Joe Wilkinson, a fifth-generation Atlantan, worked at the Coca-Cola Company for about a quarter century, beginning in 1977, and eventually became the executive assistant to the president of Coca-Cola International. But the most difficult moment of his tenure, he told me recently, came early on, when he was a spokesman for the company in the U.S. It was the early eighties, and Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow PUSH Coalition were leading a boycott of Coke, demanding that the company, which has been headquartered in Atlanta since the late nineteenth century, invest thirty million dollars into Black-owned businesses and place a Black executive on its board of directors. “There was a robust debate within the company,” Wilkinson said. “It was a fraught moment. But it all comes down to money.” Coke agreed to Jackson’s request, which Wilkinson, who is white, described as a “capitulation.” “I think it was the wrong move,” he said, “but it was made at the highest levels.” Wilkinson described a news conference at which the president of Coke at the time, Don Keough, appeared with Jackson. “Don said, ‘I feel like I’m being ordained,’ ” Wilkinson recalled. “And Jesse Jackson turns and says, ‘Well, you’ve been preached to enough.’ ” (A spokesperson for Coke told me, of Jackson, “We greatly appreciate the collaboration and dialogue we’ve had with him and his organization over the years.” Jackson did not reply to a request for comment.)
Wilkinson left Coke and became a Republican legislator, representing a conservative corner of the Atlanta metro area in the Georgia House from 2001 to 2017. In his view, the Coca-Cola company has just capitulated again. Coke stayed mum during debates about the so-called Election Integrity Act, a new Georgia voting law that Joe Biden has called “un-American” and which Stacey Abrams’s advocacy group, Fair Fight Action, described as “Jim Crow 2.0.” In the past, the company, through a political-action committee, had given money to multiple sponsors of the bill—along with many other politicians, including a number of Democrats. (The company suspended political contributions following the riot on the Capitol in January.) Then, earlier this month, Coke’s C.E.O., James Quincey, issued a statement condemning the law. “The Coca-Cola Company does not support this legislation, as it makes it harder for people to vote, not easier,” the belated statement read. Other companies, including Delta Air Lines, which is also based in Atlanta, criticized the law, too. Major League Baseball pulled the All-Star Game from Georgia, and an upcoming Will Smith production called “Emancipation,” which was scheduled to be shot in Georgia, will be going elsewhere. Now some Republicans are threatening retaliatory measures. “Voting is a foundational right in America,” the Coca-Cola spokesperson told me, “and we think it’s appropriate for us to stand up for what we believe in and for what is important to our employees and the people of the state we’ve called home for 135 years.”
Wilkinson told me that he’s read the voting bill and that it expands voting rights, rather than restricting them. Analysts continue to debate the likely effects of the bill, which was introduced by Republicans in the wake of false claims by former President Donald Trump that the election in November was rigged in Georgia and elsewhere, and amid efforts by Republican politicians in most states to newly limit or restrict voting. Though the Georgia bill requires seventeen days of early voting—and allows for two optional Sundays—it makes it harder to acquire an absentee ballot, just about bans mobile voting centers, prohibits giving out water within a hundred and fifty feet of precincts, and confers greater power over the electoral process to the state legislature. Wilkinson told me that he is convinced that the bill was meant to do good. “I know the authors,” he said. “I know their intent.” I asked him whether he thought the results of the Presidential election were fair and accurate. He said he had his doubts.
For Coca-Cola, the latest political kerfuffle has echoes that go well beyond the Rainbow PUSH boycott. As Bart Elmore, the author of “Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism,” put it to me, “Coca-Cola is not an innocent victim caught in a crossfire between right-wing boycotters and ‘woke’ liberal activists. It is facing a long overdue reckoning with a Jim Crow past that still shapes Georgia politics today and one that for decades the company quietly accepted.”
Coke, which originally included traces of cocaine, was invented by a former lieutenant colonel in the Confederate Army named John Pemberton, who became addicted to morphine after he was wounded in the last weeks of the Civil War. Pemberton, a pharmacist, sold the formula to a fellow-druggist, Asa Griggs Candler, and for years it could be found only at white soda fountains. Then Candler sold the bottling rights, making the beverage more widely available. Candler removed cocaine from the recipe, in 1903, not because the drug was illegal—it wasn’t, yet—but because it had become connected in the white imagination with Black men. “The rumors then were that Black men were drinking Coke, getting high on it, and raping white women,” Mark Pendergrast, the author of “For God, Country, and Coca-Cola,” told me. The company wanted to minimize any association between the soft drink and Black consumers. “They had no Blacks in their ads during the Depression, other than to show them as Aunt Jemima types, or servants holding a tray of Coke,” Pendergrast said.
By then, the company had been taken over by Robert Woodruff, a college dropout from a wealthy Georgia family who kept Black servants on the family’s South Georgia plantation and once said that allowing Black people to vote was “like giving monkeys the vote.” But choosing to ignore Black customers carried an increasing economic cost; Coke finally began to advertise in Jet and Ebony, in the fifties, after Pepsi started making inroads on Coke’s market share by advertising to Black customers. Then the civil-rights movement forced the company’s hand. When Martin Luther King, Jr., won the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1964, much of Atlanta’s white business community planned to boycott a local ceremony, until J. Paul Austin, then the president of Coca-Cola, insisted that they do otherwise. Coke soon hired Ray Charles—who eventually switched to Pepsi—and a number of other Black performers. By that point, Atlanta had embraced the nickname “the city too busy to hate,” or, as James Baldwin put it, “the city too busy (making money) to hate.”
