The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), and co-counsel Neil Bradley, on behalf of the Georgia State Conference of the NAACP, Fayette County Branch of the NAACP, and ten Black voters, have successfully settled a transformative Voting Rights Act (VRA) lawsuit against the Board of Commissioners (BOC), Board of Education (BOE), and other officials of Fayette County, Georgia. The settlement in Georgia State Conference of the NAACP, et al. v. Fayette County Board of Commissioners, et al. follows a more than four-year fight to provide Black voters in Fayette County with the equal opportunity to elect members to county government.
LDF filed this 2011 challenge to Fayette County’s discriminatory at-large method of electing all five members to the BOC and BOE under Section 2 of the VRA. Until this lawsuit, no Black person of any political affiliation had ever been elected to either body, even though Black residents comprise approximately 20% of Fayette County’s population and consistently vote together in countywide elections. Rather, white voters, who comprise approximately 80% of the electorate, controlled all five seats on each board.