Late in the evening of Sunday, September 25, 2016, seventy-three-year-old Tex McIver and his sixty-four-year-old wife, Diane, were driving back to their condominium in the Villa at Buckhead Heights, an eighteen-story luxury high-rise building in the elite Buckhead neighborhood of north Atlanta.
Only Tex would make it home alive.
The well-known power couple had spent the weekend relaxing on their eighty-six-acre property near the town of Eatonton in rural Putnam County, about seventy-six miles southeast of Atlanta. Others might have called the spread at 603 Pea Ridge Road Southeast a “farm” or perhaps “a gated estate.” But Tex sprinkled his life with flamboyant references to his origins in the Lone Star State. He dubbed the richly appointed property his “ranch.”
The weather that Sunday was as Southern as it gets. The temperature peaked at ninety-two degrees. By evening the humidity was a steaming 76 percent. Based on average weather data, the annual four-month hot season in Putnam County had ended ten days earlier. But the temperature in Eatonton that day exceeded the ninety-one-degree average temperature of the statistically hottest day of the year, July 20.
Eatonton is the county seat of Putnam County, which lies in the middle of a band of some thirty-five counties that stretches across middle Georgia from South Carolina to Alabama. That swath was known as the Old Plantation Piedmont Cotton Belt.
Under the plantation system Putnam County flourished. By 1850 . . . the county was prosperous. The planting aristocracy was in full bloom. The greatest wealth was among the planters. They owned plantations of a thousand or more acres and worked a hundred or more slaves. Their way of life was luxurious. They owned fine houses, generally of eight rooms, each 20 feet square, which were handsomely furnished. They had servants, and domestic life held few chores for them. They had fine horses and excellent carriages. Their hospitality was great.[1]
It was an exceedingly good life—for the white masters. Leisure, fine horses, and lavish sociability echo the romanticized plantation life described in Margaret Mitchell’s nostalgic and perpetually best-selling novel Gone With the Wind. But the foundation of the pleasant living of the “planting aristocracy” was an intricate, brutally enforced system of slavery based on rigid racial boundaries policed by remorseless violence. Black human beings were treated as property, not unlike cattle. The white elites’ fundamental premise that black persons were of an “inferior race” ultimately meant that there was little that a white person could not do to, or demand of, a black person, who by definition was fit only for slavery—excepting only compromising that black person’s utility as a tool, a human cog in the industrial machinery of the plantation system.
Scientists, sociologists, and the learned of academia have long since discredited and discarded the theory of biological racial differences. But their impact has been far from universal. “[W]hile the belief that race is socially constructed has gained a privileged place in contemporary scholarly debates, it has won few practical battles,” historian Ira Berlin observed. “Few people believe it; fewer act on it. The new understanding of race has changed behavior little if at all.”[2]
The ethic of white racial superiority was essential to the plantation slave camps of the South. It was also embraced by entire systems of trade and finance in the North and in America generally, out of both commercial necessity and cultural choice.
The lives of the eight thousand black human beings enslaved on the plantations of antebellum Putnam County at its peak in 1860 were far from luxurious. The majority of them, the “field hands”—men, women, and children—would have spent the long days of the hot season between June and September stooped over, sweating under a blazing sun. These four months were a time for hoeing weeds and trimming endless rows of maturing cotton plants. The plants rolled like waves in an ocean of white across fields that stretched as far as the eye could see. Depending on the weather and planting conditions of any given year, at some time in September the field hands would start the next back-breaking cycle of industrial cotton cultivation. Walking down the long rows, they picked the ripe cotton bolls from their thorny stems, stuffing them into burlap sacks slung around their necks and dragged behind. Driven by the whips of overseers and “drivers,” each “hand” was expected to pick a quota of cotton by weight every day, usually about one hundred pounds. Those who failed to meet the daily quota were often punished with flesh-ripping lashes from leather whips. Those who exceeded the quota set a higher mark to meet the next day.
Reminders of the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans that preceded Georgia’s slave camps still exist at two of the county’s tourist sites. The colossal theft of Native American lands and the forced migration of their owners was as essential as black slavery to the rise of King Cotton and Putnam County’s boom days. The Rock Eagle Effigy Mound and the Rock Hawk Effigy Mound were built by Native Americans sometime between one thousand and three thousand years ago. Each mound features thousands of pieces of quartzite assembled in the shape of a bird, several hundred feet long in each dimension. Rock Eagle and Rock Hawk are the only such effigy mounds known to exist east of the Mississippi River. The mound-builders were gone long before white settlers began relentlessly encroaching on the territory of the later-era Creek Indians. The Creeks in Georgia had a name for the English, Ecunnaunuxuklgee—“People greedily grasping after the lands of the Red people.”[3] Some of the Creeks’ land lay in what was to become Putnam County. Under pressure from the white man’s greedy grasping, the Creeks ceded that land to the state of Georgia in 1802. White settlers streamed in.
Putnam County today, according to the online New Georgia Encyclopedia, “has become an important center of industry and recreation in Georgia. Once the land of cotton, large plantations, and great wealth, a different look is now taking hold in the county with the establishment of golf resorts, gated communities, and new businesses.”[4] Part of the county’s new look is its racial composition. The last census before the Civil War recorded many more black slaves living in the county than whites, about eight thousand slaves to five thousand whites.[5] Those proportions are reversed today. Of the 21,208 residents counted in the 2010 census, about 70 percent were white and 27 percent black or African American.
The elegance of the plantation aristocracy during the antebellum era lives on today in the plush real estate development around Lake Oconee. The lake was created in 1979 when the utility company Georgia Power dammed the Oconee River and created a twenty-thousand-acre reservoir. The area around the man-made lake is a complex of grandly conceived gated communities, upscale second homes, and genteel resort living for wealthy retirees. At least one antebellum mansion, Hawthorne Heights, was for a time available for tours showing the typical “life of a Southern family.”[6] The development’s setting of whispering pine, green fairway, and shimmering lake is said to be magnificent. A major attraction is a challenging golf course at Reynolds Lake Oconee. It was the McIvers’ favorite local course.
But for all of Putnam County’s new look, the ghosts of slavery and its lasting effects can be found in the works of two of the county’s native authors. One is the popular late-nineteenth-century writer Joel Chandler Harris, whose apologetic view of slavery is memorialized in the Uncle Remus Museum in Eatonton. Housed in a log cabin imported from elsewhere in Georgia, the museum is one of the county’s popular tourist sites.
Uncle Remus was created by an author with a sentimental attachment to a plantation memory. Bald, bearded, bespectacled, Remus is a former slave who does odd jobs around the plantation after emancipation. He tells his stories night after night to a little white boy, son of the plantation owner, unfolding to him in grandfatherly fashion the “mysteries of plantation lore.” Remus has, Harris tells us, “nothing but pleasant memories of the discipline of slavery.” This fictional creation of a white Southerner was welcomed by an audience that wanted to believe Remus was a representative of his race; Uncle Remus is a cousin of those nineteenth-century minstrels who blackened their faces to entertain with jokes and songs. He is, in a way, white.[7]
Among other things, Uncle Remus opined that education was a bad thing for black folks. “Uncle Remus’s rejection of book learning,” writes Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, “was the symbolic extension of the rejection of a life in freedom. That, perhaps was the ultimate insult in the vast array of aspersions cast on the freedmen and freedwomen: had they their druthers, they’d ‘druther’ be slaves than free.”[8]
The other author is Alice Walker, who won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for her epistolary novel The Color Purple. Adapted into a film and stage production, the story told in The Color Purple offers a view of black life in 1930s Georgia that is very different from the confectionary drivel about the imaginary contentment of slave and freed person alike dispensed in Chandler’s tales.
