Black woman says Georgia governor signed ‘Jim Crow era’ act in front of painting of plantation that enslaved her ancestors

Kimberly Wallace says father worked at plantation as sharecropper

A Black woman living in Georgia noticed something painful in the background, when Georgia's Governor Brian Kemp signed a controversial voting rights act branded "Jim Crow 2.0" by critics into law.

Just behind where Mr Kemp sat was a painting of a plantation; but it was not just the product of an artist's imagination, but a picture of the plantation where the woman’s family was enslaved.

Kimberly Wallace spoke with CNN about what it was like to see such a dark part of her family's history in the background as a bill was signed that activists and legal experts anticipate will disproportionately affect Black voters.

She said: "When I was watching the news last night, and I saw what plantation that was, that's the plantation that my family worked at."

Ms Wallace said she gasped when she realised what the painting was depicting.

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She said her family worked at the plantation dating back to pre-emancipation, and said her father even worked there picking cotton as a sharecropper.

Ms Wallace said she felt the signing was "very rude and very disrespectful to me, to my family, to Black people of Georgia”.

The plantation's original owner, Job Callaway, built a log cabin on the land in 1785. Eventually the property expanded to include a 3,000 acre plantation, which included a slave cabin built in 1840, more than twenty years before emancipation.

The new law, called the Election Integrity Act of 2021, has been criticised for expanding voter ID requirements and for more nefarious provisions, such as a ban on bringing voters water if they are standing in a line to vote.

"The part about not being able to give people water, the part about not feeding people, like what is that?" Ms 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."

She said the arrest of Georgia State Rep Park Cannon, a Black woman who knocked on Mr Kemp's door during the signing of the law, was illustrative of the view Georgia's Republicans have toward Black voters.

"That whole thing symbolised everything that's going on in Georgia right now. Black people are coming out, Black people are voting, they don't like that," Ms Wallace said. "So they're going to try everything they can to stop it."

She believes that any attempt to stymie Georgia's Black voters will ultimately fail.

"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," she said.