Rick Rojas

Authorities said the girl, who had assembled a collection of butcher knives and other straight-edged weapons, may have been inspired by the massacre in 2015 at a storied African American church in Charleston, South Carolina, carried out by an unrepentant white supremacist.

Police found out about the plot after high school students in Gainesville, Georgia, confided to a counselor that a classmate had a notebook containing “detailed plans” for killing congregants at the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, authorities said. School officials reported it to authorities Friday.

“Our investigation indicated the church was targeted by the juvenile based on the racial demographic of the church members,” Chief Jay Parrish of the Gainesville Police Department said in a statement Tuesday.

The student, who was not identified by authorities, was charged with criminal intent to commit murder, police said. She was being held Tuesday in a juvenile detention facility.

Police officials said that the girl visited the church last Wednesday evening, a time when Bible study is usually held. “Through divine intervention or whatever you want to call it, they weren’t having services that evening,” Sgt. Kevin Holbrook, a spokesman for the Gainesville police, said in an interview.

It was not clear whether she was planning to carry out the attack that evening, he said, or gathering information for later use.

“We are thankful to God that this plot was stopped before anybody was either killed or injured,” Bishop Reginald T. Jackson, the presiding prelate for the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s more than 500 congregations in Georgia, told reporters in his office in Atlanta.

The Bethel congregation, which has about 40 members, worships in a small white sanctuary perched on a corner in a residential neighborhood of Gainesville, a city of about 40,000 people an hour’s drive northeast of Atlanta. The African Methodist Episcopal denomination was one of the first Protestant churches created by black people and has several thousand congregations around the country.

The Rev. Dr. Michelle Rizer-Pool, Bethel’s pastor, said that she went to the church to pray as soon as she heard of the plot last week. And Sunday, she said, she comforted her congregation, who were stunned and hurt by the news.

“I tried to let them know, let us not be afraid,” she said, adding that she sought to impress upon them that “God is with us.”

The plot has been an unwelcome reminder of the massacre June 17, 2015, at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, the denomination’s oldest congregation in the Deep South and one with a rich two-century history of resisting slavery and supporting the civil rights movement.

In that attack, a 21-year-old white man fueled by racial hatred sat through Bible study and then opened fire, killing nine people. The gunman, who was condemned to death by a federal jury in 2017, wrote in a jailhouse manifesto that he “would rather live in prison knowing I took action for my race than live with the torture of sitting idle.”

Law enforcement officials have said they believe that the Charleston attack, which rattled the nation, has incited would-be imitators, like a 29-year-old South Carolina man in 2017 who told an undercover federal agent, from whom he was buying a handgun, that he had plans inspired by the Charleston gunman.

And in the case announced Tuesday, Holbrook said the Charleston attack “does appear to have played some type of role in this.”

News of the plot renewed fears about the security at houses of worship, including churches and synagogues, which have been targeted repeatedly in recent years. It came at a time when hate crimes have been increasing, reaching a 16-year high last year, according to federal crime data.

“I want to be wrong,” Jackson said, “but these kinds of incidents, unfortunately, have a way of encouraging others who share the same ideology.”

Church officials said they would urge prosecutors to charge the girl as an adult, saying that the plot was not the product of a “childish mind.” The district attorney whose jurisdiction includes Gainesville did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment Tuesday.

“We love her — we’re going to pray for her,” Jackson said. But he added that the situation brought to mind a lesson he has preached many times: “For every decision you make, there’s consequences.”

This article originally appeared in

Georgia Teenager Plotted a Knife Attack on a Black Church, Police Say

ATLANTA — A 16-year-old white girl was orchestrating an elaborate, racially motivated plot to attack a small black congregation outside Atlanta, but the scheme was foiled after her classmates reported it to a high school counselor, authorities said Tuesday.

The rebels and slave owner were performers — actors, students, engineers and teachers who had been enlisted in the ambitious undertaking Friday to recreate a rebellion in 1811 in which some 500 enslaved people of African descent marched from the sugar plantations along River Road to New Orleans.

The reenactment, led by New York artist Dread Scott, excavated the memory of an event that organizers saw as an inspiring display of courage. The uprising ultimately ended in bloodshed and settled into a chapter of history that was largely ignored for two centuries.

“Join us!” the rebels chanted as they pushed down paved roads lined, in some places, with modest crowds of onlookers and bewildered residents who peered out their windows at the spectacle.

Ty’ki Clayton, 18, tried to hop in. “The cop told me I can’t walk in it,” said Clayton, an aspiring rapper who goes by Chase That Bag. Even so, he was pleased to watch it pass. “I mess with that,” he said.

“It’s beautiful,” added Trevon August, 33, who had arrived with Clayton on an all-terrain vehicle.