The record heat in Putnam County that Sunday did not stop Tex and Diane from playing a round of golf at the Reynolds Lake Oconee course. Diane was an avid golfer and a fierce competitor. Her handicap was considerably lower than Tex’s, or for that matter, almost any man who teed up with her. She scarcely concealed her exasperation with any less-talented player who slowed things down by rooting around in the rough, looking for an errant ball.
“Diane played,” one male associate remarked, “like a robot.”
Putting aside the fierceness of Diane’s golf game, the McIvers were a generous couple, sociable on the scale of Putnam County’s antebellum planters. They often spent weekends at the ranch entertaining their many friends. The grounds included a party house that was laid out like an old-fashioned Western saloon. The wine cellar in the basement of the saloon was said to be bigger than most ordinary people’s houses. Among its racks of fine wines were bottles of a privately commissioned label, McIver Meritage. Naturally enough, there were longhorn cattle and horses that Diane loved to ride. The hospitality of the Old South, the individualism of the wild west, and the folkways of the American gun culture were blended into pool parties, private country music festivals, coffee mugs labeled “Cowboy” and “Cowgirl,” a pistol-ornamented chandelier, and a replica of a revolver under a sign warning, “We Don’t Dial 911.” Tex and Diane also had a “Blue Lives Matter” billboard erected in Eatonton—a pointed rebuttal to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations buzzing around Atlanta that year, including in Buckhead’s eminence.[9]
Tex bought the ranch before he met Diane. More than one observer would compare him to Charlie Croker, the protagonist of A Man in Full, Tom Wolfe’s best-selling novel about a booming Atlanta in the 1990s. Croker, a wealthy but hapless good old boy, real estate developer, and “King of the Crackers,” owned a plantation in south Georgia called Turpmtine.
Charlie liked to think he went out shooting quail at Turpmtine just the way the most famous master of Turpmtine, a Confederate Civil War hero named Austin Roberdeau Wheat, had done it a hundred years ago, and a hundred years ago nobody on a quail hunt at Turpmtine would have been out in the sedge talking about an Atlanta whose candidates for mayor were both black. . . . When he was here at Turpmtine, he liked to shed Atlanta, even in his voice. He liked to feel earthy, Down Home, elemental; which is to say, he was no longer merely a real estate developer, he was . . . a man.[10]
For Charlie Croker, Turpmtine was more than a physical place at a certain set of geographic coordinates. The estate embodied memories—or fantasies of memories—of a way of life that connected Croker’s soul and psyche to cultural phantoms wandering through the past two centuries. Those old memories provided something that Charlie felt he lacked as a modern person and fulfilled him as a man. The metaphor of Turpmtine and the values it symbolized for Charlie raise vital questions open today about America, race, and history. Have Putnam County, the state of Georgia, the broader South, and the United States at large shed the same phantom memories of the centuries-long era of white mastery? Have they positively transformed the oppressive values, norms, folkways, and mores of these years of slavery into standards more in keeping with the noble values conspicuously declared in America’s foundational documents?[11]
The outcome remains uncertain.
There is no doubt that—speaking strictly in terms of regions of the United States—Atlanta, Putnam County, and the State of Georgia all fall squarely within the geographic South. But what exactly is “the South”? Is it Dixie, the land of the Charlie Crokers of America, or is it the progressive vision of Georgia’s noted black politician Stacey Abrams? Dispute arises the instant one tries to pin down precisely what is meant by off-hand reference to this larger entity. Notwithstanding the South’s self-evident influence on American history and culture, contradiction and argument pop up at every turn, whether one seeks to define the South in geographic, cultural, historical, or political terms. “The South”—its boundaries, its history, what it stands for, and its legitimate denizens—is an elusive, ever-changing, always disputable thing.
Library shelves are filled with books, many by Southern authors, pondering the essence and meaning of the South. The spectrum of views is cosmic, an expanse of assertion and disputation that ranges across time, race, and ideology. William Alexander Percy’s 1941 encomium to the old white Southern order, Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son, presents (among other things) a paternalistic view of the postbellum system of sharecropping. His benign view is very different from the description of that harsh life written from the perspective of other end of the stick in John O. Hodges’ Delta Fragments: The Recollections of a Sharecropper’s Son, published in 2013.[12] Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream, originally published in 1949, challenged the assumptions of white superiority and black inferiority that are found throughout a nostalgic Southern literary genre of which Percy’s book is representative. Smith’s book—quite brave for the time—laid bare the savage effects of the racist order, and Southern society’s collective silence about it, on the lives and minds of Southern whites, especially children.[13]
The frame of argument about the meaning of the South is not static. It changes apace with American demography and culture. Although not without its critics, W. J. Cash’s psycho-cultural survey, The Mind of the South, originally published in 1941, has been regarded for six decades as the essential entry point for anyone seeking to understand the South as a coherent entity. In 2013 journalist Tracy Thompson critiqued Cash’s observations and brought them up to date in her The New Mind of the South.[14] Scores of recent titles likewise reexamine scores of older writings about race and the South.
New questions are raised as time passes and analysis of the South forges on. Is any place south of the informal boundary of the Mason-Dixon Line part of the South by definition? Are twenty-first-century blue-state Virginia, progressive Maryland, or multicultural Southern Florida still part of the South? Is being a “Southerner” defined by where one was born? Or is it defined by where one lives? Or is a “real” Southerner only someone who shares a set of specific social and cultural views—within or across racial and ethnic lines, and regardless of residence?
