Delivering grit and positivity
Charu Thomas struggled in elementary school and math in particular, but through concentrated effort, she succeeded and eventually excelled. Leveraging her love for math and engineering, she started an augmented reality artificial intelligence software business that aims to make warehouses and the greater supply chain more efficient.
19 min read
Each month, our Journeys of Innovation series tells the stories of inventors or entrepreneurs who have made a positive difference in the world. This month, Jonathan Make's story focuses on Charu Thomas, an entrepreneur and inventor who founded Ox, an augmented reality artificial intelligence software company that originated from a presentation Thomas gave at the 2017 Collegiate Inventors Competition. To learn about other young people making their mark on the world, check out youth inventors and entrepreneurs.
Do you know an innovator or entrepreneur with an interesting story?
In early 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic began its deadly spread, it wasn’t looking good for a 20-something-year-old entrepreneur and her young company. At Charu Thomas’ firm, then called Oculogx, orders suddenly stopped coming in for its software that powers augmented reality (AR) smart glasses worn by warehouse workers. Technology rollouts were impacted as businesses scaled back plans during the initial dark days of the public health crisis.
Oculogx was quickly running out of money. Thomas furloughed all of her employees. Desperate for a financial infusion that could save her company and its employees, the young business owner brainstormed.
Thomas listed every conceivable option she could think of pursuing to preserve cash, generate investments, and create new revenue.
While “some of them [had a] very low likelihood of working out, we had to do whatever it took to make sure we could make payroll,” she said.
The triage list — about a dozen items — ranged in size and scope.
Number one, which she described in retrospect as being “fairly obvious,” was getting a federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) grant. The program provided eligible entities with funds to help “maintain their payroll, hire back employees who may have been laid off, and cover applicable overhead” during the early parts of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the United States Department of the Treasury.
A warehouse worker using smart glasses equipped with Ox’s software. The company was previously known as Oculogx.
(Courtesy of Ox)
Second for Thomas was renegotiating deals with current customers for better payment terms, so Oculogx was paid upfront. Third, the CEO asked her business’ existing investors and advisors for assistance and advice. Fourth, Thomas reached out to all of the would-be investors she had previously turned down, saying this time that her company would accept their money at a lower valuation of the business.
She executed on these strategies in the coming weeks and months “one by one,” she said recently. “I was so freaked out.”
But Thomas and her employees weren’t deterred.
“We were very scrappy and basically tried every option, and a couple of them worked out, others definitely did not,” she added.
The hard work paid off as several items on the list came to fruition: She received two PPP loans totaling just over $90,000 through the U.S. Small Business Administration, the full amount of which was later forgiven, helping her to bring staff back and tide the company over its roughest stretch; customers accelerated payments and investors stepped up; and the company received $3.5 million in the first such cash infusion from investors in its history. Now called Ox, the company’s focus on warehouse efficiency positioned it to thrive once the worst of the global economic fallout was past.
Thomas’ tenacity to set a goal and work tirelessly toward it is a character trait honed years earlier in a different battle of pluses and minuses.
In her early years of elementary school, Thomas got poor grades, especially in her math classes.
“I wasn’t very good at multiplication,” she shared recently.
The young student feared she would never be good at math, certainly not good enough to get into her school district’s gifted and talented program, her dream.
A school portrait of Charu Thomas as a young girl.
(Photo courtesy of Thomas)
What Thomas lacked in knowledge, she made up for in positivity and grit. To catch up with her peers, she knew she needed to work harder and do extra math work — so she did.
It took two years of concerted effort to improve her grades and academic standing, but Thomas’ dream of being accepted into the gifted-talented program was realized in fifth grade.
Having that goal “sparked something in me,” she said. “There are a lot of examples like that throughout my life of something not going the way I wanted it to, necessarily. And typically, my response is to dive in and just put in hours until I can’t [work] anymore.”
Years before the pandemic seized up the global supply chain, Thomas, while in college, had already begun working to provide some of the needed solutions to improve this complex system.
Graduating high school a year early due to her academic excellence, Thomas received a governor’s scholarship in her home state of Georgia and was accepted to the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Although she originally wanted to be a mathematician who “wrote proofs all day” Thomas decided to pursue industrial engineering, which she described as “a practical application for mathematics.”
