Even in his rural hometown, U.S. Senate nominee Herschel Walker is not popular among Georgia's Black voters

Herschel Walker with Trump (Audra Melton, The New York Times)

African American Herschel Walker, the Georgia football legend who is the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate seat of Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock, is not popular among Georgia's Black voters, including those in his hometown of Wrightsville. The local reasons are multi-faceted, reports John Branch of The New York Times.

"There are easy explanations: Mr. Warnock, who is also Black, is a Democrat who preaches at Martin Luther King Jr.’s former church, and Mr. Walker is running as a Republican tied to Donald J. Trump," Branch writes. But in Wrightsville, the seat of a county with fewer than 10,000 residents, there are "complex reasons."

"Herschel’s not getting the Black vote because Herschel forgot where he came from," said Curtis Dixon, who is Black and taught and coached Walker in the late 1970s. "He’s not part of the Black community." In Walker's final semester of high school in 1980, Wrightsville's Black community protested for more equitable treatment, and after a protest in the town square where Black protesters said they were attacked by sheriff's deputies and white supporters, violence sporadically gripped the town for weeks. Walker never got involved and Black residents in Wrightsville wonder why he has "not used his fame, fortune and now his political standing to raise the voice of those he left behind," Branch reports. "It is a question raised in 1980, echoing in 2022."

Wrightsville in Johnson County, Georgia
(Wikipedia map)

In a memoir written decades after the 1980 conflict, Walker wrote that he "could never really be fully accepted by white students and the African American students either resented me or distrusted me for what they perceived as my failure to stand united with them — regardless of whether they were right or wrong. That separation would continue throughout my life with only the reasons for it differing from situation to situation."