Signs of the Times : The Visual Politics of Jim Crow [1 ed.] 9780520945869, 9780520261839

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Signs of the Times : The Visual Politics of

Copyright © 2010. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

the george gund foundation imprint in african american studies

Copyright © 2010. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

The George Gund Foundation has endowed this imprint to advance understanding of the history, culture, and current issues of African Americans.

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The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the African American Studies Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which was established by a major gift from the George Gund Foundation.

Copyright © 2010. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

The publisher also gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by a University of California Faculty Research Grant.

Signs of the Times : The Visual Politics of Jim Crow, University of California Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,

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Signs of the Times

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Signs of the Times The Visual Politics of Jim Crow

Copyright © 2010. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Elizabeth Abel

UNIVERSIT Y OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London

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University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England

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© 2010 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Abel, Elizabeth. Signs of the times : the visual politics of Jim Crow / Elizabeth Abel. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-520-26117-4 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-520-26183-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. African Americans—Segregation—Southern States—History— 20th century. 2. Visual communication—Southern States—History— 20th century. 3. Signs and signboards—Southern States—History— 20th century. 4. Photography—Social aspects—Southern States— History—20th century. 5. Racism in popular culture—Southern States— History—20th century. 6. Southern States—Race relations—History— 20th century. I. Title. E185.61.A164 2010 305.800975—dc22 2009020570 Manufactured in the United States of America 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Signs of the Times : The Visual Politics of Jim Crow, University of California Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,

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For Richard Meyer and Benjamin Abel Meyer, with love

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Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Preface Introduction: Jim Crow’s Cultural Turns

ix xiii xvii 1

Part I. Inscriptions 1. American Graffiti: The Social Life of Jim Crow Signs

33

2. The Signs of Race in the Language of Photography

62

3. Cultural Memory and the Conditions of Visibility: The Circulation of Jim Crow Photographs

103

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Part II. Race and Space 4. Restroom Doors and Drinking Fountains: Perspective, Mobility, and the Fluid Grounds of Race and Gender

123

5. The Eyeball and the Wall: Eating, Seeing, and the Nation

160

Part III. Still and Motion Pictures 6. Double Take: Photography, Cinema, and the Segregated Theater

195

7. Upside Down and Inside Out: Camera Work, Spectatorship, and the Chronotope of the Colored Balcony

217

Part IV. Dismantling Jim Crow 8. Remaking Racial Signs: Activism and Photography in the Theater of the Sit-Ins

251

Afterword: Contemporary Turns

292

Notes Select Bibliography Index

301 357 379

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Illustrations

1. “Colored Service” entrance, New Orleans, 1980 3 2. “White Only” sign, Virginia, circa 1961 9 3. James Baldwin outside restaurant with “Colored Entrance Only” sign, 1963 23 4. Assorted Jim Crow signs 37 5. Jim Crow signs citing 1931 Alabama ordinance 39 6. “No Negros Allowed” park sign 40 7. Whites-only outhouse 42 8. Cartoon, Chicago Defender, 1945 45 9. “Colored Only” sign, Lenox Theater, Augusta, Georgia 46 10. Sign from American Beach, Florida 47 11. Painted-over “White Men” sign 49 12. Martha’s Crib Jim Crow Sign Series 55 13. Marchel’le Renise Barber in Martha’s Crib 57 14. Imperial Laundry truck, circa 1920 70 15. Deep in the heart of Texas, late 1940s 71 16. Greenwood Public Library for Negroes, late 1930s or early 1940s 75 17. Gas station excluding blacks, Calhoun County, South Carolina, 1959 77 18. Street scene near Durham, North Carolina, bus station, May 1940 81 19. Bus station, Durham, May 1940 84 20. Waiting outside train station, Kittrell, North Carolina, circa 1900 87 21. Railroad station, Manchester, Georgia, 1938 91 22. Woman and infant on “colored” bench, late 1930s or early 1940s 93 23. Segregated South, circa 1953 95 ix

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Illustrations

24. Black youth leaves segregated train station waiting room, Columbia, South Carolina, 1956 97 25. Cab Calloway’s band at railroad station, Atlanta, circa 1940 99 26. Colored bus station waiting room, Memphis, circa 1960s 100 27. Sanitation workers’ strike, Memphis, 1968 101 28. “This park for white people only” sign, Potomac Heights, Maryland, 1904 107 29–30. Drinking fountains, North Carolina, 1950 118–19 31. From Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection 127 32. Exhibit group from “Jim Crow: Racism and Reaction” 128 33. Greyhound rest stop between Louisville and Nashville, September 1943 129 34. Roadside sign, South Carolina 133 35. Bus station, Miami, 1946–49 135 36. Thunderbolt tattoo, Atlanta, 1947 136 37. Victim of the Columbians, Atlanta, 1947 138 38. Agricultural exhibits, North Carolina State Fair, 1931 139 39. Arrest of Gwendolyn Jenkins, Jackson, Mississippi, June 7, 1961 141 40. Drinking at water cooler, Oklahoma City streetcar terminal, July 1939 143 41. Drinking fountain, county courthouse lawn, Halifax, North Carolina, April 1938 145 42. Interior of Williamson County courthouse, Texas, 1963 147 43. Segregated drinking fountains, county courthouse, Albany, Georgia, 1962 149 44. Dairy Queen advertisement, Elberton, Georgia, 1941 151 45. Ira Jett at drinking fountain, Atlanta, 1947 152 46. Drinking fountains in tobacco warehouse, Lumberton, North Carolina, 1946 153 47. Segregated drinking fountains 153 48. Segregated drinking fountains, Birmingham, Alabama, 1956 158 49. Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942 166 50. Parody of Hopper: Christmas card, 1995 166 51. Restaurant sign, Lancaster, Ohio, August 1938 169 52. Lonestar Restaurant Association sign 171 53. Overton Park Zoo, Memphis, 1950s 173 54. Jacksonville Municipal Zoo, Florida, circa 1963 175 55. Restaurant sign, San Antonio, Texas, June 1949 176 56. Restaurant sign, central Florida 177 57. Lunch room, Belle Glade, Florida, January 1939 179 58. Dorothea Lange with Zeiss Juwel camera, 1937 187 59. Killing Time, Mississippi, 1938 189 60. Opening night at Rex Theater, Hannibal, Missouri, April 4, 1912 198

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Illustrations

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

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79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

xi

“There’s a reason,” Moving Picture World, August 20, 1910 215 Rex Theatre for Colored People, Leland, Mississippi, 1939 220 Unemployed youth, Birmingham, 1940 224 Theater entrance, Jackson, Mississippi, 1930s 226 Stairway to Fox Theater “buzzard’s roost,” Atlanta, 1948 230 Theater entrance, Belzoni, Mississippi, 1939 233 Theater entrance, Beale Street, October 1939 235 Theater entrance, Anniston, Alabama, 1936 237 NAACP-sponsored sit-in, Oklahoma City, August 20, 1958 260 Students sitting in at Woolworth’s, Greensboro, North Carolina, February 2, 1960 263 White youths block Woolworth’s sit-ins, Greensboro, February 5, 1960 267 Sit-in at Woolworth’s, Little Rock, Arkansas, November 1962 268 Silent treatment, Raleigh, North Carolina, February 10, 1960 269 Segregation flare up, Portsmouth, Virginia, February 16, 1960 271 Portsmouth lunch counter, February 16, 1960 274 Nietta Dunn at sit-in, Lexington, Kentucky, early 1960s 276 Sit-in at Kress Variety Store, St. Petersburg, Florida, November 5, 1960 277 Students arrested after sit-in at Thalheimer’s lunch counter, Richmond, Virginia, February 23, 1960 279 Segregated “white female” prison ward, New Orleans, 1963 281 The Long Wait, lunch counter, Birmingham, April 4, 1963 285 Sit-in at lunch counter, Jackson, May 28, 1963 286 Discarded Jim Crow signs 293 Poster protesting University of California Regents’ ban on affirmative action, September 1995 295 Students against 209 protest, Berkeley, November 1997 296 Emory Biko, Peg Leg, 2006 298

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Acknowled gments

It has taken more than a village to bring this book into being. At every stage, it has depended on the knowledge, experience, and generosity of the countless collectors, archivists, curators, activists, photographers, and scholars who have shared their accumulated wisdom with me. One of redeeming pleasures of this foray into unfamiliar turf has been the opportunity to talk with individuals whose experience has been so different from my own. This book would have been unthinkable without their contributions; their willingness to share their stories, photographs, and artifacts remains its enduring reward. I am especially indebted to the collectors of black memorabilia who allowed me to visit their collections or described them to me in detail through written or visual accounts: Marchel’le Renise Barber, Julian Bond, Brian Breyé, Dr. Thomas C. Bridge, LaCheryl B. Cillie, Janette Falkner, Rose Fontanella, Mildred Franklin, Sallie Hurt, Herman “Skip” Mason Jr., Virgil J. Mayberry, Chuck McDew, Phillip Merrill, David Pilgrim, Mary Taylor, and Dan Williams. I am also deeply grateful to the photographers who took the time to talk or write to me about the challenges of documenting Jim Crow signs and the protest movement that finally brought them down: Milton J. Hinton, Bern Keating, Calvert McCann, Alex Rivera, Steve Schapiro, and Cecil J. Williams. I also thank Emory Biko, Guillermo Prado, and Hudson Talbott for permission to reproduce original artwork. This project required guidance through a number of archival mazes, assistance unstintingly provided by archivists who helped me locate materials in their own collections, steered me toward collections I would not otherwise have known, and smoothed the process of gaining reproduction rights. Of the many who went out of their way to offer help, I especially thank Jim Baggett of the Department of Arxiii

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acknowledgments

chives and Manuscripts, Birmingham Public Library; Jennifer Ford of Special Collections, J. D. Williams Library, University of Mississippi; Karen Glynn of the Southern Media Archive, Center for Southern Studies, University of Mississippi; Rebecca Hankins and Christopher Harter of the Amistad Research Center; Barbara Natanson of the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress; Nicholas Natanson of the National Archives; Paul Ortiz of the Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University; Teresa Roane of the Valentine Richmond History Center; Peter J. Roberts of Special Collections, Georgia State University Library; Mary C. Ternes of the District of Columbia Public Library; Irene Wainwright of the Louisiana Division of the New Orleans Public Library; and Florence Wilson-Davis of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. For help in gaining access to specific materials, interviews, and images, I also thank John Belton, Department of English, Rutgers University; David G. Berger, codirector of the Milton J. Hinton Photographic Collection; Q. David Bowers of Bowers and Merena Galleries, Inc.; Leslie Calmes and Tammy Carter of the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona; Milburn J. Crowe, the city clerk of Mound Bayou, Mississippi; Dorothy Davis, executor of the Griffith J. Davis collection; Helena Hau of the Lexington Herald-Leader; Elizabeth Partridge and Margaret Partridge of the Rondal Partridge Archives; Amy Rockefeller of the Gordon Parks Foundation; Kieran Setiya, Department of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh; and Skip Tate, the editor of Xavier magazine. Over its long gestation, this project has been generously supported by several institutions. I thank the University of California, Berkeley, for awarding me a Humanities Research Fellowship, a President’s Research Fellowship in the Humanities, and a Faculty Research Grant. I am also the grateful recipient of a George A. and Eliza Howard Foundation Fellowship. I am thankful as well to the Rockefeller Foundation for a Bellagio Study Center Fellowship and to the Center for the Humanities at Oregon State University for an external fellowship. Colleagues have provided less material but no less indispensable support. I have been fortunate to have the opportunity at Berkeley to share my work with interdisciplinary groups such as the American Cultures faculty seminar, the Townsend Humanities Center working group on photography, the Center for Race and Gender, and the Race and Visual Culture working group. This book first took shape in a writing group whose members—Janet Adelman, Marilyn Fabe, Gayle Greene, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Sprengnether—helped me steer it through its most inchoate early stages. Over the years, it has benefited greatly from exchanges with Stephen Best, Anne Anlin Cheng, Carol J. Clover, Saidiya Hartman, Abdul JanMohamed, Leon F. Litwack, Waldo Martin, Susan Schweik, Anne Wagner, and Linda Williams. I am especially grateful to Catherine Gallagher and Alex Zwerdling for their careful readings of specific chapters. Leigh Raiford’s arrival at Berkeley during this project’s final years provided the gift of the ideal reader.

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acknowledgments

xv

I was also fortunate to participate in another scholarly community through a year in residence at the Center for the Humanities at Oregon State University. I thank the director, David Robinson, and the associate director, Wendy Madar, for creating such a productive and protected work environment, and the other fellows, especially Anita Helle and Barbara Loeb, for stimulating conversation and emotional support. Some of the most invaluable commentators on this project guided me longdistance through the field of photography criticism. I am especially grateful to Marianne Hirsch, whose friendship and mentoring over the years, as we have shifted fields in tandem with each other, have been a sustaining source of professional and personal support. I am also deeply grateful for Valerie Smith’s thoughtful and generous commentary. I thank Maurice O. Wallace for sharing expertise about James Baldwin and for serving as an incisive respondent to an American Studies Association panel. I am grateful as well to Jeannene M. Przyblyski for sharing her knowledge of photography and for coordinating the photography working group at the Townsend Humanities Center. Other writers and scholars have graciously volunteered specific modes of expertise along the way. I thank Stetson Kennedy for our extended correspondence about his documentation of the Jim Crow South. I am grateful to James Allen for our exchange about the differences between collecting lynching photographs and Jim Crow signs. I especially appreciate Joan Trumpauer Mulholland’s willingness to talk with me about her participation in the civil rights movement. Thanks as well to William Edwards for narratives of coming of age in the segregated South, Jane M. Gaines for correspondence about segregated movie theaters, Grace Elizabeth Hale for conversation about Jim Crow’s enduring traces, Allen Tullos for orientation to Atlanta’s civil rights resources, Patricia Turner for insights into the symbolic functions of Jim Crow signs, and Dana White and Carol Merritt for detailed knowledge of Georgia’s segregated architecture. Beyond specific scholarly contributions, friends and colleagues near and far have kept me going over the long haul. I especially thank Maryl Gearhart, Kevis Goodman, Dorothy Kaufman, Anne Koenen, Oscar Lumpkin, Sarah Benzaquen Lumpkin, Christian Marouby, Judith Meyer, Marta Peixoto, Geoffrey Saxe, and Beth Shamgar for their confidence when my own was fading. I owe a special debt to Janet Adelman and Robert Osserman for the gift of the ideal space in which to write. I am deeply grateful to Susan Gubar for the warmth, encouragement, and luminous support that have made her a guiding light for generations of feminist critics. I have been graced with a series of dedicated and resourceful research assistants who played a crucial role in assembling the materials on which this project rests. I am grateful to Catherine Hollis, Kim-An Lieberman, Monica Miller, Marya Mogk, Grace K. B. Smith, Miruna Stanica, Andrea Zemgulys, and the many participants in the Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program at the University of Califor-

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acknowledgments

nia, Berkeley. I also thank all those unnamed students, colleagues, and friends whose curiosity, questions, memories, and leads opened up new avenues of inquiry. I am grateful as well to the organizers and audiences of lectures and conferences sponsored by the American Studies Association; the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture; the College Art Association; Columbia University; Dartmouth College; the Modern Language Association; the Modernist Studies Association; Occidental College; Oregon State University; Stanford University; the University of California campuses at Berkeley, Davis and Los Angeles; the University of Colorado; the University of Graz; and the University of Leeds. A few guiding spirits have presided over this project from the beginning. Foremost among these is Michael Paul Rogin, whose scholarship inspired it and whose friendship sustained it during the long years of incubation. As everyone who knew him recognized, he was the consummate interlocutor. He could take the most chaotic thoughts and find the common thread, rethink the most inert arguments and breathe life into them. I am one of many whose unraveling drafts were salvaged by his discovery of their hidden architecture. Walking and talking with Mike about our common interests was one of the greatest pleasures of this project. My extended family has stood by me throughout this lengthy process. My parents, Marion Abel and Reuben Abel, encouraged me to venture into unfamiliar turf and remained enthusiastic auditors until the end. My parents-in-law, Charles Meyer and Helen Meyer, offered unconditional support even when they must have wondered what this strange obsession was. My brother Richard Abel has been my most faithful and attentive friend, on a constant lookout not only for the exhibits and reviews he knew would interest me, but also and more importantly for the signs of discouragement that he often recognized and tried to intercept before I was aware of them. No one intuited as well, in the face of stony silence, exactly when and how I wanted—and did not want—to be questioned about my headway. This book is dedicated to the two people most intimately and enduringly entwined with it. My son, Benjamin Abel Meyer, can barely remember a time before I was preoccupied with Jim Crow. I have fond memories of his running down the path to my study to inform me with great excitement that Jim Crow signs were on television. He and my partner, Richard Meyer, accompanied me on research trips through the South, listened patiently to my anxieties, helped me reformulate and restructure key ideas, and reassured me when I was convinced I could not sustain the argument. Their caring, compassion, and confidence have made it possible to bring this journey to an end.

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Preface From toiling as White House slaves to President-elect Barack Obama, we have crossed the ultimate color line.

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Henry Louis Gates Jr., November 5, 2008

Why a book about segregation signs in the early years of America’s first African American presidency? What is to be gained by looking back at these painful objects at the moment when they appear to have finally relinquished their grip? In the immediate aftermath of Barack Obama’s victory, it seemed as if a flood of joy and tears had melted away the divisions that are the subject of this study. It was tempting to embrace a narrative of progress in which dreams realized, however long deferred, could redeem the burdens and reward the struggles of the past. Surely that was the vision behind the headline with which the New York Times greeted Obama’s victory: “Racial Barrier Falls in Heavy Turnout.” Evoking an image of civil rights demonstrators massed against an almost tangible barrier, the headline situated the election in a history of protest movements: the end of the electoral race was the end of race, the crossing of the ultimate color line. In Signs of the Times, I propose a more dynamic relation between our segregated past and our longed-for postracial present, a longing jeopardized by (among other events) the furor over Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s description of herself as a “wise Latina” and by the shocking arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates, entangled in the color line implicitly drawn around his Cambridge home. I hope the book will provoke its readers less to draw comfort from the singular breakthroughs of electoral politics than to probe the continuities between the explicit racial laws and signs that traversed a surprisingly large swath of the nation for a surprisingly long time and the more insidious modes and sites of racialization that persist in the twenty-first century, the undeclared color lines that continue to delimit neighborhoods, prisons, barracks, places of worship, and schools. What modalities of racism still fracture the social landscape after the dismantling of Jim Crow? Where would the racial signs of our times be situated, and what language would they use? xvii

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Language is central to this inquiry because of words’ capacity to determine the visible field, to make race appear and disappear, to call it out where it is silent, to erase it where it is salient, and to invest it with the burden of history. This power was dramatized during the 2008 presidential campaign in which, after a decade of obligatory silence, race was flushed out of the closet of color blindness clad in other verbal clothes. To avoid charges either of racism or of “playing the race card,” an inescapable factor in the campaign had to be addressed through codes that made race audible (on one side) and invisible (on the other) without explicit reference. Hence, as was frequently noted, the McCain campaign relied on the racial connotations of words such as disrespectful, uppity, and welfare, not to mention that one, to paint Obama black, while winking at the use of his middle name, Hussein, to label him Muslim. The Obama campaign, by contrast, except when the candidate was compelled to address the subject directly in response to the media coverage of inflammatory remarks by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, sought to substitute place for race. As a child of Kansas and Kenya—personifications of parentage skillfully paired to suggest a symmetry and consonance that implied a natural partnership—Barack Obama became the product of a geographic union rather than a biological one. As a “girl from the South Side of Chicago” (as she styled herself at the Democratic convention), Michelle Obama became the daughter of a neighborhood. As a “young preacher from Georgia,” Martin Luther King Jr., on the anniversary of his “I have a dream” speech, became in Obama’s construction the creation of a region and a calling, as if even the mention of the leader’s name might be too racially marked. The strategy posed some compelling questions: if race is not spoken, will it become imperceptible? If it becomes inaudible, will it become illegible? The answers were suspended by success. After winning the election, the son of Kansas and Kenya became, by consensus, “black.” To register the historic nature of his victory, Obama had to become the “first black president”: neither the more precise descriptor biracial nor the more recent African American could perform that work. The postracial had to speak the language of race to herald its own advent. Reading the signs of Jim Crow, I hope, will deepen our apprehension of their ramifications for the present. Conversely, and perhaps more counterintuitively, such a reading is designed to bring into view a distant glimmer of the postracial in the transactions that troubled even the heavily marked terrain of segregation. Jim Crow’s baldly reductive, humiliatingly blunt, cruelly limited and limiting set of terms would seem a most unpromising turf on which to seek nuance or negotiability, but if we look beyond the cursory language of the signs to their discursive and material surround, and if we take into account the vantage points of viewers who recorded their perceptions in photographs that reworked the textual field, these bald directives begin to seem more complex and malleable tools of race making. “All signs reveal us,” proclaimed Eudora Welty, whose photographs, like those of her contemporaries,

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Preface

xix

teased out some of those signs’ most revealing features.1 Welty’s claim should not surprise us: the revelatory power routinely accorded language should pertain as well to signs whose limited verbal scope is offset by the heightened visibility, expressivity, and staying power that has rendered them objects of the photographic gaze. Reading Jim Crow signs through the lenses that preserved them for our scrutiny reveals an “us” that exceeds the local field of their production. It is an “us,” nevertheless, that is constrained by the binary structure that is Jim Crow’s defining and most glaringly anachronistic feature, which consequently requires some attention. The “white” and “colored” polarities of Jim Crow instituted a racial dualism whose “Manichean overtness,” in Hortense J. Spillers’s phrase, both displaced a previous tripartite division that had acknowledged the place of the nation’s original inhabitants and resisted the evolution of a flexible third term that could accommodate other racial designations and hybridities.2 A structure that began by absenting Native Americans persisted by ignoring immigrants from Asia. Although those (such as the Chinese in Mississippi) who settled in substantial numbers in the South had to navigate the binary structure of Jim Crow, typically by forging a determined path from the “colored” to the “white” position, the distinctive position of Asian Americans was largely disregarded by a racial apparatus that was not designed for them. There was no shortage of exclusionary practices directed toward Asian Americans—restrictive housing covenants, congressional action, political campaigns, union agitation, and derogatory cartoons, to name only a few—but these were intended more to obstruct than to construct a particular social location. One implication of the “white” and “colored” poles that functioned as a sorting mechanism through which immigrants from southern and eastern Europe passed en route toward Americanization was that immigrants from Asia were simply inadmissible: their foreignness prevented them from entering the system through which they might be assimilated to American culture, in however inferior a position.3 Jim Crow’s stark racial binary, which had no equivalent in a Europe that lacked the resident black population required to generate an oppositional construction of whiteness, marks the insistent and persistent if imaginary division that, to adapt Ernesto Laclau’s phrase, “structured a field of intelligibility” for American constructions of race.4 Social and legal historians have managed to analyze the definitional force of this division without reproducing the fantasy that America’s racial diversity could be filtered through two terms by mapping the fluctuations produced by the naturalization struggles of immigrant groups seeking to “become white.”5 This book attempts instead to elicit the pressures eroding the binary structure from within the terms of its articulation, not in the courthouse or the statehouse but on the outhouses and other lowly and local structures onto which Jim Crow signs were attached. Rather than chart the changing contours of race through the language of the state that evolved as groups provisionally assigned to the “colored” side of the division navigated the passage toward the “white” side through strategies that re-

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Preface

drew the boundaries of those terms, I examine the reinscription of the racial division through the public posting of its terms. The driving force behind this project was the discovery that this extensive racial scrawl—arguably America’s most public and pervasive racial text—is at risk of disappearing from cultural memory. Neither the Jim Crow signs themselves nor the photographs that preserved their more ephemeral iterations have been collected as a coherent cultural archive. If “archives represent scenes of unbearable social weight,” as Okwui Enwezor argues, we would have to conclude that the quotidian nature of these signs has kept them below the threshold of the unbearable.6 This book responds to the need for an archive of the ordinary, of posted language so routine as to have almost escaped notice. Compiling archives also carries risks, of course. The costs of dispersal must be measured against the costs of quarantine. Assembling representations of Jim Crow signs within a single volume risks setting them apart from the other regulatory and classificatory systems with which they were articulated. Segregation should not be resegregated. Fortunately, one antidote has been provided by the photographs themselves, which, rather than abstracting signs from their contexts, reveal their continuity and contiguity with a range of social messages. Publication is also a partial remedy: unlike a filing cabinet or library, a book sets into circulation images that will be viewed within multiple historical and political frames. Making these images visible carries special urgency precisely because it appears not to. Whereas the George W. Bush era of state-mandated color blindness, appropriated by the Right to justify the dismantling of affirmative action, provoked a resurgent deployment of Jim Crow signs from the Left as reminders of the work still needing to be done (as I show in the afterword), bringing these signs back into view during the Obama presidency may instead provoke anxiety about endangering gains too fragile to withstand extended retrospection. The confrontational relation between reminders of Jim Crow and a political ethos determined to disavow them has shifted to a fraught negotiation with a more ambivalent structure of feeling. Nevertheless, this negotiation is necessary. The risks of looking back are outweighed by the risks of not looking back. Walter Benjamin warns us that “every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”7 If, because we refuse to recognize the image of Jim Crow as one of our own concerns, it recedes irretrievably into the past, that loss will impoverish our recognition of a central facet of the present. By looking at disturbing words, tacked to the walls of another time and place, as neither alien to our gaze nor as threatening to absorb it, but as reflecting one of our own concerns, we may elicit the relation between Jim Crow signs and the more enigmatic signs of our times.

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Introduction Jim Crow’s Cultural Turns My name’s Jim Crow. Weel about, and turn about, And do jis so; Ebry time I weel about, I jump Jim Crow.

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Refrain, “Jim Crow” (popular song, ca. 1833)

To visit the “Field to Factory” exhibit at the National Museum of American History, you must pass through one of two doors: the one on the left, marked “White,” or the one on the right, marked “Colored.” There is an almost audible gasp as visitors stop in their tracks. For white museumgoers, the impasse is ethical: whether to pass beneath the sign of an undesired privilege or to appropriate a path one has not earned the right to walk. African American visitors confront a more excruciating choice between resubmitting to racism and repudiating race. What both groups share, I imagine, is shame at being called out by language from the past, at being reconstituted as participants in, rather than observers of, a history whose extension into the present cannot be evaded. A similar device for impressing the racial past on contemporary consciousness structures the gateway to the new Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. Here, visitors must choose between a door marked “Blankes” and one marked “Nie-Blankes.” “Whites” and “Non-Whites” are written underneath. The desire to submit the mind and body of the viewer directly to the terms of race is refracted through a colonial history that brings the politics of nomenclature into view. The choice and sequence of the wording situate the gateway politically by granting Afrikaans priority over English, and historically by translating Afrikaans into the American language of color that, with the dissemination of the civil rights movement, began to displace the language of colonialism that had yielded the previous translation of the terms 1

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as “European” and “Non-European.”1 Stratified vertically as well as horizontally, and culturally as well as racially, the gateway to apartheid both underscores the power of the racial division and suggests that we revisit America’s racial signage to ask whether it really spoke in the monolithic voice it has assumed in cultural memory, and what has fostered the impression that it did. One factor has been the constraints of public exhibition space, especially when uninflected by the requirements of a multilingual state. The fiction of symmetrical doorways, and hence of a bedrock and balanced binary, is at once deceptive, as segregated entries were rarely symmetrical or even side by side, and necessary, for if these museums had more faithfully reproduced the realities of segregated entries, they would also have risked making the terms of entry unacceptable. Who would be willing to stoop either literally (on the “colored” side) or figuratively (on the “white” side) to walk through unequal doors? Driven by the opportunity and the urgency of narrowing the gap between a forgetful present and a shameful history, these entrées to the scene of inequality exploit the potential of their three-dimensional space to deliver the effect of immediacy, even as that effect is inevitably mediated by the terms of access to that space. Photography’s flat surface, by contrast, may be better suited to examining the effects of mediation to which its own existence inescapably bears witness. Hence I propose a different kind of gateway to this book. A 1980 photograph by A. J. Flaherty captioned “Probably the last vestige of segregation in New Orleans” (figure 1)—a painfully ironic claim in the aftermath of a quasi-Biblical flood whose central revelation might be allegorized by the emergence of an old “Colored” sign from the muddy depths of the city’s Lower Ninth Ward— shows a “Colored Service” entry to a building at the crossroads of Decatur and Governor Nichols Streets in the French Quarter. As the last vestige of segregation (and one of the last photographs of segregation signage I have found), this is a threshold image, joining and dividing rather than collapsing present and past. The camera brings into focus the mediations through which segregation spoke, its articulation through as well as to the social body. A less material mode of reproduction than the entry to the “Field to Factory” exhibit, the photograph paradoxically affords greater access to the materiality of segregation signs at the same time that it foregrounds their status as signs that withhold the legibility they seem so readily to yield. Capturing a transitional moment, the image places the viewer in front of a padlocked door whose closure seems to signal the close of the system, yet whose traces linger on the wall. The gateway to the historical referent is barred. The door is locked, yet some form of access is teasingly proposed, for the image includes a small key hanging on the lower left wall. What promise of decipherment do the lock and key imply? At the most literal level, the key’s visibility evacuates the space behind the door: if anything of value had been sequestered there, the key would hardly be publicly displayed. Instead of unlocking historical secrets, the space

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Figure 1. Probably the last vestige of segregation in New Orleans. Photograph by A. J. Flaherty, 1980. A. J. Flaherty Photograph Collection, Louisiana Division, New Orleans Public Library.