While Thomas’ background in math and engineering gave her the technical foundation for her future company — especially in software programming — it was the people she met during her time at Georgia Tech who would have the most profound impact on her career.
One such influential mentor was Thad Starner, a professor at the School of Interactive Computing at the university. He runs the school’s Contextual Computing Group and is a co-inventor of Google Glass. Starner’s patents include several wearable and soft electronic devices, which he’s worn in some form in his daily life since 1993 — well before most people could even conceive of the idea beyond the confines of a science-fiction film.
Thomas had originally reached out to the professor during her freshman year. The two failed to connect, so she ended up working with a different professor on logistics technologies.
Charu Thomas wearing smart glasses at the Collegiate Inventors Competition, an event held by the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
(Courtesy of National Inventors Hall of Fame)
The following year, the then-sophomore connected with a fellow undergraduate who worked on wearable tech research in Starner’s lab — presenting another opportunity for an introduction in early 2017.
But when the day of second chances arrived, Thomas, exhausted by her intense courseload, almost decided against trying to meet Starner.
In that moment, she recalled a roommate’s father’s advice: “The best start is showing up.” So, with that voice in her head, she gathered her characteristic resolve and went to Starner’s lab that day.
Through her introduction to Starner, Thomas also met Sarthak Srinivas, another student working with the professor. When the two students realized they were both interested in developing AR products to address supply chain issues, they combined efforts into what later became Ox. (Srinivas is no longer involved with the business.) Together, Starner and Thomas researched order fulfillment and wrote an academic paper she presented at a conference — early experiences that imparted useful entrepreneurial skills.
Charu Thomas and Oculogx’s fellow co-founder, Sarthak Srinivas, pose for a photo at the headquarters of the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
(Courtesy of National Inventors Hall of Fame)
This time period “helped me deal with uncertainty. In research, it’s fully self-directed, especially since I was leading the project,” she said. “It gave me a lot of confidence in my ability to strike out and do something on my own, even though I didn’t necessarily have the knowledge of how to do that” at first.
Thomas made other important connections at Georgia Tech.
The summer after her freshman year, she worked at Martin Brower, which calls itself “McDonald's largest supply chain partner worldwide.” Thomas credits Larry Sweet with giving her the idea of working there. Sweet, then a professor of practice working on robotics at Georgia Tech, was consulting at Martin Brower and observed Thomas’ tenacity.
“She was a self-motivated [person] who could pretty much guide herself,” he recalled. “She was very mature in terms of interacting with people in the warehouse. Within the first week, she made friends with people in the office, the supervisors on the floor. A lot of the reason she wasn’t asking me a lot of questions was that she took the initiative to go out and ask a lot of people” questions.
When it comes to asking questions and curiosity, Thomas credits her mathematical thinking.
“I definitely consider myself to be a ‘jack of all trades, master of none,’” Thomas said. "While in many cases my engineering background was more directly applicable with building products for Ox, my latent interest in mathematics helped me think through problems through the lenses of clarity and curiosity."
At her Martin Brower job, Thomas built simulations of automated storage and retrieval systems, which get inventory in warehouses on the way to customers. These systems can cost millions of dollars and take years to deploy, which could be too costly and take too long for startup companies much smaller than established logistics businesses like Martin Brower. So Thomas turned to artificial intelligence (AI). AI, she believed, could speed up the entire process by giving warehouse workers more information through AR intelligence instead of relying on warehouse machinery and infrastructure. With this AR intel, workers could use this information to better do their jobs of getting products to where they needed to go. No equipment overhauls would be needed, just connected (or "smart") devices worn by employees on the warehouse floor.
This warehouse employee uses a ring scanner that works with the Ox software system to manage inventory.
(Courtesy of Ox)
This AR technology would give warehouse workers the information they need – without flipping through paperwork or taking their eyes off their demanding and often physically intensive tasks – to do their jobs with fewer repetitive actions. Thomas’ software connects with devices like smart glasses to project instructions, directions, and other information literally in front of workers’ eyes as they navigate among thousands of products in cavernous warehouses.
