Georgia Rep. Roger Bruce represents District 61 in the Georgia House of Representatives. His district includes parts of South Fulton County, which includes parts of the new City of South Fulton, North Atlanta, Douglas County, and Cobb County. With the drawing of new maps following the last census the district will no longer include Cobb County and will take in more of Fulton and Douglas counties. He served as the first African American Chairman of the Douglas County Delegation for eight years. Rolling out spoke with him about the significance of redistricting.
What were some of the issues being discussed at the General Assembly this year?
Based on this last session, several bills were introduced as local legislation that allowed counties to create election boards. If somebody complained about the election, they could create a selection board, and that board could be made up of people that were all from one political party. If there’s an election in one of those counties, and they don’t like the outcome, they could create this board, and then the board could overthrow the election. To me, that’s a big deal. And people weren’t paying attention to what was happening, because it wasn’t happening in every county, it was only happening in the counties that were dominated by Republicans.
Why are some of the on-going problems when it comes to voting?
You have a political party that’s in power that wants to stay in power, and you have a country and a state that is biased. There are still some issues with former slaves and slave masters, where there’s a tendency for them to want to stay in power and one of the processes for doing that is to control the electoral process and prevent the minority party and minorities from participating in fair elections. You look at what’s going on at the national level now with Donald Trump. This man has absolutely no business being a presidential candidate at all and for us to not have something in place to prevent him from being one given what’s going on is crazy. You cannot convince me that if this was Barack Obama instead of Donald Trump, that Barack Obama would get all of the leeway that this man is getting right now. You just can’t convince me.
How do these issues affect the Black community?
It affects any community, but us probably more so than others, because there’s this desire to lock people up. Most of the bills that get introduced are designed to punish somebody. I don’t want to send people to jail, I would prefer that we come up with laws that reward people for doing good things, as opposed to locking them up for anything and everything. There’s a tendency to want to put people who look like you and I, and live in the communities that we live in, to put us in jail. That’s part of our process to try to maintain control.