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between lock and key invites us to dwell on the writing on the wall. By 1980, the once-assertive block capitals of “Colored” have lost their singular hold and declined into partial, faded presence. Beneath, a more malleable language of service has been freshly painted in cursive script that rewrites (but does not replace) the immutable condition of race with the gentler script of contingent economic status. Segueing between two discursive regimes, the scene suggests the varied tones of voice and modes of address through which segregation was written, a variation echoed in the building’s two-tone paint. This image asks us to pause at the threshold to read the letter of segregation’s text, both the written letter and its reproduction in a visual medium. Before crossing that threshold, before even asking how we might cross it, Signs of the Times seeks to unravel the pervasive and tenacious and variously mediated web of racial signage that stretched across much of United States for three-quarters of a century. First appearing in the closing decades of the nineteenth century inside train cars and outside station doors, hundreds of thousands of Jim Crow signs—“more numerous than magnolia trees,” in Gloria Wade-Gayles’s poignant formulation—spread, through the early decades of the twentieth century, to courthouses, whorehouses, cemeteries, orphanages, hospitals, libraries, lavatories, eating places, theaters, elevators, laundries, parks, drinking fountains, windows, and then (keeping pace with technology) to telephone booths, vending machines, and airport waiting rooms not only across the South, but also more sporadically up and down both coasts and across much of the Midwest.2 This web constitutes America’s most obvious yet strangely invisible inscription of race as a network of signs. The signage lagged several decades behind the actual practices of segregation, which originated as attempts to regulate the expanded opportunities for interracial contact afforded by urban life in the North as well as the South.3 Yet whereas Northern cities, even before the Civil War, relied primarily on patterns of residential and school segregation to divide whites from free blacks, white Southerners, after the withdrawal of federal troops in 1877, implemented comprehensive and interlocking social, economic, and political structures to secure racial separation and hierarchy. Especially in urban areas where patterns of racial subordination were least entrenched, white Southerners worked quickly after the end of Reconstruction to devise a horizontal urban grid to replace the vertical structures of supervision and subordination that had ensured that the proximities of slavery would remain hierarchical and unthreatening. The primary anxiety was that a new generation of African Americans, born after the end of slavery, would be able to imagine and pursue more egalitarian social relations. Unconditioned to positions of inferiority, this generation, it was feared, could take advantage of the new urban modes of social and physical mobility that brought them into contact with whites on terms of potential equality at a range of social sites: hotels, restaurants, parks, theaters, hospitals, and—most frequently and therefore most problematically—the rapidly ex-

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panding network of public streetcars, railroads, and buses that carried increasing numbers of people within and between cities (and were consequently the first facilities to be segregated). By the 1880s, African Americans in many Southern states were restricted to second-class or smoking cars on trains; municipalities quickly followed by segregating streetcars, restricting African American passengers to the rear. Social custom was institutionalized by intensive legislation between 1890 and 1915, the first two waves (1889–93 and 1897–1907) focusing on public accommodations and transportation, the third (1913–15) on facilities in factories (especially toilets and drinking fountains) and urban housing. Although legislation gradually tapered off, Jim Crow signs continued to spread to every conceivable site between and beyond the bounds of legislation. These signs constitute a collective and flexible articulation whose dimensions were determined more by custom, taste, and convention than by law. The result was a sign system produced by many hands in a multiplicity of forms that emerged across a spectrum of geographic, economic, and political positions. Through a variety of tonal and tangible inflections that sought in letters large and small, printed on paper and painted on glass, carved in stone and emblazoned in gas, to command, humiliate, and ingratiate, Jim Crow signage gave race a graphic body that shaped the meaning of its abstract terms. Signs of the Times seeks to uncover that body, to bring it from behind the screen memory of the more sanitized and standardized terms that (like all acts of memory, especially cultural memory), are also inevitably acts of forgetting. I have tried, despite many gaps, to recover what remains of the history of this signage, to restore, against a powerful and overdetermined desire to forget, the emotionally fraught “textures of memory” these repellent objects embody and evoke.4 Recovery, however, is only a springboard to reading a sign system that has not been viewed as such. Specific signs have, of course, been noted, but very few, and often the same few; and these have been treated primarily as signposts rather than as signs, as markers that point contemporary viewers, as they did their original ones, to somewhere or something else, to the legal and social relations that are presumed to be the real subject of history. Memoirs, scholarship, oral histories, and novels have recorded some of the damage these tools of white supremacy inflicted, but although their disciplinary effects have received attention, and will continue to receive it here, the urgency of documenting these painful consequences has obscured the role of the signage itself in shaping the meaning as well as the social and economic deployment of race—in constituting what we might call, following Michael Omi and Howard Winant, the representational dimension of one of this nation’s most blatant racial projects.5 I try to redress this oversight in a way that complicates rather than attenuates our understanding of Jim Crow’s political and social effects. Reading the signs against their master plan, I consider how their status as signs also often worked at cross-purposes to their governing intention. The signs called into play forces of re-

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sistance manifest not only in the tactics devised to evade their regulatory force but also in the very grain of their inscription. That grain, most palpable in the materials of which the signs were wrought, was more subtly embedded in a less tangible but far from immaterial medium: space, or, to give it the more precise term that has come to differentiate socially produced space from its physical counterpart, “spatiality.”6 Signs that attempted to write race on social space were also mediated by the spatial dynamics that invited and exceeded their efforts at control. If racism, as Alexander Saxton has argued, is “fundamentally a theory of history,” it is also a theory and practice of space.7 Racial categories that mutate over time likewise migrate across space. After dwelling on the writing on the segregated doors, therefore, we must pass beyond this gateway in a search not for lived experience but for other configurations of race and space. Because this landscape, fortunately vanished, cannot be entered directly, we must view it through another mediating lens. Aside from passing references in personal recollections, which tend to focus on social rather than spatial relations, the geography of segregation has been preserved (as in New Orleans) almost entirely by the camera’s lens. The racial text produced by photography is obviously another—and more complexly layered—text. What was sacrificed by way of documentary precision was compensated by the gain of a multiperspective record produced from diverse vantage points in space and time. As Jim Crow signs began to draw the attention of Northerners, in part through federal projects that sought to make the unfamiliar features of a Depression-torn landscape visible to the larger social body, a set of local practices became the vehicle of a national conversation about race that was conducted in the language of the image. To follow what, in a different context, C. Vann Woodward famously termed the “strange career of Jim Crow,” here reconceptualized as a cultural as well as a political career, we need to track three interrelated displacements: from somatic to graphic sign, from genealogy to geography, and from word to image. Another way to put this is that the “spiral of transculture” that is “constantly weaving” around the textualization of Jim Crow encompasses three components: a linguistic turn, a spatial turn, and a visual turn, each of which reprises and revises the others.8 Tracing the course of a verbally instantiated color line’s translation into visual culture allows us to unpack the exchanges between word and image, conception and perception, through which race has always been culturally constructed. Rather than the traditional collaboration in which the conception of race shapes the visual perception which corroborates it in a mutually reinforcing feedback loop—whether through the prevailing negative stereotypes or the positive alternatives proposed by racial advocates—the transactions here comprise a more dynamic encounter in which each medium troubles the conceptual closure that the other attempts to impose. “Jim Crow” names a defining crux of American racial politics and culture. As the name of the legendary black stableman or servant whose dance was imitated to

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wild acclaim by T. D. Rice in blackface around 1830, Jim Crow has come to signify the expropriation of black expressive culture, the repudiation of black social mobility (to enhance that of the blackface performer), and, by extension, the construction of the system of restrictions that constitute segregation.9 A cultural scenario gave its name to a political formation, which continued to enlist cultural forms to instantiate its message. Because of this mutual implication of culture and politics, constructing and contesting Jim Crow were not entirely antithetical processes. As the famous refrain of the Jim Crow song suggests, language is an affair of twists and turns, jumps and tropes, which “turn” the terms that segregation sought to impose. Jim Crow’s performance of subservience is haunted by ambiguity about its motivation, audience, and meaning.10 Wheeling about both complies with and unsettles the fixing of social place, and those rotations are enacted verbally as well through Jim Crow’s migration from a personal name in the opening line of the refrain to the name of a performance in its closing line. The song transforms identity into dance. Jim Crow signs were finally dismantled by political action, but it was a brand of politics that was highly mediated by culture, as the sit-ins and other stagings of resistance were transmitted by the national media. It was also a political process that continues to require cultural work, as removing racial signs from public places does not remove them from the walls of the mind. Finally, it was a politics that was both opposed to and continuous with the work of sign production and reproduction, for, like its namesake, Jim Crow signage underwent a variety of twists and turns as it traveled through social spaces and representational forms. Multiple distinct yet overlapping practices—producing, reproducing, representing, collecting, performing, and transgressing—intersected in a common space of locating and dislocating race. Together, they complicated even while they served the asymmetrical construction of race by exposing it as a situational, material, mediated and therefore malleable formation rather than an immutable essence or divine law. My reading of this formation is inevitably shaped by my own location, in ways that Flaherty’s photograph also indicates. On the upper right-hand wall is an illegible curvilinear script that appears to be the ghostly signature of a former occupant or some pressure of historical inscription scratching from behind the scene. Turning the photograph over, however, reveals not a prior but a subsequent inscription. Etched by the archivist or photographer onto the back of the negative or original print, “Corner of Decatur and Governor Nichols Streets, 1980” has bled in reversed lettering onto the front of the image. As “light writing,” the inscription of light on a chemically prepared surface, photography is “the impress of one moment,” as one of its earliest commentators famously noted, but that singular impression is inevitably supplemented by subsequent moments of production and perception that also leave their imprint (albeit not often so visibly) upon the image.11 Photographic legibility derives from a relation to a future as well as to a prior history, a perspec-

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tive that scratches its message on the image as an alien yet intimate presence that defies the shutter’s capacity to delimit the meaning of the scene. Every photograph is time-stamped by the scene of its reading. The enabling condition of Signs of the Times is sufficient distance from the world of Jim Crow to afford the uncomfortable luxury of a reading of the signs that would have been unthinkable during their regime. With distance, it becomes possible both to scrutinize these signs and to recognize that scrutiny as a consequence of several scenes of reading. One of these could be identified by bringing another threshold photograph into conversation with Flaherty’s. Picture the following encounter: facing Flaherty’s “Colored Service” entry and naming the viewer’s seemingly unmarked location is Lee Friedlander’s photograph of the “White Only” doorway to a segregated store in a small town in Virginia in 1961 (figure 2). Friedlander, however, a photographer fascinated by the teasing play of shadows and reflections, shoots from behind the glass-paned doorway rather than attempting a dispassionate perspective from outside. From this interior location, represented as a tightly framed and barred rectangular enclosure that doubles as a space of consciousness, whiteness becomes visible as constraint: to see “white only,” or only whiteness, is to see the world as the inverted mirror image suggested by the reverse lettering of the words on the door. Even more provocatively, however, the “White Only” painted on the door’s transparent surface, as if directly on the organs of perception, makes explicit what is usually implicit: that we see through the lenses of race whether we recognize it or not, that even the most vitreous medium, of eyeballs or of glass, may be invisibly stamped with a racial sign. I hope to acknowledge the stamping of my critical lenses, to be mindful of how my critical perspective is both enabled and constrained by a racial location whose immunity allows for a reading of signs that is also a form of blindness to their consequences. A critic more intimately bound and vulnerable to Jim Crow’s cruel machinery would approach this scenario quite differently in ways that are indispensable correctives to the outsider’s perspective. But there is also a more broadly historical, less racially delimited, scene of reading in which this study participates. This book could only have been undertaken during the climate of social constructionism that has pervaded the academy over the past few decades, the crossdisciplinary consensus—from molecular biology to anthropology, from critical legal studies to literary critical studies—that race is a “social fabrication,” a “public fiction,” a “vacuous concept” maintained through the arbitrary specification and classification of bodily signs, a “figure of speech,” a politically motivated but “biologically meaningless” “racial semiotics,” a “global sign,” a “metalanguage.”12 Although mapped onto the body, racial difference is understood from this perspective to be “always illocutionary,” defined by the “talking animal” that “institutes, declares, writes, inscribes, prescribes.”13 That is, the signs of race are both the consequence and the instrument of language, both evidence of the foundational structures

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Figure 2. Virginia, circa 1961. Photograph by Lee Friedlander. © Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

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uncovered by the twentieth century’s “linguistic turn” and their ideal critical objects: overtly when they take the written form of Jim Crow signs, and covertly when they assume the protective guise of biological attributes. As race has joined the cultural formations that have fallen under the aegis of the cultural or discursive “turn,” as Stuart Hall notes with some misgivings, it has been reconceptualized as “working like a language,” a reconceptualization through which segregation signs assume the status of precursors to the turn that brings them into view.14 Within literary studies, this turn was signaled by the publication of Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s edited collection “Race,” Writing, and Difference (1986), at that time a provocative title that underscored the status of race, newly and controversially placed between scare quotes, as a metaphor that “pretends to be an objective term of classification, when in fact it is a dangerous trope . . . the ultimate trope of difference because it is so very arbitrary in its application.”15 “Under Saussurian hegemony,” Anthony Appiah comments with some ambivalence in his own contribution to that volume, we have come to assume that race “is, like all other concepts, constructed by metaphor and metonymy,” that it is best understood not in relationship to reference, but through the structural oppositions and combinations that govern the operations of language.16 As Appiah’s own ambivalence reveals, however, the seeds of dissension were already germinating in that volume, bred from the concern that the structuralist framework lacked the persuasive power to dismantle the social purchase of the tropes it scrutinized. Since that structuralist heyday, consequently, a series of materialist counterturns and counterweights has been proposed, especially the turn from the science of signs to the science endowed with real authority: the molecular transformations of the biological sciences that, having once provided the physiological pretext for race, now provide the tools for dismantling it. “What does that long-lived trope ‘race’ mean in the age of molecular biology?” Paul Gilroy asks, redirecting attention from what W. E. B. Du Bois called the “grosser physical differences of color, hair, and bone” to the molecular level of the distribution of alleles, or variants of genes, that are now believed to determine human variations.17 At this level, the concept of race becomes virtually meaningless: there is no direct correlation between specific alleles and race, and to the extent that certain alleles may be dominant within certain populations, these variations derive from random drift and mutations adapted to certain environments and reflect geographic conditions rather than biological essence. Signs of the Times is poised at the juncture of these theoretical crosscurrents. Rather than repudiate the science of signs for the tools of molecular genetics, it examines how race has been dispersed and pluralized through its materialization in written and visual forms. Although the Saussurean legacy is clear in my emphasis on the closed door, the referential barrier, my subject is signage in a strong sense, and I contend that segregation’s tangible markers provide an opportunity to engage with the material features of signification that the anxiety about racial reference, the

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urgency of dispelling the illusion that racial language has some meaningful grounding in the body, has kept out of the foreground of the structuralist inheritance. Signs of the Times seeks to rematerialize without re-referentializing the construction of race, and to do so by addressing the spectrum of materialities through which the racial sign both commands and loses command over the terms of legibility. This entails dwelling on the material conditions of the written word, especially of its production beyond the standardized formats of the printed text, a beyond that incorporates the surfaces of the built environment and of the photographic print. The materiality of the racial sign has its own critical prehistory, however. The prevailing narrative, already presented in summary here, situates segregation signs within the demographic and legislative history of post-Reconstruction America. If we broaden the context to include what Du Bois characterized as “the racial philosophy upon which America has long been nursed,” we can track the displacement of the racial sign from its nineteenth-century inscription on the body to its verbal, spatial, and visual reinscriptions.18 To clear the theoretical ground for the chapters that follow, we need to break apart the key components of the nineteenth-century racial sign system in order to reconfigure them. Although it may be as reckless as it is perverse to suggest that Jim Crow signs might also be viewed as an embryonic form of the turn away from the biological racism of which they were also the expression, the point is not to minimize their brutality but to maximize their legibility as interventions in a process of resignification.

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• • •

That a “science” of racial signs gained widespread credibility across western Europe and the United States during the middle decades of the nineteenth century is not news. The emerging sciences of man, especially physical anthropology, fostered the selection and classification of bodily markers that could ground the construction of coherent, measurable, and visible racial identities. But positioning segregation signs within this scenario of race-making is a new intervention. Displacing the signs from their traditional legislative niche also brings into focus less-familiar features of the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) case that is their official scene of origin. As Neil Gotanda has argued, the case marks the Supreme Court’s turn away from the status-based conception of race enshrined in its 1857 Dred Scott v. Sanford decision to a formal conception of race articulated through such ostensibly symmetrical and neutral, separate-but-equal terms as colored and white that coordinate readily with the imaginary structure of the signage.19 Viewed through the lens of the welter of biological, anthropological, and cultural theory that both produced and contested the nineteenth-century science of racial signs, by contrast, the necessity of forewarning station agents in the “white only” coach of the East Louisiana Railway that the light-skinned Homer Plessy had “colored blood” in his veins calls attention to the gap that gradually widened between written and somatic racial signs that were

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supposed to be, but were not, mutually corroborating.20 The representational vehicle of Jim Crow bears a complex relation to its turn-of-the-century discursive scene, which embraced the fruition of a school of racial theory that was also undergoing contestation at that time. The background to this relation can be signaled only briefly here. The canonical trajectory starts from the geographically based conceptions of race that began to emerge in Europe during and in service to the era of colonial expansion. European encounters with potentially exploitable peoples encouraged the production of racial categories that could be mapped onto non-European cultures. Associated with place of origin, racial difference was understood to emanate from a confluence of environmental factors—climate, civilization, soil, food, terrain, and prevailing diseases—that conditioned and differentiated life on the primary continents.21 Even at their most deterministic, these geographical models made space for a certain mutability in racial classification through the effects of environmental change and human migration. This mutability, however, was short-lived, as relatively flexible geographic categories were displaced by biological ones over the following century. It would be hard to overestimate the consequences of the shift from the specification of environmentally shaped attributes that had preoccupied natural historians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the inquiries fueled by new ideologies and technologies of bodily measurement that evolved through the nineteenth century. The development of modern biology at the turn of that century, especially the discipline of comparative anatomy that revitalized such questionable fields as phrenology and physiognomy, enabled the emergence of physical anthropology by the middle of the nineteenth century as a newly authoritative science designed to make the study of humanity more systematic and less humanitarian. The objects of its scientific gaze—members of non-European and disenfranchised cultures, classes, and races—were subjected to intensive anthropometric scrutiny through an expanding catalogue of instruments and methods that channeled an unblinking faith in the power of physical measurement to determine and compare the defining features of distinctive (especially racial) groups and to rank those groups hierarchically. Through a mutually reinforcing relationship between new instruments of measurement, the growing number of finely calibrated body parts to which they could be applied, and the racial constructions they yielded, a new kind of racial science came to prevail in England, Europe, and America in the second half of the nineteenth century.22 Specialists from an array of disciplines scrutinized the human form for somatic markers whose (ostensibly objective but in practice highly subjective) enumeration and measurement would allow the tenuous concept of race to be anchored on the firm ground of the body instead of the shifting sands of place. The gaze of the new science found racial signs everywhere: not only those readily visible on the bodily surface—skin and eye color, nose and jaw shape, facial angle, hair texture, and genital size and shape—but also, and especially, those in the body’s

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interior—bone structure, blood, and cranial capacity—whose fathoming posed greater scientific challenges and promised more foundational racial truths.23 Despite the proliferation of bodily markers that enabled new signs, however trivial (the degree of hair curl, perhaps, or the color of fingernails) to be proffered when more credible ones happened to present inconvenient evidence of too much variability within a designated group, two kinds of internal signs were invested with special value as keys not only to racial classification but also to racial essence. A growing arsenal of craniometric instruments (calipers, cephalometers, craniaphores, craniostats, craniographs, and orbitostats, to name only a few) sustained the determination of the racial science to correlate cranial dimensions with cognitive capacity and to organize the data within a comparative racial frame.24 Because cranial measurements could not account for the transmission of their map of the mental interior, however, a different bodily sign gained broader purchase on the scientific and public imagination. Blood, which was believed prior to Mendelian genetics to be the actual medium of a hereditary racial essence, became the most frequently cited marker of race. Functioning both as a metaphor of kinship and as a medium of genetic transmission, blood was a versatile racial sign through which cultural and biological inheritance could be funneled together and their intermixture secured over time. This linkage assigned African Americans a genetically transmitted racial essence that yoked the tangible markers of race to intangible properties that were packaged together and perpetuated as an immutable racial type. For although blood was a flexible enough medium to be the imagined carrier of acquired as well as inherited characteristics, that theoretical possibility was refused the “lower races” whose genetic burden was to carry forward in perpetuity the amalgamated biological, intellectual, and moral weight of a past whose severely restricted opportunities for intellectual and cultural development were reinscribed as the genetic givens of a particular blood type.25 This biological determinism that read corporeal signs as both evidence and cause of incorporeal qualities was the central, most profoundly disabling, and eventually the most vehemently protested crux of the racial sign system.26 In the United States, both the tenacity of this model and the questions it eventually provoked became especially visible, in part through the work of Franz Boas, who used his authority within the discipline that had sponsored the racial science to challenge many of its assumptions.27 Through his position as Columbia University’s first professor of anthropology and his affiliation with the American Museum of Natural History (among many other influential institutions), Boas succeeded in restructuring a discipline that had been dominated by physical anthropology into four distinctive specializations (human evolution, archaeology, language, and culture) that institutionalized his belief in the autonomy of cultural formations and the independence of the intellectual and cultural life of all human groups from the operations of biological inheritance. One of the many consequences of this disciplinary shift was the

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critique of racial determinism. Boas argued not only that environmental influences were as significant as heredity in shaping the cultural expression of all racial groups, but also that the hereditary basis for these groups itself was dubious. Calling into question the hereditary foundation of race, while separating biological inheritance from cultural expression and transmission, Boas severed the components of the nineteenth-century racial sign system, earning one historian’s remarkable assessment that he may have done “more to combat race prejudice than any other person in history.”28 Although frequently subject to both professional and public criticism, and far from the mainstream of public opinion, which did not begin to repudiate the tenets of the racial science until after their appropriation by the Nazis, Boas and several generations of his students gradually moved the analysis of culture from the periphery to the center of anthropology, and in so doing inaugurated a new model for interpreting race as a cultural rather than biological construction: that is, as an expression of the culture that constructs it. It is at this juncture of racial science and cultural theory that I wish to situate the production of America’s racial signs. What these signs shared with the most retrograde claims of the racial science is all too obvious. As the visible instruments of a system of segregation that attempted to enforce the division of the races and to safeguard white racial purity by proscribing even the most casual of bodily contacts, Jim Crow signs were on a continuum with the claims of the polygenists (some of whose most ardent advocates were in the United States) that “the races of man were primordially distinct species aboriginally adapted to specific geographic environments” and, in the most extreme formulations, incapable of interbreeding.29 Nevertheless, the signs also inadvertently, by virtue of their status as signs, attenuated the biological grounds on which they rested and unwittingly participated in the counterturn toward a cultural model that also renders them more complexly legible. By translating the theory of racial difference into the practice of segregation, the bits of writing tacked to walls across the nation opened a fault line between segregation’s sociopolitical aims and its representational form. Forcing us to read in reverse from the racial labels to the bodies they address, the signs make race visible as an effect of language rather than of biology, calling attention to the terminological inventions that are endemic to the history of race. Through the nominalism they insert into the field of racial essences, the signs foreground the arbitrariness of racial reference.30 That gap was reinforced by the signs’ placement on objects they did not reference but might be imagined to. These syntactically truncated and portable racial labels displaced some of their referential force from the biological lexicon from which they were drawn onto the things to which they were affixed. Hence the confusion often reported by children and Northerners about their first encounters with the signs: did those “White” and “Colored” labels on drinking fountains or washing machines pertain to the color of the water, of the clothing, or of the addressee?31

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This referential instability encourages a reading of these signs as signifiers of the culture that produced them. The ambiguity that riddles Karl Figlio’s critique of the racial science as “a judgment of equivocal signs which revealed something of the inward nature of the signifying animal” is resolved in one direction when the signs in question are man-made and the signifying animal must be the sign producer.32 Denied the expository mode and textual form that allow discursive texts to efface the outward signs of their authors’ inward nature, the tangible properties of Jim Crow signs embody the intangible properties of the white imagination. If, to adapt Robyn Wiegman’s phrase, the racial science produced “the corporeal as the bearer of race’s meaning,” the racial signs produced a different corpus that invites a different kind of comparative anatomy: not the statistical analysis of somatic signs but the cultural analysis of graphic signs that put whiteness on display.33

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• • •

Some components of racial signs are more evident than others. Although (as the next chapter shows) the written messages were typically set off from the background by a frame that attempted to situate them in a specific discursive context, the physical structures to which they were attached made their own silent contributions to the meanings of the terms. Giving voice to those contributions requires thinking about the ways that race and space were constructed in relation to each other through words tacked directly to the built environment. Race and space have always been intertwined in the United States, but their mutually constitutive relationship is only beginning to claim attention, primarily through models that mesh most readily with segregation’s legible designs. Legibility, however, can be misleading, as Henri Lefèbvre reminds us: “Spaces made (produced) to be read are the most deceptive and tricked-up imaginable. The graphic impression of readability is a sort of trompe l’oeil.”34 Jim Crow’s trompe l’oeil, I believe, is its manifestly disciplinary grid. David Delaney describes this compellingly as a “geography of power” contrived to manage the “interplay between (largely white) territoriality and (largely black) mobility” through the “de jurification of race,” “the promulgation and proliferation of laws— statutes, ordinances, regulations, and court decisions” that constructed a “legal landscape” of “lines and spaces.”35 Reinforcing and exceeding this legal landscape was a more pervasive system of surveillance sustained by the watchful eyes of white residents, whether formally organized into units such as the Ku Klux Klan or informally bound in a common project of vigilance backed by a range of extralegal threats. As Robyn Wiegman has demonstrated, the disciplinary functions of the racial grid could hardly be clearer.36 The problem with the disciplinary model is not, of course, that it is wrong, but that it grants the segregationists too many of their terms. Focusing on the boundary lines and the social and legal forces marshaled to enforce them overlooks the

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contrarian and protean dimensions of more complex, multipurpose spaces that pushed back against Jim Crow’s master plan. One critical category of these has been analyzed by Grace Elizabeth Hale, who counterposes a “shared geography of consumption” to the geography of power. Redirecting our attention to the commercial spaces that complicated and compromised the policy of segregation, Hale points out that even in the most rigidly segregated areas of the South, general stores could not afford to refuse to sell to African American consumers, who constituted a significant percentage of their potential clientele. As this racially mixed clientele evolved into Saturday afternoon shoppers in the towns that eventually replaced the general stores, “signs blared ‘For Colored’ and ‘For White’ on the very streets in which blacks and whites mingled.” Although she does not frame her argument for the “racial messiness of consumer culture” in quite these terms, Hale deploys one reigning model of space against another, turning the notoriously homogenizing effects of capitalist space against the differentiating effects of power, the abstraction of the marketplace against the inscription of race. She concludes that “signs of segregation were as much admissions of weakness as labels of power.”37 My perspective is aligned with Hale’s, but I route the attempt to complicate the geography of power less through the homogenizing effects of the marketplace than through the diversifying effects of a built environment designed to accommodate a range of social needs. What does it mean, I ask, to write race on a social body whose substance is not tissue, organs, blood, or skull, but trains and buses, waiting rooms, lunch counters, drinking fountains, restrooms, and movie theaters? The question sets this book in conversation with the architectural historian Robert R. Weyeneth’s account of the ways that an extensive and diverse “ ‘racing’ of space” shaped the American built environment between the end of Reconstruction and the civil rights victories of the early 1960s.38 It seeks, however, to call attention to the converse: the implications of the “spacing of race,” the wrinkles that spatialization inserted into a dualistic construction of race. Some of these wrinkles can be glimpsed even through the figure of the veil that has served more often to obscure them. Seven decades after Du Bois used the veil as a figure of racial division and double consciousness, Blyden Jackson redeployed his classic image this way: Through the veil I could perceive the forbidden city, the Louisville where white folks lived. It was the Louisville of downtown hotels, the lower floors of the big movie houses, the high schools I read about in the daily newspapers, the restricted haunts I sometimes passed, like white restaurants and country clubs, the other side of windows in banks and of course, the inner sanctums of offices where I could go only as a humble client or a menial custodian. On my side of the veil everything was black: the homes, the people, the churches, the schools, the Negro Park with the Negro park police. . . . I knew that there were two Louisvilles and in America, two Americas. I knew, also, which of the Americas was mine.39

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The rhetorical force of the figure of the veil works to partition the urban (and even the national) landscape, but we realize quickly that this seemingly stable division, however well it may characterize the side on which “everything was black,” travels with the speaker as he traverses the forbidden city, and as this figure moves, it assumes new forms. Rather than two adjacent or concentric cities, there are variously interpenetrating ones. As indicated by the references to the lower floors of movie houses and the opposite side of bank windows, the color line was drawn through, and redrawn by, a variety of spatial arrangements. Not only did whites map these interpenetrating spaces; they were also mapped within them and, however, preferentially, required to traverse a social terrain that exhibited the irrationality, heterogeneity, historicity, and thus—despite all the legal and extralegal tactics devised to shore them up—the malleability of racial boundaries. To theorize the import of these spatial arrangements, we might return to Michel Foucault, not for the obvious fit of his disciplinary model, but for the far less obviously appropriate account of the “other spaces” of modernity, which together comprise “the space in which we live . . . a heterogeneous space” made up of “sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.” These plural and incommensurable sites are superimposed, however, in the form of the contradictory spaces Foucault calls heterotopias (including theaters, boarding schools, honeymoon hotels, rest homes, prisons, sanitariums, cemeteries, and boats) which, by compressing and contesting the needs they reflect, present an alternative to normative space. The utopian dimension of the heterotopias’ otherness to the social world in which they (unlike utopias) nevertheless operate makes them obviously and offensively improper models for theorizing racially stratified spaces; yet the superimposition of racial designs on social spaces that, far from being vacuous and docile, are already contoured by the social intentions for which they were devised invests these spaces with a complexity that both negates the heterotopia’s social value and recasts its heterogeneity as a mode of resistance rather than escape.40 The resistant features of space have been explored most fully by the Marxist geography that emerged in France with the work of Lefèbvre in the early 1970s and spread to Britain and the United States in the 1990s. Concurrently with but independently of Foucault, these theorists worked through the implications of his prediction that “the present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space.”41 Redefining space as the dynamic medium through which history occurs, rather than the static backdrop to historical action, they contended that space dialectically produces, in the process of being produced by, changing social relations. As an “object of social struggle,” “a changing set of lived social relations,” a “moving cluster of points of intersection for manifold axes of power which can’t be reduced to a unified plane or organised into a single narrative,” space becomes a charged and dynamic medium, a sphere of contestation and negotiation through which multiple histories are enacted and identities produced.42