And what about the expanding mix of ethnicities that is changing faces and politics all over the South, including Georgia? Take, for example, Piyush Jindal. Born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1971, Jindal was the son of Raj and Amar Jindal, immigrants from Punjab, India. Better known as Bobby Jindal, he was elected governor of Louisiana in 2007 and 2011, the first Indian American governor in American history.[15] Nimrata Randhawa was born in Bamberg, South Carolina, in 1972 to Punjabi immigrants Ajit Singh and Raj Kaur Randhawa. Known after her marriage as Nikki Haley, she was elected governor of South Carolina in 2010—the state’s first female governor and the second Indian American governor in American history. Haley later served as United States ambassador to the United Nations in 2017 and 2018.[16] Brenda Lopez took office in 2017 as the first Latina state assembly representative in Georgia’s history. But unlike Jindal and Haley, Lopez was not born in the South, nor anywhere in the United States. She was an immigrant—a native of Mexico.[17]
Whatever one might argue about the bona fides of these three politicians as “real Southerners,” the indisputable fact is that they are representative faces of demographic change rolling through the geographic South. For example, Chamblee, a suburb northeast of Atlanta, is sometimes referred to as “Chambodia.” The nickname reflects its multi-ethnic demographics. “With entire shopping centers full of signs in languages other than English, this—along with its neighboring community Doraville—is the epicenter of the ‘international Atlanta’ the local chamber of commerce is always plugging.”[18]
For a variety of economic, cultural, and ideological reasons, some Southerners, like Charlie Croker, fear this change, focus on the past, and actively work to keep alive memories of the antebellum South and the Civil War—at least as they imagine them to have been. In 1993, the Georgia state assembly established the Georgia Civil War Commission, dedicated to preserving Civil War historical sites.[19] The commission and the state’s tourism bureaucracy have promoted “Civil War Heritage Trails,” hoping to attract tourists to visit such sites, especially those associated with Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s famous (or infamous to some Southerners) “March to the Sea.” Putnam County and Eatonton have been venues for historical reenactments intended to promote them as Civil War heritage locations.[20]
For a variety of others on the ragged ideological fringe, things haven’t changed much well into the twenty-first century. These are the diehards, some of whom still call the Civil War “The War Between the States” or “The War of Northern Aggression.”[21] These phrases might strike one as quaintly humorous, something like verbal corncob pipes and suspenders, to be tolerated but not taken seriously. However, these dead-enders express a serious and stubborn commitment to an alternative view of the Civil War, its causes, and its meaning for contemporary America. “Such groups as the United Sons of Confederate Veterans, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and the Southern Heritage Coalition are dedicated to the presentation of a romanticized memory of the pre-Civil War South that, if it includes slavery at all, does so in the most benign manner.”[22]
Summed up in the phrase “The Lost Cause,” this alternate view of American history and culture argues that slavery was benign at worse, and at best a positive good for the millions of Africans seized and transported to America as slaves. America’s bloody internal war wasn’t about slavery at all, but about the sacred right of the individual states to decide their own political and social order. Lost Cause advocates are determined to recreate that order. “[I]f, in the North, the war seems part of a continuum of history, here it remains a cataclysm,” the New York Times observed in a 2011 review of Southern museums. “The war was not a continuation of Southern history; it was a break in it. And that is still, for the South, the problem.”[23]
These widespread views are more than retrograde curiosities. They are not limited to grumbling racists in rocking chairs on a few porches in the South. They mark deep divisions in how Americans think about race and slavery. “How a person thinks about Negro [sic] slavery historically makes a great deal of difference here and now,” historian Stanley Elkins wrote in 1963. “[I]t tends to locate him morally in relation to a whole range of very immediate political, social, and philosophical issues which in some way refer back to slavery.”[24] Although some of Elkins’s writings about the supposedly infantilizing effects of slavery are controversial, this perceptive observation is unquestionably sound.
Georgia State Representative Tommy Benton, a retired schoolteacher and Republican legislator from Jefferson County, northeast of Atlanta, is a good example of a Lost Cause adherent.
“Benton is an unapologetic supporter of Georgia’s Confederate heritage,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote in a lengthy 2016 profile. “He flatly asserts the Civil War wasn’t fought over slavery, compares Confederate leaders to the Founding Fathers and is profoundly irritated with what he deems a ‘cultural cleansing’ of Southern history.” Benton was a perennial sponsor of legislation that would protect Confederate historical monuments from being moved or damaged. He disparaged proposals to alter or remove publicly sponsored Confederate monuments and symbols (such as the Confederate battle flag) as “no better than what ISIS is doing, destroying museums and monuments.”[25]
Benton also described the Ku Klux Klan as “not so much as racist thing but a vigilante thing to keep law and order.” The Klan as a “law and order thing” is a common meme of the Lost Cause culture. It was romantically depicted as such in Mitchell’s novel Gone With the Wind. Benton said that while he didn’t agree with all of Klan’s methods, it “made a lot of people straighten up.”
“A great majority of prominent men in the South were members of the Klan,” he said. “Should that affect their reputation to the extent that everything else good that they did was forgotten?”
Benton further dismissed the passionate debate over public display of the Confederate battle flag ignited by the June 2015 murder of nine African Americans during a Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The white supremacist shooter had posted pictures of himself with the Confederate flag. Benton argued that focusing on the flag missed the point. “Nobody said anything about black-on-black crime, and that’s about 98 percent of it.”
The unreconstructed lawmaker was stripped of his chairmanship of a Georgia legislative committee in August 2020 after he made disparaging remarks about Congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis, shortly after the latter died. “John Lewis, his only claim to fame was that he got conked on the head at the (Edmund) Pettus Bridge,” Benton said two weeks after Lewis’ funeral. “And he has milked that for 50 years—or he milked it for 50 years.”[26]
This view is distilled, aged, and rebottled vintage white supremacy. It embodies the dreams of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson of a white man’s republic, a nation of white yeomen farmers, growing with the territory of the United States as it expanded to fulfill what would come to be called the country’s “manifest destiny.” In the form that the white republic took during the antebellum years, the one that the Civil War was fought over according to the Lost Cause myth, there were two sets of civic rules—“inside” rules of full equality and enfranchisement for white males, and “outside” rules that excluded and subordinated everyone else, namely women and people of color. Assessing the effects of the legacy of Jacksonian Democracy today, scholar Joshua A. Lynn concludes that although its proponents “failed to preserve their happy republic . . . they did start conservatism on a new, populist trajectory, one in which democracy is called upon to legitimize inequality, a distinctly American conservatism that endures in our republic today.”[27]
That populist trajectory of legitimized inequality finds its most recent expression in what has come to be called “Trumpism.”
The McIvers’ double-wide condominium took up half of the fifteenth floor of the Villa at Buckhead Heights. The building is three blocks from the intersection of Lenox Road and Peachtree Road, the extension of Atlanta’s historic Peachtree Street. Close by that intersection lies Phipps Plaza, a shopping center devoted to high-end stores, some of which could not be found within hundreds of miles of Atlanta. The upscale Lenox Square Mall is also close to the Villa.
Kingsboro Road is in the city’s exclusive and mostly white Buckhead neighborhood—“the traditional Northside home of the white elite.”[28] When Scarlett O’Hara, the self-absorbed heroine of Gone With the Wind, found a home in Atlanta in 1862, it was on Peachtree Street, “almost the last house on the north side of town.”[29] In the early 1960s, a century after that bloody second year of the American Civil War, some things had not changed much in Atlanta’s Northside. It was a refuge of upper-class white flight, sealed off by a genteel segregation.
Even as they tried to pursue a new “partnership” with the ever-growing black community in city politics, the white businessmen of Buckhead would still have their own white city-within-a-city as their retreat. “It was as gracious—and segregated—a life as it had ever been,” reflected one reporter. “In those north-side neighborhoods, it might as well have been 1958.”[30]
Atlanta’s “new partnership” in the 1960s was called “the Atlanta Way.” Looking for a progressive, or at least profitable, way to come to terms with growing black political and economic power and get beyond the endemic tensions of the “color line,” politicians and entrepreneurs of both races worked together to promote commercial development and jobs in forward-looking alliances across racial lines.
Although the system provided jobs and made some people wealthy on both sides of the color line, its edges were ragged. They cut both ways, sometimes leaving abrasions of resentment and perceived exploitation on both sides. Diane McIver, for example, led a determined corporate assault on the city’s supposedly unfair (read, corrupt) award of airport advertising contracts to minority contractors, a major element of the Atlanta Way.
Tom Wolfe focused on this interracial partnership in A Man in Full. Wolfe’s fictional black mayor, Wesley Dobbs (“Wes”) Jordan explains the Atlanta Way by comparing it to the internal structure of a baseball, starting by removing the ball’s white horsehide cover and an internal padding of white string.