The devices project information in the wearer’s field of vision showing where and how to move products and packages while also identifying which ones to take where and which to leave in place. Ox says this saves companies money and time. It also saves individual workers extra steps during the order picking process — herding products through vast spaces to get them to customers.
“Order picking, while a seemingly simple task, accounts for a whopping 55-65% of warehouse costs,” Ox’s website states. “The power of AR lies in its capacity to overlay digital information onto the physical world, enhancing the user's perception and interaction with” their surroundings.
By using workers’ time more efficiently, Thomas’ AR innovations help warehouses speed up shipments of the products customers buy in physical stores and those bought online to be delivered to homes.
Becoming an inventor and founding a business was not something Thomas envisioned as a young student.
“There are some people who excel at school because they are just a natural. I don’t think that was the path for me,” Thomas said of her early challenges in school. “I was just really pretty gritty.”
Her determination to excel in academics — including her two-year journey to be accepted into the gifted program during elementary school — and later her career was the result of external influences and internal drive.
“Culturally, career and intellectual pursuits and those kinds of things were kind of considered the most important,” Thomas said of her family’s Indian roots.
Charu Thomas receives advice from Radia Perlman, inventor of the Spanning Tree Protocol, during the Collegiate Inventors Competition in 2017.
(Courtesy of National Inventors Hall of Fame)
Growing up, she witnessed how involved her parents were in their careers, especially her multitasking mom who Thomas described as a “workaholic.” Both her parents spent their careers in information technology (IT), having switched to IT from science after leaving India where they earned postgraduate degrees — including her mother’s doctorate.
“It influenced me to be driven and committed,” Thomas said.
Her academic transformation was also due, in part, to inherent positivity.
As a child, her father said Thomas was “full of beans,” an old British English idiom.
“What he was saying is that I have like this really positive energy and spirit and optimism, and that has been a part of my personality since I was a little kid,” she said.
While Thomas’ perspective helped her succeed in business, her innate differences sometimes led others to unfairly target her.
In her community in suburban Atlanta, Thomas at times was treated like an outsider. She recounted being called a terrorist by high school classmates. Thomas said this prepared her to be an outsider — a woman in a male-dominated technology field. Having experienced discrimination fueled her drive to improve other people’s working conditions, she said.
“It imbued a sense of desire for equity and fairness, because I had experienced a sense of what it was like to be outside,” she said. “It definitely did really deeply impact me. If there’s something I really didn’t like, let’s resolve it. There are really critical issues I need to fix.”
Thomas carried this person-focused desire into her invention, which focuses on what she calls human-centered automation. The technology will assist, not substitute for, people, she said.
From Charu Thomas’ second patent, this flow chart depicts items in a warehouse. Her software enables warehouse employees to be more efficient.
“Our whole goal is to transform the narrative around automation from something that replaces humans to something that empowers them,” Thomas reflected. She wants to give frontline employees “the tools and technology that they need to succeed,” noting that her company’s name, Ox, is also shorthand for operator experience.
By helping workers do their jobs more effectively, Thomas’ invention helps to unkink part of the supply chain, moving goods around warehouses so they don’t get slowed by the facilities’ sheer size. AI, she believed, could inexpensively bridge the gap between current logistics reality and the technologically adept and efficient warehouses of the future.
AI is “the only [type of] automation that can be deployed at scale in weeks or months, rather than years,” Thomas said.
Before she commercialized her idea, Thomas needed to protect her intellectual property (IP) with patents and trademarks, so that no one could copy her invention. She got her initial exposure to the concept of IP through tech startup competitions in college, several of which she was a finalist in. Around the time that Thomas started Oculogx (now known as Ox) in May 2017, she began hearing about how patents protect new inventions.
Most impactful was her involvement in the Collegiate Inventors Competition (CIC), a program offered by the National Inventors Hall of Fame (NIHF) in partnership with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The competition provides undergraduate and graduate students the opportunity to speak with patented inventors and industry experts to help advance their own inventions.
Steve Sasson, who judged Charu Thomas in the Collegiate Inventors Competition (CIC), speaks with Rini Paiva from CIC organizer National Inventors Hall of Fame, in 2019 in Las Vegas.
(Photo by Jeff Isaacs/USPTO)
Thomas said that before CIC, “I didn’t really know much about the patenting process.”
