A Rural Georgia for White Men, Like Brian Kemp: The Midcentury Films and Nontheatrical Legacy of Georgia Agricultural Extension

Abstract

ABSTRACT:During the civil rights era, Georgia’s Cooperative Agricultural Extension Service produced local nontheatrical films that imagined the state as rural, masculine, and white. Omitting segregation from direct view, these productions emphasized white men demonstrating respectable masculinity on rural land at a time when many southerners normalized Jim Crow as common sense for southern families and communities. These images still resonate in Georgia’s divided political climate, particularly in the 2018 campaign of Governor Brian Kemp. The racial implications of the extension service’s gendered vision of Georgia become clear in Kemp’s ads, which appeal to similar rural images to mask racist policies and voter suppression.