Everyday Life in Color, 1956

A couple of weekends ago, the girls were both still home for winter break from college; Tom wanted to go on a hike, but the weather forecast wasn't promising.  So we (and apparently everyone else with relatives in town and the day off from work) went to the High Museum instead.  Before we left we had taken a quick look on line at the current exhibits.  There was "Cézanne and the Modern," including a van Gogh painting, that was closing the next weekend.  We walked through that while a choir sang in the adjacent Florence Cathedral exhibit.  

Sarah wanted to see and hear Janet Cardiff's Forty Part Motet, a sound installation in the contemporary art galleries.  Cardiff recorded 59 individual singers as they performed composer Thomas Tallis's Spem in Alium Nunquam Habui(1556), which (according to the High Museum's description of the exhibit) translates to "In No Other is My Hope."  Walking around the large circle of audio speakers, it was like you were walking through the choir.  You could hear the individual voices.  Most of the visitors to the gallery fell silent and listened, transported to a 16th century cathedral by sound.  It was wonderful.

What else was there to see?  We asked a guard where "the photography exhibit" was, meaning one that I no longer remember the name of, and getting instead directions to the exhibit of photographs that Gordon Parks took for Life Magazine in the 1950s of everyday life in the segregation era south.  We did find the small exhibit I had asked about, and that was interesting, but then we continued to the Gordon Parks exhibit.  

Gordon Parks grew up in Fort Scott, Kansas, and attended a segregated elementary school.  He became a photographer and during the 1950s worked for Life Magazine. Later he became a film director; Shaft is his best-known film.  Much of his work for Life Magazine had not been exhibited before, but now several exhibits from Parks' archives have been assembled.  One, on what happened to his classmates from his segregated elementary school, includes photos that were never published.  They are now on exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in New York.

Most of the photos in the exhibit at the High Museum were taken in Alabama.  Some of the pictures were included in a photo essay that was published in Life in 1956, entitled "The Restraints:  Open and Hidden"; others in the exhibit weren't published before.  The exhibit focuses on the ordinary lives of ordinary people, including Mr. and Mrs. Albert Thornton, Sr., of Mobile, Alabama.

Writing about this exhibit for the New York Times, Maurice Berger wrote,

More than anything, the “Segregation Series” challenged the abiding myth of racism: that the races are innately unequal, a delusion that allows one group to declare its superiority over another by capriciously ascribing to it negative traits, abnormalities or pathologies. It is the very fullness, even ordinariness, of the lives of the Thornton family that most effectively contests these notions of difference, which had flourished in a popular culture that offered no more than an incomplete or distorted view of African-American life.

The photos speak for themselves.  A few examples.  This is Joanne Wilson, one of the Thorntons' daughters, with her niece, standing outside a movie theater in Mobile, Alabama.  Above this well-dressed young woman and small girl is a neon sign, "Colored Entrance."

In this untitled photo from Shady Grove, Alabama, a family orders at a window at a drive-in restaurant.  Between them and the wrap-around sign announcing shakes, sundaes, and cones is the sign designating the window as "Colored."

"Outside Looking In, Mobile, Alabama, 1956" showed children looking through the fence at a whites only playground.

These pictures were taken almost 60 years ago, and a lot of things have changed since then.  The pictures are jarring to see now.  We still have plenty of issues around race and inequality in the United States, but we don't have the kind of segregation any more that we had when these pictures were taken.  I also wondered, seeing these photos, what became of the people in them?  What about the children looking through the fence at the playground?  They are not much older than I am.  Where are they now?  

We do know something about what happened to some of the people Gordon Parks photographed.  Some of them paid a price for their participation in the photo essay.  The Thorntons' daughter Allie Lee Causey was quoted advocating integration.  She lost her teaching job soon after the piece was published and, fearing for their safety, she and her husband left Alabama.  Her sister Joanne Wilson, the woman standing outside the movie theater with her niece, was interviewed by Maurice Berger for the Times in 2013.  She married in 1956 and she and her husband had two children.  After she graduated from college, she became a school teacher and taught American history and economics at a high school in Prichard, Alabama. According to that article, "Like her father, Albert Thornton Sr., she believed in the power of education to uplift African-Americans and prepare them to overcome racism and segregation. Each year, she organized a bake sale to finance a trip to Atlanta for her female students and introduce them to the city’s historically black colleges."

And there's another link to Atlanta.  The exhibit includes a photo taken at the Atlanta airport in 1956.  In this photo, an African-American woman in a starched white uniform holds a white child, while a well-dressed white woman sits nearby.  Since we visited the exhibit, the Times' Lens blog on photography had a feature on this photo, soliciting information about the people in the photograph.   Assuming the two women were from Atlanta, there may still be someone in the city who knows them; they might even still be alive.  According to James Estrin's post,

"In the notes he sent with the film to the Life magazine lab, Mr. Parks wrote about Roll 24: 'These shots were all taken candidly in the Airlines Terminal in Atlanta.' This image, he said, 'shows the continuous matter of servitude which extends into the terminal around 2 a.m. Here, a white baby is held by a Negro maid while the baby’s mother checks on reservations, etc. Although the Negro woman serves as nurse-maid for the white woman’s baby, the two would not be allowed to sit and eat a meal together in any Atlanta restaurant.'"

The last time I saw at the High Museum that moved me and made me think as much as this one did was back in 2008, when Tom and I saw "Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1957-1968."   According to what I've read, Gordon Parks saw empathy as an important tool in ending the injustice of segregation; he hoped that photographs that demonstrated the essential, shared humanity of people who were relegated by law and custom to second class citizenship could lead to social change and justice.   "Gordon Parks:  Segregation Story" will be at the High Museum until June 7.  Don't miss your chance to see it.