Georgia's Keisha Lance Bottoms navigates the challenges of Black women battling political barriers

Georgia Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms is trying to make history as the first woman to be elected governor in the United States. ATLANTA (AP), Keisha Lance Bottoms talks a lot about the policies she would pursue as Georgia governor. The Democratic nominee is less likely to talk about the history she would make by winning the job.

Never has a Black woman been elected governor in any state. The former Atlanta mayor and onetime White House adviser to Democratic President Joe Biden is trying to do it in a Deep South state where her lineage extends back to antebellum enslavement.

‘I am at least a fifth-generation Georgian,’ Bottoms, 56, says as she campaigns. ‘I say ‘at least’ because we can only trace our family back five generations to a plantation in Crawfordville.’

Bottoms rarely if ever mentions slavery, Jim Crow segregation or even race explicitly. But that story, hers, Georgia’s and the nation’s, shadows her battle with Republican nominee Rick Jackson.

The billionaire, a 72-year-old white man who grew up in Atlanta but now lives on a sprawling suburban estate, has hammered the former mayor as a failure, painting her four-year tenure as a crime-ridden decline. Other Republicans, up to Donald Trump, have joined in, with the president accusing Bottoms of ruining a once-great city.

‘It’s a long-standing playbook to paint Atlanta as this big bad place,’ Bottoms said, dismissing the Republican frame as ridiculous for a town that once hosted the Olympics and recently staged eight World Cup soccer matches.

One of her most recent ads pushes back by featuring clips of the news conference she held with the city’s law enforcement leaders during the peak of 2020 street protests of police violence in Atlanta and nationwide against Black men. ‘If you care about this city, then go home,’ she said. ‘We are better than this.’

Bottoms will answer Trump and Republicans at a rally Wednesday headlined by Barack Obama, the first Black U.S. president.