Memories of the Civil Rights Movement have been presented through a photograph exhibit entitled 'Appeal to this Age: Photography of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968,' organized by Steven Kasher and the book 'The Civil Rights Movement: A Photographic History, 1954-1968,' also by Steven Kasher. The exhibit had the photographs arranged in chronological order with quotations and captions that unfold a simple story.
INTRODUCTION
I was already an adult at the advent of the Civil Rights Movement. Thus a certain sense of mid-twentieth-century history guides my analysis of how this combined book and exhibition project interprets the social issues of that era. The exhibition was organized by Steven Kasher, photographer, writer and gallery owner, and accompanied by a book, The Civil Rights Movement.' A Photographic History, 1954-1968, also authored by Kasher.
Although the exhibition, "Appeal to this Age: Photography of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968" has been traveling nationally for the past four years, this reviewer only saw the exhibition at the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY. Seventy-four black and white photographs of the "second American revolution"(1) encased in simple black frames, were mounted on freestanding wall panels. Quotations in large letters were conspicuously printed at the top of each panel. Five of the quotations were attributed to movement participants. Two were statements made by President Lyndon B. Johnson and Alabama Governor George C. Wallace. The prints were exhibited chronologically, and numbered sequentially. Photography, quotation and picture caption were arranged as if to tell a simple narrative. Accentuation in the form of enlarged quotations and five photo murals were strategically dispersed throughout the show. The largest mural, 9x14 feet, served as outer wall to a mini-theater, where the documentary Freedom on My Mind (1994)(2) showed almost continuously on one of three video monitors. The exhibition space included an Internet-linked computer, books about African Americans as photographers and as subjects, and craft activities designed for children.
Most of the photographs that comprised the exhibition and book stand as authentic documents of the Civil Rights Movement. Originally published in newspapers and as magazine photo-essays, they are evidence of the viciousness with which racists tried to contain the descendants of kidnapped people in a place that they - racists - had designated for them. Both the exhibition and the book presented familiar and new images to this viewer. The familiar included photographs published almost weekly in 1960s-era periodicals such as Life. Some selections transcended the original news stories they were part of. As Kasher put it, "The great photographs of the civil rights movement were crafted with urgent passion - for their own time and for the future."(3) The primary focus of this article is the exhibition panels: the problematic grouping of photographs and text.
PANEL ONE: Thar he.
Panel One contained four photographs, collected under the quotation, "Thar he." The first photograph, Linda Brown and Her Sister Walking to School, Topeka, Kansas, March 1953, by Carl Iwasaki, presents two children, lunch bags in hand, walking between a line of railroad freight cars and parallel sets of rails stretching to infinity. Linda Brown became a plaintiff in a class action lawsuit brought by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Plaintiffs from five geographical regions were named in suits that sought relief for African American children relegated by law to inferior facilities, services and other indignities not imposed upon white children.
Ultimately, the United States Supreme Court reviewed the cases, consolidated under the title Brown v Board of Education, Topeka. In 1954, the Court issued a landmark decision that struck down statutes underpinning segregation in public schools. In its ruling, the justices overturned the infamous Plessy v Ferguson decision rendered by the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court.
It is not surprising that the topic of public school desegregation would open the exhibition. However, in the show there is no thematic connection between Linda Brown and the other three photographs, detailed later, or to the panel quotation, "Thar he." The words are attributed to Moses Wright, a Mississippi farmer who had no direct connection to the lawsuits or to Brown. Wright was a 64-year-old farmer living near Money, Mississippi. On the night of August 28, 1955, a 14-year-old Chicago boy, Emmett Till, was abducted from the care of Wright, his granduncle. Two days later, Till's grossly mutilated body floated up from the bottom of the Tallahatchie River.
At the insistence of Till's mother, the remains were shipped back to Chicago. She also insisted that the mortician undertake none of the usual processes of restoring the features of the body. During the funeral more than 100,000 viewers filed past what had once been a boy. It was a sensational news story. Photographs of the body were seen across the nation in African American periodicals, mostly without a white readership. One of the photographs appears in The Civil Rights Movement.(4) Opposite is the finger-pointing Wright, declaring from the Sumner County, Mississippi witness stand, "Thar he" as he identified the boy's abductors. The 1955 lynching of Till "was one of the most publicized racial crimes of the century; Bob Dylan even wrote a song about it."(5) Despite their extraordinary significance, neither the photographs of Wright nor Till's corpse appeared in "Appeal to this Age."