The 26-mile march, a reenactment of the 1811 German Coast Uprising in southeast Louisiana, began Friday morning and was set to conclude Saturday. It was timed to the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans in Virginia, a moment that has ignited considerable reflection about the specter of slavery still hanging over the United States and the depths of its influence.

The project is daring in its scale, standing as one of the most expansive creations of Scott, an artist known for work that often highlights the injustices endured by African-Americans. Organizers said that the rebellion had never been reenacted on such a vast scope, taking six years to orchestrate and involving hundreds of performers on foot and horseback.

“Close your eyes and imagine hearing that come,” Suzanna Alexander said as she stood bundled up as the marchers approached from a distance. “Can you imagine that?”

She explained her good fortune: Her aunts had been schoolteachers and she was innately curious, meaning she had long ago dived into this history. Many others had no idea.

“This is the first time I’m hearing of it, and I’m 67,” said Michael Sylve, a retired plant worker, who had come with Alexander.

Alexander, 56, was delighted by the display but also disappointed. The performers in the reenactment far outnumbered their audience. Students at a school along the route came out to watch, along with other neighbors. Yet the rest of the onlookers, for the most part, included an artsy crowd from New Orleans and journalists who had traveled from out of town.

Alexander, a retired accountant and caretaker for her ailing father, drives for Uber on the side and heard about the event from a passenger.

“Every child from St. James and St. John’s Parishes should be out here watching,” she said, wishing that there had been more community participation and that organizers had done more to broadcast their plans.

“Some Oprah money behind it would make it a bigger production,” she said. “We need some Hollywood money to tell the real story. The world needs to know.”

The performance was conceived, in part, to demonstrate how the ghosts of slavery have endured; the institution itself is gone, but the animosity and oppression have evolved and lingered. Staging a provocative revival of a violent rebellion, recounted in unsparing detail, stirred fears that the performance might turn into a very real confrontation.

“I think it’s authentic-looking,” Mike Remondet, a retired maintenance supervisor, said after he pedaled over to the plantation house on his bicycle. “I just hope it doesn’t create any turmoil with the races. We usually get along pretty well.”

Instead, tension was limited to snarled traffic from a construction project that some attributed to the roads being briefly closed for the procession. The march was met mostly with curiosity and cheers. Many marveled at the rebels’ stamina, in making it as far as they did.

“The power of freedom will give you strength,” said Jimmie Young, a disabled Vietnam veteran.

The rebellion began on a rainy night in January 1811, at a plantation in St. John the Baptist Parish, west of New Orleans. A group of about two dozen slaves killed the plantation’s owner and his son and then set off River Road toward New Orleans, carrying cane knives, clubs and guns and recruiting others as they marched. It ended in death for many, but the effort was not entirely futile, as historians said it undermined the notion of the “happy slave.”

Refineries and working-class neighborhoods have replaced the sugar fields. Still, like the original rebels, the performers Friday carried cane knives and the women had their hair wrapped in scarves. To their relief, in one deviation from history, they were allowed to wear sneakers. Some of them acknowledged that even they did not know the history.

“Were they killed?” one marcher asked.

“They all got killed,” another replied.

Angela LaFonta, 45, found the march through a website advertising acting roles. It was educational, she said, yet also extraordinarily difficult to confront an ugly history in which her ancestors had been robbed of their humanity and their lives.

“You have to be in character to do this,” she said during a break in the procession — a break she imagined the original rebels did not have.

“When you’re out there and actually marching, it brings you back to that trauma,” said another performer, Scierra LeGarde, 28. “It shows the resilience of who these people were — and are because they live on through us.”

The atmosphere was bleak, the afternoon gray and chilly. They had many miles to go and scenes of violence and defeat awaited them. Yet, like the rebels they portrayed, the group was defiant. They pressed ahead.

LaPLACE, La. — The insurgents, dressed in the linen uniforms of slaves and wielding clubs and guns, swarmed the sprawling white plantation house and attacked its owner. The anger and resentment that had grown over years of oppression had boiled over into an uprising.

A Slave Rebellion Rises Again

“We want the people of Kentucky to have absolute confidence that their votes were counted as they should have been counted,” Bevin told reporters Wednesday while standing in the entryway of the governor’s mansion he was fighting to keep.

Experts say a recanvassing is unlikely to swing the outcome of the election. Even so, Bevin has the potential to set in motion a challenge that could escalate into a showdown in the state Legislature, where lawmakers could ultimately determine the result.

Legal scholars and critics raised concerns about the governor’s leveling accusations of irregularities without providing evidence. And as Bevin prepares for a review of the vote, his Democratic challenger, Attorney General Andy Beshear, has plowed ahead with planning his agenda and staff as governor.

During a news conference in Louisville on Wednesday morning, Beshear stood at a lectern where the logo from his campaign had already been altered to declare him “governor-elect” and said he was beginning the work of sketching out his first budget proposal in January.

“The politics part of this is over,” he said. “It’s time for governance.”