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To this account we must add the co-construction of race and space that the European and Marxist provenance of the new geography has tended to sideline, at least in relation to their American configurations. Despite their commitment to upending the classic Marxist hierarchy of time over space, practitioners of spatial theory in the United States have nevertheless preserved the classic privileging of the relations of production and reproduction over other social hierarchies and divisions.43 This book consequently seeks to remedy two symmetrical oversights: the undertheorization of space in an American discourse of race and the undertheorization of race in an American discourse of space. Racializing space is not inevitably, as is generally presumed, an effective or transparent means of stabilizing race.44 Spatialization was a form of racialization, but the structures designed to serve a range of social needs (for transportation, entertainment, refreshment, and elimination, among others) racialized their occupants variously. “White” and “colored” Americans not only walked through parallel doors; they sat before and behind, above and below, and face to face with one another, and each of these arrangements shaped the racial relation differently. Hence W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous definition of race—“the black man is a person who must ride ‘Jim Crow’ in Georgia”—might yield a further question: is the “blackness” of a passenger in a Jim Crow car the same as that of a spectator in a Jim Crow balcony?45 Identical words in different locations make different statements. Location shapes locution. The environmental voice could be mobilized strategically. The all-toocommon strategy of further degrading the “colored” sign by placing it on the dirtiest drinking fountain or the dingiest doorway could also be deployed in reverse, as it was, in apparent compliance with Jim Crow regulations, in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, the oldest and eventually the largest of the nation’s twenty-two exclusively black municipalities. In this self-governing community, founded in 1887 by former slaves on the grounds of their former plantation, there was only one site at which segregation was, or needed to be, practiced: the railroad depot, where the large firstclass waiting room in the front bore a “Colored” sign and the small waiting room in the rear bore one marked “White.” One citizen recalls thinking upon his arrival in Mound Bayou, “Well we’ve finally got them where we want them,” and the where was also a what: an inverted construction of race.46 Location was in turn reshaped by the demographic pressures of a far more heterogeneous public than Jim Crow’s racial dualism acknowledged. The task of steering a diverse population through physically and verbally circumscribed spaces affected both the “white” and “colored” sides, but differentially. Defended on the “white” side were the privileges of a physically commodious but socially constricted space whose boundaries were adjudicated primarily in the courts.47 The door marked “colored,” by contrast, was an open maw leading to cramped quarters. More socially porous and spatially constrained, the social contours of “colored” space fluc-

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tuated with its inhabitants. To adopt the metaphor describing the consequences of a Mississippi ruling that children of Chinese descent had to attend “colored” schools, this “curve in the well-known color line” was especially visible in the adaptations of the “colored” balcony, whose preexistence as an architectural feature enticed different communities to extend its capacity to stigmatize.48 Signs in Chicago movie theaters directing Mexicans as well as African Americans to sit in the balcony; signs in Bakersfield, California, reading “Negroes and Okies Upstairs”; and those in Rochester, New York, steering “Italians and the rougher element” (along with African Americans) upstairs betray the intention to racialize social status by treating low-status whites as “colored.”49 Even when these groups were interpellated under separate names, the conjunction and both asserted and elided a distinction that was further erased by the shared occupancy of a common space that reclassified traditionally white ethnic groups as “colored.” There are some fundamental ironies at work here: the spatialization of race unsettled some of the distinctions it was designed to stabilize. Unlike a determinate, invariant racial identity written in blood, skin, and bones and carried as baggage everywhere one went, the passage through diverse locations subjected individuals to multiform constructions of race. Contrary to their intention, the strategies designed to stabilize race in space as an antidote to modernization, a bulwark against the progressive axis of temporality, also produced an alternative to the regressive axis of temporality: the genealogical model that determines the identity of future generations according to the rules of racial descent. Against the determinism of genealogy, the “symbolic kernel” of race, the lifeblood of a concept whose defining sign was blood, the geography of Jim Crow provides a countermodel of contextual and multidirectional racial formation.50 Socially produced, internally differentiated, and susceptible to rearticulation, the spatial implantation (unlike the corporeal) both fixes and unfixes race. Although far from a protean postmodern positionality that keeps identities in flux, the coercive process of racial separation nevertheless produced, in however muted and involuntary a form, an incipient notion of positionality that was in tension with biology and could be mobilized against its fixities in theory and in practice. Ever since the turn away from the geographical model, race has been conceptualized primarily along a temporal axis, whether through an evolutionary model of racial development or a genealogical model of racial transmission. As space regains a certain efficacy in relation to race, some of the plasticity of the geographic models that precede the nineteenth-century turn to biology was restored. Placing the new geography in conversation with the old suggests certain continuities as well as obvious differences between the multiple variables of the natural environment believed to produce racial difference in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the multidimensionality of the built environment onto which race was written

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across much of America in the twentieth century. In both cases, whether intentionally or not, race was overdetermined by a variety of factors and inflected by human passage across natural or social barriers.

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• • •

During the middle decades of the twentieth century, social mobility was compounded by the photographers whose forays across the United States were both agents and evidence of a turn toward visuality that crystallized in the 1930s, when Americans “as a group” underwent a transformation, as John Dos Passos described it, from a “word-minded people” to an “eye-minded people.”51 As the turn from word to image intercepted the shift from a biological to a social anatomy of race, and the vantage point gravitated from the culture of the sign producers to that of their less habitual viewers, segregation signs that were attached to local structures were propelled into broader interpretive circuits. Bringing into play a spectrum of perspectives and positions, photographers diffused and thickened the picture of race, producing a web of social and semantic implication that reached across the nation. As much as the local meanings of the signs, the camera’s contribution to the construction of race also changed. Nineteenth-century visual technologies had been central to a physical anthropology premised on the legibility of somatic signs that offered themselves for registration by a neutral scientific gaze and a transparent photographic lens. Race was produced on the bodies of others by an invisible observer whose accomplice and prosthesis was the camera. Coco Fusco has described this symbiosis most succinctly: “Rather than recording the existence of race, photography produced race as a visualizable fact. . . . [P]hotography has served as the primary guarantor of race as a visual indicator of invisible differences.”52 As the “camera bug” reached “epidemic proportions” and a new generation of camera-wielding travelers began to record their encounters with racial barriers in the 1930s, a different scenario emerged: instead of an invisible subject exhibiting the anatomized body of an other, race was negotiated through self-implicating choices of racially explicit signs and racially implicit viewing positions.53 To assess both continuity and change, we must position this new visual anthropology in relation to the visual codes that the nineteenth-century social sciences devised to bolster their scientific authority. The comparative anatomy of race, to which the camera was as crucial as the calipers, was conducted through a set of standardized frontal and profile views whose consistency allowed the cross-racial comparison of bodily parts and proportions that might yield the biometric data for defining biological types. All traces of a human viewer had to be eliminated. On one side of the camera lens stood an invisible observer; on the other was “the subject as already positioned, known, owned, represented, spoken for, constructed as silent: in short . . . ignored.”54 Often placed in front of a cloth backdrop that abstracted them

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from social context, these subjects were depicted either naked or partially clothed from a fixed camera distance that allowed for the scrutiny of body parts. The standardization required for this comparative physiognomy was epitomized in the cross-sectional background grid of two-inch squares that J. H. Lamprey devised for the British Ethnological Society in 1869.55 Less invested in the comparative analysis of racial types (and consequently in the measuring grid) than in the demonstration of incommensurability between Americans of European and African descent, American racialists in the mid-nineteenth century deployed photography in the service of the theory of polygenesis. To provide evidence for the development of a separate human species, Louis Agassiz, professor of natural history at Harvard, arranged for what has become the locus classicus for American visual constructions of race: Joseph T. Zealy’s set of fifteen silver-plate daguerreotypes of the upper torsos of seven almost entirely naked male and female slaves, systematically displayed against a blank background from the front and side (and in some cases rear), views that defined them as biological types made up of scrutinizable body parts.56 This background helps to identify a particular strain of Jim Crow photography as nineteenth-century visual anthropology’s closest, if unwilling, heir. Across the board, photographers were trolling the social field for verbal signs rather than the biological field for physiological signs, and they were doing this almost invariably in the spirit of critique instead of confirmation. The criticism pointed in two directions, however. Jim Crow’s Southern critics, both white and African American, took advantage of their insider knowledge to operate like Walter Benjamin’s visual detectives, whose motive is “to reveal guilt and to point out the guilty.”57 These photographers performed acts of witnessing, exploding the fiction that segregation was an impartial division by calling attention to its most egregious signs, often the homemade and uncensored productions of the unabashedly racist backwoods. Jim Crow’s Northern white critics, who had access primarily to the less offensive signs displayed for the eyes of outsiders, characteristically dwelled instead on the plight of the victims, spotlighting racism’s targets rather than its perpetrators, documenting wounds instead of witnessing crimes. By converting Jim Crow signs from modes of address to descriptive labels paired with illustrative bodies, these photographs sometimes appear to resurrect the visual conventions of physical anthropology, although toward different ends. The characteristic choice of a frontal vantage point and middle camera distance in images typically organized around a central axis and characterized by the subject’s unresponsive stare both recalls and troubles typologies of race.58 Especially when the subject is an African American man standing beneath a “Colored” sign, a subject of choice among Northern white male photographers between the documentary movements of the thirties and the civil rights movements of the sixties, the typological effect is heightened by what Maurice O. Wallace calls “en-

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framement,” the visual ideology and practice that have traditionally targeted black masculinity.59 The insistence of this visual framing is an ironic consequence of the criticism of the racial frame, as is illustrated by the cropping of a photograph taken by Steve Schapiro for a Life magazine story about James Baldwin’s NAACP- and CORE-sponsored speaking tour through the South in 1963 (figure 3). To maximize the shock of the iconic writer’s subjection to Jim Crow, the version of the image that is often reproduced zeroes in on Baldwin’s upper torso and repositions it directly beneath a doorway marked “Colored Entrance Only.”60 The juxtaposition is startling, but the enframement shortchanges the photograph’s complexity. Complementing the vertical doorway before which Baldwin stands in the uncropped version of the photograph is a large, square window, behind whose partially opened blinds a middle-aged white soda-fountain jerk, in a white apron and hat, peers somewhat furtively out at the scene, seemingly unaware that he is also framed by it. To his left, a human-size, outward-tilting vanilla ice-cream sundae appears to be his projection forward onto the window pane. Without any explicit signage for whites, the window frame becomes a racialized counterpart to the “colored” doorway, and the sundae’s frothy whipped cream a phantasmatic counterpoint to the substantial, serious author in the foreground, well-dressed in a jacket, tie, and sheepskin overcoat and carrying the pen and paper (as well as the cigarette) that constitute the tools of his trade. A self-inflated whiteness compensates, unpersuasively, for a racial privilege that seems to be receding. Stripped of these interpretive possibilities, the cropped version of the photograph simply reproduces the structure it critiques. Nevertheless, even the most conventional evocation of racial typologies introduces a certain reflexivity into Jim Crow photography through patterns of association between certain bodies and signs. As in the nominalist mode in nineteenthcentury visual typologies of social others (differentiated by Allan Sekula from a realist counterpart that constructs a composite portrait of a generic social type by superimposing multiple images), Jim Crow photographers proceed from the abstraction denominated by the racial sign to a specific exemplification of it.61 Through choices about the gender, age, posture, and grouping of the racial representatives, these photographs unsettle the notion of a unified category and dispute the adequacy of a single generic figure. Not fused into a composite image but ramified through multiple takes, Jim Crow’s racial designations are disaggregated by photographs that break them down into their component parts. Consequently, whereas nineteenth-century visual typologies appear to be unauthored, the selection and depiction of human subjects in Jim Crow photographs are legible as expressions of specific points of view. Whereas the photographic self implicit in the construction of the nineteenth-century ethnographic other was entirely conventional—neutral, absent, and normatively male and white—the spectrum of visual subjects and objects galvanized by Jim Crow produced a more nuanced mode of reflexivity, as the bodies—black or white, male or female, old or young, solitary

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Figure 3. James Baldwin, New Orleans, 1963. Photograph by Steve Schapiro. Courtesy Steve Schapiro.

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or paired—that were chosen to stand beneath, and thereby to stand for, the signs of race gave visible form to often-unacknowledged features of the photographer’s own racial ideology. Beyond these negotiations over bodies, the signs situated the photographers on racially mapped terrain. However much they may have wished to place themselves outside the system they depicted, photographers were called out by signs that named the ground on which they stood. Point of view was literalized by the camera’s location in a racialized division of space; the flagrant inscription of race teased out its hiding places. Jim Crow signs triggered an unusually explicit and expansive version of the “nexus of competing gazes” that Shawn Michelle Smith describes as the “visual meaning” of the color line, a meaning amplified and pluralized by the line’s delineation and refraction across diverse sites.62 Through the interplay of marked positions and perspectives, the prospect of a transparent nation was obstructed and refracted through the lenses of race. At once the frustration of a cherished national desire for a vantage point that could assimilate America’s regional, racial, and cultural diversity into an accessible, uniform, democratic space, and the materialization of obstacles to seeing whose less tangible manifestations inevitably thwart the dream of transparent vision, Jim Crow signs and photographs bring into view the fundamental opacity of seeing.63 By inciting and intercepting the desire to see across racial barriers, the signs established the conditions for the practice enjoined by contemporary visual culture theorists: to make visible “the invisible boundary lines that determine inclusions and exclusions,” “to try and repopulate space with the obstacles and all the unknown images which the illusion of transparency evacuated from it,” in order “to understand how hard we have to strain to see.”64

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• • •

Tracking racial signs through the linguistic, spatial, and visual turns that deny transparency to each of these terms requires disentangling a web of implication without losing track of its various threads. The task presents a number of challenges, beginning with the scarcity and inaccessibility of the primary materials. Not only have the signs themselves almost entirely disappeared, for reasons I explore in the following chapter, but the photographs that recorded them have (with a few exceptions) been dispersed and disregarded rather than being collected or conceptualized as a body of significant cultural materials. I have tried to constitute this archive by retrieving photographs from their scattered and marginal locations in archives designed for other purposes in a range of state historical societies, African American history museums, university and public libraries, newspaper photo agencies, and municipal and federal collections. Gathering and reading these images in relation to each other and to the varied contexts from which they emanate, I have sought to complicate cultural memory with a more nuanced and inclusive visual record that might constitute an enduring facet of the American social landscape.

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This record is inevitably plagued by gaps and uncertainties.65 Rather than a comprehensive history, what follows is an attempt to tease out the perspectives embedded in the composition and conversation of specific images. The challenge is to coordinate Jim Crow’s verbal and visual forms as mutually constitutive systems mediated by changing spatial and historical frames. Rather than pursue discrete chronological or geographic lines of inquiry, or the careers of individual photographers, I have tried to keep multiple variables in play and to call attention to the ways that segregation signs and images operate both independently and interdependently across changing morphologies of race, space, and visuality. By holding constant a set of spatial frames that allow Jim Crow’s temporal shifts to come sharply into view, we can complicate the generic narrative or image of segregation through a series of site-specific microhistories. At each site we can chart the changing intersections among a specific disposition of racial terms, the angles of vision they afford, the photographic practices they enlist, the modes of resistance they galvanize, and the critical perspectives they engage. This cross-sectioning should yield a dynamic picture of the ways race traverses some core functions of the social body. Because different sites elicit different theoretical frames, this is inevitably an interdisciplinary project; social anthropology, film theory, geography, and architectural and political history join in conversation with semiotics and photography. Because a more inclusive historical frame is also needed to hold these changing scenes together, the book’s overarching structure traces the career of the Jim Crow signs from their origins in the late nineteenth century through their representation across the central decades of the twentieth century to the civil rights movement that finally succeeded in bringing them down. More than a linear narrative, this is a structure of predication whose conclusion is overdetermined by its starting point. Progressing from an ostensibly neutral practice of observation through a more charged interaction with the cinematic camera to a politically engaged photojournalism, photography plays an increasingly active role in this trajectory. Setting the stage for these interwoven developments, part 1 examines Jim Crow signs: how they were produced, reproduced, and made visible and invisible to distinctive viewing publics. This part of the book is centrally concerned with questions of mediation and memory. Starting with the smallest units of meaning, the first chapter, “American Graffiti: The Social Life of Jim Crow Signs,” addresses the material history of Jim Crow signs, their tangible forms and circuits of transmission. Tracing the signs’ “biography” across the twentieth century, it examines how, through whose agency, and in what material manifestations they appeared on, disappeared from, and reappeared on the American landscape. This chapter places Jim Crow signs in conversation not with the intellectual history of the racial sign, but with other forms of public signage that bring into focus segregation’s distinctive modes and spectrum of expression. In contrast to the standardization of commercial signage, Jim Crow’s perversely populist production encouraged idiosyncratic

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and self-revealing forms of utterance that were especially apparent to the signs’ primary addressees—and to their eventual preservers, collectors, and consumers. By juxtaposing two stages in the signs’ life history—their production at the turn of the twentieth century and their reproduction at the turn of the twenty-first century, when an industry emerged to meet the growing demand for ownership, primarily among African Americans—this chapter examines how race has been configured through the signs’ production and recirculation as commodities. Chapter 2, “The Signs of Race in the Language of Photography,” turns from physical to photographic modes of reproduction, and from historical to theoretical accounts of photography’s role in the construction of racial meaning. Taking off from the complementarity between logos and icon that Paul Gilroy affirms is at the core of racial thinking, the chapter begins by examining the verbal strategies through which Jim Crow signs recruited the authority of the logos to add race to the divisions of the social universe. Turning next to the visual side of the equation, and highlighting the work of African American photographers, it invokes Charles Sanders Peirce’s differentiation among iconic, indexical, and symbolic signs to question photography’s role as the iconic complement to logos. Despite the photograph’s (iconic) resemblance to the things it represents, the camera registers traces (indices) of things that disrupt our mental image of the world. Walter Benjamin is the signal theorist here; the reading of photography’s symbolic signs draws by contrast from Roland Barthes, tweaked against his inclination to associate what he calls the rhetoric of the image with the dominant ideology. In their different ways, I argue, photography’s indexical and symbolic signs rewrote Jim Crow’s verbal signs. The account of the exhibition that concludes chapter 2 is a pivot from the formal analysis of individual images to the historical analysis of institutional and discursive frames; this is the focus of chapter 3, which plays the complex inquiries posed by visual-culture studies against the uses of the visual in the construction of cultural memory. “Cultural Memory and the Conditions of Visibility: The Circulation of Jim Crow Photographs” examines the pressures that have made America’s racial signs—provocatively, intermittently—available for scrutiny. Too offensive to enlist the aesthetic interest of Northern photographers such as Walker Evans (whose extensive representation and collection of vernacular signs includes only one example of Jim Crow) and too routine to capture the attention of Southern documentarians, the signs were surprisingly underdocumented and their representations underdisplayed. Several questions thus emerge: How and by whom has Jim Crow’s visual record been produced? Where has it been lodged? And why (with a few salient exceptions that have come to represent and thereby skew the picture) has it registered so lightly in the public domain? How did the racial signs both elicit and evade the attention of photographers from diverse racial, ideological, and historical locations, and how did the resulting images come to appear alternatively too inconsequential or controversial, too obvious or aversive, too shocking or banal to war-

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rant a permanent record? What conditions of production and publication have made it possible to avoid encountering or conceptualizing these photographs as a coherent cultural archive, and, conversely, how have a few iconic images come to fill the cultural void? Why, finally, if Jim Crow signs are so significant and their representations so revealing, hasn’t this book already been written? Whereas part 1 explores the passage of racial signs across media and exhibition spaces, parts 2 and 3 expand the frame to include the mediation of these signs by the spaces in which they were displayed. Surveying the vast array of segregated spaces would produce little more than a catalogue; instead I have chosen to focus on those that carry special weight, drawing comparisons to others along the way. Two pairs of chapters call attention to the social body’s symbolic portals, each of which produces a specific viewing position. These chapters chart a course from gender to nation to visuality, and from attempts to claim a neutral vantage point to the more or less willing assumption of a “white” or “colored” perspective. Part 2 bring together sites of assimilation and elimination, beginning with the imaginative bedrock of Jim Crow: the restroom doors and drinking fountains whose parallel alignment, derived from and reinforced by the sexual division, affords the illusion of a stable binary. The side-by-side arrangement also indulges the photographic fantasy of a neutral position. How that fantasy was betrayed by the association of specific racial labels and bodies is a central interest of chapter 4, “Restroom Doors and Drinking Fountains: Perspective, Mobility, and the Fluid Grounds of Race and Gender,” which tracks the evolution of perspectives along a historical axis from the 1930s through the 1960s and across the spectrum of subject positions occupied by the photographers. If drinking fountains and restrooms might be considered the pillars of the social body, sites of collective eating could be thought of as its metaphoric stomach, an even more fundamental and therefore more highly regulated site of social incorporation, as I contend in chapter 5, “The Eyeball and the Wall: Eating, Seeing, and the Nation.” Buttressed against the threat perceived in new waves of immigration during the 1920s, the restaurant wall became a figure of a national frontier, redrawn down the center of the counter when the economic pressures of the thirties forced the racial barrier to the interior. This structure required photographers to align themselves with one side of the racially marked division or the other. This was an especially vexing dilemma during the Depression, whose widening social rifts bolstered a national faith in photography’s inclusive and reparative power. Barred from crossing over to the “colored” side, Northern white photographers in the thirties—especially the women who had only recently gained access to this mobile, expansive vision—struggled to convey the restrictions imposed on them by their “white” location. In part 3, the focus shifts to the eyes of the nation, and Jim Crow’s cultural turns expand to incorporate a second camera. At the segregated movie theater, the site

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at which visual politics and national culture are explicitly at stake, two visual technologies, and their attendant critical discourses and social functions, meet. By synthesizing the vantage points of multiple, mobile cameras, cinema’s seemingly all-encompassing gaze captivated and, on an unprecedented scale, consolidated heterogeneous viewers into a collective visual and social experience that furthered the creation of a national culture—except for those required to sit in the segregated balcony.66 This pair of chapters explores the visual politics of a paradoxical scenario that inverted the racial topography and unsettled the visual hierarchy between the movie camera’s transcendent gaze and the photographic camera’s affiliation with the “colored” viewing position. At this complex and contested scene of viewing, the encounter between two cameras unfolds across two historical and geographic frames. Chapter 6, “Double Take: Photography, Cinema, and the Segregated Theater,” looks through the lens of the movie camera at the anxieties provoked by a seating arrangement that placed socially inferior spectators above their social superiors. Rather than address recent documentary and fiction films in which segregation signs make cameo appearances, this chapter looks back at the formative moment of the teens and twenties, when the cinematic apparatus achieved the classical form that produced the conception of a universal spectator. Focusing on the intersections among racial ideology, racially stratified exhibition sites, and the breakthrough cinematic techniques that produced classical cinema’s canonical point of origin, it uncovers signs of the discomfort that the structure of the theater provoked even in the most authoritative director. A close reading of the pivotal scene of Lincoln’s assassination in the Ford Theater in D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) suggests that the film’s twinned celebrations of cinematography and white supremacy cover a fear of the insurrectionary potential of the theater’s segregated balcony as a site that resists, and hence elicits, directorial control. Chapter 7, “Upside Down and Inside Out: Camera Work, Spectatorship, and the Chronotope of the Segregated Balcony,” responds by looking through the other set of lenses that photographers trained on the segregated theater during the 1930s. Movie theaters, unlike most segregated sites, marked only their “colored” entries, since local knowledge could be trusted to ensure that the unmarked front entry would be restricted to whites. At this asymmetrically signed location, documentary photographers bring us to the movies through the entry to the “colored balcony.” By defining a perspective both toward and implicitly from that balcony, their photographs envision modes of resistance to the movie camera’s captivating gaze. Disenchantment is implied by a visual insistence on the step-by-step exterior staircase that challenges the fiction of cinematic continuity, and on the play of shadows that calls into question the promise of substance on the screen. Disillusion assumed more tangible forms among the upstairs spectators, whose narratives often recount the covert pleasures of a balcony location that was shielded from surveillance by

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the white audience downstairs. Reading these photographs and narratives together uncovers the potential for disturbance that was galvanized in different ways by segregation’s spatial plans. Throwing popcorn from the balcony had its counterparts in backtalking on buses and “drink and run” games at the off-limits drinking fountain.67 What Michel de Certeau calls “spatial practice” and Edward J. Soja “spatial praxis”—the ways in which the mapping of social boundaries produces the terms of their transgression— was a fundamental feature of the segregated world.68 Of necessity covert under most circumstances, acts of spontaneous resistance emerged as a disciplined movement in the early 1960s. Through carefully scripted and publicized acts of civil disobedience which were staged as a form of political theater, the protest movement finally succeeded in bringing down the signs. The visual narrative of this dismantling is the subject of the book’s concluding section. Returning us both to the national stakes of the lunch counters and to the encounter between two cameras, one extended chapter, “Remaking Racial Signs: Activism and Photography in the Theater of the Sit-Ins,” focuses on the representation of the sit-in movement as a carefully crafted symbolic drama in which segregation signs were displaced by the staging of bodily signs in the daily confrontations between the white waitresses who instantiated and enforced the color line and the African American students who persisted in challenging it. The standoff was a compelling subject for photojournalists, who sacrificed norms of journalistic objectivity to stand behind the students, literally and figuratively, challenging the social gaze that was funneled through the waitress with the partisan perspective of their cameras. This perspective was not monolithic, however, and diverse visions of the struggle’s goals and consequences were rendered through the differential treatment of the male and female protesters. These gendered pictures try out alternative visions of desegregation: one emphasized color blindness, the other the recognition and revaluation of difference. If this dichotomy sounds familiar, it is because this argument persists. In the late twentieth century, as color blindness was used to justify dismantling the programs devised to remedy the long-term consequences of segregation, the signs began to be redeployed to call attention to an unfinished legacy. In a brief afterword, I consider the repurposing of Jim Crow signs by activists and artists who seek to turn their discriminatory uses to progressive aims. Jim Crow signs are prime examples of what John L. Jackson calls “racial Americana,” those racially invested social relations and representations that are so tightly woven into the fabric of national life that neither scientific inquiry nor rhetorical dexterity has been able to extract them.69 Simplified in cultural memory, Jim Crow signs have refused to simply go away. It is time to examine their tenacity.

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Inscriptions

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1

American Graffiti The Social Life of Jim Crow Signs Every little southern town is a fine stage-set for Southern Tradition to use as it teaches its children the twisting turning dance of segregation. Few words are needed for there are signs everywhere. White . . . colored . . . white . . . colored . . . over doors of railroad and bus stations, over doors of public toilets, over doors of theaters, over drinking fountains. Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream, 1949

We have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories. It is only through the analysis of these trajectories that we can interpret the human transactions and calculations that enliven things. . . . it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context.

