The unseen truth, p.29
The Unseen Truth, page 29
It has fallen to cultural workers and representational tactics to use racial detailing to force a focus on the unstated second injustice behind lynching—a corrosive, willful unseeing of this history, and a disregard for any culpability for the act of racial terror, a fact telegraphed in the image of a lynching itself. Artist Kerry James Marshall tackled this history in his 2002 work reflecting on the double lynching of two black men, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, in Marion, Indiana in 1930. A mob had taken the men out of the county jail. A crowd of up to an estimated ten thousand had witnessed their killing, their bodies hung from trees. After the murders, crowd members cut off parts of the men’s bodies to keep with them as souvenirs. When schoolteacher Abel Meeropol saw the picture, taken by Lawrence Beitler, cropped here, he wrote the plaintive song “Strange Fruit,” made popular by Billie Holiday (Figure 5.14).
5.13. Underwood & Underwood, Silent Protest Parade in New York [City] against the East St. Louis Riots, 1917, photographic print.
Lynchings were not complete without their photographic staging that turned human beings into objects, dehumanized dots within the landscape. The often public event of a lynching was meant to exert civic control, as was the strategic distribution of photographs of the horror, commissioned by municipal officers as postcards and mailed to black leaders such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett as a second act of terror.187 The events conformed to a particular template, expelling one body or more with impunity in the midst of a phalanx of homogeneity. The demand for such photographs was startling, and Beitler worked for days to meet it, with his daughter recounting that “It wasn’t unusual for one person to order a thousand at a time.”188
5.14. Lawrence Beitler, view of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith at Marion, Indiana, August 7, 1930, “by parties unknown” (detail).
Marshall noticed that the lynching photograph telegraphed a visual rule of unseeing. “Everyone in the photograph is an accessory to a double murder, everyone who was present,” Marshall said flatly to the camera when interviewed about the unspeakable tragedy of the source photograph and his painting.189 Yet, he noticed, each person in the crowd seemed to gaze insouciantly, casually back at the camera even as they stood surrounding the lynched men hanging from trees. It was as if, Marshall states, they knew their presence in the image would be unseen, viewed but then disregarded as accessories to murder.
Marshall used the regime of racial detailing as a form of critique to dramatize this fact (Figure 5.15). In three inkjet prints, he muted the photograph of the lynching so it was reduced to a faint white. Yet in each, he has left one woman’s image unaltered, framed with a superimposed locket. The triptych of three portraits shows these figures spotlit from the whitewashed source image. Like lockets, like heirlooms, willful unseeing is also passed down—and with it, the need to understand this history of racial detailing to combat it.
By the 1960s, the civil rights movement roared into American consciousness because of the power of cultural actions—protests, organizing, and documentation from photographs to media—to get people to see what had for too long been obscured and rendered invisible. Wilson took refuge in the shadows before this collective work began. At the time, during the Progressive era, leaders had only just begun to understand the force of the regime of racial detailing, of the constructive imagination he had unleashed as a policymaking force for racial inequity. We are starting to realize now that what they were battling was not just outright racial injustice, but also the tactics used to enact it and then render it unvisible to the public at large, seen and then unseen.
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This history of racial detailing allows for a reconsideration of the roots of the early foundations of the civil rights movement and the full contestation of the legacy of federal segregation. It shifts our focus from landmark dates—from the founding of the NAACP to the launch of the Freedom Rides of 1947 and the work of mass organizing—to see the unheralded tactics of resistance. The work of giving voice to the unheard took place through more than demonstrable movements of resistance and protests. It included—required—addressing unseeing. It focused on details and eyewitness accounts in order to counteract the shift in vision that racial domination had brought about.
5.15. A (above). Kerry James Marshall, Heirlooms & Accessories, 2002. Three inkjet prints on paper in wooden artist’s frames with rhinestones, 57 × 54 1 / 4 × 3 in. (57 × 54 1 / 4 × 3 in. with frame), and B (detail, right).
In February 2019, after nearly a hundred years of failed attempts, Congress passed legislation to make lynching a federal hate crime. It was the first time that federal legislation condemned the use of violence and racial terror that had so long sustained racial inequity, shining a light backward to illuminate the work not only of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, but also of the Kendricks, the Murrays, and the cultural workers who had forced the country to see the unvisible. It would take until 1941 for segregation to be outlawed by President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8801, but by then, the shift in vision had taken hold and practices of segregation had become so commonplace. During this period, one young photographer, Gordon Parks, would come to Washington, DC to work for the federal government’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) project, which put a face to the depth of suffering during the Great Depression, creating pictures to support the agricultural loans, housing projects, and conservation efforts aimed to combat it. The trove of over 165,000 prints from the FSA–Office of War Information Collection, a portrait of the country from the Great Depression through World War II, is the greatest collection in photographic history. Republicans wanted it shut down and succeeded in 1942.