The second photograph in the panel, Emerging man, 1952, by Gordon Parks, was shot at ground level; only the man's head is above the rim of the manhole, and the furtive look in his eyes is a reminder of the historical marginalization society persistently imposes on African Americans. The picture is placed directly beneath Wright's words. The placement prompts viewers to accept Wright as the emerging man, but it was an unsustainable connection.
The third picture, Riding with Confederate Flags, 1967, by Mike Mauney is, on the face of it, an image of white youths riding in an automobile, a Confederate battle flag attached to the car's radio antenna and a larger flag in the grasp of a passenger. The accompanying text fails to tie picture content to the other components of the panel. There is no evidence of rights denied nor protesters being impeded.
Robert Frank's Trolley, Segregated Passengers in New Orleans, 1955-56, is the final picture in the panel. This image also doubled as the largest in the show, enlarged to cover a 9x14 feet freestanding wall. The viewer is informed that Trolley is "the front cover illustration . . . of Frank's extremely influential book, The Americans."(6) What and who the book influenced is not revealed. Indeed, The Americans was not even among the books and other resource materials the Eastman House had placed in the exhibition area.
Frank's photograph, taken from outside the trolley, places the viewer at a 90 degree angle to the trolley car. Two African American passengers are framed by the back two windows, five white passengers sit in front of them. One can infer that they are obeying the racial segregation laws extant in Louisiana in 1955-56, although Trolley, like Riding with Confederate Flags, is short on contextual clues in connection to the Civil Rights Movement. Five of the windows are open; the sixth, framing a white man, is closed, merging him with the surreal images mirrored within its rectangle and in the panels mounted above each seat. Something, the same thing, has caught the eye of each passenger, but what it is remains the subject of speculation. Viewers are left to ponder what roles these trolley passengers played in the civil rights drama. Which of them was most likely to stand up and thrust "Thar he" at the lynchers of another 14-year-old?
Panel One opened the exhibition, and the photographs were equivalents of experiences worth noting. Reluctantly, I moved to Panel Two, knowing that I had not been properly introduced. I would have to go elsewhere for reconfirmation that Brown v Board of Education was a defining moment for the Movement.
PANEL TWO: My feets is tired, but my soul is rested, 1957.
This panel quotation was attributed to "Mother Pollard, bus boycotter, Montgomery, AL, 1957." Mother Pollard's words (spoken in 1956) are coupled with four Dan Weiner photographs of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, grouped in a formal way, as if to be read as a unit unto itself. The combination resonated and provided easy entry into the story. Weiner sensed that he was witnessing a "new Black in the South who was developing a new strategy of resistance to segregation with economic, legal and spiritual weapons."(6) His pictures depict people implementing, and being affected by that strategy.
Mario Palfi's White Baggage Room, Jackson, Mississippi, 1946-49, documents one element in the system of racial segregation in public facilities. The sign is large, the letters white and neat, indicative of the care and order that went into maintaining the system. The words "White Baggage Room," are printed above the entrance to the room where luggage is checked for transport to some distant destination. Yet, the irony is that while the baggage that is suitcases and trunks would be in excess of "carry-on" items, segregation in public facilities was also excessive, imposing superfluous burdens upon both races. Despite all that, the photograph seemed an intrusion. I would have much preferred the Charles Moore photographs that hung about 40 feet away on another wall. Moore's 1958 photographs documenting Montgomery policemen physically abusing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would have strengthened the Montgomery segment of the exhibition.
A Reporter, Ralph Abernathy, Dan Weiner, and King Share a Joke, Montgomery 1956, reproduced in The Civil Rights Movement,(7) would have been a more fitting complement to Weiner's fine images and Mother Pollard's affirmation. Although the joke is not shared with readers, and the photograph is attributed to an "unknown" photographer, the subjects are at ease with each other. It is an image that increases Weiner's credibility as a witness to a newly developing strategy.
The bland White Baggage Room is mounted between Weiner's quartet and Richard Avedon's William Casby, born in slavery, Algiers, Louisiana, March 24, 1963. White Baggage Room serves as a rest stop in a musical score; it gives the vocalist - in this case, the viewer - a chance to blink, to moisten the eye before taking up the rest of the panel. I welcomed the respite, for William Casby is an unsettling image in its power to command attention. The face filling the 16x20-inch frame is rich and deep; whisker spikes and tufts of cotton-white hair heighten the subject's dark complexion. By contrast, his ample eyes seem muddy, dimmed by the years and trouble they've seen, yet ablaze in the intensity with which they regard the cameraman. I wanted to know more about this man; who, as lens, shutter and film gathered him in, was 98, 100, 110-years-old?
