This was previously posted on my blog Bluestate Georgia
The Georgia GOP, like the national GOP would really like to shake the widely held observation that they are the party of older white men. They don't want to make changes in their attitudes toward minorities, but they'd like to present a better public relations face. They would love to stamp out the White House watermelon patch post cards, Obama food stamp cartoons, witch doctor cartoons and t-shirts, and racist conspiracy theories which swirl around in the GOP base like an uncontrollable maelstrom.
At the same time RNC chair Rince Priebus was meeting with African-American Republicans in Atlanta, the Douglas County GOP was denying a seat at the GOP's state convention to the chair of the Georgia Black Republican Council. The incident is summarized in this article, with updates, from Political Insider, Jim Galloway's column and blog at the AJC
A short summary is that on a 3-2 racially split vote, the Douglas County GOP board denied Michael McNeely a seat at the convention. Due to the ensuing embarrassment and "bad optics", as someone called it, the state party overruled the vote of the Douglas County GOP (the details on how this was done are not clear to me at this time).
Douglas County is a county on the verge of turning blue. The non-Hispanic white population of the county is in decline, and has dropped to 48.5 % as of the 2010 census. Furthermore Obama won the county in 2008 and 2012. The county is on the verge of becoming solidly Democratic. The changing demographics combined with behavior like this from the GOP will likely speed up this transition and make it irreversible.