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Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction,” The Social Lives of Things, 1988

White . . . colored . . . white . . . colored: the shorthand for segregation. In Lillian Smith’s Southern Everytown, all Jim Crow signs are one master sign, a superscript over all social spaces and relations. Circumventing the channels of cognition, the signs write race directly on the body, which is programmed to dance to segregation’s piper. The choreography is various, the words invariant. Scarcely materialized in written form, their incantation appears to be intoned instead by a disembodied voice that speaks from beyond the historical scene, as if the language of Jim Crow bypassed graphic mediation to be written directly in human nerves and flesh. Collapsing the space between Jim Crow signs and the bodies they imprint is a common trope of narratives of race. For African American writers in particular, the first encounter with a segregation sign is a defining moment of social inscription, a painful rite of passage that spells the fall into race. To learn to read the “Colored” sign is to learn that one has already been read by a law that writes its terms on a body forever after “branded and tagged and set apart from the rest of mankind 33

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upon the public highways, like an unclean thing.”1 Typically recounted through the optic of the child, the law’s cutting force is registered not in the adult language of status and rights, but in the experience of bodily pain—the jerk on the arm or the shout in the ear—and the foreclosure of specific bodily pleasures: the fresh breeze on the face at the front of the trolley, the iced Coke at the drugstore counter. The body is affronted time and again, and each impact and withholding aches distinctively; yet within the coming-of-age narratives they serve, these incidents are condensed into a single originary scene that (like the scene of castration in the narrative of gender) performs the work of allegory. After recounting his traumatic childhood experience of being refused a Coke at a Mississippi drugstore counter, the civil rights activist James Forman recasts this moment as “a cliché of the black experience, so often has it happened to our children in one form or another.”2 Clichés tell important truths, but only by obscuring others. By redirecting our attention from the bodies that are racially inscribed to the bodies of the signs (also described in considerable detail by African American writers) that are the objects as well as agents of inscription, this chapter seeks to uncover the stories relayed by things instead of by authors. Jim Crow signs conduct their own social lives independent of the racial choreography Lillian Smith describes. As Arjun Appadurai argues in his introduction to The Social Lives of Things, which offers a counterpoint to the epigraph from Lillian Smith, the pathways of things-in-motion provide windows into the social transactions that enliven things. It may be strange to think of Jim Crow signs as things in motion, securely tacked to structures as they were; but as things that were subject to the concessions and contingencies of material existence, rather than as transcendent and transparent vehicles of power, they were expressive and eventually portable objects that could be adapted to a range of cultural purposes. They have a history of production and a lively posthistorical existence after they were detached from walls and thrust into circulation. The messier and longer stories they convey route power through economic and cultural transactions that redistribute it less unilaterally and reconfigure race in a broader matrix of social relations. The strange career of Jim Crow signs extends across a century, significantly outliving the statutes that gave rise to it. Its trajectory follows the general course that anthropologists attribute to the “cultural biography of things.”3 The contours of this biography enlarge the context for local arguments about the politics of collecting black memorabilia and the relative claims of preserving and undoing an oppressive history at the same time that the specificity of these things recruits the generic biography of things to the charged and contested practices of race making.4 The cultural biography of Jim Crow signs can be divided into several interdependent chapters. The biography begins with the production of the signs over the first half of the twentieth century, a chapter that reveals surprising variations in the ways that so-

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cial authority was both articulated and complicated. Formal features allowed the signs to pivot between intentional command and inadvertent signature. Making signs entailed negotiating between public and private, class and race, and selfauthorization and self-exposure on both sides of the color line. This extended period of production finally slowed with the early stirrings of the civil rights movement and the growing recognition that the signs would offer evidence of a regime that would appear increasingly incredible to successive generations. A new chapter of the biography begins with the efforts of African American activists to pry the signs loose from the structures that supported them. Diverted from their historical function, repossessed as trophies, segregation signs were transported from a disciplinary regime to an economy of consumption. This chapter unfolds in accordance with Michel de Certeau’s effort (in contradistinction to Foucault’s) “not to make clearer how the violence of order is transmuted into a disciplinary technology, but rather to bring to light the clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of ‘discipline.’ Pushed to their ideal limits, these procedures and ruses of consumers compose the network of an antidiscipline.” Certeau’s account of consumption as “another production”—devious, dispersed, and often invisible “because it does not manifest itself through its own products, but rather through its ways of using the products” imposed by a dominant order—gives us a good handle on the tactics of the signs’ earliest, most determined and defiant consumers.5 This first generation could salvage only a small percentage of the signs, however, and as this limited supply failed to satisfy a growing demand for a material record of a vanishing history, a new market and new chapter emerged, whose trademark was reproductions. Signs initially, intentionally, and often illicitly taken to be preserved as historical evidence crossed paths with commodities manufactured for general circulation. After constituting “another production,” consumption generated a more conventional mode of mass production as commercial producers, no less resourceful than Certeau’s devious consumers and inspired perhaps by some of their tricks, devised new and profitable uses of the signs in this most controversial chapter of their biography. As an engine of reproductions and reinventions whose diversions can be read as either resisting or repressing the burden of segregation’s history, the marketplace inevitably generates debates about the proper place of things in a historically grounded cultural identity. For David Pilgrim, the founder and curator of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University, the commodification of segregation artifacts is more perversion than diversion, an “ugly intersection of money and race.”6 Pilgrim’s museum, whose name sends an unambiguous message about the nature of its holdings, takes historical artifacts and meanings out of circulation to preserve them from contamination on the marketplace. But

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neither the museum nor the marketplace is a singular entity, especially in relation to the traffic in signs, typically transacted at sites outside the repository of history. The long career of Jim Crow signs reveals the ways they served to unravel their original intent by complicating not only the racial division they enforced, but also other oppositions that share its binary structure and territorial design: past and present, production and consumption, original and copy, museum and marketplace, history and memory. This is a strange career indeed, not only because of its surprising twists and turns, but also because its overall direction can be read both as an emancipatory evolution away from the dominant culture’s stranglehold over racial definitions toward a more democratic proliferation, and as a trivializing devolution from the understanding of the signs’ historical consequences to an empty, dehistoricizing, commodified form of play. The entanglements that come to the fore of the most recent chapter of the signs’ biography provide a lens for reexamining the origins of the signs, which were created, discarded, and preserved through relations of complicity and agency across and within divergent groups that, neither passively inscribing nor inscribed, took the words of segregation into their own hands.

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• • •

Jim Crow signs occupy a unique place in the history of public signage in the United States. Despite their narrow content, their heterogeneous sources and forms embraced a spectrum of expression that escaped regulation from the state or marketplace. Drawing their authority from their status as regulatory signage, a mode of public address that emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century, racial restrictions could claim kinship with safety or traffic regulations that instructed citizens where to stand or walk.7 From this stemmed the perception of a far-reaching mandate to post private prejudice in public view. Subject to only minimal regulation in even its civic varieties—a Maryland ordinance specifying that railroads must have segregation signs in each coach with “appropriate words, in plain letters, in some conspicuous place” is a characteristically vague formulation, as is a Mississippi ordinance declaring that signs had to be visible from all quarters of intercity streetcars and buses—the enticement to post racial signage was both empowering and treacherous to some of the voices it teased out of hiding, as the lack of explicit guidelines also kept out of view the implicit norms of speaking for the public.8 A surprisingly broad cross-section of the American public consequently left its racial signature in this perversely democratic mode of expression that, encompassing public officials and private individuals, professional signmakers and amateur scribblers, could be characterized as an American graffiti. At one pole were the signs commercially manufactured for transportation and entertainment companies, business and merchant organizations, and government agencies. These are relatively standardized. At the center in block capitals is a generic formula: either the minimal announcement “White” or “Colored” or more specific

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Figure 4. Assorted Jim Crow signs (reproductions).

yet still multipurpose messages, such as “Colored Seated in Rear,” which could apply not only on public transportation but also in courtrooms, waiting rooms, and county or state offices. This instructional message stands on a tripod of authority. In smaller print below are the name or logo of the commissioning organization— the Cotton Belt Route, the Louisville and Nashville Railroad Company (L&N), or the United States Army (which had the distinction of segregating its members simultaneously along the axes of race and rank, dividing “white” from “colored” soldiers and enlisted men from officers), for example—along with by the name of the company that manufactured the sign and the date or number of the segregation ordinance (figure 4). Presenting themselves as the announcement of a policy determined previously

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and elsewhere, these signs provide at least some fictive origins for their statements. The rhetoric of direct and disinterested address, divorced from personal attitude or gain, encourages the perception of a neutral general will. Unmodified nouns and passive verbs give arbitrary arrangements an axiomatic cast; restrained graphic design reinforces the impression of impersonal necessity. Both the choice and the arrangement of the words were designed as codes for public speech, but the public they constructed as the origin as well as the object of their address took more than one shape, as suggested by two signs from Alabama that reference the same ordinance (figure 5). The Montgomery drinking-fountain sign illustrates the classic strategy for legitimating a segregated public sphere. With its precise symmetry, it rests its miniature cartography of race on the parallel foundations of space (on the left) and time (on the right): the sign arranges words to create an imaginary space that supplants the material conditions they represent (almost certainly a large refrigerated cooler and a small basin nearby). Behind the state ordinance it cites by date, the sign implicitly draws a higher mandate for this idealized racial map through a silent quotation of the formula of Plessy. By contrast, the sign for the Selma swimming pool abandons any pretense of an equitably divided public sphere. Through either a slip of the tongue or a slap in the face, the sign makes explicit what is usually kept quiet by bringing the word public into view. Public space is not partitioned here: it is blatantly restricted to a single race, and gratuitously so, as the word public could easily have been avoided. The Selma sign suggests that any sign that served the interests of whites could assume the mantle of a public dictum even in the absence of a cited authority. The less explicit the organization for which the signs spoke or the statutory nature of their provenance, the broader the consensus they appeared to articulate. Less stringent, perhaps, in their disciplinary overtones than signs that stipulated the source of their authority, they were equal or more resounding as expressions of a general will. Even the most minimal form—a single racial word—functioned as a citation of the larger social framework that backed that word’s authority. More than any other formal feature of the Jim Crow signs, consequently, the physical frame conferred legitimacy, not only by virtue of the economy of expression it inevitably imposed, but also by the participation it signaled in a distinctive discursive order. That the symbolic value of the frame was widely recognized is suggested by the frequency with which private citizens painted one around the racial restrictions they stenciled or scribbled on family businesses: the frame not only called attention to the words but also situated them in a larger social context (see figures 55 and 56). Whether hand-painted or professionally manufactured, Jim Crow signage provided a conduit through which the private voice could be invested with the authority of the collective. This was a heady incentive, especially for those whose economic status afforded little access to a public voice, but effecting this translation demanded adherence to the conventions of public speech.

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Figure 5. Two Jim Crow signs citing an Alabama ordinance from July 14, 1931 (reproductions).

The most obvious taboo was the personal signature. Because the sign must appear to emanate from some impersonal source, even the name of a public official could compromise the fiction of the collective, as a signed variant of a standard formula makes clear (figure 6). This handwritten sign, posted on a tree standing sentry over a park, is given some weight by the substantial signboard, framed at the top, but the highly unprofessional, almost childish inscription—the uncertain penmanship, uneven lines, smudged paint, misspelling, and lack of foresight in spacing— seriously compromises its authority, posing the question of who—child or semiliterate or even prankster—could have written it. Perhaps to circumvent that question and to recover some lost authority, the sign is uncharacteristically dignified with a signature of sorts. But the name that is signed has the opposite effect: intentionally or not, it tilts the sign from amateurism to absurdity, and possibly to parody. Whether E. W. Grove is the name of a park commissioner or an area of the park (the east and west groves?), its inclusion creates the comical impression that the tree is speaking on its own behalf. The crudely made sign also reveals that the signature is inscribed in more than one way. The rare (because counterproductive) inclusion of a name is only the most obvious version of a self-identification that could also take the form of handwriting, diction, spelling, or choice of color. The anonymity of the discursive form was countered by the individuality of the graphic form, which provided a handprint in

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Figure 6. Hand-lettered park sign. From The Negro Almanac. Dorothy Sterling Collection, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University.

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the absence of a name. Even less idiosyncratic sign makers had recourse to graphic options that exposed the messenger as they honed the message. Tonal differences could be rendered through variations in lettering: the typical reliance on block capitals yielded to the courtesies of cursive to insinuate class or racial distinctions. Size could serve as a register of sound: the larger the letters, the louder the voice, the more inflated the authority. Pauli Murray recalls that the signs she saw as a child in Durham, North Carolina, “literally screamed” at her from streetcars and drinking fountains, and she reproduces their loud voice on the printed page through oversize block capitals that show up Lillian Smith’s quieter italics: “FOR WHITE ONLY, FOR COLORED ONLY, WHITE LADIES, COLORED WOMEN, WHITE, COLORED.”9 Choices of color, sometimes deployed mimetically for a partially literate public (white signs for white people, black signs for black people), had their expressive qualities as well: as his train crosses the Virginia border a few months after that state had enacted its separate-car law, Charles A. Chesnutt’s fictional protagonist Dr. Miller notes a large framed card “containing the legend ‘White,’ in letters about a foot long, painted in white upon a dark background, typical, one might suppose, of the distinction thereby indicated.”10 Painting the word colored in black, conversely, effects a silent translation from the polite social term to its aggressive underside, blurring the distinction between those African Americans who had garnered a modicum of status and the underclass usually designated by the blunt color label black. The range of expressive options distinguished Jim Crow signs not only from the more uniform regulatory signage but also from commercial signage, for Jim Crow signs were not subject to marketplace pressures to develop a consistent style. According to David M. Henkin, the increasing standardization of commercial signage over the nineteenth century derived from a common stake in professionalization. Because, as a visiting Argentinian statesman observed about commercial signs in New York in 1847, “a crooked or fat letter or a mistake in spelling would be enough to ensure a deserted counter for the shopkeeper,” commercial signs developed a uniform typography and style. This consistency subsumed their competitive interests into the semblance of a “single, official voice” that contributed to the evolving perception of a coherent public space.11 Because segregation signs were not promoting goods for sale, they risked no penalties for casual or sloppy expression, and there was no need to gain credibility among competing signs. Jim Crow signs thus share with their commercial counterparts the interrelation Henkin proposes between private interests and public language, but they work it in reverse. Like commercial signs, segregation signs fostered and gained power from the impression of impersonal authority, but this putatively public discourse, whose function was to articulate a general policy rather than to advertise the names and trades of individuals, was both deliberately and inadvertently a vehicle of self-disclosure. Paradoxically, whereas the commercial signage that had no intrinsic claim to public status played a cru-

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Figure 7. Inscription on outhouse, North Carolina. Harry Golden Papers, University of North Carolina, Charlotte.

cial role in developing the concept of the public sign, the racial signage that was defined as the voice of the public became a mode of private expression. In addition, there were no constraints on who could produce these signs, or how. It did not require status, money, education, or expertise to enter one’s production into the public colloquy. It was not even necessary to know how to spell. Consequently, Jim Crow signage elicited a spectrum of expressions from commercial organizations, rednecks, and kooks who, for reasons of class or psychological disenfranchisement, perceived racial language as a medium for asserting what they took to be their underrecognized rights. Before the spray-paint can gave anyone the means and the incentive to impress a private signature on a public place, Jim Crow signage offered a frame for social writing that encouraged self-expression from the fringes as well as the center. Individuals drawn to this mode of self-aggrandizement revealed more than they knew, for they were also framed by the legitimating frame by which they were seduced. The writing furthest from the center is at once the most revealing and the hardest to read. Consider, for example, the side wall of an outhouse in a field in North Carolina (figure 7). The racial restriction appears to be an exercise in absurdity: who would want to use this collapsing “tolit,” whose tilt seems to suggest the precarious

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structure of white supremacy itself ? More an act of self-definition than of practical instruction, the broadcasting of racial exclusivity seems almost pathetically compensatory. Racial entitlement attempts to remedy a class disadvantage that is visible in the diction as well as in the spelling. Yet whereas an officially printed version of the same message would pose few interpretive conundrums, these telltale markers are tantalizing but opaque. We can attribute the misspellings to inferior education—and perhaps to youth as well—but what kind of intentionality or meaning should we ascribe to the backwards F in “For”? Is it the signature of a dyslexic or child writer, as is famously intimated by the backwards R in the corporate logo of Toys ”R“ Us? A clever attempt to superimpose the number 4 on its homonym? A sinister allusion to the swastika the reversed letter also resembles? The signifier that captures our attention does not answer our inquiries. It is not only through the insistence of the letter that the material foundation of the sign is brought to our attention, however. Background as well as foreground plays a role in its formation. For it is as much the invitation tendered by the outermost board, I would argue, as the urgency of an internal state that elicits this inscription. By demarcating public space for racial writing, Jim Crow reconfigured the built environment as a series of blank pages that invited public expression of private sentiments. This had bitter and long-term consequences, but it also exposed the spectrum of racial discourse for future scrutiny.

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• • •

Racial inscription included ingenious African American variations. The most inspired occurred in cartoons designed by and for readers who had thoroughly mastered Jim Crow’s visual codes. The Chicago Defender fostered this visual play during and after World War II in the form of a comic strip about Mr. Jim Crow, a clueless white man with a crow mask who is continually forced to eat the crow produced by the rebound of the “No Collud” and “For White” signs he has tacked up everywhere. In 1950, the comic strip was opened to a competition among readers, with a prize of five dollars offered for the “most amusing ‘Jim Crow’ experience.” This would be translated into comic form by the Defender cartoonist (whose name—or pseudonym—was Whyte). Even before that extended exercise, however, the Defender published individual cartoons that capitalized on the sign system’s graphic (rather than semantic) codes, sometimes by playing with capitalization. One favorite trick was to call attention to the fact that Negro was typically written in lowercase by capitalizing all but the first letter of the word. Thus, for example, on a page supporting the reelection of Franklin Delano Roosevelt a few days before the 1944 election, a cartoon of Roosevelt welcoming a Negro delegation at the front door of the White House was juxtaposed with a sign for Thomas Dewey’s home town that included a standard formula, with a single letter altered: “nEGRO, DON’T LET THE SUN SET ON YOU HERE!” A few months later, that strategy was deftly redeployed

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with another standard formula in a cartoon by Jay Jackson in which a streetcar conductor points to a sign declaring “FROM HERE BACK FOR nEGROES” (figure 8). Beneath the sign, a Caucasian-featured woman protests: “But I’m not! I got this tan out at the beach.” By playing with the conventions of case and color in the graphic sign, the cartoon suggests that race’s somatic signs are equally unstable. Although the actual signs afforded less room for play, African American versions reveal a distinctive cultural signature directed at viewers within the community. Sometimes the same word simply registered differently. Whereas a whitemade “Colored” sign signified a humiliating back-door entry, for example, the same word on a black-owned store signaled a refuge from humiliating (or no) service in the larger culture. An insult in one context became an offering in the other: the accent fell implicitly on the preposition for. A gesture of outreach, the “Colored” sign could also alert an agitated community that black-owned businesses were on their side: during the 1943 Harlem riots, African American proprietors hung hastily handmade “Colored Store” signs in their windows as a notice to looters to spare their stores. This engagement with the community meant that commercial and racial signage were often interwoven. Rather than a separate “Colored” sign, race could be written into an establishment’s name explicitly or implicitly—“The Pit Colored Café,” “Al’s Café for Colored,” and “The Black Cat,” for example. Color coding could also be more subtle, as in the use of silver as a substitute for black, a code derived from the practice of American engineers during the construction of the Panama Canal of paying Negro workers in silver, white workers in gold. This usage was appropriated as a form of self-designation by African Americans in the South in names like “The Silver Moon Café” and “The Silver Dollar Finest Colored Club.” Color could also be expressed in adjectival form—the Silver Moon Café advertises itself as a “colorful restaurant”—or through a proper name—the Booker Tea Washington Café. Signifying on race was a way to convert a stigma into a component of communal conversation and play. In these contexts, the mass-produced “Colored” signs rarely were displayed, and segregation statutes were certainly not cited. Such practices had real liabilities, however, for they meant that African American attempts to defend the boundaries of their segregated world, to consolidate its potential as a safe and nurturing space, had little state sanction or support. As a result, the adverb only was frequently invoked: “For Colored Only” signs were as common on African American hamburger joints, taxi cab companies, movie theaters, or rooming houses as they were uncommon on “Colored” entries to white-owned facilities. Putting teeth into that only required stronger measures, however. A handpainted “Colored Only” sign posted, ostensibly for the benefit of both races, on a juke joint for migratory workers in the Belle Glades region of Florida was reinforced with the words “Police Order.” “Colored” space, then, was at once all too public— its boundaries were permeable, undefended, so vulnerable to trespass that they

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Figure 8. Cartoon, Chicago Defender, July 7, 1945. Courtesy of the Chicago Defender.

needed police protection—and external to the public, beyond the statutory safeguards of the public will. Institutions with greater economic clout could assert their boundaries more confidently. The boldest strategy was to turn the tables by deploying the signs’ structuring conventions and formulas in reverse. In the sign commissioned from the Ace Sign Company by the black-owned Lenox Theater in Augusta, Georgia, the color terms are switched in two standard (and redundant) formulas uttered in the traditional passive voice that indicates authority is speaking from elsewhere (figure 9). The theater seized the structure of the sign in a strongly worded double address to imaginary white readers behind the primary audience; a more common alternative was to deploy visual cues directed at insiders. Although white sign producers made

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Figure 9. Lenox Theater sign, Augusta, Georgia.

deliberate choices of materials to match specific settings (wood for railroad stations, Tiffany glass for high-class restaurants), the goal was less to communicate information visually than to create an aesthetically harmonious environment, especially under the pressure of a modernist aesthetic that encouraged harmonizing all signage with other design features.12 African American sign makers, however, devised ingenious strategies for implying visually what could not be verbalized overtly. These strategies become apparent in the contrast between two signs, one produced by the county, the other by the black community, for Florida beaches at which African Americans gained the right to swim in the 1930s and ’40s. The sign for Virginia Beach, marking a victory gained in 1945 after six African Americans staged a swim-in to establish access to a beach in Dade County, is a minimalist concession of territory that specifies simply the name of the county, the beach, and the message “Colored Only.” The sign for American Beach, established in the 1930s by the Afro-American Life Insurance Company in Jacksonville, which created a recreation area for its members by buying property on an isolated stretch of beach on an island north of Jacksonville, is a suggestive emblem produced by a financially secure, proud, and resourceful community (figure 10).13 The sign both embraces and teases the color line. That autonomy could cohabit with a claim to nationality is asserted in the community’s self-presentation as first and foremost an American beach that is secondarily a “playground” for African Americans. Here, the iconography suggests, signifying is one form of play. The swordfish on the left, its elongated body and jaw reclining on and extending almost the length of the word American, appears more the subject than the object of aggressive sport. On this American beach, the fished (the hunted, the hounded, the pursued, and the persecuted) are transformed into the fisher, whose sword is aimed directly at a light-skinned bathing beauty in a two-piece bathing suit. This reclamation of phallic potency, this fishing license that resists the relentless desexualization of African Americans in commercially produced iconography of perpetual childhood and happy servitude, points along the reclaimed stretch of beach to the

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Figure 10. Sign from American Beach, Florida. Photograph courtesy Stetson Kennedy and Southern Labor Archives, Special Collections Department, Georgia State University.

racially ambiguous American girl whose turned back defines her more as prey than as playmate—prey that, stepping off the sign, gestures outward like the figurehead she resembles toward a less circumscribed field of play.

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• • •

Opportunities for invention expanded dramatically after the signs were carried quite literally into the next chapter of their biography through the determination and foresight of the people they were designed to control. It is a chapter characterized by two interrelated developments: as the signs migrated from the field of production to that of consumption, there was a corollary shift from white to black predominance in the collection of black memorabilia. The heroic mode of covert consumption yielded quickly to more conventional and therefore controversial consumer practices fostered by a marketplace willing to supply copies of signs whose shrinking supply of originals could not keep pace with a growing demand. Jim Crow signs did not disappear overnight: indeed, signs of those signs continue to linger as evidence of a system that was haphazardly repurposed rather than radically purged. Succumbing to the pressures of the civil rights movement, the signage gradually disappeared through the 1960s and 1970s (occasionally lingering into the 1980s). It was sometimes sandblasted or painted over lightly in ways intended to keep the message legible, sometimes reinstated in less explicit forms, such as doors color-coded black or white, and sometimes partially dismantled but allowed to remain as broken but decipherable fragments (see figure 11). Some traces are still visible in the built environment, as symmetrical holes drilled into the marble surface above drinking fountains; as decentered or redundant restrooms that

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betray their prior duplication by race; as ceilings lowered in theaters to conceal a segregated bank of upper seats; and as insipid messages on adjacent waiting rooms, such as “Safety First,” whose primary function appears to be filling in the blank space left by painted-over segregation signs. As these traces became increasingly obscure, the signs themselves became increasingly difficult to find. Typically produced on perishable materials (paper and cardboard more often than metal, glass, or wood), most of them rapidly deteriorated after they were taken down, as the progressive Southern writer Stetson Kennedy poignantly describes: “I raced around to dumpsters collecting discarded ‘White’ and ‘Colored’ signs, thinking they would be of some interest to posterity in a Museum of Horrors. Alas, I stored them under my house, where termites got them, which may be just as well.”14 As a Southern white, Kennedy was unusual, and perhaps unusually careless in his habits. Although his experience is undoubtedly representative of that of countless other ambivalent sign retrievers—in conjunction with that of the intentional sign destroyers who, whether out of anger, bitterness, triumph, or shame, worked to make these hateful reminders disappear—there were also some determined and deliberate collectors and preservers. We owe the preservation of the few remaining original signs almost entirely to the courage of a generation of African Americans who came of age during the civil rights movement and who collected the signs as a form of activism. Acquiring the signs in the final years of their regime literally required activism. The collectors risked jail to lift them surreptitiously from buses under cover of darkness; pilfered them from hotels or restaurants in which African Americans were employed; snatched them from trash cans after they were taken down by law; or returned to abandoned buildings, gutted by natural disasters, to detach them from walls still reeking of smoke. Those with less audacity but equal foresight scoured flea markets and yard sales for the signs that others had collected, stored in attics, and eventually discarded. For some, the encounter with a sign triggered the passion for collecting; for others, especially for college students raised in the North, the sign became a prize possession to bring back home.15 By retrieving these tools of subjugation, these activist collectors—Certeau-style consumers— turned segregation signs around to testify against their makers. This generation changed the character and cast of collecting black memorabilia. Since the late eighteenth century there has been an industry in black-themed massproduced souvenirs, novelties, toys, kitchen items, dolls, and ceramic figurines, all characterized by the literal and figurative diminishment of African Americans. This market, however, was driven by a white middle class eager to fill its homes with iconographic evidence of its own superiority. Only as that desire came under fire did African Americans begin to seek to “keep the memory alive” before it was too attenuated, to preserve a record of what was “all true . . . to understand why it was done.”16 As this era receded further into a tenuous memory, the drive to collect its material remains became increasingly urgent. By the close of the twentieth century,

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Figure 11. Painted-over “White Men” sign. Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF) Collection, Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library.

the number of African American collectors had tripled to approximately fifty thousand; the number of museums of African American history had increased from approximately a dozen in the 1960s to approximately a hundred by the late 1990s; a rash of websites dedicated to assessing the value and sources of black memorabilia had been newly constructed; and the field had shifted definitively from white to African American leadership. Jeanette Carson founded the Black Memorabilia Collectors Association in 1984 to educate and encourage African Americans to collect their own history, to recognize the value of what they already owned, and to retain their collections in the face of increasingly seductive financial incentives. She notes that African Americans made up 50 to 70 percent of collectors by the end of the century, as opposed to 30 percent when the association was formed.17 Although the economic downturn of the early twenty-first century has slowed this activity, it has not altered the racial balance of the collectors. During this transitional chapter of their biography, Jim Crow signs continued to function as racial markers. Whether accomplished by theft, purchase, or inheritance, African American possession of these signs implies some narrative of

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agency, which may be one reason why some white antique dealers in the South who are happy to sell African Americans a variety of “cute little things”—Aunt Jemima cookie jars and Sambo salt and pepper shakers, the Pickaninny Peppermints and the Gold Dust twins—prefer selling “seriously derogatory racist stuff,” such as slave documents and Jim Crow signs, to other white dealers and collectors, who (according to one account) hawk these items among themselves like pornography in backroom deals.18 In their new locations, the signs measure the space between their attempts at definition and their failure to define. Clarence Page, a journalist for the Chicago Tribune, owns a “Colored Waiting Room” sign that he bought in a memorabilia shop for seventy-five dollars twenty years ago and refuses to sell despite the fivefold increase in its current value. He explains: “This symbol of our past subjugation has become something of a trophy of triumph in our struggle of memory against forgetting. . . . Designed to enforce white supremacy, these old relics possessed by new owners now expose its folly.”19 Marking a place in time as well as space, this sign carries a special charge that made it a privileged object of African American photographers’ attention (as the next chapter shows): to own the “Colored Waiting Room” sign is to announce that the wait is over. Collecting, as Jean Baudrillard and others tell us, is intrinsically an act of resignification. As objects are plucked from one context and repositioned in a different one, they cease to be defined by their function and are redefined in relation to a new set of conditions. It is the collector rather than the producer who determines their meaning by defining the new frame. This displacement from a context of use to one of ownership usually elicits a psychoanalytic reading of a dream of narcissistic plenitude or an anthropological account of Western habits of acquiring objects from vulnerable cultures and transferring them into structures of display that annihilate their original purposes and histories (as well as the manner and meaning of their acquisition).20 In the contexts of connoisseurship and cultural plunder, collecting is regularly and rightly viewed as a symptom of possessive individualism, whether personal or cultural, but political collections perform a different function. This function is well named by Whoopi Goldberg, who has mounted her collection of black memorabilia on what she calls her “Wall of Shame.” In a calculated shift of context, scattered Jim Crow signs and other testimony to discrimination are gathered together to amass a burden of proof. The wall negotiates a complex temporality. The spatialization of items from different eras assimilates them to a common temporal frame, but the dehistoricization that is a liability of collecting has a productive function here. Without entirely yielding their specific histories, objects in these collections offer them up to a synchronic present that bars the past by so powerfully representing it. These Jim Crow signs retain a monitory function in the service of their new owners: by keeping the past in sight, they ward off its return. They become, in the words of Julian Bond, one of the most passionate and eloquent

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collectors, “sentinels guarding the past, doorkeepers who prevent our ever returning to it, harsh—if even sometimes beautiful—preservers of the history we have overthrown. . . . They are our common past; silently, they face the future. They have lost the power to define my world; they have taken on the power to create a new one.”21 Bond’s own collection includes only two Jim Crow signs (three if we count the anomalous American Beach sign discussed above), a characteristically tiny percentage.22 In spite of their scarcity, however, such signs play an important symbolic role in African American collections. By contrast, white-authored catalogues of black memorabilia typically display a strong bias in favor of figural items and either omit the signs entirely or give them a marginal entry under “miscellaneous” or “paper collectibles.” It is perhaps unsurprising that the signs’ function of exposing racism would make them loaded items for catalogues produced by and seemingly for white collectors, who are driven more by nostalgia than by political witnessing, but with some poetic justice, this function persists when they appear inside this frame.23 For some of these catalogues (the ones by women are the worst) shamelessly reproduce the power relations of the past. “Which items of black memorabilia you collect is all a matter of taste,” explains Jan Lindenberger in her introduction to Black Memorabilia around the House. “I personally love it all, but I tend to lean toward the kitchen items. (The smiling mammies in my kitchen brighten my day.)”24 Her choice and presentation of Jim Crow signs are equally revealing. By selecting and centering an unusually decorative 1940s pair and strategically eliminating the counterparts for whites, the catalogue displays the signs for “colored men” and “colored women” as if they were a tribute instead of an affront. Placed above a pair of mammy and butler candles, the signs construct the colored couple as happy household servants presiding over an entourage of little black children in the form of candles, candy dishes, and Christmas-tree ornaments. This is a plantation fantasy (disguised as miscellany) sufficiently expansive to include a badge of membership in the Ku Klux Klan and a pricey statue of a Klan wizard (his arm detachable to facilitate transportation). A slightly less egregious instance of the signs’ transformation into domestic kitsch appears in Kyle Husfloen’s Black Americana Price Guide, where the category of “signs” functions as a plausible bridge from theatrical posters to slave documents in the list of items for sale under the rubric of “paper collectibles.” There are only two kinds of sign, however, as the visual display makes clear: Jim Crow signs—one set priced between $500 and $1,000 and the second at $40—and advertisements for “Pillsbury’s Best” and “O’Baby Chocolate Dairy Drink,” a juxtaposition that effectively equates the pair colored and white with chocolate and vanilla. Even morereputable catalogues treat the signs as decorative items rather than as historical artifacts. Douglas Congdon-Martin, for example, whose Images in Black: 150 Years of Black Collectibles is one of the few catalogs to allocate a couple of pages to “Jim Crow,” in a category titled “Flat Art” in the section “For the Home,” misattributes the Lenox

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Theater’s important “Colored Only/No Whites Allowed” sign (see figure 9) to a nonexistent Knox Theater because he has not bothered to remove the sign from a frame that crops off the first two letters of the theater’s name. A note on two African American collections, one private, one public, may sharpen the contrast. Although these are not commercial operations, and they therefore inevitably disregard the categories devised for marketing, their emphasis on the power relations that framed the production of domestic iconography is strong enough to warrant comparison. In a wall from the Museum in Black in Los Angeles (Brian Breyé’s personal collection), for example, Jim Crow signs are interspersed with Aunt Jemima dolls and advertisements for products such as Black Jeff coal and Gold Dust washing powder under a rod contrived to hold a grinning hobo dangling in the air. The allusion to a lynching transforms the grin—splashed across the wall in virtually every ad—into a grimace. Coercion becomes explicit in the APEX (African American Panoramic Experience) Museum, dedicated to the history of black Atlanta. Here, signs for “White Only” and “Colored Only” are radically displaced from the domestic sphere and replaced in the framework of terror: sole items in an expressionistic setting whose painted patterns and shades of black, white, and grey evoke walls dripping with blood for which the signs, hung beneath gunlike metal rods, appear responsible.

