Georgia GOP's Fond Return To A By-Gone Era: No Voting Or Knocking on Doors While Black

The outrageous, and illegal, arrest of a black female state legislator was only part of Kemp’s problematic visuals surrounding the bill. Clueless about even token diversity, his office released a photo of him proudly signing the bill – to make it “easy to vote, hard to cheat,” thus repeating “the big lie”- surrounded by a phalanx of henchmen so blindingly white they begged for KKK hoods to be photoshopped in. Behind them – see picture vs 1,000 words – hung a painting of Callaway Plantation, an actual slave plantation, home to one of the era’s largest slaveholders and a “monument to Georgia’s history of brutal white supremacy,” from slavery to Jim Crow segregation to Klan assaults to today’s voter purges and mass incarceration. “Sometimes, America’s legacy of white supremacy is hiding in plain sight, literally,” writes Will Bunch; by using the painting “as a backdrop for signing a bill that would make it a crime to hand water to a thirsty voter waiting on Georgia’s sometimes hours-long voter lines, the GOP governor was sending a clear message about race and human rights in the American South.” The painting, titled “Brickhouse Road,” shows part of the plantation that’s now a 56-acre historic site, where tourists can get “a glimpse into the by-gone era of working plantations in the agricultural South,” complete with movie night, ghost hunts, horse shows, craft fairs, and a time travelers camp for kids to play at butter-making and period dress-up. Activities do not include re-creating slaves running away and hounds biting “plugs out of their legs,” or, says Uju Anya, lawmakers’ “genocidal ancestors” raping, maiming, torturing, terrorizing and literally working to death over 300 black slaves. The image displayed as “sons of the white planter class” try to restrict black Georgians’ right to vote and challenge their power, she furiously notes, reflects “the criminal legacy that gave them that power, and the blood money which continues to nurture it.”