During the competition, the budding inventor said she received some questions from judges such as, “Is this even patentable?”
Student innovators present their work to judges and winners are awarded cash prizes. Thomas didn’t win, but she did meet past NIHF inductees and got valuable feedback. Not all of the reactions were inspiring. While others grasped her vision, at least one judge worried her idea lacked merit. As Thomas wrote in 2023 to CIC judge and inventor of the digital camera, Steve Sasson:
“…feedback [was] there were more important problems to be working on than ‘helping Amazon save a few cents.’ At the time, the patenting process was completely opaque to me, so I was initially discouraged by the input from the judges. However, you immediately leapt to our defense and countered that our technology was likely to be covered by a Utility Patent.”
The USPTO has since granted Thomas two patents. Ox also has two trademarks, one for its name and the other for the logo design of its namesake animal.
As Thomas continued in her note to Sasson, “Even though we did not win in the end, I recall leaving the competition with a renewed sense of purpose.” She said her conversations with Sasson at CIC were “early interactions [that] changed the course of my life.”
An image of a snack food that’s to be moved in a warehouse, as depicted in one of Charu Thomas’ granted patents.
In later remarks to NIHF staff, Sasson says he mentioned Thomas as an IP success story.
“She’s a really great example of a young entrepreneur [who’s] utilizing the USPTO,” he said.
Thomas’ first patent was issued in November 2022 for a heads-up display (HUD). The HUD is used by warehouse “pickers” to identify a “fulfillment route” for “target item(s).” She envisions an array of technology, which can also include radiofrequency identification (RFID) readers, barcode scanners, object and image detection, smart watches, speech recognition, and physical cues through haptics.
Thomas got her second patent granted in October 2023. It focuses on out-of-stock items. The AR software identifies an alternative product, finds the best path, and gets it to a transport receptacle.
After graduating in late 2018 from college, Thomas moved herself and Oculogx to Bentonville, Arkansas, the corporate home of retailing giant Walmart. The town hosts numerous companies that do business with Walmart, along with some of Thomas’ customers. In 2019, Thomas attended a business accelerator in Arkansas called Fuel, which gave her tools to help navigate entrepreneurship.
Less than a year later, Forbes placed her on the 30 Under 30 list for Manufacturing & Industry in 2020. Then in her early 20s, Thomas was one of the youngest in her category. The publication noted Ox’s customers included Google and Walmart.
A portrait of Charu Thomas with the trademarked logo of her company, Ox, in the background.
(Courtesy of Ox)
To turn her vision into a product, Thomas initially adapted the kinds of technology behind products like Google Glass and Microsoft HoloLens. Google Glass, introduced in 2012, was one of the first mass-produced inventions of its type. The product didn’t take off widely, though for a time it was used in warehouses. HoloLens, which was unveiled in 2015, is still used in such business settings.
Like virtually all inventors, Thomas encountered business challenges which required pivots in her plans. She had few takers for her initial plan of using 3D diagrams to better load trucks, so she switched to AI. Then Thomas tried to use Microsoft’s HoloLens, which weighed about one pound. This was deemed too heavy for workers to comfortably wear for entire shifts, so she switched to the lighter weight Google Glass. Her software now works on any major type of smart glasses, among other hardware.
As Thomas was improving on her product after getting lifelines to keep her company afloat, the pandemic saw more and more consumers move to online shopping. This created significant growth opportunities for Ox.
“The business that we built is labor automation. That actually resonated a ton, especially as a lot of our customers were growing during the pandemic,” Thomas said. “It was actually beneficial because we were able to use that narrative.”
An Ox billboard in New York City’s Times Square in 2024.
(Photo courtesy of Charu Thomas)
In the 2023 announcement of the company’s latest fundraising, Ox investor David Hall from Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund said that “as we saw during the pandemic, supply chain management has a long way to go before it catches up with the ever-expanding retail market.”
Today, Ox has grown to having 37 full-time equivalent employees. To date, it has raised more than $16 million. Thomas pointed to this fundraising in announcing, in November 2024, that she was becoming Ox’s executive chairman, ceding the CEO title to a longtime employee.
“The past 5.5 years have been an immensely transformative journey,” Thomas wrote on LinkedIn. “Ox has grown into a critical part of supply chain infrastructure.”
