Georgia elected eight Black women to statewide office on Tuesday. It matters not least of all because of the disinformation in America that it overcomes; the century of Robert E. Lee propaganda and myths that it shatters. Every statewide race on the ballot went to a Democrat, and every Black woman who ran statewide won. Keisha Lance Bottoms will be the first Black woman to serve as governor of any American state.

The first Black woman ever elected to a partisan statewide office in Georgia took her seat eleven months ago. Alicia Johnson joined the Public Service Commission in December 2025, a body over a century old. She said it was a shame to be the first anything on it.

Some have commented that Trump targeted Blacks for removal from their federal government seats, as Wilson did starting in 1913 under the “America First” banner he ran on in 1916, and thus they are winning all the races at the state level now. Notably, when the GOP ran Trump against a Black woman for President on an “America First” platform, Trump had already called Lee “the greatest strategist of them all” as the 1890 Richmond statue came down, and said Lee would have won Afghanistan. The name at the root of “America First” is specific.

Robert E. Lee.

Wilson, before he was President, delivered the Lee birthday address at Chapel Hill on January 19, 1909, presenting a traitorous “monster” who ran a school of rapists as a model for the whole nation. Four years later Carr stood on the same campus to unveil a Confederate statue, as Wilson used his election mandate to purge Black federal workers.

Lee had died in 1870 in almost total obscurity. He should have been hanged in 1865, but Grant intervened to stop the trial. After that Lee wanted to be unknown, by design, so that he could die of natural causes instead of being hanged for treason let alone killed for his many crimes against humanity (including his own men). Barely a thousand people attended his funeral, most of them students and cadets from the two schools in Lexington. His own students had to be called in to carry his body, perhaps for school credit. Fifteen years later 1.5 million people turned out for his sworn enemy President Grant, who had the Confederate generals he had defeated as his pallbearers. By any honest measure of the two men they could not be farther apart.

Grant was a military genius, a General who captured three whole armies and pioneered modern combined army and navy operations. Lee took three decades to make colonel, known for blunders and brutality including denying aid to the wounded and murdering prisoners. Grant won the presidency twice, created the DoJ and the first National Park, and initiated Civil Rights enforcement. Lee ran a college whose students were known for raping Black schoolchildren in the area and other racist violence including attempts at lynching.

Then the myth about the two men was built by racist propagandists who lost the Slaveholder Rebellion, and Georgia moved that mythology into actual law.

1889. Georgia makes Lee’s birthday a paid state holiday by statute.

1906. Hoke Smith runs for governor on Black disfranchisement. On September 22 the Atlanta papers print four alleged assaults on white women by Black men, none ever substantiated. The massacre follows that night. The 1908 amendment delivers the literacy test and grandfather clause. The invented Black rapist is the license for the real white one.

1913. Julian Carr dedicates a Confederate monument at Chapel Hill and tells the crowd he horse-whipped a Black woman until her skirts hung in shreds, one hundred yards from the statue. The crowd approves.

1915. Helen Plane of the United Daughters of the Confederacy hires Borglum to carve Lee into Stone Mountain and writes asking for Klan figures on the carving. The Klan refounds itself on the summit that November.

1919. Georgia is the first state to reject the Nineteenth Amendment, then uses a six-month registration rule to keep women out of the 1920 election. White women vote in 1922. Black women stay out under the 1908 rules. Georgia ratifies in 1970.

1924. Lee’s head is unveiled on Stone Mountain on Lee’s birthday before 5,000 people.

1954. Fifty-seven days after Brown v. Board, Marvin Griffin points at the mountain and promises to finish the carving. He adds the battle flag to the state flag in 1956 and buys the mountain in 1958. The carving finishes in 1972.

1965. Grace Towns Hamilton becomes the first Black woman in the Georgia legislature. One century after Appomattox.

2001. The price of removing the battle flag from the state flag is Georgia Code 50-3-1(c), which protects the Lee carving by statute.

2015. Governor Deal renames Lee’s birthday “State Holiday.” The day stays on the calendar.

2022. Secretary of State Raffensperger cites that holiday to block Saturday early voting in the Warnock runoff. Keisha Lance Bottoms posts that Lee’s birthday is blocking the vote. The Georgia Supreme Court overrules him.

2025. Alicia Johnson. The first.

2026. Eight. The woman who posted about the Lee holiday in 2022 is now governor.

Research published in PNAS in 2021 found Confederate monuments concentrated in the counties with the most lynchings. The SPLC data shows the monuments went up in two waves, one with the Jim Crow constitutions after 1900 and one with the backlash to Brown after 1954. Georgia hit both waves with the same mountain, and the mountain is protected by the same Republican majority that just lost the state House.

Lee’s name was a holiday, a mountain, a flag, a statute, and a voting calendar. Each one was a mythological fixation turned into a legal instrument specifically deployed for denying Black women any power.

Tuesday’s result is what Georgia looks like once the Lee disinformation bubble is popped.