Open Letter to the Fair Fight Family on the Rev. Warnock Endorsement
by: Lauren Groh-Wargo
Last month, Fair Fight and Stacey Abrams did something for the first time and something we likely won’t do again — endorse in a contested Democratic U.S. Senate race. On January 30, Reverend Raphael Warnock launched his campaign for U.S. Senate. Fair Fight and Stacey endorsed his run soon thereafter, and Fair Fight is making in-kind contributions close to the maximum limit to support his run.
I wanted to share some background on why Rev. Warnock is so special and important to me personally, and to our work overall. Rev. Warnock and Stacey have had a long relationship and have worked together on many important issues through the years. The three of us worked closely together in 2014 when we first launched the New Georgia Project, an organization founded to register an electorate that was increasingly younger and more diverse. SOS Brian Kemp launched a suppressive, evil investigation into the New Georgia Project that year, trying to shut down the largest voter registration drive the state had seen in decades, charging us with voter registration fraud. Ultimately, we were vindicated, and no wrongdoing was found. But those months in many ways are the genesis of where we are today.
I met Stacey’s longtime friend and former colleague Allegra Lawrence-Hardy, and was connected with Dara Lindenbaum — both who came on that year as legal counsel in our fight against the investigation, and then in the Writ of Mandamus we filed against Kemp — as we had unknowingly uncovered at the time the “exact match” law designed to keep people off voter rolls. 40,000 of the 86,000 forms NGP submitted that year weren’t showing up on the rolls, and so the Mandamus action was meant to force him to register those voters. Though that suit was unsuccessful, the issue evolved into another lawsuit filed by the Lawyers Committee For Civil Rights Under Law, and that lawsuit resulted in 30,000 voters being reinstated to the rolls who had been flagged in 2014 and cancelled out of the system.
When Kemp launched his investigation that year and the subpoena arrived and the fight quickly escalated, Stacey and I reached out to Rev. Warnock. He jumped in and worked side by side with us to fight back against Kemp’s attempt to shut down and criminalize voter registration. For Rev. Warnock’s kindness and fearlessness in that fight, I will be forever grateful. It was a very difficult time as we expected at any moment our canvassing offices to be raided, and we had to periodically shut the operation down because we were worried about our canvassers being harassed or arrested. Stacey stepped down from her role as Chair of NGP when she filed for the gubernatorial race in 2017, and Rev. Warnock stepped up as the new Chair of the organization. Now Francys Johnson, another fighter for voting rights and the former State President of the GA NAACP, has become the Chair of NGP. (The slideshow in this article has some great photos from 2014 of an incredible press conference/direct action, a protest at an SEB meeting, and Rev. Warnock, Francys and Stacey speaking.)
Rev. Warnock is the senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, one of our co-plaintiffs in our nonpartisan Fair Fight Action litigation, and he with his church have fought alongside us to get relief from the courts for Georgia voters.
Rev. Warnock is also a leader on numerous progressive issues, including gun safety, criminal justice reform, and civil and human rights. It is an honor to call him a friend, and I could not be happier for the Georgians we fight for every day that he is stepping up to run for US Senate. His run has the chance to transform the conversation about the importance of Georgia in the 2020 election.
I hope some of this lends some background as to why Fair Fight’s PAC is taking unprecedented steps to support his candidacy — and why we think you should join us!
Thank you for everything you’re doing to push our organization, state and country forward. Onward!
