representative LaDawn Jones expressed a distaste for a photo he took with a Confederate monument.
“This is Georgia’s history,” Spencer wrote on a post accompanied by a selfie he took with a South Georgia monument to Confederate president Jefferson Davis.
Jones, who formerly served in the state legislature until last year, questioned whether state tax dollars help pay for the upkeep of the memorial, which includes the house Davis fled to after the Civil War ended. A few comments in, Spencer began making threatening allusions.
“Continue your quixotic journey into South Georgia and it will not be pleasant,” Spencer replied. “The truth. Not a warning. Those folks won’t put up with it like they do in Atlanta.”
“I can guarantee you won’t be met with torches but something a lot more definitive,” he continued, responding to Jones’ comment about the store-bought tiki torches used by the white supremacists at the Charlottesville rally earlier this month.
After another person commented about the differences between Atlanta (a city with a large African American population) and the rest of Georgia, Spencer agreed.
“They will go missing in the Okefenokee [swamp],” he wrote. “Too many necks they are red around here. Don’t say I didn’t warn you about ’em.”
Jones didn’t back down from Spencer’s intimidation.
“Sounds like a threat of physical violence … is that what we are doing now?” she wrote. “Desperate times call for desperate measures huh? Afraid of what is going to happen in southern GA? I saw those white supremacists crying when sh*t really hit the fan.”
Read screenshots of Spencer’s threats and Jones’ response below.
So a GA State Rep told one of his black colleagues she would be murdered if she tried to go to South GA to get rid of confederate monuments pic.twitter.com/qEUJkDjOHD
— Black Aziz Ansari ???? (@Freeyourmindkid) August 29, 2017
Noor Al-Sibai is a news writer for Bustle whose work has appeared in Everyday Feminism and in various local publications around North Carolina.