Bevin and Beshear have said they have not spoken to each other. But Beshear’s campaign has urged the governor to stand down and concede, saying that the governor had virtually no shot at taking away Beshear’s considerable lead.

“We hope that Matt Bevin honors the results of the recanvass, which will show he received fewer votes than Andy Beshear,” Eric Hyers, Beshear’s campaign manager, said in a statement issued later Wednesday.

Bevin, the Republican incumbent in a conservative state, increasingly came to rely on President Donald Trump, who hosted a rally with Bevin in a state he won in 2016 by close to 30 percentage points.

Bevin, who entered the race as one of the most unpopular governors in the country, saw his approval tank after a faceoff with teachers and a push to curb a Medicaid expansion. Many voters soured over a personal style that they saw as overly abrasive and disrespectful.

In turn, Beshear seized upon that weakness, putting teachers at the center of his campaign, including selecting a high school assistant principal, Jacqueline Coleman, to join his ticket as the candidate for lieutenant governor.

The election had an unusually high turnout of 42%, with more than 1.4 million ballots cast — significantly above that of recent governor’s races.

Beshear found success in cities and in suburbs and in some rural areas as well. He ran up big margins in Lexington and Louisville; won a few historically Democratic turned pro-Trump counties in coal country; picked off suburbs south of Cincinnati that had gone for Trump; and kept his losing margins largely manageable in conservative rural counties. And while Bevin won nearly 200,000 more votes than he had in 2015, it was not enough. Bevin lagged behind the benchmarks he needed to hit in counties across the state.

On Tuesday night, Beshear claimed victory, but Bevin resisted conceding and instead began sounding alarms over electoral shortcomings.

In his news conference Wednesday, Bevin said “there really are a number of significant irregularities,” but he did not explain, saying his campaign was gathering information that would be “forthcoming in the days ahead.”

“There’s more than a little bit of history of voter fraud in our state,” Bevin said.

The next step in challenging the results would take place a week from Thursday with a recanvass during which counties would rerun the tabulations on voting machines but not re-examine ballots as would be done in a recount. Bevin, as a candidate, has the right to seek a recanvassing on any grounds. Kentucky does not have recounts of elections for governor, state election law experts said.

Describing past recanvass efforts, Joshua Douglas, a professor of law at the University of Kentucky, said, “In every instance, the vote totals change by a very small amount.” He added that it would likely come “nowhere near” the 5,000 votes Bevin needs to close the gap.

Bevin described recanvassing as a relatively routine undertaking, largely meant to confirm the integrity of the election process — making sure, as he put it, “there wasn’t a transposed number or something of this sort.”

It is unclear, however, how far he is willing to pursue his challenge.

“I’m confident that in the end the right results will be delivered,” Bevin said, “and I will be entirely comfortable with whichever way they go if I’m confident the process has been served.”

Douglas said Bevin’s recourse after a recanvassing would be contesting the election with the state Legislature, which is controlled by Republicans. There, a group of randomly selected lawmakers (eight from the House, and three from the Senate) would form an elections board that would hear evidence and arguments before arriving at a recommendation that would be forwarded to the entire Legislature.

Lawmakers could end up deciding the contest. The last time a governor’s race reached the Legislature was 1899, and it ended with one of the candidates being assassinated.

Kentucky Governor Could Challenge Election Before State Legislature

FRANKFORT, Ky. — After coming roughly 5,000 votes short in his reelection campaign for Kentucky governor, Matt Bevin on Wednesday called for votes across the state to be recanvassed as he expressed concerns about unspecified voting irregularities.

For nearly two decades, Cooley, 72, had assumed she would die in prison. She had been sentenced to life without parole on a slew of drug-related convictions, at a time when drug charges carried that stiff mandatory minimum.

She had accepted her fate. She got her own drug addiction in check, took some two dozen classes and eventually earned a place in the so-called “faith and honor” pink-walled dorm.

As she adjusted to the rhythms of life inside Tutwiler, a new normalcy took hold.

She crocheted and watched the news. And the women around her — many of whom had been convicted of violent crimes, including the rape, torture and murder of a teenage girl — eventually became her friends, people with whom she watched “The Young and the Restless.”

Outside the prison’s walls, an evolution in the criminal justice system was taking shape. Activists had gained momentum across the country as they argued that life sentences without parole for nonviolent drug-related charges were unjust.

In Alabama — where the state’s prisons are overcrowded, understaffed and, according to a federal investigation this year, have “a high level of violence” — lawmakers last year reduced mandatory minimums to include the possibility of parole, motivated in part by the reality that lifetime care for inmates is costly.

Last year, lawyers approached Cooley and said they wanted to take on her case. They argued that her sentence violated the Eighth Amendment, which protects people from unfair and cruel punishment. The district attorney did not oppose their claim for relief, and a judge reduced her sentence to life with the possibility of parole, which she was granted.

