Photograph by Bill Nigut
If former DeKalb County CEO Michael Thurmond announces in the weeks ahead that he’s running for the Democratic nomination for governor, which seems increasingly likely, one of his most important allies on the campaign trail will be a Georgian who died 240 years ago.
He’s James Oglethorpe, the founder of the Georgia colony and the subject of Thurmond’s most recent book, James Oglethorpe, Father of Georgia: A Founder’s Journey from Slave Trader to Abolitionist.
For much of the past year, Thurmond has traveled across the state giving talks about the book to more than 80 civic groups, church gatherings, and other organizations. The starting point for all of these appearances is Thurmond’s story about how he came across the remarkable little-known fact that Oglethorpe founded Georgia as an abolitionist colony.
Because Thurmond had told me that giving talks about the book also served as a “listening tour” to determine the viability of making a run for governor, I was glad he accepted my request to accompany him as he headed to Carrollton for a talk in front of the Carrollton Kiwanis Club last week.
On the long drive from DeKalb County to Carrollton, Thurmond wondered if accepting the invitation to speak to the Kiwanis on the Friday before the start of the Memorial Day weekend meant few would show up to see him. He needn’t have worried. Most of the tables in the meeting room at the Tanner Medical Center were filled with Kiwanis eager to hear what Thurmond had to say.
It’s a compelling story. Thurmond described visiting England with a delegation of Georgians led by then Governor Zell Miller in October 1996 to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Oglethorpe’s birth. The delegation visited the church where Oglethorpe and his wife are interred. And it was there that Thurmond read the plaque erected near his tomb, which included a passage calling Oglethorpe “the friend of the oppressed Negro.” Thurmond says he was initially skeptical of that claim. After all, Oglethorpe had been a principal in the Royal Africa Trading Company, the largest slave trading company in Britain. A historian at heart, Thurmond spent more than two decades researching and writing the book documenting the fascinating journey that led Oglethorpe to become the only governor of a British American colony to ban chattel slavery prior to the Revolutionary War.
As he explained to the Carrollton Kiwanis, Oglethorpe’s moral awakening came when he read a letter written by a West African man named Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, who was enslaved in Maryland. Diallo’s letter described to his despairing family the conditions under which he was living and asked for money to buy his freedom. That a slave could write and therefore read, and that he expressed himself eloquently and with emotion, made Oglethorpe realize that slaves were capable of the same intellectual and spiritual capacities as Europeans. Thurmond told the Kiwanians that Oglethorpe came to recognize that all human beings, regardless of race, religion or legal status, had the right to live as free people and to be treated with dignity.
Thurmond, a Black man who grew up the son of sharecroppers in a house with no indoor bathroom in Clarke County, was telling the story of Oglethorpe’s transformation to a nearly all white group. And he was giving his talk in bright red Carroll County, which gave Donald Trump 70 percent of their vote in the 2024 general election. Still, Thurmond is a masterful storyteller, and by the time he finished his 20-minute talk, there were people in the room who had tears in their eyes.
Thurmond didn’t say a word about his own political ambitions until the questions session, when he was asked if he planned to run for governor.
“I’ve considered it,” He answered. “I don’t know if [in] the politics of today there’s a place for somebody who wants to build consensus, who’s more concerned about getting things done than they are about partisan politics. And what’s wrong today is that we’re putting the partisanship in front of the people . . . sometimes we live in this world of ‘or.’ Everything is ‘or.‘ It’s white or black, or Republican or Democrat. Sometimes the best answer is not ‘or’ but ‘and’ . . . [but] the ‘or’ is so much more provocative than the ‘and.”
Thurmond won a round of applause when he added: “So if Georgia can have an ‘and’ governor, I might be your guy.”
Whether Thurmond can win the votes of what was presumably a largely Republican group of Carrollton voters is uncertain. But his story about Oglethorpe, which he’s repeated to groups many times across the state—in blue counties and red—is a powerful vehicle for him to address issues like racism and equal treatment for all from the safe distance of history, and at the same time allows him to make the case for a more moderate approach to politics.
Some observers of Georgia politics, myself included, have watched Thurmond flirt with the idea of running for governor for the past two years, and we’ve wondered why he still hasn’t declared his intentions. But in Carrollton, I realized the answer to that is simple. He’s been able to get in front of diverse groups of voters across the state as the author of an important book about Georgia. How many of those opportunities would never have come his way if instead he was pitching himself as a candidate for governor?
Still, with former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and state senator Jason Esteves now officially in the Democratic governor’s race, and already out raising money and working to build their networks, Thurmond knows he can’t wait much longer to declare his intentions. He told me he realizes a Democratic candidate has a very narrow path to win the governor’s office.
“At the state level, Democrats are suffering from a structural political deficit,” he said. “You have 20 straight years of defeat in every state-level office . . . and unless we can restructure the electorate then it will be very difficult if not impossible for a Democrat to win.”
Thurmond points out that since the 2002 gubernatorial election—when Sonny Perdue defeated incumbent Democrat Roy Barnes—Stacey Abrams set the high-water mark for Democratic candidates by winning 48 percent of the votes in her race against Brian Kemp in 2018. And Thurmond gives Abrams credit for coming so close by building a new progressive coalition of Black and white voters. But he sees a different path. Thurmond believes the candidate who emphasizes inclusivity, respect for political differences, and a commitment to coalition building may be attractive to voters looking for a more moderate, sensible approach to politics.
It’s worked for him in the past. On our drive, Thurmond talked about winning his seat in the state house representing Athens-Clarke County in 1986. “I lost my first two races for the seat because I focused only on turning out Black voters. Then it hit me that the district was 66 percent white.” It was only when he courted white as well as Black voters that he won on his third try. He became the first Black candidate to win the district since Reconstruction.
He had similar success using the same strategy when he won a statewide race for Labor Commissioner in 1998, again breaking a color barrier by becoming the first Black man to win a statewide race in Georgia without having first been appointed to the position he was seeking. In that first race, he was swept into office when Barnes won the governor’s office. But Thurmond won the position twice more when Perdue was also at the top of the statewide ballot.
Still, Thurmond understands his first challenge will be to win a primary in which some Democratic voters may be looking for a hard-charging candidate who hews to the left and is ready to go toe to toe with a MAGA GOP opponent. Will he be able to convince enough of them to choose someone he believes will be a more electable general election candidate?
As we were heading back to Atlanta after a long day, I pointed out to Thurmond that when he had the opening, he didn’t ask his Carrollton audience to vote for him should he decide to run. That led us to try to remember which politician it was who lost a Georgia race and went on to make the famous remark that “some of the people who ate my barbecue didn’t vote for me.” We looked it up on our phones. It was one-term governor Marvin Griffin, who lost his bid for re-election in 1962.
As Michael Thurmond comes close to announcing his candidacy, his hope will be that a lot of Georgians who buy his book will also end up voting for him.
Bill Nigut has covered Georgia politics for more than 40 years, working as a reporter at Channel 2 News and at GPB as the host of Political Rewind. Most recently, he was a cohost of Politically Georgia for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and WABE.