Thomas’ ability to turn setbacks into success, combined with her invention mindset, can help her capitalize on this and other challenges, whatever path she takes next.
Credits
Produced by the USPTO’s Office of the Chief Communications Officer. For feedback or questions, please contact inventorstories@uspto.gov.
Story by Jonathan Make. Contributions by Whitney Pandil-Eaton, Linda Hosler, Steven Griffin, Patricia Mallari, Kathy Wang, Veronica Morales, Jessica Reyes, Caitlin McCully, and Lyndsey Ardito. A special thank you to Ashley Hughes, Steve Sasson, Sarthak Srinivas, Larry Sweet, Thad Starner, and Charu Thomas.
References
News & Events, “ARM Institute Hires Larry Sweet as Director of Engineering,” ARM Institute, March 29, 2023. arminstitute.org/news/larry-sweet-director-engineering/
Barbaro, Michael, et al., "The Coronavirus Goes Global" episode of "The Daily" podcast, February 27, 2020. New York Times. nytimes.com/2020/02/27/podcasts/the-daily/coronavirus.html
Barnes, Chris, “A Mathematician at Heart, Changing the World of Retail Supply Chain Management: Charu Thomas," the Supply Chain is Boring podcast. youtube.com/watch?v=IBeYxoJWVaU
Executive order by Biden, Joe, "A Proclamation on Remembering the 1,000,000 Americans Lost to COVID-19," May 12, 2022. The White House. whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2022/05/12/a-proclamation-on-remembering-the-1000000-americans-lost-to-covid-19/
Brown, Doug, “Inspirational Women Leaders of Tech: Charu Thomas of Ox On The Five Things You Need To Know In Order To Create A Very Successful Tech Company,” Authority Magazine. April 5, 2021. medium.com/authority-magazine/inspirational-women-leaders-of-tech-charu-thomas-of-ox-on-the-five-things-you-need-to-know-in-4ce0449021d4
PPP borrower search website, the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency’s Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, accessed on November 18, 2024. pandemicoversight.gov/data-interactive-tools/interactive-dashboards/paycheck-protection-program
Unsigned and undated profile of Charu Thomas, “30 Under 30 - Manufacturing & Industry (2020),” Forbes. forbes.com/profile/charu-thomas/?
Biography webpage for Thad Starner, Georgia Tech, accessed on July 10, 2024. faculty.cc.gatech.edu/~thad/
Contextual Computing Group’s webpage, Georgia Tech, accessed on July 10, 2024. gvu.gatech.edu/research/labs/contextual-computing-group
Curriculum vitae webpage for Thad Starner, Georgia Tech, accessed on July 11, 2024. faculty.cc.gatech.edu/~thad/01_cv.htm
"Students Selected as Finalists in National Invention Competition," Georgia Tech News Center. September 26, 2017. news.gatech.edu/news/2017/09/26/students-selected-finalists-national-invention-competition
Biography of Larry Sweet, Georgia Tech Supply Chain and Logistics Institute, Accessed July 11, 2024. scl.gatech.edu/users/larry-sweet
“Glass Enterprise Edition Announcement FAQ,” Google, support webpage, accessed on July 10, 2024. support.google.com/glass-enterprise/customer/answer/13417888
Hale, Tyler, “Augmenting Her Reality,” AMP Magazine – Arkansas Money & Politics. September 4, 2019. armoneyandpolitics.com/augmenting-reality-charu-thomas/
Hale, Tyler, “Ox Secures $3.5 Million in Seed Funding to Expand Operations,” AMP Magazine – Arkansas Money & Politics. March 2, 2021. armoneyandpolitics.com/ox-secures-3-5-million-in-seed-funding-to-expand-operations/
Knoll, Corina, "Panicked Shoppers Empty Shelves as Coronavirus Anxiety Rises," March 13, 2020. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/nyregion/coronavirus-panic-buying.html
Sasson, Steve. Phone interview by Jonathan Make. July 30, 2024.
Starner, Thad. Phone interview by Jonathan Make. November 14, 2024.
Sweet, Larry. Phone interview by Jonathan Make. August 6, 2024.
Thomas, Charu. Phone interviews by Jonathan Make. July 10 and 12, 2024.