But Cooley would not let herself believe she would be freed, not until she actually walked out of the prison’s doors. As she waited on that last morning in early October, she could not restrain how eager, but also how anxious, she felt about returning to a world, and family, she had not seen in 17 years.

“The world is not the same as when I came in here,” Cooley said as she waited on her bare mattress, thin enough to be folded up. “I just want to live the rest of my life in peace with my family.”

Other inmates saw Cooley as tough and stoic, even ornery. (She said she was just a New Yorker.) But she also had a tender side, looking after newcomers who were often about the age of her grandchildren.

Many, particularly those sentenced to life without parole, found hope in Cooley’s victory. “In here, you have to have hope,” said Jennifer Jenkins, an inmate. “If you don’t have hope, you’re going to drown in self-pity.”

Annie Dennis, who at 82 was one of the few inmates older than Cooley, put her head on her shoulder, and Cooley’s stone facade cracked just a little, her eyes welling up.

“It’s like saying goodbye to my sister,” said Dennis, who had been assigned to housekeeping with Cooley. For years, the pair cleaned the dorm and showers.

Cooley stiffed back up, and she gave away the last of her things: books, shampoo, matches.

Finally, her lawyers came for her.

The others cheered, patted her on the back and hugged her again as she left the dorm for the final time and walked into a bathroom, where she changed into street clothes for the first time in a while.

Her path to prison began in 2002 when Cooley, a native of Harlem and 55 at the time, took a train to Birmingham, Alabama, to be a drug courier, according to court documents. She was given heroin and hydromorphone pills by two people she had met in the parking lot of the train station. A few minutes later, in what she believed was a setup, she was confronted by police officers, who found her carrying a sock holding the drugs.

She was convicted four years later of trafficking in illegal drugs. She had been convicted before, and served time, in New York on forgery charges, having used fraudulent checks and stolen credit cards, she said, to support herself and her heroin addiction.

Cooley was among the last women in the Alabama prison system serving life sentences on nonviolent drug charges.

Everything she wanted to keep from prison could be stuffed into a brown paper bag and two manila envelopes. Cooley packed two books, one on crocheting and another on tai chi. She also held onto a stack of family pictures. She wanted nothing else.

Two of her lawyers, Terrika Shaw and Courtney K. Cross, walked with her outside. They were all smiles and laughter as they stood on the front steps of the prison entrance, and Cooley put on a pair of sunglasses they had bought for her.

Once outside Tutwiler’s doors, Cooley fast-forwarded through nearly two decades.

She had a cellphone now and her lawyers showed her how to make and answer calls. (Texting would have to come later.) She had a video chat with her son after years of seeing him only in still photographs.

Later that day, Cooley moved to a transitional house in Montgomery called Aid to Inmate Mothers, where she was among a half-dozen other women in various stages of adjusting to life out of prison.

She fiddled with Netflix on the shared house television and was introduced to YouTube. (Her first search: Smokey Robinson.) She was thrown by how much people relied on their phones, getting turn-by-turn directions from Google Maps or making a call with Siri. “Who is she,” Cooley asked. “How does she know my number?”

She went shopping for groceries. There were so many new flavors of chips.

But not everything had changed: “The Young and the Restless” still came on at 11.

Cooley wanted to rest. She had hardly slept her last night in prison, and her first day out had been exhausting.

But first, she wanted to make a sandwich — with fresh bread, lettuce and tomatoes.

Her lawyers had prepared her room for her. Her son had sent new pictures.

“We bought you so much stuff,” said Shaw, one of her lawyers.

“It was like we’re sending our mother off to college,” Cross added.

Spread across her twin bed were the things they thought she would need: clothes, a handbag, toiletries. Cooley noticed a box of black hair dye.

“Oh, y’all were really good!” she said, bursting into laughter.

“I’m going to relax today and enjoy the atmosphere,” Cooley later told them as they prepared to leave.

“Enjoy this,” Cross said. “We’re working to get you home home. We know you’re not home yet, but at least you’re free.”

They had also bought her a night light because it was never dark in prison.

For the years of practice she had in biding time, it was failing her now.

She watched Netflix. She made more sandwiches. She went to a salon, replacing streaks of gray with a caramel brown.

She had left one form of waiting around in prison for another one at the AIM house. The plan was to return to New York and move in with her brother in Queens once parole officials approved a transfer. She was ready to get there.

“I don’t want to be in Alabama,” she said later, sitting in her room, where messages like “Love makes everything grow,” and “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams,” were stenciled on the wall.

“I have nothing against the people,” she continued, “but I have nothing good to say about it.”

She and her housemates went to a fair in Montgomery, but she tired of it fast.

And she waited for her son. The anticipation and anxiety were not unlike how she felt her last day in prison, waiting for her lawyers to come for her, each minute feeling as long as a year.

