금요일 밤 집에 돌아온 Kimberly Wallace가 뉴스를 켰을 때, 그녀는 Georgia Gov를 보았다. Brian Kemp signing a bill into law that critics have labeled Jim Crow 2.0 because of the disruptions it would mean to voters, particularly Black voters.
But Wallace, 누가 흑인인가, noticed something else in the room where Kemp signed the bill. On the wall, 그녀가 말했다, 였다 a painting that depicts the plantation on which her family members worked, going back to slavery.
Wallace said at first, she didn’t think twice about the painting. 그러나 “when I was watching the news last night, and I saw what plantation that was, that’s the plantation that my family worked at.”
Generations of her family worked there dating back to slavery, Wallace said. 최근에, her father was a sharecropper picking cotton at the plantation.
The optics of Kemp signing that bill into law in front of that painting was “very rude and very disrespectful to me, to my family, to Black people of Georgia,” Wallace said.
Kimberly Wallace
정부. Kemp’s office did not return CNN’s request for comment.
Republicans have defended the measure, dubbed Election Integrity Act of 2021, saying it’s required to boost confidence in voting after last year’s election. Kemp said the law will “ensure elections in Georgia are secure, fair, and accessible.”
The law includes new voter identification requirements for absentee ballots, empowers state officials to take over local elections boards, limits the use of ballot drop boxes and makes it a crime to approach voters waiting in line to give them food and water.
“The part about not being able to give people water, the part about not feeding people, like what is that?” Wallace said. “What in their mind would think that it’s not right to give a thirsty person some water, in any situation, whether they’re voting, or whatever. It’s ridiculous. You’re supposed to be making it easier for people to vote, not harder.”
그만큼 arrest of Democrat state Rep. Park Cannon Friday was also upsetting for Wallace. The Black state representative was arrested after knocking on Kemp’s office door while protesting the bill.
“That whole thing symbolized everything that’s going on in Georgia right now. Black people are coming out, Black people are voting, they don’t like that,” Wallace said. “So they’re going to try everything they can to stop it.”
Wallace said her father was a sharecropper, picking cotton at the plantation. He was drafted to serve his country in Vietnam, and when he came home from the war, he was told he had to use the back door at a restaurant.
Wallace was at a rally Saturday outside of Atlanta City Hall protesting the new voter law. As much as things may seem right now to be unchanged from Georgia’s past, efforts to stop people from voting will fail, 그녀가 말했다.
“It’s not going to work, because we are fueled by the power of our ancestors, and we are going to change things. It’s a new Georgia.”
