Newly elected Cobb commissioner Jerica Richardson had plenty of reasons to be pumped for the Major League Baseball All-Star Game coming to Truist Park in July.
The midsummer event was set to be staged in the heart of her District 2, which stretches from East Cobb to parts of Smyrna.
County leaders—government, business and community—had been eyeing the extravaganza as a vehicle for economic development in the aftermath of COVID-19 as well as civic pride four years after the Atlanta Braves moved to Cobb.
And as part of an historic black female Democratic majority on the Cobb Board of Commissioners, Richardson was eager to demonstrate the political and cultural evolution taking place in a county long known for deeply conservative, mostly white elected officials.
But Major League Baseball’s decision on Friday to relocate the game due to Georgia’s new elections law dashed all those aspirations.
“We’re obviously not happy at all, Richardson said in an interview with East Cobb News. “I wanted to use this as an opportunity to show leadership.”
Instead, she said, “it’s an opportunity that’s lost.”
On Friday, she stood by Cobb Commission Chairwoman Lisa Cupid, the county’s first black and first female head of government, who had tried to keep the game in Cobb.
Opponents of the law, passed by a Republican-majority legislature, said it amounts to voter suppression, and on Wednesday President Joe Biden called for the game to be moved. He said the new law in Georgia, a state he barely won in November, is “Jim Crow on steroids.”
Richardson said that while there some parts of the law she likes and others she does not, trouble arises “when you choose division.”
She said that “the people who were most impacted by that bill were not listened to. You can’t solve anything when people aren’t talking to each other.”
The pitched rhetoric over the new law, she said, reminded her of previous political battles in Georgia, including the state flag, and of an anti-gay resolution by Cobb commissioners in the early 1990s that resulted in the county losing Olympic events.
During a transformational time in the county, to be deprived of what Richardson said would have been Cobb’s biggest event ever “is a lost chance to elevate the kind of conversations we need to have.”
Related content:
- Cobb County loses baseball All-Star Game
- Richardson to hold virtual town hall, announce priorities
- East Cobb Cityhood bill calls for Nov. 2022 referendum
- Cobb libraries to resume Saturday hours in April
- Cobb COVID-19 rental assistance applications open
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The closing sentence [During a transformational time in the county, to be deprived of what Richardson said would have been Cobb’s biggest event ever “is a lost chance to elevate the kind of conversations we need to have.”] begs the question … what kind of conversations do we need to be having.
The problem in this story isn’t that the All-Star game was “lost” – it’s the reason that it’s not going to be here. When it’s okay to require IDs to fly, buy a house, open a checking account, and buy cigarettes but not okay to require IDs when voting for the people you want running your country, then THAT is the problem. It’s not “voter suppression” … in fact, it’s the total opposite. It’s making sure that every vote counts the way it was cast and that it was cast by a legal citizen of the place in which it was cast.
That has nothing to do with race, age, economic status, or anything else. The only possible problem is that homeless people might be difficult to ID due to lack of address – but they come in all races, creeds, and economic strati (unless, of course, we’re now either rich or poor and the middle class has disappeared totally).
So, Commissioner Richardson, exactly what conversation opportunity has been lost? Perhaps the one about not letting celebrities influence what laws are made regardless of how the people for whom they are made think about them would be a good start.