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• • •

Despite a shared political purpose, African American collectors are a heterogeneous group, as the last two examples indicate, and the differences among them are both heightened and confused as the field is flooded by reproductions. The noncommercially produced “White” sign at the center of the wall of the Museum in Black, based, like the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, on the decades-long effort of an individual collector, has no counterpart in the APEX Museum, which, like many of the African American history museums founded in the 1980s and ’90s, has had to rely on reproductions of the signs, some reconstructed painstakingly from archival photographs, others inexpensive commercial copies.25 The originals that activists salvaged, their value enhanced by the transgressive acts embedded in their acquisition, have become so rare and consequently precious—worth as much as two thousand dollars when their provenance is known, which is a higher price than most slave documents command—that they are either unavailable or unaffordable to all but the wealthiest collectors, a market increasingly dominated by celebrities (Whoopi Goldberg, Bill and Camille Cosby, Cicely Tyson, Oprah Winfrey, Alan Page, Anita Baker, Sammy Davis Jr., Spike Lee, Magic Johnson, and Juanita Jordan among them), for whom they constitute a badge of membership in a historical community of race.26 Because this desire is not confined to celebrities, however, an industry in reproductions has emerged. Some are offered by profiteers who exploit the desire for

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scarce originals by devising strategies for making recent copies appear old. Their tactics range from the fairly transparent practices of punching holes in metal signs to make them look as if they had been hung on walls and soaking paper reproductions in coffee to turn them brown to higher-tech procedures, such as placing paper in smokehouses or special low-temperature ovens injected with an acidic mixture of gases to accelerate oxidation and aging. Some dealers also capitalize on the early discovery of undistributed or returned Jim Crow signs in company warehouses, shortly after the demand for them declined, by placing phony announcements of hot new warehouse finds in trade journals for antiques.27 This industry in fake authenticity, which commands prices lower than certifiable originals but higher than acknowledged reproductions, is driven by the growth of a black middle class with discretionary income to invest in memorabilia, a situation that has led cultural critics such as Gerald Early and Lynn Casmier-Paz to decry what they consider a “bourgeois investment pastime” on the part of a “privileged class.”28 This is not the only class eager to purchase such items, however, and a different kind of product has been devised for buyers of more modest means and aspirations. Although concerns about legislative and social pressure against the dissemination of racist materials have shrouded this industry in secrecy (notwithstanding a widespread belief that it is based primarily in Asia), their inexpensive products, reproductions of mass-produced signs typically priced at fifteen to twenty-five dollars, are easy to find in second-hand stores (indeed, the examples at the beginning of this chapter are readily available versions of these products).29 Sometimes appearing as minimalist messages without authorizing tags, sometimes in creative reinventions that introduce misspellings and fictional dates, sometimes in multiple variations with differing degrees of specificity, these popular simulacra both attenuate historical accuracy and replenish historical memory, especially in communities with limited access to originals.30 Reproductions of segregation signs occupy an important niche in secondhand stores that double as information centers, operated by ordinary citizens turned street educators. Their shops, often located in the heart of the ghetto, function as improvised museums and alternative-history centers, repositories of knowledge both arcane and mundane, meeting places and resource centers that provide a hands-on education in material culture, from segregation artifacts to movie posters, baseball cards, and old copies of Ebony, along with local bus and movie schedules.31 Often history buffs who have gathered their diverse merchandise over many years from many locales and who can recount each item’s story in detail, these collector-proprietors also perform the role of organic intellectuals who prod casual shoppers, browsers, kibbitzers, hangers-on, and people who have come in from the rain to wait for buses into an encounter with things whose juxtaposition composes an account of history. During the prosperous 1990s, the expanding market for black memorabilia could

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be tapped more directly through a new kind of store designed to meet a new consumer desire. That inexpensive replicas of Jim Crow signs were, for a range of sometimes contradictory reasons, prime objects of that desire is clear in the retailing decisions of one of the most controversial, well-documented, and (for more than a decade) successful of these: Martha’s Crib, an Afrocentric art, crafts, and memorabilia store that captured the attention of the national media as well as the Chicago press through its strategies for catering to an African American clientele in urban communities west of Chicago from 1994 to 2005. Uncertain whether Jim Crow signs would offend her customers, its proprietor, Marchel’le Renise Barber, polled them; almost all urged her to produce the signs and asked to be placed on a waiting list to ensure that they would be among the first to own one. Because not only the originals but also copies of the signs were by then in short supply, Barber expanded her selection of merchandise by designing her own line: the Martha’s Crib Jim Crow Sign Series.32 This development is a striking example of historical reversal and continuity: almost a century after Jim Crow signs were produced by and for white businesses, they were being commissioned and designed by an African American business to meet the demand of African American customers motivated, in contrast to the collectors of the 1960s, less to memorialize than to perpetuate their pain. A generation that, as children, was shielded from the signs’ wounding force by parents who steered them away from places where the signs were displayed is now seeking out replicas to transmit that wound to their children and grandchildren. Although this impulse to “leave things for the next generation . . . to let our children know that this happened” is a product of the same historical moment that has fueled the recent spate of African American memoirs written for a generation for whom, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. puts it in Colored People, the primary reference of colored is a box of crayons, it enacts a more aggressive relation to a segregated past whose reconstruction is vulnerable to the hazy glow of memory.33 The choice of signs is an index of this function: whereas colored is the key word in the titles of the printed texts, a tag for an intact and nurturing community that integration undermined, its opposite holds that place in the marketplace of signs. Marchel’le Barber, whose store was dedicated to keeping alive the pain of the past for a generation that had “no sense of history and no sense of hurt,” initially planned to reproduce only one or two of the “less offensive” (presumably “For Colored”) signs. Her plan changed when an African American man insisted that he wanted to buy a “White Only” sign in order “to hang it in his house outside his bathroom so his teenage son might be able to relate to the experience of needing to go to the bathroom—but not having anyplace he could go.” That forged Barber’s determination to “go all the way”: not only to produce the sign in her Jim Crow Sign Series, but also to hang it outside the bathroom of her own condominium.34 The disciplining of the body by the “Colored” sign was now administered by a “White” sign in the hands of African Amer-

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Figure 12. Examples from the Martha’s Crib Jim Crow Sign Series.

icans seeking to imprint an endangered dimension of their racial heritage on the nerves and flesh of a younger generation. In a further ironic twist, the sign’s very materiality was altered, along with the racial label it enforced. The “White Only” sign that Barber designed to meet the demand of her customers is, like the rest of her series, openly fake. Barber, who deplores and exposes the practices of unscrupulous dealers who attempt to pass copies off as originals, was scrupulous about marking her signs as reproductions. Although she meticulously imitated the lettering, shapes, colors, and borders of the originals, she stamped her versions “Historical Reproduction” and sold them at only ten dollars apiece (see figure 12). She also stamped them with the name of the store, the copyright symbol, and date. Her signature replaced that of the companies that commissioned and produced the originals: it is not the white sign producers who sign the copies of their signs, but their African American reproducer. As white historical production became black historical reproduction, the date of the ordinance on the originals was displaced by the date of the copyright. Ownership changed hands, but what exactly was now owned? It was not the original object or language, but the copy that was copyrighted, reserving to Martha’s Crib the exclusive right to continue to make copies. The copy, apparently, is an original, a form of intellectual property, whose originality resides in its conception and execution as a copy. As a copyrighted copy, however, it makes a different claim on its viewers. The claim to private ownership that is registered by the copyright symbol also marks the copy of the sign with the sign of the published text. As the ordinance that stamped the signs with the weight of the public is replaced by the copyright that stamps them as private property, the signature of the author-producer is severed from the social body, and the sign that was replicated to keep alive an experience of the body takes the disembodied form of a text and a commodity. With such an attenuated weight of history, what can these signs impress upon

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the body? One answer might be provided by a closely associated product. For one of the many media stories on Martha’s Crib, Barber posed with some of her stock: a variety of figurines, two Jim Crow signs (one from her own line, the other a standard reproduction), and her most controversial product—slave shackles redesigned as jewelry (figure 13). Adapted for contemporary use, the shackles and the signs are similarly designed both to subject contemporary bodies to the burden of the past and to assert a victory over that past by displaying its symbols as trophies or ornaments. Slave shackles are Jim Crow signs’ immediate antecedent: as slavery became segregation, the shackles became signs whose control of the body was verbal rather than physical. The photograph translates temporal into spatial continuity: the “Colored Waiting Room” sign that juts at right angles into Barber’s chest is connected to the elbow of the forearm that she raises to display the bracelet/shackle in a clenchfisted echo of the Black Power salute in which this narrative culminates. The body is shaped by what it wears: a less historically weighty bracelet would elicit a different modeling gesture (fingers gracefully extended instead of clenched, perhaps). That the link is more than accidental is suggested by its recurrence: Barber used an almost identical gesture to display the shackles in her website advertisement. Her expression is also consistent: the fixed, unsmiling gaze, lips sealed, eyes forward, seems a direct transmission from her ancestors through metal to her flesh. “When I held the slave shackle in my hands for the first time, I got a very chilling feeling. I imagined how my ancestors probably felt being stolen from their homes and taken to a country where they were looked upon with scorn and treated like property.”35 That chill is registered in Barber’s frozen posture and face: the shackles design her body as well as the reverse, and Jim Crow signs are embedded in this exchange. But is it the reproduction of slavery or the reproduction of slavery that produces the affectless expression and unanimated body that poses with the shackles and Jim Crow signs? The impassivity that expresses the chill of slavery also suggests another mode of alienation in which the copy reproduces the condition of a copy in those it reaches out to touch. Barber’s stylized self-presentation—not just her body language, but her designer nail polish, makeup, hairstyle, and jewelry (the shackle/ bracelet matched by the chain around her neck)—assimilates the producer to the products she designs. Her blankness and manicured exterior make her look as drained of life as the reproductions on her shelves. Instead of an exchange of painful embodiment, the relation of body to shackles is one of reciprocal disembodiment, which is also a deliberate feature of the bracelet/shackles’ design, for the weight of history they carry is tempered not to overtax the contemporary body. The bracelet is designed not to lock, in order to demonstrate that these slave shackles never can enslave; it is also sized to fit comfortably (in small, medium, and large), to slip on and off the wrist easily, and to be lightweight, shiny and visually appealing. Unlike a set of ankle shackles Barber made for home display out of rough textured metal, intended to look worn and old and thus to manifest the historical weight they claim

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Figure 13. Marchel’le Renise Barber in Martha’s Crib. Photograph by Lloyd DeGrane. Courtesy Lloyd DeGrane and Xavier magazine.

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to carry, the wrist shackles made for bodily display are of polished copper and are made to look attractive, to entice people to buy them. To buy or sell them, however, is to reproduce the profound alienation of human labor that was slavery; the price tag on the bracelet/shackle echoes in a minor key the price tag on the body. To make one’s body a prop for the copy of what enforced the conversion of people to property is to place it in this chain of commodities. Barber attempts to break this chain by securing the commodity’s historical meaning. Attached to the last link of the copper chain on the shackle is a coin inscribed with the admonition “Never Forget.” The copper chain is intended as a genealogical chain that connects the wearer with her ancestors, removing her from the circuit of commodities and placing her in the chain of history. In the photograph in which the producer models her product, however, the historical exhortation is eclipsed by the other economy into which the coin inevitably inserts her: an economy that rejoins the shackles to the signs. In the spatial logic of the image, these products are contiguous not only in a historical narrative of inscription on the body but also in an economic narrative of that inscription’s recirculation as commodity. Sign and shackle are linked metonymically through salient and parallel parts: the coin on the shackle, the price tag on the sign, a bargain copy of the “Colored Waiting Room” sign that Clarence Page refused to part with for any price, are now a packaged and purchasable memory readily available for $22.99. At their outer edge, these crisp geometric shapes—shiny copper circle, bright red rectangle—stand out from their respective frames and reach out to each other in a new signifying chain. Partnered as items for sale, the replica of the sign and the replica of the shackle are implicated in a revised relation to the body. The embodied weight of the racial past becomes the deracinating imprint of the marketplace. A “retailer of revolution” used to be Barber’s chosen moniker: “In my own way,” she explained, “I am affecting change.”36 Perhaps some unconscious recognition of retailing’s effect on revolution found expression in the slip of the tongue (as in the composition of the image): affecting change may be what marketing historical ornament is about. • • •

Retailing history makes it available to anyone. Whereas the expensive original items represent and require a financial and emotional investment that restricts who will buy them, mass reproduction places replicas in general circulation. Barber has insisted on monitoring the uses of her own products by refusing to take phone or email orders, scrupulously guarding against the potential of misuse, but the other reproductions that are on the market travel outside any determinate political or interpretive frame and are as readily available for purchase in redneck as in African American stores. The “White Only” sign demanded by Barber’s customers and displayed over her own bathroom to keep the pain of exclusion physically alive is as avidly sought after by whites to display over their bathrooms, swimming pools, and

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recreation rooms to keep the pleasure of entitlement symbolically alive. The meaning of the signs is entirely contextual, and the context of their acquisition as well as of their use spans antithetical constituencies. Inexpensive copies are for sale not only in high-profile racist stores such as the Redneck Shop of the Ku Klux Klan Museum in Laurens, South Carolina, which advertises signs such as “Public Swimming Pool White Only,” “Colored Must Sit in Balcony,” and “No Dogs Negroes Mexicans,” but also in the garden-variety country stores that are a feature of backwoods communities such as Skullbone, Tennessee, whose inhabitants can undoubtedly find them alongside the popular “Equal Rights for Whites” T-shirts, Confederate flags, and Ku Klux Klan crosses. Over the past decade, the Internet has become a primary vehicle for disseminating white supremacist items.37 The African American investment in material evidence of segregation has fostered an industry in simulacra that serves opposing camps in opposing ways. This paradoxical effect has been intensified by the fact that signs of white privilege continue to be privileged among African Americans as well as among whites. Both groups want, for antithetical reasons, to preserve the record of white racism and consequently prefer the most blatantly discriminatory signs: indeed, “the most offensive” was Marchel’le Barber’s criterion for choosing signs to stock, a yardstick qualified only by her fear of censure by the NAACP.38 If African Americans wanted primarily “For Colored” signs, they would serve as a way of differentiating black ownership from white in an updated rendition of the racial division the signs themselves imposed. But it is not the Lenox Theater’s “For Colored Only/No Whites Allowed” sign that is in most demand at African American stores, but the Lonestar Restaurant Association’s outrageous “No Dogs Negroes Mexicans” sign that is a bestseller not only at the Redneck Shop of the Ku Klux Klan Museum, but also at Nightmares and Notions, a ghetto shop in Oakland, California, where it is the handsdown favorite among young African American and Chicano men who buy it to display in their pick-up trucks (see figure 52). A framed copy also hangs on the wall of the director’s office at the Museum of African American Life and Culture in Dallas because, in his view, “these things send a message, and the more repulsive, the louder the message,” a claim for the verbal field that seconds Clarence Page’s claim for the visual field: “The more vile the stereotyping, the more outrageous the bug eyes and fat lips and big hips, the more the item finds itself cherished by some black collectors today. It’s a black thing.”39 But a white one too. In this chapter of their biography, Jim Crow signs depart from their defining frames to enter a mass marketplace that defies racial boundaries in subject matter as well as ownership. The more extreme the language, the more it lends itself to reappropriation—which also runs in both directions, as the display of racial superiority is parodically inverted, and then inverted back again. No sooner did a sign declaring, “Parking for African Americans only/All others will be towed/City Ord 1024” appear on the market, complete with a fictional ordinance number and man-

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ufacturer’s name that mimic the conventions of Jim Crow signs, than copies of the copy sprang up to vaunt the rights of other minority, but hardly parallel, groups. Alamo Flags Company has offered variations on the template for (among many others) Greeks, Norwegians, Irish, Italians, Australians, Armenians, Serbians, Danes, and Swiss. Printed as much as possible in the colors of the national flag, the model has been deflected from racial to national groups that, however small their numbers in this country, could hardly be construed as oppressed. Indeed, the list has been constructed to occlude culturally sensitive racial and ethnic categories. There has been a “Parking for Mexicans Only” sign, but none for Chicanos; a “Parking for Chinese Only,” but none for Asian Americans; a “Parking for Peruvians Only,” but none for Latinos; a “Parking for Israelis Only,” but no acknowledgment that Jews drive cars at all. The sign for African Americans that gave rise to the others designates the only racial category (and conversely, no African nationalities are named).40 As soon as the parodic inversion was in place, it was translated into a less volatile form. Other features of the signs changed accordingly: as segregation ordinances became parking authorizations, their numbers evolved from the plausible 1024 on the African American sign to a fanciful 0007 on the Italian sign, a seeming allusion to James Bond, a superhero powerful enough to commandeer that most prized urban possession, a personal parking space. Signs are uncoupled from history, and bodies from identity. As racial difference is diluted into national origin and the struggle over social space devolves to the parking lot, the only bodies that matter are the mobile mechanical ones, stationed under the sign of nationality when it offers an advantage. It is consequently tempting to call a halt and reserve our regard exclusively for signs authenticated by experts and housed in museums. The tension between the marketplace and the museum, between commercial dissemination and historical preservation, is endemic, social anthropologists tell us, to the biography of objects diverted by the marketplace from their original function.41 The more potent the objects, the more powerful the pull toward enclaving them. The tools of segregation certainly qualify as highly charged and potent things, and the call to withdraw them from circulation has strong advocates. Perhaps the strongest is Lynn CasmierPaz: “Preservation requires a museum where history becomes priceless, and painful memories and narratives are suspended behind glass—ostensibly beyond the reach of monetary exchange.”42 As her “ostensibly” seems to register, however, not only does monetary exchange continue to operate outside and indeed to penetrate inside the museum (for how else do objects end up there?), but the parallel between monetary exchange and the flux of memories and narratives unleashed by the circulation of affordable copies, especially of signs that function more as forceful memory triggers than as domestic items designed for whites, also calls into question the possibility and desirability of attempting to suspend history behind glass. The release and exchange of memories in community-based memorabilia stores offers an

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important counterweight to the authoritative history conserved by museums. As Mary Taylor, co-owner of Aunt Meriam’s in Harlem, puts it: “The best things are the conversations.” By transforming commodification into conversation, these stores function as milieux de mémoire, environments of memory reconstituted by the common touch of objects.43 The historical meaning of Jim Crow signs does need to be enclaved, but in addition rather than in opposition to the questions and memories provoked by the circulation of copies. As verbal things, Jim Crow signs occupy an especially delicate position in the trade-off between preserving and disrupting the burden of history. Their commodification does not simply exploit and trivialize the past, as does, for example, the commercialization of the names and faces of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks; it also advances the destabilizing turn that was always implicit in the written signs by demonstrating that racial markers are neither anchored in the body nor suspended behind glass and beyond change. The intersection of money and race is generative as well as ugly because money is one medium through which the legacy of racial signs can be renegotiated. A more discriminating medium was provided by photography.

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The Signs of Race in the Language of Photography It is far more interesting that this race-producing activity required a synthesis of logos with icon, of formal scientific rationality with something else— something visual and aesthetic. Paul Gilroy, Against Race, 2000

To be seen, photographs must be woven into other languages; otherwise, like the “unexamined life,” the “unlinguistic image” will float off in an anarchy of unincorporated data. Laura Wexler, Tender Violence, 2000

“The illiteracy of the future,” someone has said, “will be ignorance not of reading or writing, but of photography.” But shouldn’t a photographer who cannot read his own pictures be no less accounted an illiterate? Won’t inscription become the most important part of the photograph?

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Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 1931

If the biography of a thing encompasses its transformation into a commodity, perhaps its life story should be extended to embrace its translation into a visual form. Even to speak of “translation,” of course, is already to take a position in a series of debates about words and images, language and photography, a multifaceted and slippery set of relations that have a complex bearing on the production of race that Paul Gilroy characterizes as a synthesis of logos and icon. Gilroy has in mind the recruitment of the visual field to embody racial concepts, a function most fully realized in the catalogue of racial types produced by photography’s historical deployment as the “primary guarantor of race.”1 Perhaps to signal the ways in which this synthesis reiterates foundational mythologies of world making, Gilroy chooses the originary Greek terms logos and icon, replete with Biblical connotations of the power of the Word to bring forth life, to constitute and be constituted through the forms of a visible world. Traditionally opposed and rejoined along the lines of sexual dif62

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ference (as in Roland Barthes’s claim that symbolic meaning “impregnates” the image that is “penetrated through and through by the system of meaning”), logos and icon would seem to map as well onto racial difference, and to align the subordinate status of the visual media with the silent station of the subordinated race, relegated to an iconic field that passively reflects its informing terms.2 If we concentrated less on the metaphysical oppositions that position photography as the iconic helpmate of racial ideology and more on the signifying practices employed by two media that do not simply complement but also, as both Laura Wexler and Walter Benjamin suggest, inhabit one another, we might arrive at a different conclusion, however.3 The previous chapter examines the graphic features of racial signs that compromise the social ambitions of the logos; here I both revisit those ambitions to elicit the verbal strategies devised to realize them and consider the linguistic features of photography that complicate the association of whiteness with creative word, and of color with compliant image. This undertaking entails inquiring into photography as a representational medium, the kinds of signs it uses in its translation of verbal signs, and the ways this translation affects the racialized power relation between word and image. We should begin by asking how or whether photography should be considered an iconic medium and to frame that inquiry, as is traditional, in terms of Charles Sanders Peirce’s tripartite differentiation among icon, index, and symbol, which he summarizes succinctly in these terms: “There are three kinds of signs. Firstly, there are likenesses, or icons; which serve to convey ideas of the things they represent simply by imitating them. Secondly, there are indications, or indices; which show something about things on account of their being physically connected with them. Such is a guidepost, which points down the road to be taken. . . . Thirdly, there are symbols, or general signs, which have become associated with their meanings by usage. Such are most words, and phrases, and speeches, and books, and libraries.”4 Peirce claims that photographs deploy both iconic and indexical signs, as photography’s (iconic) resemblance to the things it represents is produced by the (indexical) relation between things and the impression they make, through the agency of light, on the chemically prepared surface of the photographic plate or film. More often, however, one of these two accounts is emphasized, and each has found proponents since the origins of the medium. The claim that photography works through resemblance has been expressed through metaphors of mirroring: photography captures the “image of nature,” the camera is a “mirror with a memory.”5 It has received its canniest spin from Roland Barthes, who in his early essays on photography proposes that, in contrast to the discontinuous and arbitrary signs of language, the photographic image “is not the reality but at least it is its perfect analogon and it is exactly this analogical perfection which, to common sense, defines the photograph. Thus can be seen the special status of the photographic image: it is a message without a code.” Barthes pro-

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ceeds to analyze the ways that symbolic codes penetrate this denotative level of the photographic message, but he is equally emphatic about the impact of photography’s semblance of unmediated mirroring, “the feeling of ‘denotation,’ or, if one prefers, of analogical plenitude.” By saturating social constructions with a “lustral bath of innocence,” through the effect of disinterested copying that constitutes the medium’s “special credibility,” photography naturalizes ideology.6 The visual analogon’s difference from the conventional signs of language gives language one of its most potent sets of cultural tools. Barthes offers a lens for understanding how photography’s iconic signs have lent themselves to naturalizing racial constructions by seeming “to found in nature the signs of culture.”7 These signs, however, are only one aspect of photographic signification, whose engagement with linguistic signs is highlighted by the visual representation of the written word. As W. J. T. Mitchell asserts, and most theorists of photography would agree, “Photography is and is not a language,” and the various ways in which it constitutes a language are as distinctive as the kinds of signs through which it operates.8 Indexical signs, whose operation as physical traces has long been associated with photography, also assume in this context a more specific association with the mode of writing that is registered in the name of the medium. Opposing the metaphors of nature’s mirror, an equally strong rhetorical tradition has characterized photography as the “pencil of nature” or “solar pencil” that transcribes visual impressions through “words of light.”9 Barthes’s version of this process, which by his late work Camera Lucida he had come to see as the defining feature of the medium (“nothing can prevent the Photograph from being analogical; but at the same time, Photography’s noeme has nothing to do with analogy”), dwells on the chemical discovery that light, through its action on a sensitized surface, could trace an immediate, almost tangible connection between the subject of the photograph and the viewer’s gaze. “The photograph is literally the emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here. . . . A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze.” Vulnerability to this visual touch is intensified by local, specific, concrete details whose singular associations reach out and pierce the viewer: hence Barthes’s designation punctum. For Barthes, the indexicality of photographic signs (not a term he uses) is about particularity, rupture, an immediate tactile and affective capacity to wound. Rather than a form of writing, the direct relay from object to image to viewer is divorced from, even opposed to, the web of formal and cultural relations he designates and dismisses as the studium. Barthes even goes so far as to invent an alternative etymology that, by translating the Greek photo-graphy into the Latin imago lucis opera expressa, or “image revealed, ‘extracted,’ ‘mounted,’ ‘expressed’ (like the juice of a lemon) by the action of light,” bypasses the medium’s traditional association with writing.10

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To think about photography as a pattern of traces that operate in relationship to each other, a form of writing rather than wounding, we must turn to the other signal twentieth-century theorist of photography, Walter Benjamin. Notably absent from Barthes’s discourse on photography and rarely placed in conversation with him, Benjamin locates a radically different version of photographic indexicality at the interface between the photographic apparatus and the traces of an unfamiliar world this impersonal technology registers. Better known for his analysis of photography as, in contrast to painting, a mode of mechanical reproduction that divests visual media of their aesthetic aura and makes them available for mass distribution—an account more germane to the physical than the visual reproductions of Jim Crow signs—Benjamin is also an enigmatic theorist of photography as a mode of shock-inducing inscription. Rather than draw the viewer into an intimate relation to the represented thing, the camera estranges the viewer through the detection and inscription of unfamiliar patterns that resist the known contours of a verbally mapped world. This form of textuality requires a new, unconditioned form of literacy. Hence Benjamin’s chosen analogies are surrealism and Dada, movements that cross verbal and visual media and that juxtapose incongruous materials in startling ways that write large the subtler dislocations of photography. Through its own more quietly anarchic inscription “the most important part of the photograph,” and the hardest to read, especially by the photographer who feels in command of the image, the camera makes available to discerning eyes a counterwriting or anti-logos machine. If a gender analogy proves illuminating here, it would oppose the iconic sign’s traditional femininity to an indexical écriture féminine that disrupts the patriarchal word. This version of photographic indexicality puts special pressure on the sign for whiteness in which the authority of logos is vested. There is a third kind of photographic sign, however, whose very different operations require a return to Barthes’s early essays and the more culturally constructed features of photography that Benjamin disparages as stale literariness and that Barthes also came to belittle in favor of the punctum’s immediacy. Through his analysis of what he calls in the title of one of these essays “the rhetoric of the image,” Barthes provides a way to understand the construction of photographic meaning in relation to Peirce’s symbolic signs, whose meaning is determined by usage and convention. Defined by their arbitrary relation to what they signify, symbolic signs are typically identified with language— the words, phrases, speeches, books, and libraries that Peirce cites in increasing order of magnitude—and contrasted to the more proximate relations of resemblance or connection that characterize iconic and indexical signs. Photography, however, has its own iconographic and compositional conventions that translate the iconic “message without a code” into the cultural codes that infuse the image with connotative meaning. Although inevitably different from the symbolic operations of linguistic signs, these codes partake of the symbolic signs’ conventional character.