According to Kasher, the portrait of the cat-eyed Casby was made for Avedon's 1963 book, Nothing Personal. The book, "a study of the faces of power and powerless in America, includes numerous pictures of civil rights workers and their opponents."(8) With that information, I was still constrained to wonder if, on March 24, 1963, Casby was a civil rights worker. On the other side of that question I wondered if he might have provided Wright and his old bent finger a place to hide from vengeful Klan brothers of Emmett's murderers. Or, was Casby the model for "Mathu," one of the "eighteen old black men" of the 1983 Ernest J. Gaines novel, A Gathering of Old Men?(9)
Avedon's portrait unfortunately overpowered Hinds County, Mississippi, 1962, mounted to the right of William Casby. The photograph, considerably smaller than Casby, was taken by honored photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. Two elderly black men sit side-by-side on a four-foot-long bench, their folded arms echo the code that restricts their reach; eight feet away, an elderly white man sits, wide-spread arms draped across a portion of his ten-foot-wide bench. There is nothing to suggest that the three men are waiting for a bus. Perhaps, we are to fall back on Mother Pollard's wisdom and conclude that their "feets is tired." If enough attention is paid to Cartier-Bresson's statement about place and privilege, the Hinds County trio may yet tell, at their own pace, what sitting on a bench is and is not.
PANEL THREE: I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.
"Segregation forever," dripped from the lips of Wallace during his January 14, 1963 inaugural address. However, First Day of School, c. 1958, by Gordon Tenney, depicts integrated Oklahoma City elementary school students. At this ostensibly desegregated school, six African American children stand backs against the wall, while four white children pass by in the foreground, studiously ignoring the apprehensive, solemn African Americans. The rest of the panel is mainly about the turmoil fomented by the pronouncements of governors Orval Faubus of Arkansas, Ross Barnett of Mississippi and Wallace. Each had, in 1957, 1962 and 1963 respectively, bellowed defiance to court ordered integration. Each had added his own brand of theatrics, and through such antics provoked confrontation between state and federal authorities.
On September 2, 1957, Faubus announced on statewide television that he was deploying the National Guard to prevent the "Negro" students from entering all-white Little Rock High School. This set the stage for all-too familiar scenes of white resistance to desegregation of public schools. The eruption of mob action, alongside Faubus's misuse of the Arkansas National Guard, led President Dwight D. Eisenhower to federalize the Guard, and dispatch the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division to Little Rock to enforce the Court order that supported admission of nine African American students to the previously all-white school.
The furor that swirled around the "Little Rock Nine" was observed worldwide. But Ernest Withers's Little Rock Nine's first day of school, Little Rock, 1957, was the lone photograph to represent the Faubus folly. Except for helmeted soldiers in the background, it is an image that could be mistaken for a car-pooling scene repeated at suburban school sites across this nation. Three young women in freshly-ironed dresses have just exited a station wagon. They appear lighthearted, especially Minniejean Brown, stooping to pick up something. (Later that fall, Brown would be suspended because of her retort of"white trash" to a white student who called her "nigger bitch."(10)) But the face of Elizabeth Eckford is composed, recalling the stoicism she willed herself to 19 days earlier when a mob had threatened to lynch her. Though not represented in "Appeal to this Age" a photograph of her previous run-in is included in Kasher's book: Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine, Pursued By The Mob Outside Little Rock Central High School, September 4, 1957, by Pete Harris.
A riot was precipitated at the University of Mississippi campus on September 30-October 1, 1962 by the arrival of African American student James Meredith. The rampage was set up by Barnett's widely publicized attempts to prevent Meredith from registering. Four photographs capture the drama of the confrontation to complete the third panel.
PANEL FOUR: Today the choice is no longer between violence and nonviolence; it is between nonviolence and nonexistence. The Negro may be God's appeal to this age - an age rapidly drifting to its doom. The eternal appeal takes the form of a warning: "All who live by the sword shall perish by the sword."(11)
These photographs, save one, focus on role-playing preparations for nonviolent demonstrations, actual demonstrations and two black shoppers under attack. One photograph by Flip Schulke was of the grief-etched, yet saintly countenance of Myrlie Evers, widow of slain NAACP field secretary, Medgar Evers. She symbolizes those to whom the aftershock of violence visits yet again.