It is against the backdrop of segregation, specifically in Washington, DC, that Parks transformed the very model of documentary photography and the role of images as weapons in the long civil rights movement. His central question: How could he get people to see past the unseen, to overcome the near studied, practiced disregard that had ossified in the racial stratigraphy of American society? His aim was to get a viewer to “have some human feeling for these people,” as Grimké would say, expressing frustration at the inability to move past the mechanical language, denials, and obfuscation of federal segregation.190
Parks had come to Washington inspired, but within a day his elation, like Kendrick’s, had turned to disbelief and then determined outrage. Born in Fort Scott, Kansas, having lived in Minnesota and Chicago, he saw nothing but the principle of equality and justice when he arrived in the nation’s capital. He looked at “The White House, the Capitol and all the great buildings wherein great men had helped shape the destinies of the world” and hoped to “borrow from their tradition.”191 He walked with confidence into the office at Fourteenth and Independence Avenues.
He met with the head of the Farm Security Administration, Roy Stryker—the ringleader of the agency’s band of roving photographers from Dorothea Lange to Ben Shahn and Arthur Rothstein—who promptly took away Parks’s cameras, a Rolleiflex and a Speed Graphic, and locked them in a closet during their first meeting.
“You won’t be needing those for a few days,” he told Parks.
Stryker instead asked him to experience Washington, DC, to “walk the city. Get to know it,” and perhaps most importantly, attempt to buy a few things. After a few days of this, he wanted Parks to report back.
Parks’s entire worldview changed. He went to a drugstore to get breakfast and was denied. He tried to see a movie. Same thing. He tried to buy a coat at a department store and was told, when someone finally helped him, that the store didn’t have his size. They never asked what his size was. This led to a “ridiculous” stand-off between Parks and the retail staff. Parks sat on the couch. No one would help him try on a single coat or look for his size. The manager came to speak with Parks, but would not help him try on clothes.
“Such discrimination in Washington D.C., the nation’s capital,” was, he wrote, “hard to believe.”192 Parks said of his experience in 1942 that “discrimination and bigotry were worse there than any place I had yet seen.”193
He went back to Stryker sooner than he imagined, eager for his cameras. After their conversation, Parks wrestled with how to craft a way to convey visually the paradox of this injustice—to unsilence it.
Vibrating throughout the story was Parks’s experience of the kind of segregation and Jim Crow rule he did not expect, the kind Kendrick did not foresee could be possible in the nation’s capital, the kind Murray fought to make visible through visual analysis—a disbelief about the unseen. Stryker had locked the young photographer’s camera away at first to make a point—that anything Parks had imagined he might do with his camera before coming to Washington, DC would not work until he had witnessed it for himself. New tactics, a new visual strategy, were needed. Parks would, as Stryker urged, “think it out constructively,” as if echoing Woodrow Wilson’s chosen term, to find a way to undermine, with a new intentional force, the construction of the regime.
Parks found a model through a now iconic image, American Gothic (1942), a portrait of Ella Watson who worked cleaning the notary public offices. She stands holding the tools of her trade, a mop and broom, in front of an American flag. Her polka-dotted dress, with one button missing and another broken, rhymes with the flag’s stars as if a reminder of the heralded dots in the landscape of the United States. Parks had met Watson one night at the start of her shift that ended at 2:30 A.M. He learned of her strength and resolve: her father had been murdered by a lynch mob. Her husband had been killed just before her daughter was born. She was, as her great-great granddaughter would relate, a “Proverbs 31 woman” who wouldn’t abide being idle, but whose life was built by “all that her hands have done.”194 Here, as photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier, a contemporary heir to Parks, explains, Ella Watson stands “in front of the American flag in a society, a nation, a government that doesn’t recognize her as a full human being” (Figure 5.16A, left).195
5.16. A (left). Gordon Parks, “American Gothic,” Washington, D.C., 1942, Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Transfer from the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Beinecke Fund, © Gordon Parks Foundation, Photo President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2.2002.1000, gelatin silver print, 13 3 / 16 × 9 5 / 8 in. B (right). Arthur S. Mole and John D. Thomas, The Human U.S. Shield, 1918, gelatin silver print, 12 13 / 16 × 10 3 / 8 in. The Museum of Modern Art, Gift of Ronald A. Kurtz, 351.1994.
Parks’s American Gothic, when set against Mole’s larger collective portraits, makes vivid the critical work of racial detailing as an act of political resistance in the wake of the second founding of the United States and the long legacy of reconstruction after the Civil War (Figure 5.16A, B, left and right). If one aim of the American Civil War “was to replace the sentiment of section with the sentiment of nation,” as Louis Menand has argued, an effect of America’s involvement in World War I was the attempt to conflate the concept of nationalism with racial whiteness.196 Mole’s widely hailed work constructed a collective portrait of the United States with a precision that reflected the rigid hierarchy of racial difference and a reliance on detail that became the means through which it was done. Parks shows what it would take to undo it—the same penetrating insistence that guided Murray’s work and Kendrick’s painstaking letter-writing campaign, both calling attention to those narratives honoring black life that were being left out.