Thomas, Charu. Video interview by Jonathan Make and Jessica Reyes. May 30, 2024.
Thomas, Charu. Video interview by Jonathan Make. July 29, 2024.
Thomas, Charu. Video interview by Jonathan Make. September 18, 2024.
Thomas, Charu. Video interview by Jonathan Make. September 25, 2024.
Martin-Brower Global - About Us, Accessed June 27, 2024. martinbrower.com/about-us
McBride, Sarah, “With HoloLens, Microsoft aims to avoid Google's mistakes,” Reuters. May 23, 2016. reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-hololens-idUSKCN0YE1LZ/
McCully, Caitlin, “Meet Charu Thomas: Patented Inventor, Technology Trailblazer and Successful CEO,” National Inventors Hall of Fame (NIHF). July 21, 2023. invent.org/blog/inventors/meet-charu-thomas
“Take Your Innovation to the Next Level With Our Collegiate Inventors Competition,” webpage of the Collegiate Inventors Competition, published by the NIHF, accessed on July 8, 2024. www.invent.org/collegiate-inventors
"Congress to Vote on Coronavirus Rescue Package," unbylined, March 12, 2020. New York Times. nytimes.com/2020/03/12/world/coronavirus-live-news-updates.html#link-12cbfecb
"Ox: How AR Technology Can Improve Order Picking," Ox corporate blog. November 28, 2023. getox.com/blog/ox-how-ar-technology-can-improve-order-picking
“Ox Raises $12.6M to Pioneer Human Centered AI to Dramatically Improve Frontline Supply Chain Operations,” Resources & Insights section of Ox’s website. April 24, 2023. getox.com/blog/ox-announces-series-a-funding
Srinivas, Sarthak. Emails to Jonathan Make. July 24 and 30, 2024.
Starner, Thad Eugene et al., U.S. Patent No. 8228315, “Methods and systems for a virtual input device.” Published by the USPTO on July 24, 2012. ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloadPdf/8228315
Tardif, Antoine, “Charu Thomas, Founder and CEO of Ox – Interview Series,” unite.AI. March 31, 2021. unite.ai/charu-thomas-founder-and-ceo-of-ox-interview-series/
Thomas, Charu. Email to Jonathan Make. July 10, 2024.
Thomas, Charu. Email to Steve Sasson. February 28, 2023.
Thomas, Charu. Email to Jonathan Make. July 10, 2024.
Thomas, Charu. Email to Jonathan Make. July 12, 2024.
Thomas, Charu. Email to Jonathan Make. November 4, 2024.
Thomas, Charu. Email to Jonathan Make. November 6, 2024.
Thomas, Charu. Email to Steve Sasson. February 28, 2023.
Thomas, Charu. Post on LinkedIn, November 8, 2024. linkedin.com/posts/charuthomas_i-am-excited-to-share-that-i-have-officially-activity-7260664523978649600-TUGw?
Thomas, Charu, U.S. Patent No. 11488235, “Systems, methods, and devices for utilizing wearable technology to facilitate fulfilling customer orders.” Published by the USPTO on November 1, 2022. ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloadPdf/11488235
Thomas, Charu, U.S. Patent No. 11783405, “Device, medium, and method for utilizing wearable technology to facilitate fulfilling customer orders.” Published by the USPTO on October 10, 2023. ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloadPdf/11783405
Thomas, Charu, Trademark application No. 97761378, published by the USPTO in the Trademark Official Gazette. May 28, 2024. tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=97/761,378&caseSearchType=US_APPLICATION&caseType=DEFAULT&searchType=statusSearch
Thomas, Charu, Trademark application No. 97761400, published by the USPTO in the Trademark Official Gazette. May 28, 2024. tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=97/761,400&caseSearchType=US_APPLICATION&caseType=DEFAULT&searchType=statusSearch
Paycheck Protection Program website, Treasury Department, accessed on November 14, 2024. home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/coronavirus/assistance-for-small-businesses/paycheck-protection-program
Weisman, Jonathan, "Racists Once Terrorized This Georgia County. Diversity Made It Prosper," The New York Times. May 19, 2022. nytimes.com/2022/05/19/us/politics/replacement-theory-georgia.html
