Joe.My.God. LGBT News
News One reports:
Adding insult to injury, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp appeared to metaphorically thumb his nose at his Black critics in particular by signing the state’s voter suppression bill into law while seated in front of a painting of a “back-breaking” plantation that “thrived” from slave labor. Kemp signed the bill Thursday evening amid national outcry at the restrictions the new law would disproportionately place on Black and brown people.
The Daily Beast reports:
A guide from Georgia Council of the Arts confirms the painting is titled Brickhouse Road (Callaway PLNT). It depicts the Callaway Plantation, once a 3,000-acre plantation that owned up to 100 slaves. Their master was so cruel he built a quasi-jail on the property for unruly slaves, and set dogs onto those who tried to escape, according to an oral history from Mariah Callaway, a woman who was born into slavery on the plantation in 1852.
I was proud to sign S.B. 202 to ensure elections in Georgia are secure, fair, and accessible. I appreciate the hard work of members of the General Assembly to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. pic.twitter.com/1ztPnfD6rd
— Governor Brian P. Kemp (@GovKemp) March 25, 2021
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 Sign Up For My Newsletter (@Will_Bunch) March 26, 2021
3. If you scroll about halfway down this PDF link, you can see that the painting is clearly “Brickhouse Road — Callaway PLNT” (PLNT for “Plantation…subtle, right?) by artist Olessia Maximenko from Wilkes County, GA https://t.co/rnUGyhs9wR pic.twitter.com/mkd04jbXs5
— Will Bunch Sign Up For My Newsletter (@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 Sign Up For My Newsletter (@Will_Bunch) March 26, 2021
5. 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 more than 100 slaves who were held in cruel human bondage
— Will Bunch Sign Up For My Newsletter (@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 Sign Up For My Newsletter (@Will_Bunch) March 26, 2021
7. “…[T]here were some slaves who were unruly; so the master built a house off to itself and called it the Willis jail. Here he would keep those whom he had to punish. I have known some slaves to run away on other plantations and the hounds would bite plugs out of their legs.”
— Will Bunch Sign Up For My Newsletter (@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 Sign Up For My Newsletter (@Will_Bunch) March 26, 2021
9. In short, the Callaway Plantation is a monument to Georgia’s history of brutal white supremacy that unfortunately didn’t disappear when Mariah Callaway and the other slaves were emancipated in 1865. By the 1890s, Georgia’s white ruling class…
— Will Bunch Sign Up For My Newsletter (@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 Sign Up For My Newsletter (@Will_Bunch) March 26, 2021
11. Georgia blazed a trail into the new era of mass incarceration and voter suppression, epitomized by Brian Kemp and his purges of legitimate voters and other Jim Crow-inspired tactics. In 2021, the irony…
— Will Bunch Sign Up For My Newsletter (@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 Sign Up For My Newsletter (@Will_Bunch) March 26, 2021
13. The symbolism is no accident. Brian Kemp and his white henchmen have created an image for our times, in working to continue a tradition of inhumanity and white supremacy that now spans centuries, from the human bondage…
— Will Bunch Sign Up For My Newsletter (@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 Sign Up For My Newsletter (@Will_Bunch) March 26, 2021