Understanding the symbolism of Georgia’s voter suppression
Sometimes America’s legacy of white supremacy is hiding in plain sight, literally. When Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed a hastily passed voter suppression law that many are calling the new, new Jim Crow on Thursday night, surrounded by a half-dozen white men, he did so in front of a painting of a plantation where more than 100 Black people had been enslaved.
The fitting symbolism is somehow both shocking and unsurprising. In using the antebellum image of the notorious Callaway Plantation — in a region where enslaved Black people seeking freedom were hunted with hounds — in Wilkes County, Georgia, as the backdrop for signing a bill that would make it a crime to hand water to a thirsty voter waiting in Georgia’s sometimes hourslong voter lines, the GOP governor was sending a clear message about race and human rights in the American South.
The portrait of the plantation was the starkest reminder of Georgia’s history of white racism that spans slavery, Jim Crow segregation, the rebirth of the modern Ku Klux Klan and today’s voter purges targeting Black and brown voters — but it wasn’t the only one. At the very moment that Kemp was signing the law with his all-white posse, a Black female Georgia lawmaker — Rep. Park Cannon — who’d knocked on the governor’s door in the hopes of watching the bill signing was instead dragged away and arrested by state troopers, in a scene that probably had the Deep South’s racist sheriffs of yesteryear like Bull Connor
or Jim Clark smiling in whatever fiery hellhole they now inhabit.
On one level this new voter-suppression law — “voter integrity,” in the modern GOP’s Orwellian branding — is inspired by the current and possible future events of ex-President Donald Trump’s Big Lie about fraud in the 2020 election, the narrow upset wins in Georgia for President Joe Biden and two new Democratic senators, and the threat that voting icon Stacey Abrams poses to Kemp in the 2022 election. But there’s also a powerful pull back to Georgia past. That link is made clear by the history hanging right behind Kemp on Thursday.
As Kemp’s tweet of the closed-door bill-signing ceremony was making the rounds Thursday night, I had questions about the Old South-looking scene that the governor’s office had centered in the photo. Thanks to crowdsourcing and specifically the help of my Twitter pal Brendan McGinn, I learned that the painting is called “Brickhouse Road — Callaway PLNT” (PLNT for “Plantation … subtle, right?) by Siberian-born artist Olessia Maximenko, who now resides in the area of Wilkes County in east-central Georgia.
Today, the Callaway Plantation is a 56-acre historic site where — as the Explore Georgia website cheerily notes — tourists can get “a glimpse into the by-gone era of working plantations in the agricultural South.” The promotional sites gloss over the fact that by the time of the Civil War, the Callaway Plantation only thrived because of the back-breaking labor of at least 100 enslaved people and perhaps many more who were held in cruel human bondage.
In Washington, it’s more imperative than even that the Senate ditch the filibuster to pass the two federal voting laws. As for Georgia, Major League Baseball needs to strip metro Atlanta of the 2021 All-Star Game immediately, and stronger steps — including a boycott — need to be on the table. This is an all-hands-on-deck situation to save democracy and end systemic racism. Brian Kemp has reminded us that — just like in Faulkner’s Mississippi — that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.”