Residents may voice their concerns for the extreme levels of racial division being used as a political tool to achieve unjust racial political ends by emailing Mayor Skip Henderson directly at SkipHenderson@columbusga.org, while cc’ing their respective city council members on the email.

COLUMBUS, Ga. — “By the next two elections, there will be a black mayor and a black council.” — City Manager Isaiah Hugley, in the most racist statement a city officer could make, stated publicly at the Greater Beallwood Baptist Church, Feb. 24, 2023.

The statement made by Hugley disgustingly placed the color of people’s skin as the qualifier for who — according to him — will be in office, regardless of the constitutionally democratic elections required by our city, state, and nation. 

What Hugley stated is the manifestation of coordinated political efforts to illegally pursue — let’s say that again: illegally — pursue the totalitarian selection of our city’s elected officials based on the color of their skin. 

This isn’t only an illegal thing for Hugley to openly state as an appointed city officer. It is a disgustingly unethical one that violates the Code of Ethics of our City Charter.

Look around you. Look at the state of our city. 

Look. At. It. 

Hard. 

Have you noticed the extreme increase of murder taking place throughout our city at rates more than five- and a-half times the rest of the country?

What about the extreme increase of drug overdose deaths in Muscogee County which have doubled from 2020-2022?

How about our city’s poverty level which is now twice the national average?

For the most vulnerable Columbusites, these realities are impossible to ignore. 

For the less vulnerable, they are just now beginning to witness their realities first-hand as shootings, murder, and violent crime continue to spread to the most affluent parts of our city. 

Have you noticed?

Have you questioned why?

If you haven’t noticed, anyone with more than two brain cells can logically identify that police chief Freddie Blackmon’s incompetence is the reason for his tumultuous career-ender. It doesn’t take a degree in criminology nor twenty years of Police experience to string together the city’s crime rates, lack of officers, and the fact that said officers are resigning because of Blackmon’s ineptitude. 

It also doesn’t take a degree in communications nor a tenure as a military general to string together that Blackmon’s inability to form a coherent sentence whilst briefing the slides of his own presentation — that a hired consultant developed, mind you — are intolerable displays of his insane lack of martial leadership ability. That ‘plan’ by the way rests solely upon literally bribing his officers not to quit, using funds that do not exist within the department’s budget that he himself dictates. 

Not to mention that four — count them: four professional studies conducted over the course of two years all independently identified that Blackmon’s lack of leadership ability has been the sole reason for the demise of our police department. 

Nonetheless, according to Hugley, all of this was somehow just a big coordinated effort to oust a black man from a position because the entire city is somehow ‘racist.’

You’d have to be an idiot to believe that. 

Unfortunately, many have and continue to answer that call for idiots. 

As the rates of murder, violent crime, poverty, and drug use all continued to turn our city into the next Detroit, others have exposed themselves to be aiding and abetting Hugley in his blatantly-selfish and abysmally-racist ambitions to fulfill his race-based political agenda — all while Hugley is an appointed officer of our city who serves at the leisure of city council. 

Wane Hailes, the head of the Columbus NAACP, has continued to make insanely outlandish and illogical claims in support of Hugley’s openly-racist agenda: at city council meetings, in public forums at churches, in his laughably-misspelled and extremely-racist ‘newspaper,’ and even in a recently-leaked email which may well wind up incriminating him through four separate criminal charges under Georgia State law. 

That email, by the way, explicitly stated that black city councilors must vote how Hailes wants them to — along racial lines — or else they should be subjected to undue political pressure and shame.

Hailes stated in writing that he and his followers plan to “force council to vote '' and that they “will not accept '' city councilors exercising their sacred duty to vote as they choose; they must vote how he wants them to, ‘or else.’

Don’t forget: all of this is because our city’s duly-elected legislative representatives have rightfully and lawfully decided that the incompetence of an appointed city officer — police chief Freddie Blackmon — is a matter of public safety for the welfare and security of our city’s residents. 

But to Hailes, the color of the man’s skin is the only thing that matters. 

To Hailes, competence is irrelevant;  so long as the guy in charge is black, it doesn’t matter what the crime rate is. 

Look around you. 

Is the state of our city acceptable to you?

Are you happy with the murder rate being more than five times the rest of the country?

Do you feel safe?

How many more of your loved ones; your neighbors; your friends need to be murdered in our streets before you realize that there aren’t enough police officers because they cannot tolerate Chief Blackmon’s insane incompetence?

To men like Isaiah Hugley and Wane Hales, your answer doesn’t matter. All that matters is skin color as the city continues to decay and people continue to die. 

Unlike Hugley and Hailes, we at the Muckraker will judge them both by the content of their character and never by the color of their skin — and their character is despicably racist, selfish, and psychopathically-uncaring for the welfare, safety, and security of our city.

Based on their continued overt and public actions, all that matters to Hugley and Hailes is skin color — and our city will not tolerate that.  

If we had to guess, these absolute idiots of bigoted human beings will likely have their own undoing and ironic refutation served to them on a cold plate as they become the laughing stock of the southeast. 

If those two lunatics are reading this: it isn’t too late to come clean. Just stop. We would all much rather everyone just get along and work to create a safer city instead. Unity — true unity — is a much better plan for building a legacy than you continuously going on-the-record making racially-bigoted statements that will be judged by generations to come. Your grandchildren will thank you, and so will the rest of the city. 

Or, if not: you'll likely be recalled and prosecuted, as our city and its 205,617 residents are done — done — with your purposefully-engineered racial divisiveness.  Done. 

Your call. 

Residents may voice their concerns for the extreme levels of racial division being used as a political tool to achieve unjust racial political ends by emailing Mayor Skip Henderson directly at SkipHenderson@columbusga.org, while cc’ing their respective city council members on the email.

Facts are stubborn things — and we’ll keep publishing them, whether city officials like them or not.

-30-

© 2023 Muscogee Muckraker. All rights reserved.

Be sure to follow Muscogee Muckraker on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to see all the muck that’s fit to print as it breaks throughout the coming week.