Winfred Rembert is a remarkable artist who lives in Connecticut. He creates his art out of leather, having learned his leather working skills in a Georgia prison in between shifts on a chain gang. Born in 1945, Rembert grew up in Cuthbert, the county seat of Randolph County in southwest Georgia. As a teenager, he got involved in the civil rights movement. He told Greg Cook of WBUR in Boston the rest of his story.

"I ran away from the cotton fields and I started hanging out at Jeff’s Pool Room on Hamilton Avenue. All the civil rights work was based on Hamilton Avenue. I was 14. They was doing street protesting for different things, trying to get equal rights in restaurants, theaters, all over Georgia and Alabama. … I wasn’t a big part. I was just making up the numbers, just being part of the body...Among the protests he participated in was one in Americus, Georgia, in the mid 1960s against blacks receiving much harsher sentences than whites for similar crimes. “It was a kind of big demonstration, bigger than usual. They had the fire department deputized and they had citizens deputized. And things got out of hand. White people started shooting. And we started running and everything. So I ran down this alley trying to get away and these two white men were running behind me. There was this car sitting there and I took that car and got away.” Within hours, police caught him: “They just pulled up behind me. And they put me in jail in Cuthbert.”

Rembert managed to overpower a deputy and escape. Then things got worse.

“I went to some people’s house who I thought I could get some help from. But they went in the next room and called the police. They threw me in the car. First, they put me in the back seat and escorted me to the jail. Then two, three hours later, they threw me in the trunk [of a police car] and drove me out to an isolated place where they had these noose hanging from a tree. Then they took me out and hanged me upside-down. Then the same guy that I locked in the jail, in the cell, he tried to castrate me. Until another man, a white man, came up and stopped him and saved me from being castrated. Then they cut me down and took me back to the jail bleeding like a pig...There was no new trial. One day they took me to a kangaroo court. They had a judge, but there was no plea, guilty plea, and all that kind of stuff. They just gave me some time. Judge gave me five years for escape, two years for pointing a pistol, and he gave me 20 for robbery. And I asked him, ‘Who did I rob?’ He says, ‘You robbed a man of his pistol.’ I said, ‘Well, he was pulling the pistol to shoot me.’ He says, ‘Well, you should have let him shot you.

Rembert went to prison, got out and moved to New Haven, where he has worked at his leather crafts ever since. But Randolph County, where he nearly was murdered in custody, is back in the news again, with history echoing loudly through the years back to the time when Winfred Rembert grew up there. From The New York Times:

The Randolph County elections board is scheduled to meet Thursday to discuss a proposal that would eliminate seven of nine polling locations in the county, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia. Included in the proposed closures is Cuthbert Middle School where nearly 97 percent of voters are black. "There is strong evidence that this was done with intent to make it harder for African Americans," ACLU of Georgia attorney Sean Young said. The ACLU has sent a letter to the elections board demanding that the polling places remain open and has filed open records requests for information about the proposal to close the polling places.

This is appalling enough on its face, but the sheer brass it takes to make this kind of decision right out in the open is testimony to the success that the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts has achieved at rolling back the hard-won blood-gains of the civil rights movement, a project that truly has been Roberts's life's mission ever since he was a young lawyer in the Justice Department under Ronald Reagan.

Barry Williams Getty Images

Under the old Voting Rights Act, gutted by the Roberts Court in Shelby County v. Holder, the decision in which Roberts declared the arrival of the Day of Jubilee, nobody would have dared pull a stunt like this. The pre-clearance provisions of the VRA would have kicked in. The DOJ would have been breathing down their necks within the hour.

According to the latest census figures, Randolph County's population is more than 61 percent of black, double the statewide percentage.The median household income for the county was $30,358 in 2016, compared to $51,037 in the rest of the state. Nearly one-third of the county's residents live below the poverty line, compared to about 16 percent statewide, according to U.S. Census figures. The closure of polling places will affect those who lack reliable transportation, the ACLU says. Public transit doesn't exist in much of the rural county, and 22 percent of the county's residents have no car. People who currently vote at the polling places that would close under the proposal would have to travel an additional 10 miles to vote, the ACLU says. With no car or bus to reach a different polling location, this predominantly black, Democratic county will not be able to fairly vote, ACLU of Georgia executive director Andrea Young said.

It shouldn't be this easy to do this kind of thing in 2018. People shouldn't feel comfortable doing it so plainly in the open. It shouldn't be such a simple job to dress up the evil ghosts of the past in modern clothes and parade them down the rural highways where Winfred Rembert once broke rocks because he "stole" a gun from a white man who was trying to shoot him. The bastards at least should have to work harder for it.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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