Her son had told her he was close, so she stood outside the house, watching every car that passed. Finally, he arrived. She rushed toward him, her grandson and granddaughter, who had driven through the night from Connecticut.

“Look at you!” she said as she wrapped herself around her son, Lamont, and her grandchildren.

After nearly two decades, she finally was back with her family. She was not home home. But with them, she felt like she really knew she was free.

Leaving Prison at 72: 'Not Home Yet, but at Least You're Free'

WETUMPKA, Ala. — In the pink-walled dormitory of the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women, nearly all of the inmates had risen before dawn. Some sat on one another’s beds, applying makeup and sipping instant coffee. Geneva Cooley sat alone, having just put on her white uniform for the last time.

Leaving Prison at 72

The outcome was a rebuke to parish leaders, and illustrated just how strongly many residents wanted to separate themselves from Baton Rouge, the state capital, which is governed jointly with the parish.

Yet with just 54% of voters supporting incorporation, the referendum also demonstrated a split in the community over the proposition, with concerns that going ahead with incorporation could sow further division and financial uncertainty in what would be Louisiana’s fifth-most-populous city.

The yearslong effort began as an attempt to create a new school district, and evolved over time into a drive for a whole new city. Supporters said they wanted to improve schools, have more local control over infrastructure and have their tax dollars spent closer to home, rather than see the money spread across East Baton Rouge Parish. They said all areas of the parish would benefit as a result.

“When we create a better St. George, we’re creating a better parish,” J. Andrew Murrell, a local lawyer and a leader in the incorporation effort, told supporters at a victory party Saturday night, according to The Advocate, the Baton Rouge newspaper.

But critics portrayed the incorporation effort as part of a pattern of white and affluent communities separating themselves from more diverse cities and counties.

The St. George effort faced strong opposition from much of the Baton Rouge establishment, with local government officials, business leaders, the editorial board of The Advocate and even a former Louisiana State University basketball coach voicing dissent.

Opponents have questioned how a small, newly formed government could hope to outperform the established parish administration, and have argued that incorporation would only lead to higher taxes.

Sharon Weston Broome, who as mayor-president leads both the city of Baton Rouge and the administration of East Baton Rouge Parish, has been among the most vocal opponents. In a statement, Broome said that, incorporated or not, the area making up St. George would still be part of the parish and remain under her jurisdiction.

“Whether it be issues like drainage or transportation or our economy,” she said, “we will have the highest level of success the more we stay united.”

The city of Baton Rouge and East Baton Rouge Parish blended their governments long ago to reduce costs and eliminate duplication. But over the years, a few smaller areas within the parish have incorporated anyway, like Zachary, a suburb with roughly 17,000 people, and Central, which has just under 30,000 residents. St. George would be considerably bigger, with 86,000 residents, displacing Lake Charles as the fifth-largest city in Louisiana.

Leaders of the incorporation effort promised to build a lean city government that would privatize many functions and that would continue to rely on the parish for some services, like the Sheriff’s Department. A mayor and five-person council would be appointed by the state governor, according to a website created by supporters.

The passage of the proposition Saturday opens a 30-day window for legal challenges while the new city government is organized. One of the most vocal opposition groups, however, has already said that it would respect the outcome of the vote.

“All the details and next steps will need to be discussed,” M.E. Cormier of the group One Baton Rouge said in a statement. “We look forward to hearing the St. George timetable, to see how we can work together to make our parish stronger. St. George has some very big promises, namely no tax increases of any kind, to keep.”

In celebration late Saturday, organizers of the incorporation effort posted on their Facebook page a message thanking supporters and a photograph of a “welcome” sign with a seal for St. George, stamped with “Est. 2019.” The post drew a flood of jubilant responses, but also a note of warning.

“We took a big leap of faith,” one supporter wrote, “and I expect no graft, no corruption, and setting up a city with resident input at all times.”

Suburbanites in Louisiana Vote to Create a New City of Their Own

BATON ROUGE, La. — Residents of a largely white suburb of Baton Rouge voted on Saturday to incorporate a new city of their own — to be called St. George — and take away control of the community’s taxes, schools and other services from the less affluent, more diverse surrounding parish.

“It’s been eight years in the making,” said Lionel Rainey, a leader of an effort that is now tantalizingly possible after proposed legislation and petition drives came up short.

Now, the plan to establish a new municipality, which the residents would call St. George, is before voters of the unincorporated area, a measure that also has become in many ways a referendum over the future of East Baton Rouge Parish and the role that a largely white enclave has in driving it forward.

St. George supporters cite a litany of frustrations, with complaints about underperforming schools chief among them. They said their other worries include inadequate drainage systems that make their neighborhoods more prone to flooding and roadways that are so clogged that the traffic feels more like driving in Los Angeles than Louisiana. In their view, their tax dollars could be spent closer to home, and not spread across the 470-square-mile parish. (“Our Independence Day is coming,” organizers posted on their Facebook page.)

