How 17 Outsize Portraits Rattled a Small Southern Town
Newnan, Georgia decided to use art to help the community celebrate diversity and embrace change. Not everyone was ready for what they saw.
It was the Saturday afternoon that this small Southern city had been dreading. A group of neo-Nazis promised to hold a rally in downtown Newnan to celebrate Adolf Hitler’s birthday and rail against illegal immigration and the removal of Confederate monuments.
Newnan had prided itself on its quiet charm. It offered small-town living just 40 miles southwest of Atlanta and had earned the nickname “City of Homes” for its antebellum architecture. Now, on a spring day in April 2018, a neo-Nazi group had assembled in a park near the courthouse, the leader having said the group preferred to hold rallies in predominantly white towns.
But it turned out that only a few dozen white nationalists attended the rally, and the Newnan they had imagined no longer existed. Its population had more than doubled in less than 20 years, drawing an increasingly diverse collection of newcomers. Newnan was changing and many in the community wanted to embrace that change more openly. A year after the white nationalist rally, the town made an effort to do so by putting up 17 large-scale banner portraits, images of
the ordinary people who make up Newnan...READ MORE + MORE PHOTOS
