It’s what Walker did, even as some Black students took to calling him “honky-lover” and “Uncle Tom,” while a white teammate said it “helped” that he “stayed neutral.” And it’s what he kept doing, from his standout stint in college in Athens 100 miles north to his more uneven time as a pro that included playing for a team owned by Trump to his life as an entrepreneur after that. Walker believed, he said, not in “Black and white” but in “right and wrong,” according to a biography published in 1983. “I never really liked,” he wrote in his memoir in 2009, “the idea that I was to represent my people. My parents raised me to believe that I represented humanity — people — and not black people, white people, yellow people, or any other color …”

But after a lifetime of mainly steering clear of making head-on comments on matters of racial conflict, Walker only relatively recently began to more overtly engage in the political arena — and did so on behalf of a polarizing white celebrity-politician who had earned a reputation for stoking the very racial divisions Walker says he was taught and inclined to evade. In 2015, in the initial stages of the presidential bid of his former employer, Walker made known his support for Trump. And in only the last couple years, in the wake of the murders of George Floyd in Minnesota and Ahmaud Arbery a few hours away here in Georgia, as Black Lives Matter and critical race theory and the fight for voting rights have come to define the rifts in the nation’s discordant political discourse, Walker has talked more and more about race — and in ways that echo if not outright reiterate the worldview he began to express when his out-of-the-way hometown more than 40 years back became an unlikely capital of the perpetual struggle for racial justice…

“It will matter,” Democratic consultant Rich McDaniel told me. “In rural counties, places where UGA flags fly year-round, places where Grandpa might’ve been a Klansman but I’m not, he’ll get their vote if for no other reason than they get to wear it as a I’m-not-a-racist badge,” said Republican pundit Mike Hassinger. “Herschel Walker’s race will be a good test case,” added Democratic operative Kevin Harris, “where even if you are a candidate of color, can you run a race-neutral campaign in the South?”