Given Parks’s work, it is perhaps no surprise that, in 1947, he would photograph Dr. Kenneth Clark and Dr. Mamie Clark’s study known as “the doll test” showing the psychological impact of this racial inequality, which became key evidence in the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that would help outlaw segregation. Parks’s work helped the public to forsake a studied disregard for inequality—an unseen truth long denied. If representation had become a “weapon,” as Parks argued, it was because it harnessed the power of interpretation that Murray, that Kendrick, that Marshall knew was critical to address injustice and inequity in American racial life. When seen in the context of Murray and Kendrick’s labors, it becomes clear that Parks was not only working within an aesthetic tradition of documentary photography. He was one of many civic actors who saw politics as conditioned by a cauterizing visual regime of interpretation that had come to pervade civic life.
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After Swan Marshall Kendrick died, his daughter, Charlotte Swan Kendrick Brooks, worked alongside her son Joseph Kendrick Brooks to self-publish a biography of her ancestors. It is now in the Library of Congress, ensuring that the unseen will not be unheard. Much of the manuscript is crafted from the letters between her parents. We also have this family history due to the perseverance of Kendrick’s sister, Hattie D. Kendrick, who worked at age ninety-five to record the family’s lineage, and of Ruby Moyse Kendrick, who saved her letters with Swan Marshall Kendrick for sixty years. Kendrick’s sister would go on to work in a middle school and file a suit against the Cairo Board of Education in 1941 that was won by Thurgood Marshall, then chief counsel for the NAACP.197 The Kendrick-Brooks family history, along with Murray’s work, models not only the precise, painstaking work of the long civil rights struggle, but is a testament to the force of the racial detailing that obscured the forms of racial domination we seek to undo.
“The ancestors deserve to know that their struggles were not in vain; that their hopes and dreams for their children and their children’s children have in very large part been realized, and will continue to be realized,” Charlotte Swan Kendrick Brooks wrote in the preface to her biography. “The descendants will learn at least partially from this story what the people of their own blood have lived through and suffered, and that they were strong, competent, persistent and enduring, loving people who deserved much better than slavery, disfranchisement and—worst of all—the lies told to conceal their humanity, intelligence and courage.”198
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The conditioned unseeing common in Wilson’s administration did not arrive at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It was part of a fundamental transformation of vision that emerged in the nineteenth century in order for racial domination to survive. We do not “see,” but as Wilson put it, have so “learned how” to unsee the fractured foundations of racial domination such that it is nearly second nature.
Wilson never did or could receive a report about the look of women from the Caucasus region. He had asked for the report to be delivered in person. He suffered a stroke shortly afterward. Yet there was nothing lost at that point by not seeing images of the actual Caucasus region in the United States. Racial domination had created a shared language to both legitimate and unsee the false foundations of racial hierarchy, one naturalized to become part of the everyday circuits of vision in American life.
We have not been told about the fictions underlying the logic of racial domination; we have been conditioned not to see them. We have been trained to ignore them as the regime of racial hierarchy was stabilized through a history of negative assembly, erasure, and racial detailing. These practices have served to mask the fictions that supported racial domination, once codified into law, but still present today. These tactics find force precisely because they are so common to racialized norms in the United States that they are easy to miss.
A visual racial regime accommodated unspeakable fictions at the basis of racial supremacy. Racial supremacy in the United States was built on more than stereotype, and to undo the damage will require more than redemptive images. The unseen truth of silencing and racial detailing to secure racial domination is cloaked in the very roots of modern American culture. There is an invective, a near epistemic violence, to the silence around this history. For far too long, the tactics employed to naturalize the reproduction of fictions beneath our racial order have masked the foundational lie that Kendrick Brooks exposed: there was never any basis for asserting the superiority of any American racial group over another at all.
Epilogue
It Takes So Long to See
I was not expecting to stand just feet from Woodrow Wilson’s tomb and memorial on the ground floor of Washington National Cathedral. I had come to see a new commission that the church was set to unveil: stained glass windows and tablets by artist Kerry James Marshall and poet Elizabeth Alexander to replace those dedicated to Confederate generals Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson and Robert E. Lee that had remained for seventy years. Wilson’s tomb had been deliberately installed beneath these stained-glass windows, which had been erected years earlier through a gift from the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). After being invited to speak about the new commission, I had asked for a tour and then noticed what had gone unmentioned in all the reporting: Wilson’s memorial would now be directly next to the new Marshall windows and Alexander tablet. Joined by an open-air arched passageway, they are porous to each other, connected through place and time.
Wilson is the only president buried at Washington National Cathedral. His sarcophagus and cenotaph are in the nave next to the pews for worship. The church was built by an act of Congress and deliberately set on the highest point in the area as a house of prayer for all people. Initially, Wilson was buried one floor below ground in Bethlehem Chapel. More than three decades later, he was raised to the main-floor level and given his own bay with three windows designed by Ervin Bossányi portraying allegories of God’s blessing, forgiveness, and destroyed peace.