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They convey their “symbolic message” not only (in ways analogous to language) through the lexicon of cultural meanings pertaining to the objects the photograph represents but also through a specifically visual rhetoric that is as conventional as language despite its appearance of naturalness. These rhetorical devices include human poses that signify status and character through “a store of stereotyped attitudes which form ready-made elements of signification”; props that carry specific meanings individually and collectively; lighting (often enhanced in the development process) that invests certain figures with (or divests them of) authority, agency, or spirituality; camera angles that magnify or diminish human subjects; and framing that determines their centrality or marginality.11 Barthes, whose focus in this essay is commercial photography, takes for granted that the system of cultural connotation is uniform, that rhetoric is “the signifying aspect of ideology,” and that ideology “cannot but be single for a given society and history, no matter what signifiers of connotation it may use.”12 He does not consider that there are positions from which the dominant ideology could be contested, that the same set of rhetorical tools might be marshaled toward different ends by subordinated cultures and their political allies. This was the primary rhetorical project of Jim Crow photography, including its infrequent undertaking by African Americans, who took advantage of the medium’s rhetorical tools to counter the “Colored” sign’s demeaning connotations. Whereas photography’s indexical signs work primarily against the verbal sign of privilege, the symbolic operations of its visual codes were worked primarily on behalf of the sign of secondariness. Because the racial signs enter the photographic field asymmetrically, we need to map a number of intersections, beginning with the verbal side of the equation. The trajectory here, in contrast to previous chapters, is not from the imagined omnipotence of the spoken word to the constraints entailed by its materialization in writing, but from the verbal strategies for tapping that omnipotence to the consequences of their translation into modes of visual “writing.” The language of Jim Crow attempts to recruit the creative power of the originary word to articulate the foundational divisions of the universe out of a primal formlessness. To the differentiations between day and night, heaven and earth, land and water, male and female that result from the word of God in the first week of creation, the signs appended white and colored, assigning each a location on a social landscape and a great chain of being. Often less creation than negation, less “let there be” than “let there not be,” this language performed a dual function: mapping the social world and exempting white people (the locution of choice) from the implications of that mapping by inflecting Genesis with a tradition of Christian dualism that aligns whiteness with the primacy of the word and the purity of the soul that lodges only lightly in an embodied world.13 The power of the word was put to use both to articulate race and to disarticulate whiteness from race. It did this through nouns and adjectives, singulars and plurals, declaratives and imperatives that were chosen to fash-

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ion race discursively as well as to distribute it spatially. This fashioning generated a broader and more broadly contested discursive field crystallized by the captions through which photographers attempted to rewrite the signs in their own words. In this section of the chapter, the camera is a silent partner whose function is to make visible the language of the signage. Photography, however, also rearticulated this language through its own kinds of signs which, in their distinctive ways, recast the intentions of their verbal sources. The greater the effort to invest whiteness with the self-authorizing power of the logos, the greater the rebound from photographic indexicality, as illustrated by a pair of photographs by the Farm Security Administration photographer Jack Delano in section 2 of this chapter. Conversely, since there was little motivation to use photography’s cultural codes to promote an alreadysanctioned whiteness, and some risk (as we will see) in a pairing of white bodies with “white” signs that would be at best redundant and at worst delimiting, the intentional uses of photographic rhetoric most often engage the “colored” sign. Both the range and the limits of this rhetoric are examined through the lens of the “colored waiting room” in the chapter’s concluding section. Attending to the operations of verbal and visual signs clarifies their interactions, but these exchanges do not occur in the airless vacuum of theory. Rather, they are mediated by the “whole set of material practices” that constitutes the middle ground between materials and modes of signification, senders and receivers, ideas and articulations, representations and exhibitions.14 As we track the course of materialization from Word to words to images, we must bear in mind that the conditions under which photographs are taken and displayed contribute to their meaning. Toward this end, and as a pivot to the next chapter, which takes up questions of exhibition and circulation, the chapter concludes by turning to the 2000 exhibition “Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present,” a massive retrospective of black photography, asking, first, how the only Jim Crow photograph included in it might complicate categorical distinctions among kinds of signs, and, second, how the exhibition space itself might redefine the rhetoric of the single image. We begin, however, with the rhetorical strategies of the verbal sign. • • •

The rhetoric of Jim Crow begins initially reveals a restrained and respectful symmetry. The earliest signs at their earliest locations during the first two decades of the twentieth century manifest an intention to address both races with the same codes of civility. Turn-of-the-century photographs of railroad stations in North Carolina and Georgia show symmetrical signage reading “Waiting Room for White People” and “Waiting Room for Colored People.” These signs deploy a discourse of personhood in which race is an adjectival modifier of a basic humanity and political belonging. Even though the waiting rooms themselves were rapidly and deliberately differentiated, forms of polite address lingered somewhat longer, whether

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as conscious or unconscious verbal fictions, and increasingly in terms that circumvented the attribution of personhood: “White Passengers” and “Colored Passengers” marked train cars, “White Patrons” and “Colored Patrons” the entryways to certain stores. The most economical solution, eventually, was to drop the noun entirely for the “White” and “Colored” formula that became the canonical shorthand, but before and beyond this abbreviated symmetry, more varied wording indicates what was at stake in the intersection of personhood and race. Rapidly withdrawn from the “colored” side of the equation (except during periods of economic duress when financially strapped institutions revived it to encourage African American patronage), the word people had a staying power on signage that sought to deracialize whites even when racial separation was the goal. Abjuring the pseudo-scientific racial terms (Caucasian, Anglo-Saxon, Aryan, Nordic) that were favored by other racialist regimes and invoked strategically in the United States under specific circumstances, the signage both stays within and clarifies the stakes of retaining variations on the phrase white people. Entering political discourse with the 1790 naturalization act that restricted citizenship to “free white persons,” a tellingly different choice of words from the racial categories (Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, Malay, American) that Johann Friedrich Blumenbach had introduced in Germany nearly a decade earlier, white people persisted in the language of segregation even after Caucasian entered the American racial lexicon with the precedent-setting Ah Yup case (1878) shortly before the Jim Crow era. The circuit court’s response in that case to the first Chinese immigrant’s petition for naturalization enlisted the category of “the Caucasian race” in order to ground the amorphous boundaries of “white people” in a more scientific formulation that could restrict citizenship to persons of European descent and refuse it to others who might have claims to inclusion in the imprecise color term white: “The term ‘white person,’ ” the court declared, means “an individual of the Caucasian race.”15 Although Caucasian race became a standard feature of legal discourse through the 1920s and entered the popular vernacular by the middle of the twentieth century, it had no brief on segregation signs. That absence was overdetermined. The less specific term white was more useful on the signs for some of the same reasons that it was more politically useful in contexts other than naturalization law: it was a portmanteau term sufficiently elastic to absorb competing European groups, often defined as races in relation to one another, into a national identity that could be marshaled against racial others.16 Nevertheless, we may need to look a little further to grasp fully why the racial term Caucasian that served so well against immigrants from Asia was not recruited by the signage against African Americans, why there were no “For Caucasian Only” equivalents to the “Nur für Arier” signs in Nazi Germany, for example.17 One place to look is the wording of actual signs, which make it clear that people, stated or unstated, is an essential component of the meaning of white. Nowhere is this clearer

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than on signs for city buses that reserved seats in the front “for white people,” those in the rear “for the colored race.”18 These signs construct “white people” not as a superior race, but as above, beyond, or outside race; personhood became an attribute of one group, race of the other. Whiteness was deracialized, I contend, to avoid the possibility that blacks and whites could be comprehended within a common set of terms. Through the distinction between a biological category and a social one, whiteness was conveniently severed from the realm of the body, which was displaced onto the race behind one’s frame of vision. Even this displacement was insufficient, however, because, despite the impulse toward abstraction, the noun people cannot be completely purged of the burden of embodiment. It was against that biological burden that the rhetoric of whiteness was directed, most conspicuously in ads for health spas and laundries that attempt to narrow the distance between the always already contaminated body and the condition of purity to which whiteness aspires. “To be white,” as Richard Dyer reminds us, “is to have expunged all dirt, faecal or otherwise, from oneself: to look white is to look clean.”19 Buckstaff Baths in Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas, which promoted itself as “The Nation’s Health Resort . . . Where the sick get well and the well stay well,” and where “A course of baths will add years to your life,” advertised that it was “Complete. Sanitary, Convenient. White Attendants. This Means Service.” Although the ordinary bodily care of whites has always been comfortably entrusted to African Americans, in the imaginary of these ads, it is the healing touch of white hands that will wash off innate bodily impurities, bestowing a lighter, whiter, and longer-living body that is less of an encumbrance to the soul. Whereas the project of nurture produces black surrogate parental figures (Aunt Jemima, Uncle Tom), that of purification brings whiteness rhetorically to bear. If at spas the body is lightened through the touch of white attendants, at laundries it is cleansed via a metaphoric transfer from the body to its raiments that restore it in a whiter form. ”For White People Only” painted on one of the horsedrawn trucks for the Imperial and Empire Laundries in Birmingham, depicted in a 1908 photograph, offers to transpose onto white terrain the cleansing properties of imperialism that had recently been given national sanction by U.S. adventures in the Pacific and the Caribbean.20 These twin companies offer to transpose the cleansing properties of imperialism onto white terrain. That offer is tendered visually as well as verbally in the design of the Imperial Laundry car that replaced the horse-drawn truck. In a photograph taken twelve years later (figure 14), whiteness sparkles in the bright coat of paint and whitewall tires and running board that literalize the promise to reinforce the customer’s racial status by removing bodily impurities or taints of any kind: if you send your soiled garments to the Imperial Laundry, they will be restored to you and you to them through the device of a whiter second skin. Equivalent rhetorical labor was expended to construct the other side of the equa-

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Figure 14. Imperial Laundry truck, circa 1920. Courtesy Birmingham Public Library Archives, Cat. #32.09.

tion as the locus of the body. Beyond detaching the substantive people from the modifier colored over the course of the twentieth century, sign producers devised a range of strategies to insinuate foundational differences. A banner that was strung across the main street of Greenville, Texas, for example, welcomed visitors to “The Blackest Land” and “The Whitest People” (figure 15). The juxtaposition not only makes “black land” the counterpart of “white people”; it also posits a causal relation. The “colored people” with the imaginary power to dirty whiteness have been converted to the dirt from which “the whitest people” grow. It is because the land is so black— that is, because the presence and labor of black people have been reconstituted as an innate feature of the land—that the people are all white (or all the people are white). It is not only that black labor, agricultural and domestic, nurtures white people rather than black. The very existence of black labor has been effaced: one deft rhetorical stroke divests African Americans of their status as a people and deprives them of the fruits of their labor. The wording is hardly innocent: the choice of blackest instead of richest as the modifier of land writes race both into and out

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Figure 15. Deep in the heart of Texas, late 1940s. Photograph by Stetson Kennedy, Greenville, Texas. SCEF Collection, Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library.

of this scene. This banner mimics a Jim Crow sign in its disposition as well as in its choice of terms: white on one side, black on the other, at a maximum distance spatially and rhetorically—these are the poles that sustain and explain the greenness of the middle term, a town whose name proposes a kinder, gentler version of the interdependence of nature and culture that the banner proclaims The choice of black is overdetermined by the contrasts being drawn in this twist on a Jim Crow sign. The adjective was rarely used in more traditional signs because the advantages of the stark black/white contrast were offset by the disadvantages of narrow reference. The great majority of sign producers preferred the more inclusive and elastic colored that functioned as the verbal equivalent of the rule that “one drop of colored blood” sufficed to classify an individual as nonwhite.21 This was not the term preferred by African Americans, however, who (in concert with the photographers and journalists who took their part) engaged in their own negotiation over the terms of self-denomination. Not granted a choice between defining themselves in terms of race or personhood, they debated the pros and cons of asserting

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a racial category that might have the rhetorical stature of Caucasian. At stake, at one level, were the relative merits of adjectives and nouns. As an adjective, colored offered the advantages of portability; it could be attached to a wide range of nouns, including those of well-regarded class and professional identities (colored gentleman or lady or doctor or lawyer). But as an adjective (for in contrast to usage in South Africa, the word was never used as a plural noun), colored could only be a modifier; it could never identify an entire group. Negro posed the opposite dilemma. As an uppercase proper noun, it could be, and largely was, embraced as an objective, dignified, and scientific label, the name of a racial group with the legitimacy and neutrality of a scientific category. Hence, by the late nineteenth century, as Leon F. Litwack points out, both W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington agreed that Negro was the preferable term, superseding colored American, which had been endorsed early in the century as an affirmation of both national and racial identity, and Afro-American, which enjoyed a brief post-Emancipation vogue as a counterpart to Anglo-Saxon but was always jeopardized by the vexed relationship to Africa. In response to a high school student’s complaint that Negro is “a white man’s word to make us feel inferior,” Du Bois explained at length in the pages of Crisis that Negro (as long as it was capitalized) was “etymologically and phonetically . . . much better and more logical than ‘African’ or ‘colored’ or any of the various hyphenated circumlocutions.” In so doing, he reiterated the claim made forty-five years earlier by George Washington Williams in the first scholarly history of black people in America that Negro is “a good, strong and healthy word, and ought to live. It should be covered with glory; let Negroes do it.”22 The very need to justify the term, however, points to its dangers, which (along with its advantages) were carefully negotiated in the complex dance performed by Northern photographers and journalists who sought to register their alliance with the targets of Jim Crow by modifying the language of the signs. The Rex Theatre for Colored People in the Mississippi Delta, to which I return in chapter 7, was a sufficiently compelling site, for example, to capture the attention of both Dorothea Lange and Marion Post Wolcott. Dorothea Lange’s 1937 photograph simply reiterates the theater’s name as the caption (“The Rex theatre for colored people”); two years later, however, Marion Post Wolcott inserts her own voice into the racial discourse by captioning her photograph “The Rex theatre for Negro people,” adopting the uppercase term endorsed by the spokesmen of the group the theater served (see figure 62). She makes a similar substitution in her caption for a photograph of another Mississippi theater that directed African Americans upstairs to a segregated “colored” balcony. “Negro man entering movie theater by ‘Colored’ entrance,” she calls it, substituting Negro for colored where she can, and, where she can’t, distancing herself from the second term by putting it in quotes while rendering it less offensive by the shift to uppercase.23 The impulse to substitute Negro for colored took more problematic forms in com-

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mercial photojournalism. In 1956 Life magazine ran a multi-issue series “The Background to Segregation,” prompted by “the crisis brought about by the school segregation decision of the Supreme Court” and dedicated to representing segregation as “a subject of moderate and unprejudiced consideration” through “the words of thoughtful, devout Southerners.” One installment juxtaposes Gordon Parks’s photograph of “white” and “colored” drinking fountains with an indirect citation from Albert Thornton Sr., the oldest member of the African American family whose story provides the focus of this installment: “He can remember, in the days before Jim Crow, when there were no ‘white’ and ‘Negro’ signs on public facilities.” There is no way to know whether the word choice is Thornton’s or that of the white author of this installment, Robert Wallace, but the discrepancy between the language attributed to an African American voice and the signage documented by the African American photographer creates the impression that words are being put in Albert Thornton’s mouth in an effort as much to whitewash as to protest the racial signage of the South.24 Negro is thus a slippery term that required careful syntactic management. As a noun it ran the risk of essentialization, a pitfall Walker Evans attempted to avoid in his wording of his captions, which used the term only as an adjective. Captions to the photographs in his 1938 “American Photographs” exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, for example, include “Negro barber shop interior, 1936,” “Interior of Negro preacher’s house, 1933,” and “Houses in Negro quarter of Tupelo, Mississippi, 1936.” Photographs of African American individuals are identified by place, civic status, or experience rather than by race through captions such as “42nd Street, 1929,” “Citizen in downtown Havana, 1932,” and “Arkansas flood refugee, 1937.”25 Within the syntax of Jim Crow, conversely, the word was used only as a noun: never Negro people, just Negroes. In this syntax, moreover, Negroes is rarely the object of the preposition for. Compare, for example, the elevator sign in the Century Building in turnof-the-century Atlanta—“This Car for Coloured Passengers, Freight, Express and Packages”—with the “Negroes and Freight” signs that appeared on trains and elevators later in the century.26 The gesture that the preposition implies is safely contained instead within the symmetrical “For White” and “For Colored” formulation that keeps the second term firmly in its secondary place as an afterthought, an echo, a compensatory reflex with little positive content of its own. Precisely because for Negroes diverges from this structure, the phrase has the potential to imply an affirmation, a positive allocation for a group defined in autonomous rather than mirroring terms. Consequently, this locution was sometimes adopted by African Americans, rarely by whites. One occasion of its use was documented by a Works Progress Administration photograph that frames it as a pivotal phrase in a discourse of community. The sign for the Greenwood Public Library for Negroes, hand-lettered and tacked on the door, appears to be the work and wording of the library staff rather than municipal authorities; certainly the sign on the tripod stand below it announcing in

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bright white letters, “You Are Late,” each single-syllable word capitalized for maximum emphasis above what looks like the sketch of a hand, speaks in the vernacular rather than in impersonal bureaucratese (figure 16). This sign adopts a mode of direct address designed to grab the attention of its readers, reprimand them, and foster their sense of personal responsibility; it is a tough-love admonishment that bespeaks an intimate relation between speaker and addressee. This branch of a public library “for Negroes”—a crucial institution that is almost certainly staffed and probably supported economically as well as socially by African Americans, and which carries into the Jim Crow era the struggle for literacy that originated under slavery—is the site of a complex instruction in literacy: not only the decoding of written texts, but also initiation into the voice of the community.27 Together, the signs on the library’s exterior model and encourage a form of direct and honest speech that talks back to the texts at the library’s interior. Calling things as they are (You, Negroes—not the more evasive and genteel colored people), they allow for neither circumlocution nor extenuating circumstances. The discursive space they carve out is both affirmative and disciplinary; one must abide by certain regulations to be inscribed within this for. The photographer captures a moment of this verbal education: a barefoot child in overalls, library book in hand, stands poised on the steps in front of the closed door, absorbing the lesson the sign administers. The construction of a positive communal space was, of course, one of the few benefits of segregation and a source of the nostalgia fueling the recent spate of memoirs that lament the passing of a self-contained and sustaining African American social world. Within the normative grammar of Jim Crow, however, Negroes appears almost entirely in the form of a negation. No and Negroes are as firmly yoked as for and colored; the two pairs of terms negotiate the difference between secondclass citizenship and race-based exclusion. The pairing of no and Negroes was overdetermined by syntax and paranoia. No requires the plural noun that colored did not provide, and Negroes imported the weight of race into the force of a negation. Negation and racialization are mutually reinforcing here. Although syntactically correct, the formulation no colored people would merely differentiate subsets of the human and hence (to my knowledge) never occurred. The polite parallelism of signs reading “For White People” and “For Colored People” had no counterpart in the negative because no unleashed more aggressive intentions. These intentions were so culturally ingrained that no intensifiers were required. The simple negative sufficed. In contrast to restrictive signage directed to other ethnic groups, such as “Positively No Filipinos” signs in California and “Positively No Beer to Indians” signs in Montana, in which the adverbial intensifier obliquely acknowledges the possibility of negotiation, those excluding African Americans assume that possibility is foreclosed. Beginning the formula with a simple negative, moreover, launches a trajectory with no determinate end. The sign producers exploited the opportunity to insinuate guilt by association by stringing unlike terms

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Figure 16. Greenwood Public Library for Negroes, late 1930s or early 1940s. Works Progress Administration, courtesy Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

together. These lists chart a slippage along a metonymic chain that transfers race from the human to the animal kingdom, propelling the very concept of race beyond a social boundary. What started as “No Negroes Allowed in Park” became “Negroes and Dogs Not Allowed,” which in turn devolved into “Niggers and Dogs Not Allowed.” The negative also licensed verbal abuse. It is one of the prime rhetorical sites in which the racial slur “nigger” is likely to appear (“For niggers” is obviously

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not a plausible construction). A venomous feedback loop binds the terms: the exclusion legitimates the verbal abuse which reauthorizes the exclusion. The most abusive forms of hate speech licensed by the negative were local, individual, and produced without a sign company’s imprimatur. Less pervasive and public than the more standardized and sanitized signs, they required a local photographer to ferret them out. Cecil J. Williams, a stringer for Jet and the Afro-American, a contributor to the Crisis, and the official photographer for the South Carolina NAACP, captured one of the most outrageous and obsessional scenes in the back roads of South Carolina, where boundary regulation both evokes and inverts the generativity of the logos (figure 17). The signs appear to have been made to order to satisfy the gas station owner’s compulsion to proclaim each of his preposterous beliefs at least twice. Because no signs restrict the actual sale of gas, their proliferation around the building seems compensatory, as if the commercial transactions at the pump intensified the need to erect a barrier around a white interior. Language is a weapon in this defense. Designed through their excess—qualitative and quantitative—to blow their targets off the face of the nation as well as off the owner’s property, these Jim Crow signs launch a well-coordinated campaign in excess of any conceivable informational value (a small “White Only” sign on the front door would deliver the same grim news adequately). The sign closest to the gas pump and hence inescapably visible delivers the first blow by assaulting its reader with a racial slur before conceding the proper noun as an afterthought: “No Nigger or Negro allowed inside building.” The rhetorical effect is to ensnare those readers who resist the first term in the second’s more capacious verbal net, but only after dragging them through the dirt. The sign’s reinscription at the entryway twists the language in the opposite direction by redeploying the conjunction or to attach Negro to Ape: “No Negro or Ape allowed in building.” Together these signs present a graphic case of unlike terms yoked violently together under the umbrella of the negative. The other pair of signs on the storefront, vertically arranged, assumes a more leisurely genealogical approach to filling in the gaps between these terms: “Negros not wanted in the North or South. Send them back to Africa where God Almighty put them to begin with. That is their home.” Adding a creationist gloss to the account of (d)evolution outlined by the yoking of Negro and Ape, they point to shared origins in Africa. God “put” Negroes in Africa, they explain, but this did not place them under his enduring care, but rather consigned them to a realm of natural law outside the Christian space delineated by the building’s perimeter. Several signs safeguard this divine interior. The one affixed permanently to the front door announcing “Closed on Sunday” divides the Sabbath from the workaday world; two additional “Closed” signs mark the day of the photograph as Sunday. A picture of Jesus taped to the window and turned outward toward prospective customers also broadcasts a message about the interior. The interweaving of Christianity and racism is overdetermined here: because Sunday is

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Figure 17. Gas station that excluded blacks in Sandy Run, Calhoun County, South Carolina, 1959. Photo by Cecil J. Williams. Courtesy Cecil J. Williams.

the only day this photographer could have safely photographed this scene (“If I had taken the photo when the station was open, my life would have been in jeopardy,” Williams has explained), his photo necessarily depicts the most emphatic sealing of boundaries between sacred and secular spheres.28 The enunciative fervor Williams pictures here both perversely mimics Genesis—the man whose authority derives from his twenty-eight years of pumping gas (as declared in a sign above the door: “Pumped gas since 1931”) deploys Jim Crow signs as verbal fiats to declare primal divisions between light and dark, sacred and profane—and invests it with the Christian conflation of whiteness with transcendence.29 On the outside of his store is a bestialized, unsanctified, dark continent where the “Negro or Ape” belongs; on the inside, children of God inhabit a white Christian nation, for the gas station owner doesn’t hesitate to speak for the nation as well as for the Lord. No mere Southern redneck, he draws North and South together behind his little white storefront, reconstituted as the symbolic frontier of the white Christian nation that stands beleaguered but united in the face of Africa.

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• • •

Williams’s life would have been at risk with good cause if he had been caught photographing the signs at Sandy Run: his action wrested interpretive control away from their producer by framing their message differently and making it available to unsympathetic viewers. Beyond the photographer’s deliberate acts, however, the camera itself puts pressure on the authority of the logos. The tension between the artificial lens and the human eye that points it toward a subject but cannot determine all that it sees makes the photograph always an uneasy compromise between intentional and unintentional effects. While the photographer looks at one thing, the camera records others. What Alan Trachtenberg describes as the camera’s “inability not to show what appears to the lens” contrasts with the selective viewing practices of the human eye.30 Lee Friedlander characterizes this indiscrimination of the photographic process, this “maddening generosity” of a medium that “records everything it sees, whether you like it or not,” in terms that challenge the linguistic arrogance of Sandy Run: “I only wanted Uncle Vern standing by his new car (a Hudson) on a clear day. I got him and the car. I also got a bit of Aunt Mary’s laundry and Beau Jack, the dog, peeing on a fence, and a row of potted tuberous begonias on the porch and seventy-eight trees and a million pebbles in the driveway and more.”31 Friedlander’s deceptively naive allegory plots the petering out of the central human subject, or the subject of humanism, created in God’s image as patriarchal, proprietary, and normatively white, from masculine to feminine to the increasingly inchoate multiplicity of the animal, vegetable, and mineral worlds, as the perspective trickles down the great chain of being, like Beau Jack’s pee, from the proper name to the indistinction of “and more.” That is exactly the visual technology’s disruptive point, of course: the camera resists the power of the word to delineate the contours of the world. No one has made this case more forcefully than Walter Benjamin, for whom photography is able to loosen the grip of social constructions by registering traces of what exceeds their boundaries as clues to an underside of the social text. It is worth quoting at some length from a central passage of his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” which segues from visual to auditory metaphors that are especially germane to the depiction of written words: By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we

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calmly and adventurously go traveling. With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject. . . . Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye—if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man.32

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Whether through still photography or film, the camera both exposes and explodes the “prison-world” of the regimes that bind us. It achieves this paradoxical effect paradoxically: both through the photographer’s deliberate manipulation of visual technologies (close-ups, slow motion, enlargements) that do not simply clarify what we already know but also disclose unanticipated and hence emancipatory “structural formations of the subject”; and also—after a break and almost as an afterthought whose eruption into the logical sequence of the exposition parallels the sudden emergence of new visual formations—through the unwitting exposure of more and other than the photographer knows. The substitution of “an unconsciously penetrated space” for one “consciously explored by man” means not only that the space is unconscious of being penetrated but also, and more crucially, that its penetrators are unconscious of, and hence not shaping, their penetration of it and thereby allow unmapped data, “a different nature,” to reach our eyes. This is an effect of the camera apart from, even in opposition to, its guidance by human hands. Peeling away the always already familiar features of the world, photography is a visual technology analogous to the verbal technologies of psychoanalysis: as the analyst makes audible, the camera makes visible unintentional and seemingly random, and yet—or therefore—profoundly determined and meaningful associations. Benjamin makes explicit the comparison to Sigmund Freud: The film has enriched our field of perception with methods which can be illustrated by those of Freudian theory. Fifty years ago, a slip of the tongue passed more or less unnoticed. Only exceptionally may such a slip have revealed dimensions of depth in a conversation which had seemed to be taking its course on the surface. Since the Psychopathology of Everyday Life things have changed. This book isolated and made analyzable things which had theretofore floated along unnoticed in the broad stream of perception. For the entire spectrum of optical, and now also acoustical, perception the film has brought about a similar deepening of apperception. . . . The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.33

Because the eye of the camera cannot overlook what the mind’s eye chooses not to see, it opens up a more democratic signifying field in which the repressed can have its say (or see). Photography’s inscription of a depth dimension of the social text has special implications for the depiction of the street that is a primary site for the return of the visual noise that anthropometric photography had worked so hard to silence and

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that returns with a vengeance to the scenario of Jim Crow in the form of vehicles, street signs, newspaper headlines, and the general cacaphony of life in the street. As David M. Henkin has pointed out, the twinned emergence of photography and public signage in the American city in the middle decades of the nineteenth century enabled the closer reading of the texts of urban life, which fostered the expectation that the urban scene be legible.34 Photography increased the number and visibility of public signs but was subjected in turn to their heightened volubility, which compromised the camera’s visual control. Re-viewed through the lens of unconscious optics, the cacophony of the street assumes its own unpremeditated and disclosive logic. Like the Dadaist “word salads” that represent photography’s cutting edge, the bits and pieces of language— advertisements, street signs, newspaper headlines—that share space with Jim Crow signs in the public sphere are brought together by the camera in a multidirectional syntax.35 An obscure word from the background leaps into the foreground to propose an alternative reading of the scene; an anomalous detail usurps the central subject; strange new conversations emerge. Whether the photographers were so focused on the segregation signs or so oblivious to them that they failed to observe these larger conversations, or whether they deliberately sought out telling juxtapositions, the camera accomplished its own effects in excess of their intentions. Drawn by the click of the shutter into a single unfamiliar frame, the language of the street exposes the underlying threads of a latent social text: not only, as at Sandy Run or Greenwood, when diverse messages are intended to coalesce, but also, and especially, when they aren’t. The slice of life captured by the camera’s lens is also a cross-section. By wrenching messages from their original paradigmatic frames—competing products for the advertisements, alternative instructions for the traffic signs—and placing them in a syntagmatic one at odds with their original design, the camera directs our attention to the interlocking structures from which these messages emanate. The coincidence of public speech acts on a street is more than coincidental: they are all instances of direct address from authorized speakers to the passersby, examples of the social body speaking to itself. Each photograph is thus a citation from a multiply authored, multilayered, and historically sedimented social text, and each citation gestures toward the unvoiced conversation from which it has been clipped. Situating Jim Crow signs within this conversation affects them differentially. The eruption of what Benjamin describes as “the tiny spark of contingency” has a greater bearing on the sign designed to confer exemption from contingency.36 As the term that is supposed to stand above the contradictions of history, white is more vulnerable than colored to the ironizing interplay of plural messages and presences that cluster around the secondary term in ways that can turn to new advantage its secondariness. The passage of these signs through the visual field operates at cross purposes to their verbal intent.