Finally, you get down to the core, which is black, a small black ball of rubber. Well, that’s Atlanta. The hard core, if we’re talking politics, are the 280,000 black folks in South Atlanta. They, or their votes, control the city itself. Wrapped all around them, like all that white string, are three million white people in North Atlanta and all those counties.[31]
But it was no longer 1861 or 1958 or 1994, even in the McIvers’ Northside Buckhead. The urban enclave was slightly more integrated. Jeffery Lamar Williams, a black Atlanta rapper who goes by the name Young Thug, bought a $2.6 million home in Buckhead in 2016. The eleven-thousand-square-foot mansion had seven bedrooms, eleven bathrooms, an indoor pool, a bar area, a theater room, walkout patios and balconies, a “secret room,” and a four-car garage.[32] Gentrification was also changing the city’s overall racial balance, as young whites moved into the city and blacks moved out to the suburbs. Even so, Atlanta and Buckhead were the focus of stormy protests against white privilege and its alleged consequences in 2016, mounted primarily by local activists of the Black Lives Matter movement.
The McIver home was a combination of their two big luxury apartments, with a wall between knocked out, remodeled and combined into one mega-condo. The Villa and its occupants towered indifferently above the strident protests in America’s culture war going on in Buckhead. Tex McIver was “a Republican loyalist whose money and privilege insulated him from the realities at the heart of those very protests.”[33]
Diane was as well insulated as Tex. Living the American dream in that home, Diane had more control over her life and far more money than that six-year-old crying in her little sundress in 1958 could possibly have imagined she would ever have. Diane was a millionaire. She was the hard-charging president of US Enterprises, a conglomerate informally known as “the Corey Companies.” She had helped shape the Corey Companies into a profitable cornucopia of entrepreneurial successes, most recently scoring spectacular coups in the lucrative airport advertising industry. And she was the glamorous half of one of Atlanta’s, indeed the South’s, most envied and respected power couples. Diane and Tex McIver, it was said, had it all. Money. Friends. Political clout.
But that elite union almost never happened.
Diane wasn’t looking for romance when she bought a condominium and moved into the Villa. Having escaped a financially draining first marriage that her friends describe as physically and emotionally abusive, Diane was indifferent to the prospects of another marriage.
Claud L. McIver, III, a prominent Atlanta labor lawyer and bachelor who lived in the Villa, was smitten the first time he saw Diane. Claud affected cowboy boots and courtly manners. He preferred to use the name “Tex.” One of Diane’s closest friends quipped that if her name were Claud, she also would have changed it to Tex. Like Diane, Tex had survived a bitter divorce battle. It had cost him dearly financially, and he continued to smart from its sting. Taken by Diane’s vivacious beauty, Tex let it be known around the Villa that he wanted to meet the new resident. He slipped a note under Diane’s door, welcoming her to the condominium. Diane rebuffed Tex’s probes. He persisted. Eventually Diane relented and accepted an invitation to dinner in Tex’s apartment. Fashion-conscious Diane’s choice of attire—a baseball cap and workout clothes—evidenced her indifference to the impression she might make on Claud, aka Tex, McIver.
Tex was not to be deterred. He mounted a dogged courtship campaign that culminated successfully with a sixty-thousand-dollar engagement ring for Diane. The couple were joined together till death did them part at a lavish 2005 wedding, complete with a horse-drawn carriage for the lovebirds to ride in, fried chicken, pralines made on the spot, and gallons of fine wine and champagne for the hundreds of guests at Tex McIver’s ranch. It was a courtly event straight out of the romantic nostalgia of the Old South.
But this was not a case of a woman “marrying up” into a rich man’s wealth. Diane had achieved financial and business success well before Tex came courting. In truth, she was better off financially than Tex. And she had a track record for keeping the upper financial hand. Love was love. Business was business. When she escaped her first marriage, she made sure that her former husband paid for his sins. After Diane married Tex, she loaned him a large sum of money, secured by an interest in the ranch. That loan was strictly business. Diane made it clear. Tex would pay the loan back or forfeit his pledged interest in the ranch.
Diane took the first step on her path to the great American dream when she was just seventeen years old. She started as a part-time payroll clerk at a company in Conyers, Georgia, owned by a wildly successful businessman, William E. “Billy” Corey. Father figure and mentor to young Diane, Billy Corey had scrabbled his way out of Great Depression poverty in Cabbagetown, then one of Atlanta’s most desperate neighborhoods. He became one of Atlanta’s best known and inscrutably wealthy entrepreneurs. Few people knew exactly what Billy Corey was worth. But it was certainly a lot.
Corey spotted payroll clerk Diane’s bigger talents and relentless drive. He took her under his wing. Business magic happened. Billy Corey spun off dozens of money-making ideas from his restless business sense. Diane became the gifted implementer and tough overseer of those ambitious ideas. When Diane was birthing a business deal for Billy Corey, it was said, she wasn’t interested in a long labor. She wanted to see the baby, the completed deal—signed, sealed, delivered, and the check in the bank. She could and would inflict a withering tongue-lashing on any subordinate who failed to measure up to her high standards. “Diane could take the skin off of a skeleton,” one former co-worker recalled. Yet even those who suffered Diane’s scourging loved her like a sister. Diane’s lash was business, not personal.
Billy and Diane got fabulously rich in the process.
Diane came to enjoy a very wealthy person’s choices of sumptuous private venues and opulent accessories. There were Waterford crystal flutes for the champagne. She could choose from among her Rolex, Chanel, and Baume et Mercier watches. She could wrap herself in any of forty-four fur coats. One of them was dyed bright orange, Auburn University’s school color. Diane followed the Auburn football team loyally, often traveling to important games. There were dozens of hats. Diane was rarely without a fashionable hat in public. It was her signature accessory. She could grab one of twenty-five purses from Chanel, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Versace, and other high-end designers. She had a treasure chest of jewelry, earrings, bracelets, and necklaces to choose from, dripping with diamonds, rubies, sapphires, opals, and pearls.
Tex McIver fancied himself a cowboy transplant from his home state of Texas, where he went to college and law school.[34] His father was a decorated aviator in the Second World War.[35] Tex himself served in the Army’s judge advocate general corps in Vietnam during that bitter war.
Tex was then a partner at Fisher & Phillips, an Atlanta labor law firm. (Later on, Tex lost his partnership status as a result of his declining ability to “shake the tree” for new client fees.) He was politically connected enough to Georgia’s conservative Republican establishment to have been appointed vice president of the State Election Board. His Atlanta law practice was on the management side of labor law. That put him conveniently in favor of allowing into the country the cheap immigrant labor that his clients needed for their chicken farms and carpet factories. “If we could somehow pull a switch and all of the undocumented immigrants went back to where they came from, who will eviscerate those chickens?” Tex asked Georgia Trend Magazine. “We were losing poultry jobs to Arkansas and other places because we couldn’t find local people to do the work.”[36]
Tex loved guns. He owned dozens of them. In what would turn out to be a monstrous irony, the American Bar Association had appointed Tex to its Standing Committee on Gun Violence, scarcely one month before the Sunday evening he shot Diane to death.[37] Mutual acquaintances suggest that Tex’s friendship with the then-president of the bar association, his friend and fellow Buckhead resident Linda A. Klein, may have played a role in that peculiar appointment.
Tex’s personality would have been called both “reserved” and “mildly flamboyant” in polite company. Within a few months, however, other adjectives would roll off of the tongues of old and new observers alike.
Everyone in Atlanta would have a strong opinion about Tex McIver.