From the Evers photograph one moves to an adjoining panel, to confront Robert Sengstacke's Spiritual grace, Saviour's Day, Chicago, 1967, a medium close-up of the Nation of Islam's women's corps, heads bowed in supplication. Three photographs by Parks follow, including Ethel Sharrieff and members of the Black Muslim's women's corps, Chicago, 1963. In both, row upon row of uniformly-dressed women, hair concealed under cloth, bodies encased in pristine, white, buttoned-to-the-neck dresses, present an image of beauty, power and composure, a complement to the distraught Evers in funereal black. But the panel is unlabeled. It seemed that the Black Muslim photographs were to be associated with King's warning against violence.
In Kasher's The Civil Rights Movement, Malcolm X's assassins are characterized as "Black Muslim hitmen."(12) That is curious, especially since, 11 pages later, a picture caption reads, "Three Muslims were convicted of Malcolm X's murder, but it is still not known who ordered the assassination."(13) (emphasis mine)
Two additional Parks photographs, Malcolm X, Los Angeles, April-May 1963, and Malcolm X and William Rogers, Los Angeles 1963, were taken before Malcolm X had formed a rapprochement with King. But in 1963, Parks was given unprecedented access to Elijah Muhammad, head of The Nation of Islam. Life and other mainstream publications, characterized the group as "the Black Muslims, [who] want nothing at all to do with whites . . ."(14) That characterization alone signifies the complexity inherent with pairing the "Black Muslim" photos with Civil Rights movement pictures. A sensible pairing could have been made, but the approach used in the exhibition "Appeal to this Age" was seriously flawed.
Regrettably, the Parks and Sengstacke photographs are not used to explore the status of women in the Nation or in the Movement; as widows, as wives or as photographers. Instead, the sequence abruptly detoured 180 degrees to the wall where Panel Three ended. Photographs there depicted the spring 1963 demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama and the March on Washington, August 28, 1963.
The Birmingham series is dominated by six Moore photographs: firemen hosing demonstrators with streams of water strong enough to strip bark from trees; dogs, at the urging of their policemen handlers, ripping clothes, and possibly flesh, from the bodies of demonstrators. Birmingham is separated from the March on Washington by a mural of Myrlie Evers, in which the beauty of the print featured in Panel Four is sacrificed for the scale of the mural. Inexplicably, Declan Haun's Burned-out building after riots, Birmingham, 1963 is interposed between two March on Washington photographs. Possibly, this was an attempt at irony - the peaceful Washington demonstration of 250,000 gathered in Washington, against rioting in Birmingham. To this viewer, it continued the curious curatorial judgments exhibited in Panel One and elsewhere.
PANEL FIVE: [M]any Americans do not enjoy [civil] rights . . . not because of their failure, but because of the color of their skin. [It] can not continue. Our Constitution, the foundation of the republic, forbids it. The principles of our freedom forbids it. Morality forbids it, as the law I will sign tonight forbids it.
Arguably Johnson's signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was an outgrowth of the 1963 March on Washington. The words were impressive, and with them the President sought harmony with the "content of their character" theme in King's soaring prose. What is clear is that signing the bill made no immediate improvement in the lives and fortunes of Mississippi African Americans.
Between 1950 and 1960 more than 300,000 people of color left Mississippi.(15) In 1964, the rate of the northward migration had not subsided. But in 1964 there would also be more intense civil rights activity in Mississippi. A consortium of civil rights organizations operating as the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), launched an ambitious voting rights project that involved 800, mostly northern, mostly white college students, in staffing literacy, citizenship and voter education projects across deep south states. The presence of northern-based, mainly white middle-class volunteers among mostly rural Black Mississippians was part of a strategy to nationalize the voter registration crusade. The visibility of this force, the work it performed, coupled with the tragic murders of three CORE (Congress on Racial Equality) workers, radically increased the attention of photographers and other members of the media.
The photographs in Panel Five covered protests and retaliation in Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia and Alabama. Six were concerned with the 1965 Selma to Montgomery March. Steve Shapiro's Youth Waving the American Flag, and Matt Heron's A young marcher with his cause [the word "vote"] inscribed on his forehead, Selma to Montgomery March, 1965 demonstrate how symbols help make some photographs. The most compelling image was James Karales's Marchers with flag, Selma to Montgomery, 1965. With the sweep of a panorama, a marching multitude becomes a signature image for organized protesters in action. It neither appeals for sympathy for the wounded nor seeks revulsion for those who inflict wounds. It is a visual evocation of King's Stride Toward Freedom. It is both document and illustration, having become the signature picture for books, catalogs and Henry Hampton's prize winning television documentary series, Eyes on the Prize (1987).(16)
PANEL SIX: '"All I want is a chance to be part of America," Fannie Lou Hamer at Democratic National Convention, Atlantic City, 1964.