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Figure 18. A street scene near the bus station, Durham, North Carolina, May 1940. Photograph by Jack Delano. FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress.

This dynamic is well demonstrated by a pair of photographs that Jack Delano took in quick succession of contrasting racial signs near and at the Durham, North Carolina, bus station shortly after his arrival in the South on his first solo assignment for the Farm Security Administration, the New Deal agency whose role in shaping the Jim Crow archive I explore below. The first, “A street scene near the bus station,” takes as its subject the culture’s most intensively defended distillation of whiteness (figure 18). “White Ladies Only” read the words painted on a white restroom door, in a white wall in a recessed corner of the street: the photo shows a verbal and architectural construction whose fragility appears in the labor dedicated to defending it. The sign is a case of rhetorical overkill: race is already written into the class-inflected ladies, a noun reserved so exclusively for whites that signs for ladies and women could serve without further modification to signal racial difference. A white guardrail that functions as a line of demarcation between the ladies’ room and the thoroughfare reinforces this verbal barrier. Even this space’s interior is ideologically secured against the dangers presented by the window at the left of the frame—dangers less of outsiders looking in than of insiders looking out, for whether the “White Ladies Only” inscription that appears in reverse on the window pane reflects or reiterates the message on the door, it functions as an address to straying eyes that need to be returned to the task of self-recognition. By relaying

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the signage on the door, the window becomes a mirror that restores identity in a written form. Delano shoots the Durham scene from an angle that also captures the interplay between the Jim Crow sign and the ad for Southern Dairies Ice Cream that together construct white ladies as the cream of the cream, the ultimate creation of the dairies of the South. Lest our imagination kindle cravings for any flavor other than vanilla (especially transgressive hungerings for chocolate), the ad is inscribed in an ovular white shape, a standard icon of white space that resonates strongly in this setting with the sign for white ladies. We could plausibly assume some intentionality on Delano’s part here, some desire to transpose the two signs’ accidental conjunction on a street into a frame that would make their metaphorical connections legible. (His alertness to food’s potential for racial symbolism was by no means unusual. Both sides in the struggle over civil rights self-consciously exploited this potential. The segregated lunch counter reconstructed by the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, for example, features “Snow White Ice Cream”—a name that evokes the famous fairy-tale virgin as well as the more general trinity of whiteness, purity, and frigidity.) We could attribute intentionality as well to Delano’s decision to click the shutter at the moment when two young white women walking arm-in-arm toward the camera, seemingly engaged in a private conversation (one covers her mouth with her hand, as if telling a secret for the other’s ears alone), appear to give human form to the self-enclosure of white femininity. Yet these echoes also introduce complications he less plausibly intended but which collaborate nevertheless in a critique of Jim Crow. By photographing from an angle that does not respect the material or mental guardrails of the “White Ladies Only” sign, Delano opens up the space it defends to the pressure of history: not only the conventional fate of white ladies that is signaled by the ad for ice cream (whose purity is cultivated in order to be consumed), but also the destiny of “white ladies” as a designated category, a fate already being scripted by history. Striding purposefully forward in the direction of the traffic in practical dark-colored workaday clothes and carrying purses that register their financial agency, the two young women he depicts, unlike cloistered “white ladies,” are modern women who walk the thoroughfares of time; indeed, they seem to spearhead it, examples perhaps of the changing gender roles that World War II precipitated. Not streetwalkers but women walking in the street—the site of all that threatens traditional femininity—they point forward toward the time when the sign will have receded further into the history prefigured by their forward pace. A similar parting of historical ways takes a technological form in the street, where a forwardpointing car abuts a backward-turning bicycle. This illumination of historical crosscurrents, this positioning of the camera that brings them into view, may entitle us to read another instance of technology as a metacommentary on photography. Marking the far edge of the sidewalk is a lamp-

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post at the curb; between the opposite and opposing structures of the curtained and cloistered white ladies room and the erect, commanding twin-globed lamppost, the women walk into our view. The camera that represents both the ideological enclosure and the awareness that pushes its envelope finds its alter ego in the lamppost that raises its doubled lights upon the scene. Like the street lamp, the camera extends our ability to see: both are technologies of illumination that stand outside the narcissistic filtered half-light of white femininity, the premium expression of racial ideology, to ally themselves not with the natural light of day, but with its artificial extension into the night, the revelation of that which, shrouded in darkness, lies beyond what we assume we can see. History and irony cluster differently around the sign of secondariness in Delano’s second photograph, taken shortly afterward. The spatial configuration in “At the bus station” (figure 19) is in some ways similar: like the “White Ladies Only” sign, the sign “Colored Waiting Room” is on one side of the traffic corridor, but it is aligned with, rather than pressured by, the passage of history. The position it marks can only be desirous of—waiting for—change, the attitude suggested by the man who turns his head to read the column of magazine ads that reaches upward toward the “Colored Waiting Room” sign, which acts as a magnet for unstable social energies. In the force field of textual fragments that is catalyzed by the image, the sign either recruits to itself the language of privilege—as in its intersection with the bus terminal’s “Private Property” sign that hangs beneath and seems to modify it— or acts in concert with other marginalized voices to expose the fragility of power. Delano has clicked his shutter at a moment at which the destabilizing potential of color is accentuated by the colored subject’s—and consequently our—point of view. For we enter this densely textual scene through the act of reading that it represents: the sideways glance of the African American man standing beneath the “Colored Waiting Room” sign. A reader of signs himself, he is not simply signified by them. Positioned on the margin of the social text, he looks at it obliquely and initiates us in this angle of vision through the direction of his eyes, which establishes a countercurrent in our reading of the image: not only top down, with the full normative force of that direction, but also from the bottom up. In the vertical sequence of magazine-stand ads, all of which strategically deploy the language of disclosure, the bottommost Cosmopolitan cover, which advertises excerpts from Faith Baldwin’s new novel Hawaii, appears to draw the man’s eyes. The only cover to use a visual lure, it offers a seductive picture of an island paradise a continent and an ocean away, a classic escape fantasy that is particularly phantasmatic in the context of the gathering war in the Pacific. With its empty expanse of beach dissolving into sea and sky, the ad offers an utterly seductive and foreclosed image of release from the constrictions of Jim Crow. Our eye travels up to the next revelation, which substitutes bold print and assertion for the seduction of the image. This is the central panel of meaning as well as of the lineup, the point at which

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Figure 19. At the bus station, Durham, North Carolina, May 1940. Photograph by Jack Delano. FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress.

the spark of historical contingency erupts into the image from the darkness to which it was relegated by the picture of escape. But history enters from a specific vantage point, one affiliated with the man through whose oblique gaze we view it. Promising the “True Story” of Hitler’s love life as revealed “By His Former Maid,” the ad promises to expose history from the bottom up, the perspective our reading subject and proxy shares. The conjunction of Hitler’s maid and the African American man is at once serendipitous and meaningful; a click of the shutter brings them into an alliance that crosses geographic, racial, and gender differences through the common experience of an underclass with a shared perspective on power. The secrets of the master race are vulnerable to those racially, sexually, and socially below it. It is a profoundly if also comically destabilizing moment that goes beyond implying the commonalities between the racial regimes of Nazi Germany and the United States to suggest their common susceptibility to those endowed by subordination with a capacity for knowledge and disclosure. It is this sudden convergence, this flare-up of seemingly unrelated fragments of history into new constellations of meaning, that is captured in the ad in the uppermost panel. “Bingo Tonite!” broadcast capital letters in a sunburst. Good Housekeeping grabs our attention through a double discourse of revelation: it promises

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to tell the true story of “Who’s Really Behind the Bingo Game in Your Town,” the seemingly sinister undercover forces that support and stand to gain from this innocuous and socially sanctioned form of gambling, but it does so through the language of revelation that belongs to the game itself. Bingo is about revelation: random throws of the dice or spins of the wheel converge in the spelling of the single word that has entered our lexicon as the name of revelation. Meaning emerges in a game of chance from the fortuitous conjunction of numbers and letters rather than deliberate and systematic thought. At the pinnacle of this series, then, the culmination of a bottom-up strategy of reading, is the signifier of the process through which serendipity generates significance. Made more piquant by the made-up spelling of tonite, which echoes the made-up word it modifies, the ad creates the illusion of immediacy, bringing history to an exclamation point in the present: It is tonite! that the true story of Hitler’s love life will be revealed, and that the ideological glue that keeps power in place may come unstuck through the flash of revelation. Right now, in this moment of time, the present moment that the photograph frames and freezes for our contemplation, a little shock or shake is administered to power’s foundation. The shock is entirely illusory, of course. The Good Housekeeping ad mimics a poster to simulate urgency; the secrets of Hitler’s love life will not be revealed, and it would hardly matter if they were; and bingo communicates surprise without truth value. The effectivity of the image, however, resides precisely in its effect, its revelation of possibility, its power of suggestion, rather than its fidelity. Bingo names one feature of photography’s social agency, its setting of the stage so that familiar pieces of the social text can address one another in unfamiliar ways. Exceeding what the photographer who frames it can foresee or control, this colloquy is catalyzed by his point of view. Clicking the shutter at the moment that a twist of the head suggests an unorthodox angle of vision, Delano aligns with this perspective a series of fragments that converge with the force of illumination. If the “Colored” sign stands to benefit from the contingent capacities of photography, and the “White” sign to stand in jeopardy, we should ask what happens when the signs themselves enter the photograph accidentally. Once again, an asymmetry emerges, because the “Colored” sign was the target of attention both for Jim Crow’s visual critics, for whom it epitomized the system’s inequities, and for the sign’s addressees, who might avert their eyes but could not afford not to know that it was hanging over their heads, determining not only where they could go but also how they were perceived. Equally marked but unequally aware, the raced subjects inhabit different epistemological positions that were captured by the camera’s impersonal technology, which recorded white subjects caught unaware in the linguistic trammels of their privilege. Ironically, the gap between the “White” sign and the bodies that always posed a threat to it was narrowed by the very noun that was chosen specifically (although

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used irregularly) to secure that gap. People—the word embraced to separate whiteness from race—became an ironic hinge between language and the body. Whereas operational terms such as passengers or patrons could maintain some semantic autonomy from the diverse people captured in the photographic frame, referencing them only casually and lightly, the more global reach of white people touches firmly down on and in turn is grounded by all the white bodies within its reach. The effect is an ironic incarnation, the phrase chosen as a defense against the body becoming flesh against its creators’ will. As the camera moves “White People” from a position of immunity into a relation to white bodies—the bodies that always needed to be massaged or laundered into better shape—the phrase designed to deflect the stigma of race becomes a racial label, and white people become just other marked and mortal subjects, no matter how immaculately clad in language or in furs. Some awareness of this dilemma may account in part for the reluctance of white people to pose in front of the sign addressed to them, since as Richard Dyer reminds us, “To represent people is to represent bodies.”37 There was always the danger of sliding from the creators of a racial taxonomy to its exemplars, white people becoming “White People,” ethnographic specimens classified as if in a museum and, like indigenous peoples in anthropological photographs, incompletely aware of the terms in which they were being framed. Those conscious of the risk could collaborate with their photographers to offset its effect. Those caught off guard incurred the risk of finding themselves inscribed in a scene to which they had not given their consent. We could take as a good example a turn-of-the-century photograph of a wedding group gathered at the station to bid farewell to the newlyweds. At once selfconsciously composed and unseeing, “Waiting outside train station, Kittrell, North Carolina, ca. 1900” is a classic example of an honorific portrait (figure 20). The photograph is taken from a low angle that magnifies the party’s stature and endows its erect and square-shouldered members with a certain monumentality. These are people of substance meticulously dressed for a special occasion: the men in threepiece suits, bowler hats and bow ties, some sporting gold watch chains and carrying cigars, the women in suits or dresses and hats. We infer that the occasion is a wedding from the distinctiveness of the pair on the left, the only couple in the group and the object of several members’ gaze; from the coordination of the man’s boutonnière and the woman’s floral bouquet; from the woman’s wedding ring and elaborate satiny hat, made yet more resplendent by the sunlight it reflects, which singles her out from the sober, black-hatted, horizontal line of guests; and from the clasped hands of the woman on the right (perhaps a younger sister) who seems to be preparing to throw rice at the couple. The party has gathered to send the couple off on their honeymoon. It is an occasion more solemn than festive. The newlyweds pose stiffly for the camera at which, rather than look at each other, they gaze unsmilingly. Conscious of their dignity, they present themselves for posterity. The scene they compose with their guests is less about romance than about respectability, the

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Figure 20. Waiting outside train station, Kittrell, North Carolina, ca. 1900. State of North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources.

confirmation of social status, the formalized coupling of individual to class through the medium of family. The photographer who has produced this portrait, however, appears to have been so inured to the Jim Crow system that he fails to notice how the “Waiting Room For White People” sign that hangs above the newlyweds intrudes into and reframes this carefully arranged scene. Had the sign been an intended feature of the group portrait, had it been the identity that either the subjects or the photographer wanted to proclaim, they would have arranged themselves, or been arranged by him, beneath it in a way that acknowledged its significance. Instead, entering the image inadvertently, the sign’s white-lettered bottom line “White People” joins and crowns the heads of the bride and groom as a ghostly, unacknowledged, and ironic presence that names them from behind their backs in terms they do not see. The newlyweds and their guests have arranged a performance of class; the sign recruits them to a performance of race. They are re-presented in the act of self-presentation, framed in a framework that is not their own (however they might embrace it in

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other situations), rendered exemplars of a category other than that they have enlisted a photographer’s service to record. At the moment of marriage that formally confers adulthood, the moment of full accession to one’s station in life, an unperceived fragment of the social text undermines the display of mastery. That we know more about the scene than do its subjects further compromises the terms of their autonomy; the intrusion of the ghostly letters over their heads shadows other forces they do not control and as such is a harbinger of that ultimate definer, mortality. The weight of the future hangs over them like the top-heavy hat of the bride, which captures the play of light and time in its modulated textures and flesh-colored folds, constellations of the twists and turns and curves and flowering of narrative possibility that are held for a moment before our eyes but cast a shadow over hers. The textile version of the textured white bouquet, the luminous bridal hat lifts our eyes upward to the white letters that seem almost to touch it and to cap the whispers of mortality that, like the bridal accoutrements, are attendant on entry to the married state, the loss of virginity, the fall into the world of body and time that bears the seeds of death. By seeing what these serious and dignified people do not, we also see their finitude in the sign that preinscribes them from beyond their field of vision. The train they will board at this station will carry them farther than they know; the stage of life on which they so confidently embark has a more distant terminus. The “White People” sign thus stamps the image with an intrinsic feature of photography: its unwilling service as memento mori, a visual reminder of the mortal condition it seeks to remedy. As an image whose permanence betrays, while attempting to arrest, the body’s transience, photography inevitably gesture toward the body’s final disappearance; as the tangible trace of a presence that is no longer present, it pierces us with the immanence and ineluctability of loss; as the record of a moment that is always already over, it measures the extension of time toward death. As Susan Sontag argues, “Photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction, and this link between photography and death haunts all photographs of people”—but especially, perhaps, of white people, rendered more vulnerable through their efforts to wrest immunity from contingency.38 The wedding photo allows us to rethink the ideas of two signal twentiethcentury theorists of photography in relation to questions of racial representation that have rarely been posed to them. No text has theorized photography’s imbrication with indexicality and mortality more powerfully than Barthes’s Camera Lucida. For Barthes, however, indexicality, as the relay through which the referent that “adheres” to the film is experienced in a different time and space, is evidence of embodiment that attaches with special force, as Ruby C. Tapia has noted, to blackness as an irrefutable and traumatic presence (and conversely to the maternal body as a beloved and irrecoverable absence).39 “This-has-been” is the temporality of the pho-

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tograph for Barthes. He is concerned with the ways that photographic indexicality insists on an absent presence that pierces the viewer with an unrefusable connection to something terrible that has happened or to someone treasured who is lost. Read through the lens of Benjamin, by contrast, the indexicality transcribed by an impersonal technology exposes the fragile grasp of the race that fails to acknowledge its own preinscription. Photography points less to the past than to the future that “nests so eloquently” in the image that “we, looking back, may rediscover it.”40 Rather than an elegiac medium, it anticipates the possibility of a changed social order in which white people are democratically subjected to the leveling effects of contingency as they are to the leveling conditions of mortality: it is an order in which signs of privilege are eroded, like Uncle Vern and his new Hudson, by the forces of inscription to which they are subsumed.

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• • •

African Americans were not exempt from the force of inscription, of course. On the contrary, their subjection to it was so obvious that photographic critics of the “Colored” sign had to enlist rhetorical resources of the medium that were not summoned by the signage for whites. At stake here is another and more intentional kind of photographic “language,” whose codes enabled a rhetoric of critique as nuanced as its verbal counterpart. Directed to different audiences, this rhetoric presented a range of possibilities for shaping viewers’ attitudes. Race played a role in the process of selection: white photographers and black photographers addressed their imagined audiences quite differently, although there is a spectrum on both sides that comes into focus within the framework of a single site. The “colored waiting room” was the site to which African American photographers were most likely to be drawn, in contrast to the drinking fountains whose asymmetries functioned as a magnet for whites. As a site of immobility, the waiting room had its own symbolic weight, of course, which the visual rhetoric attempted either to reinforce or reinflect. At one pole were the normative documentary conventions, from which we can trace a range of inflections, proceeding from white to black photographers, and from more- to less-familiar strategies, before asking whether reinflection, by conceding the given terms, is intrinsically a losing game. Even the notion of documentary conventions requires some qualification from the start, however. The liberal documentary practices that evolved under the aegis of the New Deal in the 1930s have been credited, or perhaps discredited, with consolidating a rhetoric that called attention to the victims of economic and natural disaster and attempted to mobilize sympathy on their behalf; but these practices actually encompassed a spectrum of approaches.41 The New Deal Agency that began as the Historical Section of the Resettlement Administration in 1935, became the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1937, and merged with the Domestic Operations Branch of the Office of War Information (OWI) in 1942 is usually con-

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sidered a prime locus of this liberal documentary style, although, as we have already seen from Delano’s “At the bus station” and will see again in chapter 4, there was considerable variety within the FSA archive, especially within that subset whose documentation of verbal signs could either consolidate or interrogate documentary codes. Associating the New Deal documentary style too narrowly with a practice of “victim photography” overlooks the extent to which these photographers, encouraged (as well as personally drawn) to represent publicly posted texts (posters, billboards, signs) that revealed cultural “contrasts” and “mental attitudes,” exploited the potential for ironic social commentary.42 The best-known examples involve the jolting contrasts between the promotional billboards displayed by corporations and the hard facts on the Depression ground: Dorothea Lange’s juxtaposition of migrant workers carrying suitcases with the Southern Pacific Railroad billboard “Next Time Try the Train” comes immediately to mind. Although (as the next chapter shows) FSA photographers did not receive the same encouragement to represent segregation signs, the photographs they did produce often took advantage of the possibilities for ironic juxtaposition. Text is volatile in the visual field. The especially heavy burden carried by segregation signs made their immobilizing consequences tempting to depict, but their status as signs also made them vulnerable to rearticulation. If this latter potential is well represented by Delano’s “At the bus station,” as well as by other FSA photographs examined in chapter 4, the more conventional practice of aligning verbal and visual rhetorics of helplessness is well illustrated by one of his FSA colleagues (whose own engagement with a more critical mode is one of the examples in chapter 4). John Vachon’s “A railroad station,” photographed in Manchester, Georgia, in 1938, is a classic depiction of the state of arrest imposed by the colored “station” (figure 21). Deploying the rhetoric of “type” reserved for inferiorized classes and races, in contrast to the codes of portraiture that shape the Kittrell wedding photograph, Vachon represents four unemployed or underemployed black men hanging out in work clothes at the juncture of two Jim Crow signs at the back side of the train station.43 Whereas the wedding group in Kittrell enlisted a photographer to commemorate a special occasion for which they assembled and groomed themselves, the scene at the Manchester station is of interest only as an example of an uneventful dailiness. The photograph could be a textbook example of 1930s documentary style. The camera’s frontal position and medium distance, both higher and farther away than in the Kittrell photograph, suggest mastery over its subjects, while the evenly lit and carefully balanced composition reinforces the impression of a fully legible scene.44 The photograph offers no prospect of change. Denied occupation, agency, and mobility—the defining attributes of masculinity—these slouching or seated men present a static picture of a fixed station in life. The inertia is compounded by emptiness; there is no interaction within or between the two pairs of men, whose dis-

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Figure 21. Railroad station in Manchester, Georgia, 1938. Photograph by John Vachon. FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress.

tance from each other is measured by the space between two metal pilings. Behind them, the brick wall, blind windows, and closed doors, whose paneling resembles bars, are visible reminders of the carceral structure in which these men are trapped. Their status as permanent occupants of a waiting room is breached only by a glimpse of depth between the station and the telephone pole on the left, a space in which life passes, a white woman hurries toward a train, and parked cars and a bicycle recall the mobility the rest of society enjoys. Deracinated, functionless, legible only in relation to the signs that name and place them, these isolated, impotent and aimless “colored men,” who seem to lack the materials from which future generations or social movements could emerge, are testimonies to Jim Crow’s disciplinary force, the state of arrest that Orlando Patterson has so aptly named “social death.”45 We can discern the gendered associations of this state and the cultural specificity of the rhetoric that renders them by looking at the closest approximation of a “colored waiting room” photograph that features a female subject. It may not be coincidental that the photographer in this case came to the United States after his expulsion from Germany for “non-Aryan” activities in 1933; despite the Jim Crow sign that dominates one side of the image, the scene evokes a concentration camp more than a distinctively American racial history.46 Walt Sanders’s depiction of a slender African American woman seated on a bench beneath a “Colored” sign on

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an elevated train or tram platform in an unspecified city in the South in the late 1930s or early 1940s both highlights and modulates the impression of entrapment (figure 22). The geometric grid of the wire fence, topped with barbed wire, the horizontal slats of the bench, platform, and guardrail, and the latticed vertical girder that seems to support an upper level evoke a prison camp or cage. In contrast to Vachon’s men, however, this woman, elegantly dressed in silk stockings and high heels and a matching two-piece outfit whose whimsical print pattern contrasts with the geometric grid, appears only transiently perched on this bench, confined but not defined by the racial box in which she is required to sit. Looking resolutely away from the camera, presumably down the tracks toward the vehicle that will transport her to some other place, she resists the joint efforts of the verbal sign and its visual accomplice to squeeze her into the category posted on the fence. The woman’s elusiveness is also suggested by the wrapped and somewhat enigmatic bundles on her lap—of which the largest is an infant, according to the caption, but if so a strangely rigid one—and by her folded arms and slightly inward-turning legs. Like her blanketed bundle, she does not yield her secrets; some central core is well defended; some integrity of gender is unimpaired. She appears to be passing through rather than residing within the visual and the racial frames. As a result, neither the hallmarks of documentary camera work—the frontal gaze, the balanced composition, the middle distance (or a little closer here)—nor the blatantly explicit sign bear their usual yield. Something remains illegible despite the clearly posted word. For racial signs to signify, it seems, there must be more collaboration between the verbal and visual rhetoric; for photographed objects to be legible, as Laura Wexler argues, the photographer must bring them “into relation to other, publicly legible, semantic structures—myth, ideology, semiotic systems.”47 Rather than render entrapment, whose American burden is associated with emasculation, Walt Sanders’s only Jim Crow photograph portrays the tensions between enclosure and escape, as if he looked through the particulars of time and place and even perhaps of race to a deeper and more abstract structure whose overtones are European as much as American. Although it possesses the formal ingredients of an iconic image (as I discuss in the following chapter), this photograph has not become one because it lacks the rhetorical ingredients to ground it fully in a particular culture. The defining tensions of Sanders’s photograph vanish in a related effort to develop a rhetoric different from the FSA’s address to a primarily Northern liberal audience. Like Sanders, the Mississippi-based writer and photographer Bern Keating resists the rhetoric of stultification, but he rejects that of imprisonment as well. In an effort to enlist the support of Southern moderates in the early 1950s, Keating, a former segregation advocate who had undergone a change of heart, staged an extended series of photographs to document the machinery of Jim Crow in his hometown of Greenville, Mississippi, where African Americans made up half the population. His

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Figure 22. Woman holding infant, late 1930s or early 1940s. Walter Sanders/Black Star.

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strategy was to pose an attractive, well-dressed African American couple at the segregated facilities they encountered in the course of their day: individually at their separate tasks and together at a number of recreational sites, on an extended bus trip, and in front of a hotel. The photographs are carefully constructed: both the man and the woman are more formally dressed than most of their activities warrant, they engage in only positive interactions with white coworkers as well as with black friends, and they treat one another with formal courtesy as if, despite their wedding rings and the children with whom they occasionally appear, they are conducting a courtship rather than a marriage. As their lives unfold against a backdrop of “For Colored” signs, the model couple appears both to represent one race and to be represented through the cultural codes associated with the other. Keating’s project is to counter his compatriots’ assumptions about racial difference by depicting scenarios in which that difference is at once explicitly marked and imperceptible. The rhetorical thrust of the series is not that segregation is a morally reprehensible form of othering, as the FSA photographic corps tried to show, but rather that it is a “preposterous” contrivance that neither reflects nor produces otherness, but instead arbitrarily divides two continuous and compatible social universes.48 Although it may look like a casual shot when viewed alone, the one photograph Keating took of the “Colored Waiting Room” sign at the Greenville bus station (figure 23) assumes greater legibility in the context of this larger series, which explains some of the attitudes expressed by the pose and props assigned the man beneath the sign. First, we should note the decision to compose a solo portrait of black masculinity; the couple could plausibly have been shown together here, as they are after they board the bus. Like Vachon, Keating examines what it means for a black man to wait. This man, however, is neither passively awaiting nor attempting to precipitate change. Although he waits, he is not idle, but instead of viewing mainstream cultural publications askance, like the subject of Delano’s “At the bus station,” he is absorbed in a parallel and self-reflexive world evoked through the rhetoric of deliberate props: a suit, tie, dress shoes, and fedora, a suitcase that announces his mobility (in contrast to the men at the Manchester station) and an issue of Color that presents both him and us with a textual alternative to the “Colored Waiting Room” sign. The magazine’s logo describes its mission clearly: “Color, A Creation—Not a Copy; A Pleasure—Not a Problem.” Published out of West Virginia since 1944, the magazine was a showcase for black expressive culture. The man at the Greenville station turns to a text that reflects him as he sees himself rather than as he is seen. With his head bent toward the magazine, he is not fully defined by our eyes, but rather, like the folded-over suitcase that mimics his knees-to-shoulders pose, selfcontained and self-enclosed. The suitcase that transports the coverings of his body also conveys (by concealing) the contents of his soul. Inward-turning and sealed against our eyes, he preserves the privacy that is both a privilege and a hallmark of white masculinity at the same time that this privacy, in contrast to the female sub-

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Figure 23. Segregated South, circa 1953. Photograph by Bern Keating, Greenville, Mississippi. Special Collections, University of Mississippi Libraries.

ject’s in Sander’s photograph, seems both unthreatened by the camera and rendered legible through carefully chosen props. This man’s opacity offers the white viewers to whom the photograph is addressed an unconventional avenue of identification: rather than penetrate his space, white viewers are invited to put themselves in his position, gaining access to him circuitously through a recoil to themselves. Routing identification through a mental gymnastics that acknowledges both otherness and similarity, the image proposes the common ground of shared interiority. Hardly calling to tear down the Jim Crow signs, Keating instead expresses the wish that they will simply atrophy through the work of recognition that his photographs set in play.

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By transposing the rhetorical codes of white middle-class masculinity, Keating solicits greater identification than Vachon from his white viewers, but without engaging the social formation that Vachon starkly depicts. Each of the African American photographers who represents the “Colored Waiting Room” sign from the 1940s through the 1960s attempts to supply at least one of the missing ingredients from Vachon’s documentary vocabulary. The most predictable development can be located in one of the photographs taken by Gordon Parks (another is discussed in chapter 4) as part of his assignment for Life magazine’s inaugural series “The Background of Segregation” (1956). In his depiction of the Tennessee State University professor E. J. Thornton, the most successful member of the extended family that was the centerpiece of the fourth installment of the story (September 24), under the “Colored Waiting Room” sign at the Nashville bus station, Parks captures the moment when, dressed in jacket and tie and carrying a briefcase, Professor Thornton is surrounded by his attractive and well-dressed wife, daughters, and son, who all turn to look up at him admiringly. The center of their attention, as well as of ours, he is a composed yet commanding figure of masculine authority that resists the degrading effects of the sign and rebuts the impotence of the unisex group waiting at the Manchester station. The refusal of pathos is evident even when children, its most obvious trigger, become the central focus. In a photograph of a young relative moving toward us through the open side of the doorway to the segregated waiting room at the train station in Columbia, South Carolina (figure 24), Cecil J. Williams brings together the spatial codes of the child at the threshold with the rhetoric of light in a way that projects a pathway toward the future. Instead of being trapped in a racialized box, this self-contained and serious boy, whose slightly averted gaze suggests an inwardness echoed in the room’s dark recesses, hovers at its brink. Just behind him we discern the tiny sliver of a little girl who, by appearing to follow in his footsteps, reinforces his status as a leader. In this context, even the amateurish lettering of the “Colored” sign creates the impression of a juvenile world whose terms might yield to a child’s negotiation. This potential is enhanced by the rhetoric of light. Shining behind the child is a vertical column of light from a tall window whose luminousness he seems to condense and carry forward; the ray of sunlight that bathes his face from a window on the right illuminates it so powerfully that Williams felt compelled to retouch the photograph to make it clear that the boy is African American.49 This ambiguity is perhaps the point. Glowing with a radiance so intense that it appears to anoint him as a future leader, the child is invested with the spiritual qualities of illumination that have been culturally coded white and reserved for the depiction of “great men touched by heavenly inspiration,” in contrast to the “brutal, scrutinizing quality” of ethnographic photography, exemplified here by Vachon.50 From the enclosure of the colored waiting room, Williams’s visual rhetoric suggests, a new day will issue forth.

