Gov. Kemp signed Georgia voter-suppression law under a portrait of a brutal Southern plantation
This is what you call bad optics. Like really, really bad. Oedipus seeing Jocasta bad. (Yeah, my references are really old, but I couldn’t find a way to plausibly work Match Game into this one.)
So you know that awful, awful Jim Crow-style voter suppression bill Georgia just passed? Well, the way they’re going it’s going to end up being an African American voter-drive bill. Because the outrages just keep on comin’.
Will Bunch is an opinion columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, but he’s trotting out lots of facts in this Twitter thread about Gov. Brian Kemp’s bill signing. (Recall, too, that they arrested a Black state representative last night who wanted to watch this affront to decency unfold.)
If you don’t do Twitter, click here to see this thread.
2. Notice the antebellum-style portrait behind Kemp as he signs the suppression law? Thanks to Twitter crowdsourcing and particularly @TheSeaFarmer, I can report the measure to limit Black voting was signed under the image of a notorious slave plantation in Wilkes County, GA
— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) March 26, 2021
4. Today, the Callaway Plantation is a 56-acre historic site where — as the ExploreGeorgia website cheerily notes — tourists can get "a glimpse into the by-gone era of working plantations in the agricultural South." https://t.co/BslVZYLSC4
— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) March 26, 2021
6. The harsh reality of life for slaves in the era of the Callaway Plantation is captured in this oral-history "slave narrative" of Mariah Callaway, a woman who was born into slavery on the plantation in 1852. In her account, she notes that… https://t.co/oW8Pq5tf0y
— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) March 26, 2021
8. Visitors today to the Callaway Plantation say this legacy of inhumanity is downplayed. One wrote on Trip Advisor the slave cabin "is hidden in some trees and mentioned as an afterthought and something you can go to and look at yourself." https://t.co/RYtMkpwif1
— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) March 26, 2021
10. …enacted a series of harsh Jim Crow laws to segregate all public facilities and block Black people from voting. The state, for all of Atlanta's "Too Busy To Hate" bluster, was a KKK hotbed in the 1960s' civil rights era, and in the 1980s…
— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) March 26, 2021
12. …of Kemp signing this bill — that makes it illegal to give water to voters waiting on the sometimes 10-hour lines that state policies create in mostly Black precincts — under the image of a brutal slave plantation is almost too much to bear.
— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) March 26, 2021
14… that took place behind the placid scenery of Brickhouse Road in Wilkes County, to the suppression now hidden behind a phony facade of "voter integrity." This legacy is a crime against humanity, and it cannot stand – 30 –
— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) March 26, 2021
Not a whole lot to add to that except, well, it’s a fitting portrait for what they’re doing. Bull Connor and his dogs might have been a bit more on the nose, but hey, that would just be crass, now wouldn’t it? This is just an anodyne pastoral setting that Georgia officials will now claim as part of their lofty “heritage.”
Nothing to see here. Now move along.
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