The flag, Old Glory, appears in three of the seven photographs that make up Panel Six. There is also Charmian Reading's Fannie Lou Hamer singing, March Against Fear, Mississippi, June 12, 1966. Hamer, born a sharecropper's daughter, afflicted in childhood with polio, has been accurately identified by ethnomusicologist Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon as a warrior woman.(17)
Hamer was cut from the mold that produced Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, mighty voices in the struggle to end chattel slavery. One hundred years after Emancipation, the voices, the marching, the demonstrating, the protesting was about inclusion. Hamer, with little formal schooling, could articulate that problem and what it would take to overcome it. She made rousing speeches and was an inventive singer of Negro spirituals reconstituted as freedom songs. Hamer was indispensable in the challenge to keep the demonstrators's "eyes on the prize." Reading's fine portrait captures Hamer at her art.(18)
PANEL SEVEN: "I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation when they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I have a dream today." Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Lincoln Memorial, August 28, 1963.
Panel Seven evokes the "Dream." Five of the eight photographs show mourners of the slain King: the widow, the mother and sister, daughters and son and inhabitants of "Resurrection City." There is also a 1964 photograph of a smiling King in a motorcade, pausing to shake the hands of well-wishers in Baltimore. Yet, preceding these is a photograph of "Black Power" advocate Stokely Carmichael, head thrown back, teeth agleam in the heartiest of laughs. The juxtaposition of a smiling King and a laughing Carmichael is rendered even more worrisome by the photograph's caption, which dredges up the issue that the two female Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) workers, Mary King and Casey Hayden addressed in a position paper that circulated at the November 1964 Waveland Conference. According to the caption, a paraphrase of Kasher, the paper protested "the demeaning treatment of women within SNCC. Carmichael's infamous response was, 'The only position of women in SNCC is prone.' Some historians date the beginning of the '60s women's movement to a subsequent article by King and Hayden, published in Liberation in April 1966."(19)
Placing an image of a jovial Carmichael, along with his adolescent remarks, in the series that recounts King's last hours and the grieving that followed his death, may have been another stab at irony. Was it intended that viewers associate the arrogance of Carmichael and the now stilled thoughts of Dr. King? If so, why? If not, then for what purpose was that freakish pairing of quotation and pictures to serve?
INTERPRETING HISTORY AND REPORTING HISTORY
Emerging man, 1952, was the dominant photograph of Panel One. It was large, more formal in composition than the other three, and technically superior in print quality. The caption noted that it was "one of several illustrations that Parks shot for Life in salute to [Ralph] Ellison's prophetic vision." Literary critics regard Ellison's 1952 novel Invisible Man(20) as a highly distinguished work that is required reading today in some college-level literature courses. The author was honored with the 1952 National Book Award.
To craft his tale, Ellison used jazz imagery and cultural and historical myths in presenting a naive African American man, repeatedly deluded by illusions of the American Dream. Eventually, the unnamed narrator rejects societal obligation, as one rendered invisible might do. Yet, in the solitude of his subterranean existence, the illusions are sloughed off, like the natural process that compels animals to exchange old skin for new. Ultimately, the narrator reemerges, concluding that even an invisible man must play his role in society.
Parks's Emerging man is an appropriate illustration for Ellison's masterpiece, but sheds little light on the history of the Civil Rights Movement. "Thar He" and Emerging man could have been used to assay the reasons the work of comparatively few African American photographers were published during the civil rights struggles. What, when, where and how African American photographers produced what they did is part of the struggle for civil rights. Had that issue been noted in "Appeal to this Age" and addressed in more than one paragraph in The Civil Rights Movement, we would have a more cogent analysis of the role of still photography in the Civil Rights Movement.