Creating their own city, supporters insist, is an answer to their discontent, one that would bring them freedom and flexibility to pursue their own path, which they said could include investments in lagging infrastructure and improving local schools without having to raise taxes.

“I’m hoping we will have more input,” Theresa Blair said just after casting her ballot in favor of the new city during early voting at a local firehouse. “If it’s smaller, we’re hoping there’s more concern for the community.”

Still, even within the confines of the would-be city, many others said they fear that voter approval to create St. George would only sow division and undermine the broader community. Some critics have also questioned the organizers’ motives, arguing that beneath the rhetoric and list of grievances lies a familiar pattern of white residents in a more affluent area seeking to distance themselves from black and poorer communities.

“I can see nothing good that can come out of forming St. George,” said M.E. Cormier, who is part of One Baton Rouge, a group opposing the incorporation. “All signs, all statistics, all reporting points to negative, harmful parishwide effects if St. George were to break away.”

The campaign has also inspired intense opposition from much of the Baton Rouge establishment. The Advocate, Baton Rouge’s newspaper, published an editorial that described it as an effort that “seems more driven by passion than pragmatism.” Local government officials and business leaders have portrayed incorporation as an unwise endeavor that stands to bring about financial uncertainty and increased taxes, all while leaving St. George residents just as exasperated as they were before.

“That’s going to be a rude awakening for a lot of people,” said Sharon Weston Broome, who, as mayor-president, oversees the municipal government in Baton Rouge as well as that of East Baton Rouge Parish.

For decades, the city government in Baton Rouge has been blended with the parish’s, shaving costs and avoiding redundant bureaucracies as it oversees services for the city proper and its surrounding communities. On a drive through the parish, it is difficult to discern where the city of Baton Rouge would end and St. George would begin.

The campaign for St. George has drawn national attention over the years, highlighted as a reflection of something more troublesome. An article in The Atlantic called it part of a “new secession” of white, wealthier suburbs separating from city schools, a pattern that has repeated itself in dozens of communities across the country. (The East Baton Rouge Parish School System, with just over 40,000 students, has enrollment that is 89% nonwhite.)

Opponents argue that the city’s architects have constructed a plan pocked with holes, questioning the wisdom of privatization and how a small, nascent government can outperform what the parish offers, noting recent investments in infrastructure.

“I don’t see neglect when I look at that area,” Broome said. “I see a thriving community that has benefited from their relationship with the city-county government.”

The roots of the St. George effort came from a legislative push in 2012 to create a new school district inside East Baton Rouge Parish, which has about 441,000 residents. The campaign morphed into the notion of St. George as organizers said that lawmakers had told them a new school district could be viable if it were part of a freshly incorporated city. About four years ago, a petition drive came close to making it onto a ballot.

The campaign was revived in recent months and came as Baton Rouge, the state capital, was still stinging from a rash of turmoil that underscored the ties that bind the community — as well as the gulfs that divide it.

The city was roiled by unrest in 2016 after Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old black man, was fatally shot by police, and rattled when, days later, a targeted attack left three officers dead and three more wounded. Then, roughly a month later, the city was devastated by floods, a disaster that, many residents said, banded the community together after so much tumult.

“It was an incredible family that came together in the parish,” Cormier said, “and I don’t know how we lost it. How did it go away so quickly?”

If the vote passes, St. George — the name an homage to an extinct parish that the area was once a part of — would displace Lake Charles as Louisiana’s fifth-largest city, with some 86,000 residents. It would stretch from a horseshoe bend in the Mississippi River to the Amite River, encompassing commercial and industrial pockets, block after block of single-family homes in middle-class neighborhoods, and parts like Highland Road, a lengthy oak-shaded corridor winding between sprawling and stately Acadian homes.

Plans for the city call for a lean operation: The parish’s Sheriff’s Department would police it and it would continue to rely on other parish services. A mayor and five-person council would be appointed by the governor, according to a website created by supporters. And the city’s bureaucracy would also be largely privatized. “It’s a very modern, some could say even progressive, way to look at city management,” Rainey said.

Rainey, who works in political communications, was the group’s spokesman during the previous incorporation effort but has had a less active role this time.

Other organizers of the effort declined multiple requests for comment. “We are not interested in interviewing with media outside of our voting area at this time,” their spokesman, J. Andrew Murrell, a local lawyer, said in an email.

But Rainey said the ambitions for St. George were fueled by something larger and more wholesome than political or racial divides, or even run-of-the-mill complaints about government services.

“This is about creating a better life for your family,” he said, describing the financial burden for families that chose to educate their children in private schools. “What’s more important than your family? Nothing. The rest is just noise.”

