See how legislator is arrested in Georgia Capitol 2:28
(CNN) ––
If you're trying to assess the impact of Georgia's new electoral law restricting the right to vote, two photos will tell you everything you need to know.
The first image shows Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signing the lengthy bill.
Precisely, a rule that many argue will make voting difficult for people of color.
Kemp is seated at a table in a stately room.
He is surrounded by six men wearing suits.
Behind them is a portrait of what appears to be a painting of a plantation-style house before the war.
The second photo shows two burly white police officers arresting a distraught-looking black woman - Georgia State Rep. Park Cannon - after she repeatedly knocked on Kemp's office door while he announced the signing of the bill.
It's hard to ignore the symbolic contrast between the two images.
Which, in addition, were taken within minutes of each other during the afternoon of this Thursday at the Georgia Capitol.
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In the first photo, Kemp and surrounding Republican lawmakers wear face masks due to the covid-19 pandemic.
Members of the Republican Party rushed approval of the bill in the state's two legislative chambers and got it done in a few hours.
This allowed Kemp to sign it into law that night.
Yet there is something about the perception and timing of signing, sheltered from the dark, with white men wearing face masks.
These conditions will only fuel suspicions among voting rights activists and black Americans that what Georgia Republicans pushed for on Thursday was not legislation.
Rather, it was the 21st-century political equivalent of Jim Crow heavy-handed tactics to prevent black citizens from voting.
New electoral law in Georgia seeks to prevent fraud 2:34
Single image
It has been said that a single image can strengthen a movement and change public opinion.
A photo of white officers beating black protesters with bobbins and truncheons on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, helped push through passage of the Voting Rights Act.
ANALYSIS |
Georgia's new law that suppresses the vote is a victory for Trump
An image of a shocked young woman bent over the face-down body of a college student who was killed by National Guard soldiers at Kent State mobilized anti-Vietnam War sentiment.
And a video of a black man trying to breathe as a white cop knelt on his neck last year ignited one of the largest racial justice movements in the nation's history.
No one died Thursday night when Cannon was taken to jail, accused of disrupting the meeting.
The representative admitted that she kept knocking on Kemp's door after state police told her to stop.
He said he did it to fight voter suppression.
Kemp and his fellow Republicans who posed for the firm's portrait have said the new law is necessary.
It is required, he argues, to increase confidence in "safe, accessible and fair" elections.
But they will soon discover that the photo will haunt them for years.
The juxtaposition between that image and the one of Cannon's arrest shows –– perhaps better than a thousand opinion pieces on “voter integrity” –– what the new Georgia law is all about.
Georgia Law