White photographers were welcomed, indeed deemed essential to the Movement. As Moore has suggested, the "whiteness" of the white photographers often provided a degree of "invisibility" to enable them to move among white people menacing civil rights demonstrators. Without such a cloak, Parks, Sengstacke, Withers and other African American photographers were often seriously impaired. Parks speaks of this in his 1990 autobiography, Voices in the Mirror.(21) In 1956, Life had directed a white man named "Freddie" (a pseudonym), one of its Southern bureau chiefs, to "act as a sort of a liaison, to help fend off any possible danger that might await" Parks and his young assistant, Sam Yette, on assignment in Alabama for Life's "Segregation in the South" series:(22)
Long after dusk he [Freddie] finally showed up, and the place of his arrival was obscured by darkness. After a weak handshake, he hushedly informed me that my assignment was ill-founded; that there was insufficient segregation in Birmingham to warrant it.(23)
Despite Parks "expressing such doubts to the editors in New York," Freddie remained on the job. Even after Parks discovered, and related to Life editors, that Freddie was in league with the White Citizens Council - a group known for their hatred of blacks as much as the Ku Klux Klan - he was assured that Freddie was a member of the team.(24) After that, Parks and Yette went into hiding, pursuing their assignment without Freddie's "help."
Willie and Allie Lee Causey, of Anniston, Alabama, were two members of an extended family that Parks photographed and reporter Robert Wallace interviewed. The story ran in the September 21, 1956 issue of Life. Mrs. Allie Lee Causey was quoted: "Integration is the only way through which Negroes will receive justice. We cannot get it as a separate people. If we get justice on our jobs, and equal pay, then we'll be able to afford better homes and good education."(25)
The good white people of Anniston were incensed when they read Causey's comments. In no time, her husband lost his truck and was refused all other means of making a living in the county, and she was dismissed from her teaching job at the colored school. In fear of their safety, they hurriedly left Anniston. Freddie, whose duty it was to help protect them, took his family on vacation. Parks and Yette were menaced, stalked and eventually attacked, but they successfully fought off their attackers, and outfoxed the menacers.(26)
Parks's "blackness" was of course an asset to gaining access to the Nation of Islam. The Nation took no role in the Civil Rights Movement, and by contract Parks was not photographing the strategies of the Nation of Islam for integrating public schools and he was aligned more with King's goals than to those of the Nation of Islam. This complexity within the movement is referenced in an essay by Parks. On assignment from Life, Parks wondered, for a moment, "whether [his] achievement was worth the loneliness [he] experienced" He decided that the "price was small" that his experiences had taught him that "there is nothing ignoble about a black man climbing from troubled darkness on a white man's ladder, providing he doesn't forsake the others who, subsequently must escape that same darkness."(27) Parks developed a relationship with Malcolm X, and came to admire the intelligence of the caustic critic of America. Yet Parks maintained an abiding faith in his country, declaring, "I wouldn't follow Elijah Muhammad or Malcolm X into a Black State - even if they achieve a complete separation . . . I've worked too hard for a place in this present society. Nor will I condemn all whites for the violent acts of their brothers against the Negro people. Not just yet, anyway."(28)
That Parks was granted entree to the interior life of The Nation of Islam suggests that its leadership was not averse to using the media. However accurate that speculation, it is clear that The Nation's message was 180 degrees from that of civil rights organizations: Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, et al. This is reinforced in Parks's report of an intimate conversation with Malcolm X:
Unexpectedly, he [Malcolm X] said, "We sent a little white college gift out of the [Nation of Islam] restaurant in tears today." I listened uneasily, bracing myself for another diatribe against a presumptuous, if well-meaning "devil" But Malcolm, speaking with a gentleness he rarely exhibits when discussing whites, hastened to assure me that it was nothing any Muslim had said against her. She had come in to see if there wasn't [some] thing she and her college friends could do to help Muslims and whites get together; he explained. "That's nice," I said, pushing up in my seat. "What did you say?" I am positive he was unaware of the trace of melancholy in his voice as he answered, "I told her that there was no chance - not the ghost of a chance. She started crying, then she turned and went out."(29)
There were points of contact between Malcolm X, vocally critical of the goal of integration and of the philosophy of non-violence, and King. Each had a tacit understanding that Malcolm's rhetoric contributed to authorities willing to deal with King. Exploring that axiom could have provided the rationale for inclusion of the Nation of Islam photographs. Instead, four images from inside that movement, seemingly, are thrown into a space dedicated to a cause for which the subjects would make no claim.
The William Casby picture also sapped the exhibition (and book) of some of its vitality. Apparently, viewers were expected to make inferences based on the subject's dark skin, and the fact that he was "born in slavery in Algiers, Louisiana." "Born in slavery" triggers, among serious African American cultural workers, a desire to reconnect with the Africa gouged from their heritage by the Atlantic slave trade. In the Africa stolen from Casby (and from which his forebears were stolen), secret societies employed initiation rites to reinforce cultural values and to educate the young. That freedom to implement societal order and growth was the very thing that was de-based in order to make New World slaves of forebears of Wright, Till, Brown and Casby.