King did not stop criticizing the company, however: in his very last speech, he told his listeners “to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola,” along with products from a few other companies, “because they haven’t been fair in their hiring policies.” Even so, when King was assassinated, in 1968, Woodruff sent the company jet to Coretta Scott King to take to Atlanta for the funeral, which he helped pay for.
The accusations that Coke’s hiring practices were racist did not go away. In the late nineties, four former and current employees filed a lawsuit accusing the company of systemic bias against Black employees. (Bart Elmore’s father was a partner at the firm that represented the employees.) Finn Findley, who worked for Coke in operations and marketing for twenty years, recalled the episode. “Two weeks before the shareholders’ meeting that year,” he said, “I get a call from the C.E.O.’s office that’s, like, ‘Hey, there are gonna be a couple buses of people up there that are suing the company for discrimination. Can you make them feel welcome?’ ” Findley went on, “I’m this low-level guy. I’m, like, ‘What do you want me to do? Put up a stand and serve Cokes?’ How about not discriminating against these people? That would help. But it’s a little late now.” Still, he noted, the company didn’t fight the case, settling the suit, in 2000, for $192.5 million. “When it was brought to their attention, they were, like, ‘Yeah, it doesn’t look right,’ ” Findley said. “I’m sure they weren’t excited about paying hundreds of millions of dollars, but they didn’t make a big stink about it.” The Coca-Cola spokesperson told me that the company settled the lawsuit “because it was the right thing to do,” and that the company was unable to confirm Findley’s account of the incident. Pendergrast told me, “They want to placate all sides and to try to appear like the good guy. That’s their normal approach. But the bottom line is what usually drives things.”
After Coca-Cola issued its statement criticizing the voting law, many Republicans, in Georgia and beyond, decided that it was their turn to call for a boycott. Legislators dramatically removed the soft drink from their offices. Trump called for a boycott of Coke and other “woke” companies—although a picture posted on Twitter by Stephen Miller two days later appeared to include a partially obscured Diet Coke bottle behind Trump’s phone. (The former President reportedly drinks twelve of them a day.)
Gabriel Sterling, who works in the Georgia secretary of state’s office, and who won over Democrats earlier this year for his clear and repeated denunciations of Trump’s election-fraud claims, insisted that the Election Integrity Act has been misconstrued. “It expands early voting and the ID requirements will lower absentee rejection rates,” he wrote on Twitter. As for Coke, he told me, “I know people who’ve sold all their Coke stock. I know people who won’t drink it now. But none of that will really hurt Coke.” He was sipping a Coke Zero as we talked. “I’m against boycotts in general, and in this case,” he said, adding that any economic fallout from the bill would be the fault of Abrams and other Democrats pushing the “false” narrative that the bill restricts voting.
Chuck Hufstetler, a state senator in northwest Georgia, who was among the very few Republican officials in the state to publicly dispute Donald Trump’s false claim that massive voter fraud took place in the Presidential election, also defended the law. Like Wilkinson, Hufstetler worked for Coke early in his career, in quality control, just after he graduated from college, four decades ago. (The Coca-Cola company, through its PAC, has donated money to Hufstetler in the past.) He was one of a handful of Republicans who voted against the original version of the Election Integrity Act, but he supported the version that ultimately passed, and he noted, in an interview, that Georgia’s election laws were not out of line with those of Delaware, Biden’s home state, or New York. This has become a common talking point among Georgia Republicans, but, while a number of states with Democrat-controlled legislatures have restrictions on voting, many of those legislatures have taken steps to expand voting access. Delaware, for instance, has already passed a law establishing early in-person voting; it goes into effect next year. Also, its state election laws do not specifically prohibit the distribution of food and water.
Hufstetler has a forgiving interpretation of Coke’s decision to speak out against the bill. “It’s long,” he said. “I think maybe they heard some of the earlier stuff and just didn’t read the final bill,” which is nearly a hundred pages. He’s heard some colleagues talk about boycotting Coke, and I asked whether he would. “For health reasons, I don’t drink any soft drinks anymore,” he said. “Too much sugar.” He had a hard time imagining folks in his district giving it up, “or, God forbid, switching to Pepsi.” Joe Wilkinson, for his part, got up to get himself a Diet Coke in the middle of our conversation. “I’m continuing to drink products of the Coca-Cola Company,” he said. He had no plans to stop flying Delta, either; his wife worked there for years.
Finn Findley, the former Coke employee, said that the boycotts struck him as grandstanding, noting that Coca-Cola is a “huge global company,” and that the U.S. is “maybe a third of the total sales volume.” Those paying close and critical attention to this controversy were just a fraction of that. Pendergrast, the author of “For God, Country and Coca-Cola,” also took a global view, remarking that the company has faced accusations of depleting India’s aquifers, of turning a blind eye to Latin American bottlers who allegedly hired death squads to kill union employees, and of contributing to an obesity epidemic. “This isn’t huge,” he said, “stacked up against the allegations of obesity, of murderous death squads, of mistreating the environment and people of India, of being racist. I think it’ll blow over.”