Even as Diane and Tex were knocking golf balls around the Reynolds Lake Oconee course on that steaming September day, something new and puzzling was happening in American politics. Depending on where one stood on the political spectrum, the 2016 presidential election campaign was frightening, ludicrous, or inspiring. At times it was all three at once. Reality television host Donald Trump was shaking America’s political tree like a twelve-year-old truant out on a mean-spirited lark. Old-line conservatives from Jeb Bush to Ted Cruz were falling out of the whip-lashed branches like over-ripe apples.
The political cognoscenti, Republicans and Democrats alike, originally dismissed Trump as little more than droll entertainment, part stunt man, part huckster, part grifter. He would quickly fade, it was gravely opined, when the “serious” politics started. Trump had no political experience. His views were “out of the mainstream.” But by the start of 2016, Trump was relentlessly closing in on the Republican nomination. He was stubbornly bouncing back from body blows—sex scandals and caught-out lies—that in the past would have promptly knocked out a more conventional candidate.
Journalists were scratching their heads. Pundits were extracting lint in cotton-bale quantities from their confounded navels.
“I sold Trump wildly short, and his entire campaign to date has proven it,” Ross Douthat, a conservative columnist for the New York Times admitted in January 2016. “Of course I’m not completely humbled. Indeed, I’m still proud enough to continue predicting, in defiance of national polling, that there’s still no way that Trump will actually be the 2016 Republican nominee.”[38]
It turned out that there actually was a way. Donald Trump won the nomination. And the presidency. But Douthat was by no means the only pundit, journalist, or election expert to express doubt right down to the wire about the likelihood of Trump’s winning the nomination or the presidency. Opinion polls often appeared to support that doubt, or at least they were interpreted by an incredulous news media as if they did.
“Donald J. Trump’s campaign was teetering early last month, with an increasingly isolated candidate and a downcast staff that seemed to lurch from crisis to crisis,” the New York Times wrote in January 2016. “Having fired his campaign chairman and retooled his message, Mr. Trump was still far behind Hillary Clinton in the polls, and Republicans were running away from him.”[39]
In September, the same newspaper reported that “Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton are entering the final stretch of the presidential race essentially tied,” but added reassuringly that Clinton “still has the upper hand in most of the crucial swing states, such as Pennsylvania and Florida, that will likely decide the election.”[40]
Even in Georgia—a state that had not gone for a Democratic presidential candidate since Bill Clinton in 1992 and twice rebuffed Barack Obama—Donald Trump’s prospects appeared to be in doubt by late summer. “As polls continue to show Hillary Clinton maintaining and steadily increasing her lead over Donald Trump in Georgia, her top surrogate in the state said it is now time for her to go for the kill,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in early August.[41] Despite those polls, most of the state’s Republican establishment was standing by Trump. Many regarded him as the lesser of two evils, the greater evil being Hillary Clinton.
“It’s a choice between bad and worse—and I’m choosing bad,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported state Senator Renee Unterman as saying. “If you go on down the list, Trump was my last choice.”[42]
But the last was destined to be first. America woke up on the morning of November 9, 2016, to find that it had indeed elected an inexperienced, bad boy, reality television star to be the next president of the United States of America. The swing states of Florida and Pennsylvania broke for Trump, as did Georgia.
Trumpism was born.
Writing from a stunned New York City the morning after, journalist Roger Cohen zeroed in on the “single formidable intuition” that likely accounted for Trump’s slogging victory. Trump’s intuition was that “American anger and uncertainty in the face of the inexorable march of globalization and technology had reached such a pitch that voters were ready for disruption at any cost.”
“This is the revenge of Middle America,” wrote Cohen, “above all of a white working-class America troubled by changing social and cultural mores . . . and by the shifting demographics that will make minorities the majority by midcentury.”[43]
From the moment he left the starting gate at Trump Tower in New York City on June 16, 2015, Donald Trump crafted a campaign that would appeal to a base of angry white folks, the spitting-mad electorate, the plurality of Americans polled who said they got mad at least once every day at something they heard or read in the news. That was among the remarkable results of a survey conducted by Esquire magazine and NBC News and reported in January 2016. “White Americans are the angriest of all,” the survey stated, and then revealed this fascinating nugget about “perceived disenfranchisement”:
When we cross-tabulate these feelings with reports of daily anger (which are higher among whites than nonwhites), we see the anger of perceived disenfranchisement—a sense that the majority has become a persecuted minority, the bitterness of a promise that didn't pan out—rather than actual hardship. (If anger were tied to hardship, we'd expect to see nonwhite Americans . . . who report having a harder time making ends meet than whites . . . reporting higher levels of anger. This is not the case.)[44]
Donald Trump’s campaign worked “perceived disenfranchisement” like the pedals of a cathedral organ, mashing down hard on the immigration chord as a proxy for the low note of outright racism. In the process, Trump trashed the Republican party’s emergent strategy of using implicit (as opposed to overt) appeals to win racist white voters. His mode was to skip implicit pretense and head directly to explicitly hostile statements. Trump set this divisive tone in his notorious campaign announcement on June 16, 2015.
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us [sic]. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.[45]
The afterthought about good people was classic Trump. Without conceding that any immigrants from Mexico are in fact “good people,” Trump slipped in the insipid assumption that just possibly there might be some good people among the drug couriers, criminals, and rapists pouring over the border. This throwaway line insulated candidate Trump from the charge of blatant racism that might have resulted had he classified all Mexican immigrants as degenerate racial inferiors. Over the following years Trump dropped attempts to cushion his message at the margins. Americans became numb to a new reality—a fire hose of deliberately divisive rhetoric from their president.
Trump made it clear that he was concerned not only about Mexican immigrants, but also about others of non-white complexions. “It’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and it’s coming probably—probably—from the Middle East.”[46]
The openly racist white nationalists of the “alternative right,” or “alt-right,” were delighted with Trump’s attack on immigrants of certain complexions. Just days before the McIvers spent their last weekend at the ranch, Mother Jones magazine reported that “since Trump officially announced his bid in June 2015 he has drawn effusive praise and formal backing from some of the country’s most virulent neo-Nazis, white supremacists, militia supporters, and other extremist leaders.”[47] The New York Times was optimistic about what these endorsements might mean politically, but concerned about their meaning for America’s future. “There aren’t enough of these people to put Mr. Trump in the White House,” the newspaper editorialized. “But his candidacy has granted them the legitimacy they have craved for years. For the first time, a candidate is using a major-party megaphone to shout the ideas they once could only mutter among themselves in the shadowy fringes of national debate.”[48]
The notorious white supremacist Richard B. Spencer, who coined the term “alternative right,” was among those who were inspired by Trump to come out of the shadows. Spencer’s National Policy Institute is “dedicated to the heritage, identity and future of people of European descent in the United States, and around the world.” In May 2017 Spencer led a torch-light rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the city’s plan to remove a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. He was also a featured speaker at the August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville that turned violent and resulted in the murder of a counter-protestor. It was in reference to this deadly August rally that Trump uttered the infamous phrase that there were “very fine people on both sides,” adding, “You had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest and very legally protest.” Spencer hailed Trump’s statement as “fair and down to earth.”[49]
Several years before, Spencer had explained the racial significance of the alt-right’s obsession with immigrants. “Immigration is a kind of proxy war—and maybe a last stand—for White Americans, who are undergoing a painful recognition that, unless dramatic action is taken, their grandchildren will live in a country that is alien and hostile,” Mr. Spencer wrote in a National Policy Institute column.[50]
Whatever else Trumpism might prove to be, with the stalking horse of immigration it moved issues of race, and all the hate and anger they generate among many fearful white Americans, to the fore of Donald Trump’s campaign, his presidency, and his legacy.
