Singleton Funeral Home

Earlier that day, Singleton, who is African-American, like the majority of the town’s residents, had filmed Royce Reeves, Sr.—a forty-six-year-old barber and an elected city commissioner—receiving a ticket for illegally parking a limousine on Highway 19. Reeves, who is also black, had recently borrowed the vehicle to take poor or unmotivated residents to the polls to vote early. (I wrote about one such ride for this week’s issue of The New Yorker.) He twice voted for Barack Obama, then Donald Trump, and is now an outspoken supporter of Stacey Abrams, the African-American Democrat running for governor of Georgia; by November 6th, Reeves expected to assist as many as four hundred Abrams voters. Along the way, he often shouted out the window of the limo at passersby, which was out of the ordinary in a quiet town otherwise best known for its watermelons.Moments after one state patroller engaged Reeves on the side of the highway, more law-enforcement vehicles began to show up. “It’s stupid. Look at them,” Singleton tells another observer in the video. “They called all that backup.” She went on, counting law-enforcement vehicles surrounding the white limo, which was on loan from the J. W. Williams funeral home. “One, two, three, four.” Someone else said, “Six cars!” Singleton went on, “Seven. . . . That’s a crying shame. On one little person. And the man driving the funeral-home car.”Reeves told me he’d driven past the first patroller, who was ticketing someone else, then made a left and went a few blocks farther—beyond the view of the patroller—to talk to a man about his commissioner work. “They turned the lights on me,” he told me. ”And the guy, one of the troopers, when he got out of the car he spoke to me ugly. I said, ‘I’m not a criminal. If you’re gonna give me a ticket for being improperly parked, give me a ticket.’ They called in a bunch more troopers.” Reeves added, “They knew ...