One such fraternity was/is the Poro society of the Mende people, residing largely in that same Sierra Leone from which came La Amistad "mutineers."(30) To facilitate their responsibilities, members donned specially sculpted masks to become the embodiment of mythic figures within that culture's cosmology. In the mounting of Casby's cheeks, the thrust of his chin and the slender, angularity of his face; in the many troubled waters that muddied and inflamed his eyes, we have the masque.
Such a far-reaching reading is in the realm of ancestral memory - an inbred sense of connection to cultural roots beyond integration, beyond segregation, beyond slavery. Ancestral memory is the personal integrity that allows one to eschew pity and bitterness, and try once more to reconnect with that Africa that was "gouged from their heritage by the Atlantic slave trade." Ancestral memory is the spiritual DNA that is "William Casby, born in slavery." Selection and placement of this Avedon portrait invited what some, at risk of deluding themselves, would call far-reaching interpretations. Avedon, who, by 1960, had built his reputation on portraiture, illustrative and high fashion photography, presents Casby as a mask. It is not unlike his photographing of fair-skinned high fashion models and elites.
Kasher used another of King's analogies to enhance our understanding of the "persuasive and protective power of photography***:' The Introduction title to his book, "Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare," is a direct reference to a passage from King's book, Why We Can't Wait:
The brutality with which officials would have quelled the black individual became impotent when it could not be pursued with stealth and remain unobserved. It was caught - as a fugitive from a penitentiary is often caught - in gigantic circling spotlights. It was imprisoned in a luminous glare revealing the naked truth to the whole world.(31)
The beatings, the dogs and fire hoses, the marches, the sighing, sorrowing and singing: the many signs of struggle were captured by the photographers tracking the Civil Rights Movement. But "Appeal to this Age" stumbled and stuttered, and at times got lost in what seemed an attempt to present the photographs as art. Avedon's William Casby or Parks's Emerging man, among many, were integrated into the story with James Karales's Marchers with flag, Selma to Montgomery, 1965 and Marcher draped in the American flag, Selma to Montgomery March, 1965. The Karales pictures have transcended their function as documents of the march, particularly the former with its majestic composition. The Avedon and Parks photographs were created as illustrations. To integrate them into the story would require more judicious use of text to firmly connect them to the topics raised in the panel label on which they appear.
The exhibition fell short of the mark because the text was incomplete or was poorly and sparsely presented. Historical facts were jumbled. For example, the 1963 discussions, confrontations, demonstrations and rioting in Birmingham occurred in April and May. The March on Washington for Freedom and Jobs, took place August 28, 1963. Yet, Burnt-out buildings after riots, Birmingham, 1963, is stuck between two March on Washington pictures.
Frank's Trolley, it would seem, presents segregation in public transportation, pure and simple. The exterior view of the trolley was given prominence as a large mural. The passengers were life size, but its meaning was not clear. The perspective such as that of life-long New Orleanian Tom Dent was missing:
I had grown up a generation earlier [late 1940s] under the same system of complicated barriers in New Orleans. As a boy going to school . . . I had had to sit in the rear of streetcars and buses behind a moveable wooden barrier with the words FOR COLORED ONLY stenciled upon it as if some sort of privileged section had been set aside for us. . . . We had to master a knowledge of where the "for Colored" bathrooms were at the downtown stores, and which businesses maintained them, however poorly; where the "Colored" water fountains were, which stores we might enter, which places we must never enter, certainly not through the front door.(32)
The drift toward doom that King warned of can be benchmarked with Plessy v Ferguson, the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision that established the "separate but equal doctrine." The decision, in its legalization of racial discrimination, was perhaps the beginning of the age that King said God was appealing to. In 1900 it was a young age, and the barriers to civil rights remained cast in stone. Many African Americans had reasoned that to remain in the South was to march in place - a place defined by Jim Crow law and plantation economics. Commencing before the turn of the century, many thousands had trekked northward, and during the years of World War I their exodus ballooned into the "Great Migration."
By the 1930s, leaving the South had become more clandestine as landlords strained to tighten their hold on the black serfs they all but owned. Still, shoebox packed meals in hand, the migrating masses packed into the Jim Crowed trains of the Illinois Central, the L & N, the B & O and the Southern, and they spilled from them into compounds set aside for them in Chicago, Gary, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and elsewhere in the industrial North.