No direct evidence known to the author indicates that either Tex or Diane McIver bought into Trump’s racist memes. But there is an abundance of evidence that by September 2016 they had enlisted in the ranks of an emerging and restless corps of proto-Trumpists—donors, activists, and voters—who were about to defy polls, pundits, and conventional wisdom. The McIvers were among those who enthusiastically vaulted Donald Trump into office as president of the United States of America.
Both of the McIvers had a history of contributions to the Georgia Republican party and to conservative Republican candidates in particular. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Tex and Diane contributed more than one hundred thousand dollars to Republicans.[51] Federal Election Commission records show that Diane and Tex both contributed to Donald Trump’s campaign committee in 2016. Tex also contributed to the Trump Victory Committee, a joint Republican fundraising entity.
Like many Georgia Republicans, Diane evidenced an early preference for a Republican candidate other than Trump. In 2015 she contributed to a super PAC—CARLY for America—supporting business executive Carly Fiorina’s presidential bid. But Diane’s sentiments changed as the field evolved and Fiorina dropped out. Diane ended up contributing enough to the Trump effort to win a personal photo with Trump when he visited Atlanta in June 2016. That photo, enlarged to poster size, was in her office in Atlanta, waiting to be mounted. Other mementos at the ranch included a Trump coloring book, an autographed copy of Trump’s ghost-written book Crippled America,[52] and books signed by prominent Trumpists Oliver North and Ben Carson.
The record of the McIvers’ contributions does not include the many other ways in which the couple boosted conservative Republicans, such as hosting fundraising events at the ranch. Nor does the donation record touch directly on Tex’s operational ties and extensive political activity within the Georgia Republican establishment, including giving advice to Republican candidates. Tex was not only a true believer; he had the obstinate commitment to blind loyalty shown to be characteristic of Trumpism.
“In Tex’s mind a candidate’s conservative bona fides excused all manner of sins,” Atlanta Magazine reported in October 2017. “When a federal grand jury indicted former Congressman Pat Swindall in 1988 on ten counts of perjury amid a money laundering investigation just weeks before he was up for reelection, McIver doubled down on his man. ‘I support him more than ever and intend to give him additional money because it looks like he needs it more than ever.’”[53]
Tex was intimately involved in another theme of Trumpism—claims of widespread voting fraud that helps Democratic candidates, and the invention of formalistic restrictions on voting that critics contend are no more than clever means to continue the minority voter suppression that began in the Jim Crow era after the Civil War. Georgia has been a viral center for the dispersion of these means throughout the several states.
Tex was vice chairman of the Georgia State Election Board. From that perch he promoted a political bombshell, a controversial voter photo identification requirement. Would-be voters who did not have government identification that included a photograph, such as a driver’s license or passport, were required under a law passed in 2005 to get a Georgia state identification card. Tex and the measure’s Republican supporters said that the identification card was needed to stop voting fraud. Critics replied that there was hardly any voting fraud in Georgia, nor anywhere else in America for that matter.
Although informed and impartial experts agree that voter registration rolls are often an administrative shambles, there is virtually no evidence that more than a miniscule number of actual voters in any modern election vote illegally, and certainly not in big enough numbers to have affected any results. Yet the myth of “voter fraud” has been weaponized by the conservative establishment in America. The fiction of massive fraud has become a staple of Trumpist activism, spewed from the bully pulpit by the president himself.[54] This blunt club is little more than a transparent scheme to erase ethnic and racial minority voters—the base of the Democratic Party—from the voter rolls, and to make it harder for those who survive the purges to vote.[55] The identification requirement opened a raw sore in the racial politics of Georgia. It spread to other states that Republicans in power were determined to keep in the red column.[56]
When the McIvers rolled out of the ranch the evening of the shooting, Dani Jo Carter, one of the Diane’s best friends, was at the wheel of their 2013 King Ranch SUV.
The massive SUV weighed nearly three tons empty at the curb—5,782 pounds. The manufacturer’s sales brochure assured buyers that “should an accident occur, you and your passengers are well protected by a sturdy safety shell, side-intrusion beams, and a system of six airbags.”[57] The King Ranch SUV was a rolling steel vehicular fortress. It captured the essence of Tex McIver’s being. It was the top of the model line. And it was marketed by Ford in affiliation with the biggest ranch in Texas, the King Ranch, which covers 825,000 acres—more land than the state of Rhode Island.[58]
Diane was in the front passenger seat. Tex was seated behind Diane in a bucket seat in the second of the big vehicle’s three leather-covered seating rows.
The three stopped to meet a friend for a dinner of steak and wine in Conyers, an Atlanta suburb about midway between the city and the ranch. Conyers was a pivotal place in the history of the Corey Companies and in Diane’s life—it was where she first began working for Corey.
When the meal ended, Dani Jo—the only one of the three who did not drink—took the wheel, glided up a ramp and into the heavy end-of-weekend traffic on Interstate 20, headed for Atlanta and the McIvers’ home.
Night had well fallen by then. Tex apparently fell asleep in the back seat. Dani Jo and Diane talked quietly, exchanging the humorous and intimately informed banter of two long-time, close friends. Diane, Dani Jo said, was “more like a sister than a friend.” There was little that the two women did not know about each other, or could not frankly say to one another’s face.
As Dani Jo maneuvered the big vehicle through the last few miles of downtown Atlanta’s knot of freeways, highway maintenance work slowed traffic to a maddening crawl at a notorious choke point called The Connector. At Diane’s instruction, Dani Jo took an exit off the freeway and onto a side street.
At some point shortly after they left the freeway, Tex woke up. He looked around and saw that they had left the freeway.
“This is a bad idea, girls,” he said. “This is a bad area.”[59]
Tex asked the women to hand him his gun, a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson Model 638 pocket revolver. The gun was wrapped in a Publix supermarket plastic bag and stuffed into the center console. Diane handed the gun to Tex. Exactly why Tex thought he needed his gun at that moment became thoroughly muddled in the coming days and weeks by his own conflicting statements. Whatever the real reason was, Tex apparently was not alarmed enough to keep him awake. He ostensibly fell back asleep—with a loaded gun in his hand.
Diane and Dani Jo continued their quiet conversation as the SUV rolled easily through light traffic along increasingly genteel blocks. At some point—perhaps ten to fifteen minutes after they had left the freeway and while stopped at a traffic light—Dani Jo heard a loud bang. Her first thought was that two other vehicles must have collided next to them. Not seeing any evidence of that, she looked back into the rear seat, simultaneously smelled the acrid bite of gun powder, and suddenly realized that the noise must have come from Tex’s gun being fired. Stunned, deafened by the noise, and believing at that surreal moment that the gunshot had been a harmless accident that must at worst have left a hole in the SUV’s floor, she expected to hear Diane cut loose with a classic verbal shredding aimed directly at Tex for his foolish mistake.
But after a few shocked and confused seconds, Diane turned around and said, “Tex, you shot me.” Then she slumped over and began to make frightening, involuntary sounds. Danni Jo thought that Diane was in the throes of death.
A single bullet from Tex’s revolver had indeed ripped through the leather of the front passenger seat, struck Diane in the back, and passed through her stomach and other organs. It had inflicted mortal wounds. Bleeding could not be stopped. She died later that morning. The blown up, poster-sized photograph of Diane and presidential candidate Donald Trump was still in her office waiting to be framed and mounted.