On a recent sweltering morning, a firehouse on the edge of St. George was a very busy polling site. One after the next, residents repeated familiar talking points: Things cannot get any worse than they already are. Or, the last thing they want is the additional taxes a new city would bring.

Some expressed their worries about what would come, no matter the outcome.

“It’s just going to split up the community,” said Elizabeth Ott, who lives just outside the proposed St. George boundary. “We’ve got enough division.”

John Overton, an executive at Turn Key Solutions, an IT business that would be within St. George, said he had strong concerns about the consequences that creating a new city could have, and the emotions that appear to be driving its supporters.

Yet when it came to the threat of lingering animosity, he held onto a strand of optimism: The divisions could only reach so far.

“We’re neighbors,” he said. “I think there will be some challenges to avoid a ‘them and us’ mentality. But our kids are still best friends even though they don’t go to the same school. You’re still my valued client even though you’re in the next city over.”

Voters Near Baton Rouge Want Better Schools. First, They Need a New City.

BATON ROUGE, La. — Their plan to create a new independent school district failed. And then it failed again. But residents of an unincorporated area southeast of Baton Rouge were undeterred. This time, they hatched an idea to establish a city of their own.

“I’m actually supporting Steven Reed,” Minor said, explaining the enthusiasm she had, as a black woman and nearly lifelong resident of Montgomery, for the other candidate: Reed, a probate judge and the son of a prominent political family, who emerged from a runoff race on Tuesday as the first African American elected to lead Alabama’s capital city.

His campaign, and its success, has sent a volt of excitement and validation through the black community, which makes up 60% of the city’s population.

Montgomery is fundamentally shaped by tandem legacies as a capital in the nation’s vicious racial past and as a cradle for the civil rights movement. And many who grew up under the shadow of that history could not help but hope that they were seeing the start of a thrilling new chapter.

“This is our season,” said Yolanda Sayles Robinson, 59, who was born in the city and described herself as a product of the 1960s. “We’ve been waiting for this for a long time.”

Reed entered the nonpartisan runoff with Woods, a white television station owner, after advancing from what had been a 12-person race. In the election Tuesday, Reed captured 67% of the vote, according to unofficial results released by the city. Now, Montgomery joins Birmingham and Selma, two other monumental battlegrounds in Alabama’s civil rights fight, in selecting young, African American men as mayors.

“You believed that we didn’t have to be defined by our past,” Reed told the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd that had jammed into a hall for his election night gathering and chanted his name and “One Montgomery” as he ascended the stage. “It’s not going to be about the first. It’s not even going to be about the best. It’s going to be about the impact we make on the lives of others.”

In some corners, Montgomery, set on the Alabama River with a population of about 200,000, has gone through a revitalization.

The history that has long haunted the city has evolved into a source of a boon, as a national memorial to victims of lynching and a museum of slavery and mass incarceration draw large crowds. New hotels and other developments have popped up downtown, and the streets around the State Capitol are dotted with restaurants bustling with young people. Hyundai, the automaker, has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into a plant that has been a major job provider.

Still, the city’s gains have not been spread evenly. Pockets of the city have streets lined with overgrown lots and hollowed out homes, and there are neighborhoods mired in poverty and crime.

There are also concerns about losing talented young people to bigger cities, attracted by their wealth of options for careers and culture. Robinson’s daughter, who is in her 30s, left for New York City and most likely will never return. “That hurt my heart,” she said of her leaving. “We need to have opportunity here.”

During his campaign, Reed talked about bringing about progress “regardless of neighborhood, regardless of ZIP code.” He said he would encourage investment in education and seek to improve ties between the police and the city’s minority communities.

He joined a packed field of candidates who stepped forward after the incumbent, Todd Strange, who has held the office since 2009, said he was not running for reelection. Ten of those candidates were black and included a lawyer, a retired U.S. Air Force brigadier general and an employee of the state Department of Corrections.

Reed received 42% of the vote during the first mayoral election in August, and was trailed by Woods, who had campaigned on his business expertise. On Tuesday, Woods, whose political experience was limited to an unsuccessful congressional bid in 2008, signaled his support for Reed as he conceded. “A unified Montgomery,” he said in a television interview, “is a lot stronger than a divided Montgomery.”

Reed was the first black probate judge in Montgomery County, and a graduate of Morehouse, the historically black college in Atlanta, and Vanderbilt, where he earned an MBA. He also has deep ties to the community. His father, Joe Reed, has been the longtime leader of the black caucus of the state Democratic Party, and his family has been a fixture in the city. Some voters recounted memories of Reed as a teenager or seeing him as a young boy in church, and shared a certain pride in following his rise.

Pierre Flowers, however, had no clue who the man going around shaking hands in his barber shop was. But as Reed struck up a conversation with him, he was taken by how unassuming the candidate was. “He seemed like he had a good vibe,” Flowers, 28, said just after voting for him. “Why not?”

