Black Southerners are wielding political power that was denied their parents and grandparents

The Democrats' stunning victories in Georgia were partly the result of generations of African Americans moving to Atlanta and the Deep South -- reversing their ancestors' northward migration patterns and changing the electorate.

There was one place, though, that her mother dreaded visiting: the Deep South. Her mother saw it as a forbidding land of lynch mobs and "Whites Only" signs, where Black people went missing just for trying to vote. Burton's mother grew up in segregated Virginia and was so mistrustful of the South she once dissuaded her daughter from vacationing in Atlanta and encouraged her to visit the Bahamas instead.