“Either this is an intentional homicide or a terrible accident,” J. Tom Morgan, a former DeKalb County district attorney, said shortly after the shooting. A pivotal question on that point during the investigation and trial was this: Exactly why did Tex McIver—a wealthy and successful lawyer, riding in the leather comfort of a moving steel cocoon—think that he needed to have a gun in hand after the SUV left the freeway?
“A lot of people are scratching their heads on this,” Morgan observed. “A lot of us have gone all over Atlanta day and night without having to pull a gun.”[60]
A visitor to Atlanta who followed the exact route that the SUV took that night learned that if there were any area along that route that might be called sketchy by any reasonable urban standard, it was no more than the first block or two by the off ramp, where the route briefly passed immediately under the freeway. Just beyond that point, however, the environment quickly changes to unremarkable blocks of increasingly upscale, well-tended neighborhoods.
The first answer to that crucial question was given to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution five days after the shooting by Bill Crane, a family friend who was serving as Tex’s spokesman. According to Crane, Tex was worried about black folks—people from a nearby homeless shelter who allegedly approached the vehicle, raising the possibility of a carjacking, and the chance of randomly coming across a midnight Black Lives Matter demonstration.[61]
The newspaper’s report ignited a fury of angry response from many in Atlanta’s black community. In the heat of that firestorm, Tex repeatedly asked his friend Bill Crane to withdraw the statement. Crane refused. He insisted in later court testimony that the explanation had been vetted in advance by Tex himself.[62] If Crane’s account is accurate, it is strong evidence that Tex McIver was seeing things through the lens of race—what could be worse to a privileged, ultra-conservative, proto-Trumpist, aging white lawyer like Tex than coming across homeless black people or a midnight Black Lives Matter demonstration? If a tie-breaker were needed in this “he said, he said” match, it can be found in testimony about Tex’s conduct in the emergency room that night. Dr. Marty Sellers testified that when Dr. Blayne Sayed—a person of color—asked Tex to sit down, in preparation for telling him that Diane had died, Tex snapped, “Don’t tell me what to do, boy!”[63]
All of this assumes, of course, that Tex’s explanations were not simply a dodge, a cover for his deliberate intention to shoot Diane in the back that night. In either case, as desperate as Tex was to stuff the racial genie back into the bottle, he could not. The genie he let loose not only laid bare Atlanta’s racial tensions—it raised the most fundamental questions about race and justice in America.
Whatever Tex McIver might have thought, or pretended to think, there is no getting around the question of why there is a Black Lives Matter movement in the first place. How is it that America is still gridlocked in the deadly intersection of racial perception well into the twenty-first century?
Waller Wynne, “Culture of a Contemporary Rural Community,” Rural Life Studies, January 1943, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Agricultural Economics, 4 (available at Google Books).
Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1998), 1.
Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land: Land and Power on the Frontier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 87.
“Putnam County,” New Georgia Encyclopedia, https://www.georgia
encyclopedia.org/articles/counties-cities-neighborhoods/putnam-county.
Wynne, “Culture of a Contemporary Rural Community,” 13.
“Showing off Lake Oconee,” Atlanta Journal Constitution, January 30, 2001 (downloaded from Atlanta Journal Constitution archives).
Introduction to Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings (New York: Penguin Classics, electronic edition, 2001).
Henry Louis Gates, Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (New York: Penguin Press, 2019), 96.
Details of the McIvers’ possessions are based on “Everything Tex and Diane McIver Owned Is Being Sold. Everything,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Jennifer Brett, August 1, 2018, https://www.ajc.com/entertainment/everything-tex-and-diane-mciver-owned-being-sold-everything/B2orOkkTVJxLQRD7W7tSmJ/; “McIver Ranch Sold for $1 Million at Auction Saturday,” Union-Recorder (Milledgevill, GA), August 8, 2018, https://www.unionrecorder.com/news/mciver-ranch-sold-for-million-at-auction-saturday/article_aee6e99e-9b1b-11e8-980c-f37104457d5c.html; “Buckhead Company Co-hosting Auction for McIvers’ Eatonton Ranch Property,” Northside Neighbor, July 31, 2018, https://www.mdjonline.com/neighbor_newspapers/northside_sandy_springs/news/buckhead-company-co-hosting-auction-for-mcivers-eatonton-ranch-property/article_c0acfc40-9503-11e8-952a-7bcdc4e4eed9.html; Joe Kovac Jr., “Convicted Killer Tex McIver’s Ranch—and Everything In It—On Auction Block,” The Telegraph (Macon, GA), July 31, 2018, https://www.macon.com/news/local/article215823435.html; Richard Elliot, “Tex and Diane McIver’s 85-Acre Ranch Set to Hit Auction Block,” WSB-TV, August 1, 2018, https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/everything-tex-and-diane-mciver-owned-to-be-sold/803692241/; Media release, “6.77-Carat Diamond Ring Brings $31,000 and a Large Figural Hall Bench Attributed to Horner Realizes $28,320 at Ahlers & Ogletree, January 14th-16th,” March 6, 2017, https://www.aandoauctions.com/january-2017-signature-estates-auction-post-auction-report/.
Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full (New York: The Dial Press, 2005), 5.
Concise definitions of these terms can be found in Matthew Lippman, Law and Society, second edition (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc., 2018), 4: “Values are the core beliefs about what is moral and immoral. . . . Norms are the ‘action aspect’ of values and tell us how to act in a situation. . . . Folkways are the customs that guide our daily interactions and behavior. . . . Mores are deeply and intensely held norms about what is right and wrong.” These elements of culture, taken together, are powerful influences on the shaping of law and its administration.
William Alexander Percy, Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1941); John O. Hodges, Delta Fragments: The Recollections of a Sharecropper’s Son (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2013).
Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994).
W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Vintage Books Reprint, 1991); Tracy Thompson, The New Mind of the South (New York: Free Press, 2013).
Annie Gowen and Tyler Bridges, “From Piyush to Bobby: How Does Jindal Feel about His
Family’s Past?” Washington Post, June 23, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/from-piyush-to-bobby-how-does-jindal-feel-about-his-familys-past/2015/06/22/7d45a3da-18ec-11e5-ab92-c75ae6ab94b5
_story.html.
“Nikki Haley,” Biography.com, https://www.biography.com/political-figure/nikki-haley.
Johanes Rosello, “Nuestra Comunidad: Latina Politician Makes Georgia History,” Atlanta Journal Constitution, January 20, 2017, https://www.ajc.com/news/local/nuestra-comunidad-latina-politician-makes-georgia-history/WT8WKZYuJ9cxX14fClpvpM/.
Neal Becton, “Atlanta’s ‘Chambodia,’ a ‘Burb With a Global Flavor,” Washington Post, April 18, 1999, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/travel/1999/04/18/atlantas-chambodia-a-burb-with-a-global-flavor/aef19940-19d1-462f-b9bd-8ca000e63562/.
Dan Child, “Georgia Civil War Commission,” New Georgia Encyclopedia, April 12, 2020, https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/georgia-civil-war-commission.
“Civil War ‘Trails’ Proposed,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 27, 2000 (downloaded from Atlanta Journal-Constitution archives); “State Hopes Tourists will Follow Sherman’s March to Sea,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, November 21, 1999 (downloaded from Atlanta Journal-Constitution archives).
See, for example, Edward Rothstein, “Not Forgotten,” New York Times, March 16, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/arts/design/in-the-south-civil-war-has-not-been-forgotten.html.