The vote, for some, carried deep meaning, even drawing comparisons to 2008, when President Barack Obama was elected. “Here we are,” said Derrick Marshall, 63, a teachers’ aide who has lived in Montgomery virtually his entire life, “standing at the door of another significant event.”

The city was incorporated in December 1819 and served as the first capital of the Confederate States of America. Martin Luther King Jr. also planned the Montgomery bus boycott, the protest that made Rosa Parks a household name, in a church in the city.

Evidence of that history abounds in a highway sign advertising the First White House of the Confederacy, and the school and thoroughfare named for Jefferson Davis, the confederacy’s only president. It also lingers in less visible ways, in the racial tensions that Montgomery, as the rest of Alabama, has not been able to settle.

“It’s been an incredible education,” said Kim Anderson, a white resident of Montgomery originally from the Finger Lakes area of New York. “It’s been an education that I couldn’t have gotten anywhere else.”

But many looked at the election as a sign of the progress still being made. It was a reflection of a shift underway as a younger generation — one decades removed from the civil rights movements of their parents and grandparents yet also mobilized by the racial struggles of their own era — has stepped forward.

Reed joins Randall Woodfin, the 38-year-old mayor of Birmingham, Alabama’s largest city, and Darrio Melton, 40, who has been the mayor of Selma since 2016. Talladega also elected its first black mayor, Timothy Ragland, 29, on Tuesday.

On election night, as speakers thumped with music — with a playlist that included Beyoncé, Usher and the Isley Brothers — the crowd at Reed’s party watched local television news projected onto a wall, cheering as the vote totals flashing across the screen edged in their direction.

Reed’s win would be a “blessing,” some said, and an answer to their prayers. It was something they had sought for generations, but Sylvia Norman was among those who saw the delay as a gift of sorts. Years without a black mayor, she said, had strengthened the community’s resolve to make it happen.

“It didn’t take too long,” Norman said as the crowd roared around her. “God did it in his time.” She noticed on the screen that more precincts had reported and that Reed’s significant lead had solidified. She cheered, danced and jumped as it looked like that time might soon arrive.

Montgomery, a Cradle of Civil Rights, Elects Its First Black Mayor

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — At a polling place not far from the intersection of avenues named for Jefferson Davis and Rosa Parks, Laura Minor spent a scorching afternoon on a folding chair with a David Woods for Mayor sticker on her shirt. She had been hired to represent his campaign, yet she was not shy about making it clear that Woods had bought her time but had not won her vote.

But seven months after Riley arrived at the university’s flagship campus in Tuscaloosa, he resigned in what the university called a “mutual agreement.” It is a decision that administrators have not explained and that came one day after a conservative news website published an article about old tweets in which Riley, who is black, described the police and the American flag as fixtures of a “systemic history of racism.”

While the language in Riley’s posts was considered inflammatory and offensive by some, others — including black students and faculty members — said the tweets described their reality. “Because I’m a black woman, I live it out each day,” said Cameryn Blackmore, a political science researcher, instructor and doctoral student.

In the weeks since the Sept. 4 publication of the article and the university’s brief acknowledgment of Riley’s resignation, officials have remained silent, prompting faculty, staff and students to accuse administrators of failing to support Riley and his freedom of speech. But what began as an uproar over a black administrator’s departure — which some said felt forced and unfair — has led to a reckoning over race on a campus that is predominantly white and remains haunted by its racial past.

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — When the University of Alabama announced that it had recruited Jamie R. Riley as its new dean of students, it lauded him as an educator with “invaluable” leadership skills who had a “proven track record of advocating for students.”

Rick Rojas

Articles written by the author

Georgia Teenager Plotted a Knife Attack on a Black Church, Police Say

A Slave Rebellion Rises Again

Kentucky Governor Could Challenge Election Before State Legislature

Leaving Prison at 72: 'Not Home Yet, but at Least You're Free'

Leaving Prison at 72

Suburbanites in Louisiana Vote to Create a New City of Their Own

Voters Near Baton Rouge Want Better Schools. First, They Need a New City.

Montgomery, a Cradle of Civil Rights, Elects Its First Black Mayor

Dean's Departure Prompts a Reckoning Over Race

In a Suffering City, an El Paso Priest Needed a Message of Hope

Uncertainty in El Paso as Names of Shooting Victims Trickle Out

A First at a Century-Old Seminary: A Black Woman Takes Charge

A #MeToo episode from 1969 casts a long shadow for a folk legend

Survivors press for diocese to name abusers

MetroCard series to commemorate first responders to 9/11 attacks

Becoming Catholic in the age of scandal

New York Archdiocese Releases Names of Clergy Members Accused of Abuse

New York Archdiocese Names 120 Catholic Priests Accused of Abuse

Let he who is without Yeezys cast the first stone

Can a preacher walk a Godly path in Yeezys?