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Wallace said at first that she hadn’t thought twice about painting. But “when I looked at the news last night, and saw which plantation it was, this is the plantation my family was working on.”
Generations of his family have worked there since slavery, Wallace said. More recently, his father was a sharecropper picking cotton on the plantation.
The optics of Kemp who signed this bill in front of this painting were “very rude and very disrespectful to me, my family, black people in Georgia,” Wallace said.
In a statement to CNN, Mallory Blount, press secretary in the governor’s office, said the news of the painting was a media attempt to “hijack” the new law.
“The painting house was built in 1869, after slavery was abolished,” she said. “The painting was selected by the Georgia Council for the Arts’ Art of Georgia program, which rotates various works of art for display throughout the state capitol.”
Republicans have defended the new law, dubbed the Electoral Integrity Act of 2021, saying it was necessary to build confidence in the vote after last year’s election. Kemp said the law “will ensure that elections in Georgia are safe, fair and accessible.”
The law includes new voter identification requirements for postal ballots, allows state officials to take over local election commissions, restricts the use of ballot boxes, and makes it a crime to approach voters who are lining up to give them food and water.
“The part of not being able to give people water, the part of not feeding people, like what?” Said Wallace. “Which in their minds would think that it’s not fair to give water to a thirsty person, in any situation, whether they vote or whatever. It’s ridiculous. You’re supposed to facilitate it. people vote, not Stronger. “
“It all symbolized everything that’s going on in Georgia right now. Black people come out, black people vote, they don’t like it,” Wallace said. “So they’re going to try everything they can to stop it.”
Wallace said his father was a sharecropper, picking cotton on the plantation. He was drafted to serve his country in Vietnam, and when he returned from the war, he was told he had to use the back door of a restaurant.
Wallace was at a rally outside Atlanta City Hall on Saturday to protest the new election law. Even though things currently seem unchanged from Georgia’s past, efforts to prevent people from voting will fail, she said.
“It won’t work, because we are powered by the power of our ancestors, and we are going to change things. This is a new Georgia.”
CNN’s Faith Karimi, John Blake, Kelly Mena and Dianne Gallagher contributed to this report.
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