James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, eds., Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 44.
Rothstein, “Not Forgotten.”
Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1963), 1.
Unless otherwise noted, quotes of Benton in this section are from Chris Joyner, “Ga. Lawmaker: KKK Made ‘People Straighten Up,’” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, January 28, 2016, https://www.ajc.com/blog/investigations/lawmaker-kkk-made-people-straighten/QUYypM8evZYmlZojQ9ZdmO/.
Maya T. Prabhu, “Georgia Lawmaker Attacks John Lewis’ Legacy, Loses Chairmanship,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, August 14, 2020, https://www.ajc.com/politics/georgia-lawmaker-attacks-john-lewis-legacy-loses-chairmanship/NFDH2LKPE5HHXHFJP3STO62CUA/.
Joshua A. Lynn, Preserving the White Man’s Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019), 10.
Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modem Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 237. The descriptions of Diane McIver’s adult personality and character here and throughout the book are based primarily on the author’s interviews with several of her close friends and co-workers, supplemented by other sources as noted.
Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind (New York: Scribner, 2011), 159.
Kruse, White Flight, 237.
Wolfe, A Man in Full, 97.
Najja Parker, “Atlanta Rapper Young Thug Selling Buckhead Mansion for $3M,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, February 12, 2019, https://www.ajc.com/news/world/atlanta-rapper-young-thug-selling-buckhead-mansion-for/upLa0QMY5CtObwA0Md3WTM/.
Steve Fennessy, “Tex and Diane McIver Had It All. Now She's Dead, and He's Going on Trial for His Life," Atlanta Magazine, October 11, 2017, https://www.atlantamagazine.com/great-reads/tex-mciver/.
For a summary biography of Tex McIver, see Lisa Hester, “Fisher & Phillips Partner Tex McIver Receives Highest Award from National Fraternity,” Midtown GA Patch, October 24, 2012, https://patch.com/georgia/midtown/amp/12032978/fisher-phillips-par.
“Obit of McIver Jr., Claud L. ‘Mac’ - Oklahoma County, Oklahoma,” The USGenWeb Project, October 23, 2005, http://files.usgwarchives.net/ok/oklahoma/obits/mno/m2160026.txt.
Jerry Grillo, “The Immigration Dilemma,” Georgia Trend Magazine, December 1, 2010, https://www.georgiatrend.com/2010/12/01/the-immigration-dilemma/.
“Atlanta Attorney Says Gun in His Lap Went Off, Striking His Wife,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, March 23, 2018, https://www.ajc.com/news/local/atlanta-attorney-says-gun-his-lap-went-off-striking-his-wife/1pA2ZtJkQI94
xnIr9J0zcL/.
Ross Douthat, “Confessions of a Columnist,” New York Times, January 2, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/03/opinion/sunday/confessions-of-a-columnist.html.
Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman, “Trailing Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Turns to Political Gymnastics,” New York Times, September 5, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/01/us/politics/trump-campaign.html.
Alan Rappeport, “New National Poll Shows Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton Essentially Tied,” New York Times, September 6, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/07/us/politics/poll-donald-trump-hillary-clinton.html.
“With Clinton Leading Trump in Georgia, Reed Wants Campaign to Push,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, August 9, 2016 (downloaded from Atlanta Journal-Constitution archives).
“Ga. GOP Officials Uncomfortable with, but Committed to, Trump,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, August 21, 2016 (downloaded from Atlanta Journal-Constitution archives).
Roger Cohen, “President Donald Trump,” New York Times, November 9, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/opinion/president-donald-trump.html.
Esquire Editors, “American Rage: The Esquire/NBC News Survey,” January 3, 2016, https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a40693/american-rage-nbc-survey/.
“Here’s Donald Trump's Presidential Announcement Speech,” time.com, June 16, 2015, https://time.com/3923128/donald-trump-announcement-speech/.
“Here’s Donald Trump's Presidential Announcement Speech.”
Sarah Posner and David Neiwert, “Meet the Horde of Neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and Other Extremist Leaders Endorsing Donald Trump,” Mother Jones, September 21, 2016, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/09/trump-supporters-neo-nazis-white-nationalists-kkk-militias-racism-hate/.
The Editorial Board, “Donald Trump’s Alt-Right Brain,” New York Times, September 5, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/06/opinion/donald-trumps-alt-right-brain.html.
Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman, “Trump Gives White Supremacists an Unequivocal Boost,”
New York Times, August 15, 2017, https://www.nytimes
.com/2017/08/15/us/politics/trump-charlottesville-white-nationalists.html.
The Editorial Board, “Donald Trump’s Alt-Right Brain.”
“5 Things to Know about Diane McIver,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 23, 2018, https://www.ajc.com/news/local/things-know-about-diane-mciver/tfktDC2Xtwvm1rAIG4IiAL/.
Donald Trump has not fared well with his ghostwriters. Tony Schwartz, who wrote Trump’s 1987 memoir, The Art of the Deal, later “denounced the book and called Trump a liar and a sociopath.” Katy Guest, “Donald Trump, Beware—When the Ghostwriter Gives You Up,” The Guardian, July 22, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/22/donald-trump-beware-when-ghostwriter-gives-you-up. The ghostwriter of Trump’s 2000 The America We Deserve said in 2015 that Trump has “no class” and announced in 2016 that he would not vote for Trump. Guest, “Donald Trump, Beware”; Jack Moore, “Donald Trump’s Former Ghostwriter Won’t be Voting For Donald Trump,” GQ, January 1, 2016, https://www.gq.com/story/donald-trump-ghostwriter-vote.
Fennessy, “Tex and Diane McIver Had It All.”
See, for example, David W. Blight, “Trump Reveals the Truth About Voter Suppression,” New York Times, April 11, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/opinion/sunday/republicans-voter-suppression.html; Eli Rosenberg, “‘The Most Bizarre Thing I’ve Ever Been a Part Of’: Trump Panel Found no Widespread Voter Fraud, Ex-member Says,” Washington Post, August 3, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/08/03/the-most-bizarre-thing-ive-ever-been-a-part-of-trump-panel-found-no-voter-fraud-ex-member-says/.
See Jane Mayer, “The Voter-Fraud Myth,” New Yorker, October 22, 2012, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/10/29/the-voter-fraud-myth; Theodore R. Johnson and Max Feldman, “The New Voter Suppression,” Brennan Center for Justice, January 17, 2020, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/new-voter-suppression; Justin Levitt, “The Truth About Voter Fraud,” Brennan Center for Justice, November 9, 2007, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/truth-about-voter-fraud.
Brentin Mock, “Like It or Not, Voter ID Is Not Working,” Citylab.com, March 3, 2016, https://www.citylab.com/equity/2016/03/voter-id-is-not-working-photo-laws/471957/.
Ford Motor Company brochure, “2013 Expedition+EL,” 2012.
“The King Ranch Legacy,” https://king-ranch.com/.
Fennessy, “Tex and Diane McIver Had It All.”
“New Details, More Questions in Exec’s Death,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, October 1, 2016 (downloaded from Atlanta Journal-Constitution archives).
“New Details, More Questions in Exec’s Death.”
“Former McIver Spokesman Tells of Race Comments; Bill Crane Says He Refused to Change the Story about Fatal Night,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 10, 2018 (downloaded from Atlanta Journal-Constitution archives).
“Former McIver Spokesman Tells of Race Comments.”