Georgia’s Fulton County District Attorney Fanni Willis is heading up the criminal trial of Donald Trump and 18 other defendants for conspiring to commit election fraud. Willis herself is being investigated in regard to a personal relationship with her chief investigator, Nathan Wade. During a hearing on that matter, former Georgia Governor Roy Barnes testified that in 2021, Willis had asked him to be a special prosecutor in the Trump case, but he said no. He had already once had to live with private security due to threats against him, and he didn’t want to have to “live with bodyguards for the rest of my life.” Barnes said that in that previous incident, he had assumed at first that the threats were because of his leadership regarding the removal of the Confederate battle emblem from Georgia’s state flag. But he learned from the FBI that those threats against him were because he was “too close to the Jews.” What was Governor Barnes’s connection to Jews that incurred the wrath of some Georgia racists?

Governor Roy Barnes by Will Folsom is licensed under CC BY 2.0 DEED, via Wikimedia Commons

A. Barnes was influential in bringing about a reexamination of the case against Leo Frank, the Jewish business owner who was convicted in 1913 on charges that he assaulted and strangled a 13-year-old female employee. When Frank’s death penalty was commuted and changed to life in prison by then governor John Slaton, a mob stormed the prison, dragged Frank out, and lynched him. Frank was pardoned in 1986, but Barnes’s efforts have led to a possible exoneration of Leo Frank.

B. In 2001 Governor Barnes appointed a commission which ultimately approved a plan to provide kosher meals in state prisons. There was opposition by white supremacists and others on the far right, as well as others who simply felt that the cost would be prohibitive, especially because it was assumed that many who didn’t actually keep kosher, or weren’t even Jewish, would sign up for the kosher meals, believing that it would taste better than regular prison food.

C. In 2002 Roy Barnes presented playwright Alfred Uhry, an Atlanta native, with The Outstanding Georgia Citizen Award in recognition of his artistic achievements. Uhry is known for his plays with Jewish themes and characters, in particular Last Night at Ballyhoo, Parade, and Driving Miss Daisy.

D. In 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King was scheduled to speak at the Atlanta Municipal Auditorium, but the City Council imposed financial requirements intentionally designed to prevent King from speaking there, even though Jim Crow laws had officially ended in Georgia. Then-lawyer and activist Roy Barnes reached out to friends who were members of Temple Emanu-El, a prominent Reform synagogue in Atlanta, which opened their doors to Dr. King. Barnes introduced King at that event and remained close to the Jewish community.

E. Governor Barnes established a commission to determine what to do about Georgia’s controversial Stone Mountain, the massive mountainside carved with images of Confederate heroes Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson. The commission approved Barnes’s suggestion that the mountainside be re-carved to feature CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.

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