Is it deja-vu ‘sick’ all over again in Georgia?

I can recall, somewhat vaguely these days, when President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s called the United States “a sick society.”

Those 1960s, a turbulent time for sure, what with the civil rights movement that certainly White supremacists made decidedly uncivil with a Sept. 15, 1963, Birmingham, Ala., church bombing that killed four Black girls; the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22 that same year; the slaying of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in June 1964; the ramping up of the Vietnam War in 1965; the assassination of Black power activist Malcolm X by Nation of Islam members on Feb. 21, 1965; bloody riots in major U.S. cities in 1967; civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated April 4, 1968; Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, JFK’s brother, fatally shot June 5 that same year.

Yes, the 1960s were turbulent and troubling times, but there were some silver linings among the years, too: The exploration of outer space by Apollo astronauts; King’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington on Aug. 20, 1963; Congress’ approval on the War on Poverty on Aug. 11, 1964; Johnson, a former school teacher who grew up poor in rural Texas, laying the foundations of his “Great Society” during a Jan. 4, 1965, State of the Union address; the Voting Rights Act, which banned literacy test and other voter qualification tests.

There’s more, of course, but I want to stop there, with the landmark voting rights bill — part of federal legislation that helped to end nearly a century of Jim Crow laws meant to marginalize Blacks in the South by denying them not only the right to vote but also to hold jobs, get an education, and more.

Why stop there? Because neo-Jim Crow is back in the Peach State.

It is still fairly fresh and significant news that Georgia was key to securing Democrat control of the White House and the U.S. Senate after four years of ol’ 45. You remember him, the former guy who could not stop asserting that he had been the subject of voter fraud nearly everywhere, but particularly in Georgia, where, like everywhere else, there was little or none. And he convinced a lot of folks it was true, aka “the big lie,” which more or less culminated with the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol, with the death of one Capitol police officer and others, dozens more injuries, and a mob, including one guy dressed like a Viking, others who dressed like they were going to war, that stormed into the House and Senate chambers, acting as if they had bourbon for breakfast. Some of them, the Oath Keepers militia members and the far-right group the Proud Boys, apparently, according to federal prosecutors, appear to have coordinated plans for the riot. I’m not sure if they had any time for guzzling bourbon.

Back to Georgia, where there’s still probably a lot of simmering anger about Gen. Sherman’s March to the Sea, from Atlanta to Savannah in late 1864, breaking the back of the Confederacy and leading to the end of the Civil War.

Earlier this month, the Republican-controlled Georgia Legislature passed bills that would make voting tougher, especially for people of color.

And on Thursday afternoon, the good ol’ boys and girls in the state Senate — on a vote of 34 to 20 — passed a law that would impose new voter identification requirements for absentee ballots, empower state officials to take over local elections boards, limit the use of ballot drop boxes, and make it a crime to approach voters in line to give them food and water. (As for the latter, does it strike you as just lowdown and mean?)

It was signed into law shortly afterward Thursday by Gov. Brian Kemp, and it follows record turnout in the November election and the Senate runoffs that elevated Raphael Warnock of the fabled Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, and Jon Ossoff, a documentary film producer, to Capitol Hill and gave Democrats a razor-thin majority in the Senate.

Earlier on Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called the proposed voting rollbacks in dozens of states — including Georgia, Iowa, and Arizona — an “existential threat to our democracy” that reminded him of Jim Crow.

Senate Republicans, like Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Roy Blunt of Missouri, keep saying things like they want to “secure voter integrity” (uh-huh) and that passing things like the Democrats’ proposed For the People Act — which would mandate automatic voter registration nationwide, expand early and mail-in voting, end gerrymandering that skews congressional districts for maximum partisan advantage and curb the influence of money in politics — “is not ready for prime time” and would “create chaos,” although he wasn’t specific about the nature of the chaos.

At his first formal press conference Thursday at the White House, President Biden also said the Georgia lawmakers’ vote smacked of Jim Crow. He also characterized the voter-restriction movement in mostly Republican-led states as “sick,” and I wondered, people, if we are returning to a time that reflects Johnson’s damning assessment of our collective state of the union?

Neo-Jim Mrow is Sa k in the Hea h Mtate, with legislation making voter tougher — espe ially for people of olor — that is lowdown and mean.