In the view of historian Lerone Bennett Jr., optimism lingered or metamorphosed into an "optative mood," [which] "bridge[d] past and future, giving men time to count their winnings."(33) May 17, 1954, seemed an especially good day to count winnings, for inherent in the Supreme Court's decision to outlaw segregation in public education was a governmental promise to sweep away codes and covenants that condemned African Americans to the scrap heap.
A year and some days later, the lynching in Mississippi of a 14-year-old boy from Chicago made the rest of Bennett's meditation abundantly clear, namely, that the optative mood invites the wishful thinking that leads men and women "to absurd exaggerations of their gains, preparing them unwittingly for the next period of excruciating disappointment."(34) Still, many thousands would step over excruciating disappointment, and in the boldness of their stride spark the "luminous glare."
NOTES
1. Steven Kasher, "Wall Label," a description distributed to people visiting the 1998 exhibition at the George Eastman House, Rochester, but dated May 1994.
2. Connie Field and Marilyn Mulford, Freedom on My Mind (1994).
3. Steven Kasher, The Civil Rights Movement: A Photographic History, 1954-1968, (New York: Abbeville Press, 1996), p. 17.
4. Ibid, p. 22.
5. Vickie Goldberg, The Power of Photography: How Photography Changed Our Lives, (New York: Abbeville, 1991), p. 203.
6. Robert Frank, The Americans, (New York: Aperture, 1978). Frank was Swiss and brought the eyes of a European to his controversially direct photographs of the U.S.
7. Kasher, The Civil Rights Movement, p. 26.
8. Ibid, p. 28.
9. Ernest J. Gaines, A Gathering of Old Men, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983). The novel focuses on one hot day in Louisiana in the late 1970s when 18 elderly African American farmers step forward, each professing to be the one guilty of killing the Cajun plantation owner who was representative of the life-long abuse they had endured.
10. Juan Williams, Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1964-1965, (New York: Viking, 1987), p. 117.
11. Martin Luther King, Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: the Montgomery Story, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), p. 224.
12. Kasher, The Civil Rights Movement, p. 194.
13. Ibid, p. 205.
14. Gordon Parks. "'What Their Cry Means to Me' - a Negro's Own Evaluation." Life, May 31, 1963, p. 31.
15. U.S. Bureau of the Census, "Percentage Distribution of Nonwhite Out-Migrants from Selected SMSA's by Region of Destination" from U.S. Census of Population: 1960, Subject Reports, Mobility for States and State Economic Areas, (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1963), Table 36.
16. Henry Hampton was the creator of Eyes on the Prize. He is also Executive Producer of the Boston-based Blackside, Inc., the media company that produced the 1987 series.
17. Kay Mills, This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer, (New York: Penguin, 1993), p. 116.
18. This fine portrait of the animated Hamer was also used for the cover of Mills's biography of Hamer. Mills's book is one of several that specify Hamer as the youngest of 20 children in contrast to "the youngest of sixteen," as cited on page 157 of The Civil Rights Movement.
19. Kasher, The Civil Rights Movement, p. 143. Carmichael's words were printed beneath the caption to Lee Lockwood's photograph of him.
20. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, (New York: Random House, 1952).
21. Gordon Parks, Voices in the Mirror: An Autobiography, (New York: Doubleday, 1990).
22. Life, "Background of Segregation, Part IV. The Restraints: Open and Hidden." September 21, 1956, unpaginated.
23. Parks, Voices in the Mirror: An Autobiography, p. 166.
24. Ibid, p. 166.
25. Life, "Background to Segregation, Part IV."
26. Parks, Voices in the Mirror, p. 168.
27. Gordon Parks. "'What Their Cry Means to Me' - a Negro's Own Evaluation," p. 31.
28. Ibid, p. 79.
29. Ibid, p. 80.
30. It is the call of the Poro society of the Mende people of Sierra Leone and Liberia. One version of the origin of Poro (meaning "no end") is that it comes from people hiding in the forest from slave-raiders and bound to each other in mutual loyalty. See Geoffry Parinder, African Mythology, (London: Paul Hamlyn, 1967), pp. 96-98.
31. Kasher, The Civil Rights Movement, p. 8. Reprinted from Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can't Wait, (New York: New American Library, 1964), p. 39.
32. Tom Dent, Southern Journey, (New York: Morrow, 1997), pp. 11-12.
33. Lerone Bennett, Jr., Confrontation: Black and White, (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Co., 1965), p. 169.
34. Ibid, pp. 169-170.
DAVID A. ANDERSON teaches humanities at SUNY-Brockport and St. John Fisher College, and is a teller and published writer of stories.