Margaret Coker, the editor-in-chief, started her two-decade career in journalism at Cox Newspapers before going to work at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. In that time she covered stories from 32 countries on four continents.
Margaret has won numerous national journalism prizes for investigative, business and diplomatic reporting as well as feature writing. She led a team of Wall Street Journal reporters named as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting in 2017.
For almost two years, as Brunswick and Glynn County came to grips with the racially motivated murder of Ahmaud Arbery, community organizations have been lobbying for removal of the stark reminder of Coastal Georgia’s legacy of white supremacy and slavery.
In a 20-page motion filed in Glynn County Superior Court on Wednesday, Jackie Johnson’s lawyers asked for the two charges brought by Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr against her to be dropped, calling the accusations “wholly specious, unjust” and “an impermissible, politically motivated ‘hit job.'” It claims that within 3 hours of Ahmaud Arbery’s death that Glynn County police decided not to charge the men involved.
Ahmaud Arbery’s death sparked a small group of acquaintances to band together to try to force Glynn County to confront the many failures of its law enforcement and other elected officials. Their group, A Better Glynn, wields a powerful combination of local roots, national experience and professional know-how.
The most common encounter between police and the public is the traffic stop, and in Glynn County Black drivers are more often ticketed than white drivers, in relation to their percentage of the population, according to three years of records that the police department provided to The Current.
A six-month investigation of Glynn County police records and court documents by The Current show a persistent lack of accountability among county law enforcement that stretches back a decade.