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Figure 24. A black youth leaves the segregated waiting room at the train station in Columbia, South Carolina, 1956. Photograph by Cecil J. Williams. Courtesy Cecil J. Williams.

If the rhetoric of inspiration marks one end of a rhetorical spectrum, the other is marked by irreverence. It could be indulged only by a Northern African American photographer whose audience and subjects, a select cohort of friends and coperformers, allowed for a more daring approach. This rhetoric of daring revisits Vachon’s trapped and apathetic men not, as in the work of Gordon Parks, through the supplementation of the nuclear family, but by presenting a self-defining band of men—quite literally. Milt Hinton, the great bass player and unofficial photographer of Cab Calloway’s band, depicted a number of the Jim Crow signs the band encountered while on tour in the South. The photographer and his fellow players col-

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laborate in the staging of these images as a kind of comic therapy: they direct his attention to the sign, perhaps at his direction, pointing out by pointing back that they too could signify. In contrast to disaggregated groups cowed beneath the “Colored” sign, Hinton and his bandmates conspire to represent African Americans acting as a group united by a single attitude that enhances their authority. The excess of the gesture—not one but all the band members pointing—is a way to mock a system that imagined it could master these spirited masters of improvisation (who also enjoyed donning fezzes and faking business cards to impersonate Arab dignitaries as a way to cross the color barrier). “When I shot Jim Crow signs in the South, I intended to be funny. I wasn’t trying to prove anything. We all lived in the North, and one of the only ways we could deal with the stupidity of the segregation laws was to make fun of them.”51 Clowning was especially unrestrained at an implausible site of play: the colored entrance to the Atlanta train station, where the sign seems to have triggered an outbreak of song that Hinton documented on two occasions. In the more self-conscious example (figure 25), nine members of the band mimic a song-and-dance routine with the racial platform as their stage and the camera as their audience, while the signs of their own success—suitcases and suits, top coats and hats—show that they can safely mimic minstrelsy. Smiling broadly and stretching out their arms toward the sign above and the imaginary audience in front, these performers use their performance skills to do a number on the “Colored Entrance” sign. They steal the stage, breaking the conventions and pushing the boundaries of social space. It is a pleasure they can indulge because their entrance is also an exit; they can break out of a frame that doesn’t permanently bind them by boarding a train that will return them to the North. The photograph is all about the mobility—of expression, gesture, and meaning—that marks their difference from the South’s native sons. In the text that accompanies the image in Bass Line, Hinton describes the band’s laughter at one of their member’s Arab escapades and concludes: “These episodes told us something about how little thought people give to the way they behave. These rules are taught from childhood and they’re followed because that’s the way things are done. People just don’t know there’s another way.” Like cross-dressing as Arab dignitaries, the photographs demonstrate, by “making fun of this ridiculous, unnecessary system,” that there are other ways to react to it even when action is constrained.52 Across the spectrum from aspiration to derision, some African American photographers attempted to rework the “Colored” sign that elicited aversion among many of their peers. Since to represent the sign, no matter how critically, was also to accord it recognition, however, it is important to try to gauge how this dualedged project was received. One route has been provided by “Reflections in Black: a History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present,” a massive retrospective exhibit curated by Deborah Willis in 2000 in Washington, DC. For reasons discussed in the next chapter, only one of this comprehensive collection’s nearly six hundred

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Figure 25. Left to right: Chu Berry, Danny Barker, Rudolph Rivers, unidentified individual, Quentin Jackson, Cozy Cole, Tyree Glenn, and Cliff, Cab Calloway’s valet, at railroad station, Atlanta, Georgia, circa 1940. Photo by Milt Hinton. Courtesy Milton J. Hinton Photographic Collection, © MiltHinton.com.

photographs depicts a Jim Crow sign. Perhaps not coincidentally, it is a photograph of two “Colored Waiting Room” signs, taken by Ernest C. Withers (figure 26). Because his bleak and seemingly casual depiction of these signs at the bus station in Memphis in the 1960s stands out neither within Jim Crow photography in general nor within the impressive oeuvre of this Memphis-based photographer, celebrated for his coverage of civil rights struggles (especially the Emmett Till murder and trial) and musical stars (represented by another of his photographs in this exhibition), we must wonder why, beyond the contribution to portraying the duality of Southern life that is noted in the text, it was singled out for this exhibition (and the volume that accompanied it), or more precisely how it functions within its larger frame.53 The grounds for its selection do not seem to have been primarily aesthetic, for neither the signs nor their environs are strikingly composed. Instead, I would argue, it is the overwhelming sense of emptiness and absence that gives the image its critical power. In contrast to the other photographs of the colored waiting room, no one stands beneath these signs, endowing them with human form; no rhetoric of personhood attempts either to decry or to disarm the implications of the signs.

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Figure 26. Bus station, colored waiting room, Memphis, circa 1960s. Photograph by Ernest C. Withers. © Ernest C. Withers. Courtesy Panopticon Gallery, Boston, MA.

If there is a rhetoric here, it is that there is not one: that in this sparse unadorned record, the signs are writing themselves on the film without the intervention of a point of view. In its vacancy, Withers’s photograph recalls the photographs of unpopulated urban scenes that Benjamin hails as marking the advent of twentieth-century photography, the cleansing dissolution of the aura that lingered in conventional portrait photography. In Eugène Atget’s photographs of “what was unremarked, forgotten, cast adrift” in turn-of-the-century Paris, the overwhelming and defamiliarizing experience, according to Benjamin, is emptiness: “The city in these pictures looks cleared out, like a lodging that has not yet found a new tenant.”54 Denied the centralizing focus of the human subject and the organizing focus of the photographer’s point of view, the viewer is compelled to read these photographs afresh. Rather than appreciate their aesthetic or humanistic values, we are encouraged to uncover the historical and political information carried by seemingly trivial details that suddenly emerge from what had been the background. Atget, claims Benjamin, photographed deserted streets as if they were crime scenes, similarly deserted and scrutinized for evidence of invisible criminals sheltered by the semblance of normality. The camera’s impersonal lens makes traces of the crimes of modernity visible: why

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Figure 27. Sanitation workers’ strike, Memphis, 1968. Photograph by Ernest C. Withers. © Ernest C. Withers. Courtesy Panopticon Gallery, Boston, MA.

are there no tenants for these lodgings? Where have they all gone? The absence of man allows evidence of the scene of the crime to surface; the absence of man is evidence that a crime has been committed. In “Bus station, colored waiting room,” the crimes are all too obvious; no detective work is required to ferret them out. Read through Benjamin’s lens, however, the absence of human beings implies that, in excess of its political crimes, segregation has committed the capital crime of murder: not the social death rendered by Vachon’s documentary rhetoric, but the deadlier violence revealed by the process of inscription. The scene’s desolation comes to seem less an accident of the time of day than a consequence of the signs. No people of color can populate the colored waiting room; the existence of the signs negates their own. The selection of Withers’s photograph for “Reflections in Black” is consistent with the preference for witnessing over documentary that we have already observed among Jim Crow’s Southern critics, but Benjamin allows us to recast this distinction in terms of inscription and rhetoric (what Benjamin considers “literariness”), or indexical and symbolic signs. Beyond the opposition to a certain kind of documentary rhetoric, there appears to be ambivalence about rhetoric itself in the representation of Jim Crow, an attempt to endorse the effect of the indexical. It is, of course, an effect; Withers’s camera (like Atget’s) has been deliberately trained on

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the scene. Rather than an opposition between two kinds of photographic signs, the photograph presents a rhetoric of inscription. This rhetoric, however, is itself revised by the larger context of the exhibition (and publication) space. On the wall of the exhibit, and the page of the catalog that accompanies it, Withers’s photograph of the segregated Memphis bus station appears underneath his far more celebrated photograph of the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike on March 28, 1968, an event that gained notoriety for bringing Martin Luther King Jr. to the city in which he was assassinated (figure 27). The juxtaposition of the two Memphis scenarios recontextualizes both, creating the impression that the colored waiting room, one door of which is propped open with a suitcase, has been emptied by the men who have gone above, seemingly upstairs, to stand united in protest. In this context, the single powerful statement produced by the horizontal line of demonstrators brandishing their “I Am a Man” placards, the slogan created by the Community on the Move for Equality to talk back to bosses about unfair employment practices, talks back as well to the emasculating effects of segregation that Vachon (among others) had documented thirty years earlier. Rather than being annihilated by the “Colored Waiting Room” signage, the juxtaposition of photographs suggest, its targets have stopped waiting and regrouped elsewhere. The rhetoric of inscription is reinscribed in a narrative of political and aesthetic agency: disaggregated individuals and images can form new alliances, at least retrospectively. Retrospection is important, because Withers’s photograph of the Jim Crow sign is assigned a position in the canon of black photography only in relation to a particular conclusion. Through Deborah Willis’s provocative juxtaposition, a sign written by black activists speaks back to the “Colored Waiting Room” sign in a highly condensed narrative about taking sign production into one’s command. This exhibition directs us to the critical role that framing contexts play in making photographs visible and legible. “Reflections in Black” is, of course, only one signal case that demands that we turn our attention from the formal qualities of individual images to the ways they enter the public eye.

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Cultural Memory and the Conditions of Visibility The Circulation of Jim Crow Photographs Images help stabilize and anchor collective memory’s transient and fluctuating nature. . . . Photographs turn somewhat magically into iconic representations that stand for a system of beliefs, a theme, an epoch. Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, 1998

The task of an alternative photography is to incorporate photography into social and political memory, instead of using it as a substitute which encourages the atrophy of any such memory. John Berger, About Looking, 1980

The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one.

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Susan Sontag, New York Times Magazine, 2004

Photographs do not emerge out of nowhere as solitary units bereft of context. Instead, they appear—when they do appear—in specific institutional and discursive frames that shape their legibility. These contexts of reception are often tied to contexts of production: the institutional mandates and political and commercial motives that call documentary photographs into being. Although some Jim Crow photographs were taken by private individuals determined to make a record of discrimination, the majority were driven by journalistic, administrative, or political assignments that both created and constrained their production and display. The puzzle posed by the scarcity and undercirculation of these photographs parallels that of their subject matter: why, given the political and affective power of segregation’s markers, weren’t these images more extensively displayed? After attempting to decipher the ways the signs themselves were perceived as either too disturbing or not disturbing enough to elicit a more comprehensive visual record, this chapter examines the priorities that made their representations appear in103

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sufficiently sensational to capture commercial interest, insufficiently patriotic to sustain the support of state bureaucracies, and (with the some carefully managed exceptions) insufficiently palatable to warrant assimilation into the canons of African American photography—at the same time that these frames determined the ways these photographs were produced and exhibited. Broader ideological mandates played a role as well: neither the state liberalism of the thirties nor the cold-war patriotism of the fifties encouraged the production or display of embarrassing images of domestic racism, and the protest movements that gained force after the Second World War had access only to small-circulation publications. The result was a cultural vacuum that subsequent generations would try to patch over with a few iconic images whose familiarity—a product both of their overcirculation and their compliance with established habits of seeing—has tended to discourage the effort undertaken here to retrieve a more heterogeneous corpus from more heterogeneous sources and to analyze the tensions that shaped the uneven record. The interplay between a spotty historical record and a full cultural memory is one thread of this story. At each of the four moments at which silence enters into historical production, according to the model presented by Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Jim Crow representation has been subject—if we adapt his terms to visual materials—to modes of erasure. Because the signs were underdocumented at the “moment of fact creation (the making of sources),” and their photographs marginalized within archives (the “moment of fact assembly”) and minimized within the exhibits and publications that extended these archives into general view (the “moment of fact retrieval, or the making of narratives”), it is not surprising that these photographs were also abstracted out of the culminating “moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance)” and pressed selectively instead into the service of a cultural memory that a visual medium is well suited to sustain.1 The fuller the historical record, the greater its resistance to the schematizing forces of cultural memory; the attenuation of one feeds the consolidation of the other. Cultural memory, however, is itself a contested process through which, as Leigh Raiford has demonstrated, “people recall, lay claim to, and understand the past . . . the negotiation, the use of history for the present.”2 These uses frequently rely on the stabilizing processes of visual abstraction; hence the almost magical power of certain photographs, especially those whose schematic forms displace historically specific details, to “concentrate the hopes and fears of millions and provide an instant and effortless connection to some deeply meaningful moment in history.”3 It is easy to see how photographs that juxtapose “white” and “colored” signs in a timeless equilibrium could serve this representational task. As John Berger insists, however, photography can also provoke and preserve a more critical social and political memory. How was this potential diverted for those Jim Crow photographs that contest the criteria for entry to what Susan Sontag calls the “Western memory mu-

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seum,” criteria that encourage the atrophy of social and political memory in favor of photographic styles that assist in forgetting as much as remembering or, in Barbie Zelizer’s resonant phrase, in remembering to forget?4 Designed to culminate in a discussion of those photographs that have been lodged, literally as well as figuratively, in a memory museum, this chapter charts the institutional and ideological routes through which a small body of Jim Crow photographs was intermittently produced and consistently (although by varying means) kept from view.

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• • •

To begin with some bare statistics: Jim Crow signs may have been commonplace, but their representation was exceptional. My research has uncovered fewer than two hundred photographs, a surprising underdocumentation that has been recognized by archivists and curators of historical collections in the South. To cite only one particularly striking example, out of the 1.2 million regional photographs collected since 1926 by the Atlanta History Center and housed in its library and archives division, only one depicts a Jim Crow sign. There was no shortage of such signs in the city: indeed, a blurb on the wall in the Atlanta History Museum’s public exhibition space acknowledges that “culture was rigidly segregated. ‘Whites Only’ and “Colored’ signs were everywhere”—except in the photographic record.5 Among the available explanations, including the possibility that photographs may have been destroyed after the end of segregation for some of the same reasons that the signs themselves were destroyed, the underlying cause appears to be that for the great majority of white Southerners who were their beneficiaries, segregation signs seems to have been about as worthy of documentation as telephone poles or traffic signs, and typically appear, if at all, only in the background of the places or events whose documentation was the primary goal.6 Even when the signs do appear in the foreground, what they show is that they were not seen. The sole example at the Atlanta History Center’s library and archives, for example, a 1936 architectural photograph of a new Kress store that includes two shiny, symmetrical drinking fountains labeled “White” and “Colored,” is captioned only with the location of the store, the date of the photograph, and the names of the architect and contractor. The segregation signs are visually present and discursively absent. This was not unusual, as a glance at an article on the architectural achievements of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) reveals. Boasting that an attention to detail manifests a coherent aesthetic plan in every design feature, the essay includes several photographs of drinking fountains in which the word white is incorporated into, not superimposed onto, the design. That the captions offer lavish praise for the “clean, efficient-looking details that are used in all the TVA buildings” without noting the racial inscriptions reveals the degree to which such inscriptions were invisible even on federally funded projects.7 The cultural blind spot that extends even to signs that stare the viewer in the face

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helps account for the disparity between the scattered Jim Crow images and the more widely viewed and hotly debated lynching photographs, primarily postcards, collected and exhibited by James Allen. Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (2000) is the signal and most shocking visual archive of race yet compiled in the twenty-first century.8 Beyond the intrinsically sickening subject of these photographs of brutalized bodies hanging from trees, what makes the collection so profoundly disturbing is the depiction of violence as spectacle, an act that implicates both the crowds of white spectators who eagerly attended these events and the photographic practices that gratified and exploited the popular desire for souvenirs. The collection reveals not only the extent to which lynchings functioned as public carnivals but also the degree to which they provided a commercial opportunity for professional photographers to make and market images that (in one account) were “once as common as postcards of Niagara Falls.”9 These photographs served both to gratify spectatorial desire and to advertise the prowess of the studios that set up portable darkrooms at the lynching sites to speed the delivery of images to newspapers and postcards to consumers. Whether stored in family albums or mailed to relatives and friends, these postcards provided a material trail that Allen tracked through flea markets and pawnshops for over a decade to recover the 146 photographs that form this collection. As Jacqueline Goldsby has argued, this is a very small number compared to photographic production generally and to the circulation of other postcards and racist materials through the U.S. mail. The representation of lynching as spectacle was accompanied by a logic of scarcity and secrecy that, in her powerful account, increased its ability to instill terror in black communities, in part by withholding sustained legibility. Even as the “most spectacular secret in the world,” however, lynching triggered the production of postcards whose circuits, although clandestine at the time, enabled the photographs’ eventual recovery, signally via Allen’s determination not only to expose the perpetrators of lynching but also to provide a collective and respectful resting place for these brutally exposed images of dishonored bodies.10 Nothing could be more different from the scenario of Jim Crow. Invisible rather than hyperbolically (if also intermittently) visible, both the signs and their occasional and accidental images slipped below the cultural radar. Too commonplace to capture the camera’s attention, the signs also weren’t spectacular or exceptional enough to act as a backdrop for the commercially profitable display of white supremacy. We almost never find white people posing proudly beneath them, and one of the few examples of this stance also produced the only postcard I have found that depicts the actual signage (as opposed to the abundant promotional postcards promising “white only” facilities). In what appears to be a connection to those promotional uses, the 1904 postcard (figure 28) shows three well-dressed, bowler-hatted gentlemen positioned on both sides of a sign declaring “This Park for White People Only” at the entry to a desolate park in Potomac Heights, Maryland, near the na-

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Figure 28. Park sign, Potomac Heights, Maryland, 1904. Courtesy the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

tion’s capital. The self-conscious pose of the man looking directly at the camera from his perch on the wooden railing suggests that he has either asked or agreed to be depicted in conjunction with the sign of racial privilege. Mailed to a friend with a message (“You can get both room and board here”) that suggests that the postcard may have been intended to advertise accommodations the viewer doesn’t see, the card performs a quieter version of one of the lynching postcards’ crucial functions: reinforcing the bonds of whiteness. Both the material form and the attitude it depicts set the postcard apart from other Jim Crow photographs and align it, despite the difference of subject, with the lynching archive. The other example I have encountered of intentional self-display served an antithetical purpose. A photographic series on the Columbians, an extreme whitesupremacist group on trial in Atlanta in 1946–47, depicts two members of the group positioned, in one case proudly, in front of a sign declaring “Ice Water White People” above a drinking fountain in the Atlanta courthouse (see figures 36 and 45). These photographs, which I revisit in the next chapter, were taken not by a sympathizer, profiteer, or advertiser, but by Marian Palfi, a recent immigrant from Hitler’s Europe and a progressive photojournalist who, in collaboration with the Southern activist and writer Stetson Kennedy, produced an exposé of the group that was published in I. F. Stone’s left-wing journal PM.11 The state-sponsored signs, of which

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there is no trace in the Atlanta library and archives (although they remained in place until 1962), become visible through and for the critical gaze of outsiders. In contrast to the lynching photographs, some of which were reclaimed and recirculated by antilynching organizations, the visual record of Jim Crow was originally produced, rather than subsequently redeployed, almost entirely by its critics, even in this atypical scenario of deliberate self-display. If Jim Crow’s critics produced the most substantial portion of this record, then, we must ask what constraints made their contribution smaller and less conspicuous than we would expect. We might begin by dividing this critical project into a few of its most significant blocs. The first was set into motion by the Farm Security Administration, which dispatched a substantial photographic corps (including at various points Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, Jack Delano, Esther Bubley, Marion Post Wolcott, John Vachon, Carl Mydans, and Gordon Parks) to compile an extensive pictorial record of American life between 1935 and 1943. Under Roy Emerson Stryker, an economist whose commitment to the illustrative power of images led to his appointment in 1935 as director of the Historical Section of the Resettlement Administration (which became the Farm Security Administration in 1937), the agency launched a massive project of visual documentation that far exceeded its original task, producing approximately 270,000 prints and negatives, of which approximately 107,000 captioned black-and-white prints have been housed as the Farm Security Administration—Office of War Information (FSAOWI) Collection in the Library of Congress since 1944.12 Stryker believed, in an assessment echoed by less partisan commentators, that it was “a great collection now, perhaps the greatest ever assembled in the history of America”—or anywhere else.13 According to Nicholas Natanson’s careful calculations, approximately 10 percent of the prints in this collection depict African American subjects—a higher percentage, as he points out, than that of photographs by most New Deal agencies and roughly proportional to the percentage of African Americans in the general population.14 Only thirty photographs in this vast collection, however, represent Jim Crow signs, despite the fact that the plight of sharecroppers drew a significant number of the photographers to the South and despite Stryker’s encouragement to pay special attention to the cultural tensions made visible by public signs. Could it be that, in a massive documentary project charged with “perpetuating photographically certain aspects of the American scene which may prove incalculably valuable in time to come,” the segregation signs didn’t register as historically significant? Or was there something about the ways in which they registered that deflected a fuller record?15 There is no question that, unlike the Southern habitués, these primarily Northern photographers were shocked by the Jim Crow signs. Esther Bubley recalls: “It was never put to me that I should look out for segregation signs. But I was free to take what impressed me as odd, interesting, horrifying. I was twenty-one at that time, I had grown up in an area where very few blacks lived. Those segregation signs

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were awful. I didn’t know how anyone could overlook them.” Her ten photographs of the signs constitute one-third of the FSA-OWI’s collection.16 These numbers are both misleading and revealing, however, for eight of the ten photographs are virtually indistinguishable shots (varied only by a shift from vertical to horizontal views) of the same “White Waiting Room” sign at a Greyhound bus station in Memphis. Because there is nothing remarkable about the sign or its setting, the repetition suggests a kind of trauma, as if Bubley could hardly believe her eyes and kept clicking the shutter to master the shock. Other FSA-OWI photographers were similarly stunned, although they registered the shock less idiosyncratically. Although it took Jack Delano only three days below the Mason-Dixon line to report back to Roy Stryker that he “was struck by signs of racial segregation everywhere: separate drinking fountains for blacks and whites, separate waiting rooms at bus and railroad stations, separate schools for children, separate sections on buses and trains and in movie houses and separate churches,” he took only three photographs of the signs, two of which we have already seen.17 Whether shock yielded to numbness, as Stryker recommended, or to an aversion that outweighed an investigative impulse that would have been dampened in any case by exposure primarily to the most standardized versions of the signs that were posted for outsiders primarily at transportation sites, Delano’s acute awareness, like that of the other FSA-OWI photographers, translated into a representative sampling rather than extended coverage. A further disincentive came from the project guidelines which, as Bubley notes, offered permission but not encouragement for documenting subjects that did not contribute to the agency’s overarching goal: to provide an accessible archive of free images whose exhibition or publication would bolster public support for the expenditure of federal money on social-welfare projects by producing visible evidence of their beneficial effects. The emphasis on usable images meant not only that depictions of whites were prioritized, as indicated by Stryker’s response to a question from Dorothea Lange—“Take both black and white, but place the emphasis on the white tenants, since we know that these will receive much wider use”—but also, as his silence regarding another of her queries suggests, that controversial subjects were discouraged.18 The shock that made the Jim Crow signs worthy of documentation to the government-employed photographers also made them too controversial for inclusion in government-supported exhibition and publication venues. Beyond the general ambivalence that Natanson has documented toward exhibiting the black file, the tiny subset of sign depictions was rarely seen until after the signs themselves came down and became safely distant objects of a broad but quickly satisfied public curiosity that photos in the public domain were ideally suited to reward. One way to expose the silences (or invisibilities) that structured the processes of fact collection and narration is to examine the photo books that constituted a major outlet for the government archive as well as a more enduring record than the

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traveling exhibits or magazines. With one misattributed and deceptively captioned exception in H. C. Nixon’s Forty Acres and Steel Mules (1938), Jim Crow signs make no appearance in the twelve photo books for which the FSA provided images, including those that made extensive use of the black file. One omission is especially revealing. In 12 Million Black Voices, the collaborative photo book produced by Richard Wright and the FSA photography director, Edwin Rosskam, the eighty-eight photographs that constitute this “picture book of negro life” (sic) do not include a single FSA photograph of a Jim Crow sign.19 This was not an oversight: Wright had expressed interest in these images, some of which were probably included in the original sample Rosskam presented to enlist his participation in the project and all of which would have been included in the full FSA file Wright consulted in Washington, DC, in preparation for the project early in 1941. Prompted most likely by these images, Wright makes explicit and repeated reference to segregation signs in his text: “in public places their signs read: for colored and for white,” “the old familiar signs: for colored and for white.”20 These passages call out for illustration, but despite the close association between image and text elsewhere in the project, the closest depiction of the language of the signs is a photograph taken by Wright himself (the only one in the book) of a “Just Opened to Colored” sign in Brooklyn. As Martha Jane Nadell points out, this photograph works well in its textual location, which is Wright’s denunciation of profiteering in the urban North by the “Bosses of the Buildings” who buy properties abandoned by whites in order to subdivide and rent them at exorbitant rates to migrants from the South; but the opportunity to illustrate the description of racial signage in the South, an opportunity for which the photographs were already available, is renounced.21 Because the list of topics attached to the FSA requisition form includes the specification of “Jim Crow signs,” Rosskam or Stryker or some other government authority must have determined to withhold these images. This level of resistance is especially surprising because the book includes more obviously disturbing photographs, especially one, borrowed from the Associated Press/Wide World Photos, of a lynching in Georgia.22 As Natanson argues, the FSA may have preferred to outsource the book’s most controversial images, but beyond this general caution there may have been a specific anxiety on the federal agency’s part about displaying scenes of racial inequality in which the federal government was implicated, indirectly via Plessy and directly through its own discriminatory practices; segregation was harder than lynching to cast as a remote regional aberration. Once again, and counterintuitively, the horrific lynching photographs had greater visibility than the comparatively banal segregation images. Ironically, when the perception of the photographs’ banality eventually displaced anxiety about their controversiality, they became vulnerable to a different kind of oversight. When 12 Million Black Voices was reprinted in 1988, the original omission of segregation signage was remedied by an FSA-OWI photograph of “a rest stop for Greyhound bus

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passengers on the way from Louisville, Kentucky to Nashville, Tennessee, with separate accommodations for colored passengers” by Esther Bubley, but the new publishers inserted the right photograph in the wrong place: it simply replaces, in the midst of the account of Northern economic exploitation, the photograph by Wright that had substituted for it. No longer subject to censorship, segregation photographs were still not seen. A federally sponsored documentary project thus produced a public archive whose most explicit Jim Crow images were shielded from the public gaze. A different set of paradoxes conspired to keep the segregation signs out of the general public’s view even after the documentary movement lost its government mantle and its staff photographers either followed their director to his new corporate home at Standard Oil or turned to the field of photojournalism that, boosted by technological developments in the thirties and energized by the public eagerness for access to the theater of war during the early forties, entered the postwar era with expanded cultural status and scope.23 Within the altered global and domestic climate of the cold war, heightened and highly accessible forms of visuality confronted a contradictory set of pressures produced by the experience and aftermath of war. The negotiations that resulted gave segregation signs a higher level of visibility than they commanded in the government archive, but only in the ephemeral form of a progressive photojournalism directed to a specific audience. In the domain of commercial photojournalism, the wartime inducements to publish patriotic photographs assumed a new guise under the cold-war dictates to discourage politically sensitive images, including those that provided evidence of racial discrimination, which might compromise America’s international prestige and lend fuel to communist charges that had made American racism “a principal Soviet propaganda theme.”24 The pressures that construed social concern as patriotic failure reinforced the mass media’s disinclination to seek out segregation photographs that failed to meet either of the criteria required to secure the two critical goals of corporate sponsorship and national readership: visual excitement and political neutrality. Whereas sensationalistic lynching photographs, which complied with the first criterion, had previously made it onto the pages of Life, as had photographs of the 1942– 43 Detroit race riots, less dramatic images of enduring racial inequalities offered no advantage to a sensation-hungry but politically cautious magazine that, in the words of its founder’s wife, “could not afford to make a statement on a segregated South . . . [because] we understood that the magazine was an escape for an audience that didn’t have time for problems.”25 Segregation signs made no appearance in Life until the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and the escalating racial violence that followed the attempt to desegregate Southern schools forced the subject into the daily media coverage and made it commercially viable. Although some earlier photo essays (notably W. Eugene Smith’s renowned 1951 “Nurse-Midwife”) had addressed some of the economic hardships of African American experience in the South, there

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was no explicit verbal or visual recognition of segregation until the 1956 series “Backgrounds to Segregation” sent Gordon Parks to Alabama. By contrast, the wartime experience did stimulate attention to segregation among the politically awakened and aroused minority that was stung by the absurdity of fighting fascism with a segregated army. The mobilization on behalf of democracy made it increasingly difficult to continue to ignore flagrantly antidemocratic practices at home. Although most sharply perceived by returning African American veterans who had risked their lives for principles from which they did not benefit and who organized under the banner of the Double V campaign for victory at home and abroad, America’s contradictions were also observed by European émigrés such as Walt Sanders and Marion Palfi, who were shocked by their encounter with the signs of American racism in the sanctuary from European fascism.26 As Palfi commented in 1945 in the inaugural issue of Ebony, for which she supplied the cover image and to which she became a regular contributor: “I knew vaguely about discrimination in America but I was shocked to know how deeply rooted it is and I want to use my photographic ability to fight it.”27 Palfi’s involvement with Ebony is of course telling, but before turning to the impact of the illustrated magazines that emerged at the end of the war for an expanded African American readership, it is important to dwell for a moment on the larger publication context her choice of venues illustrates. Palfi’s three-year collaboration with Stetson Kennedy (1946–49), of which the story on the Columbians was one offshoot, was intended to appear in a comprehensive survey, to be titled The Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A, with text by Kennedy and photographs by Palfi. After the manuscript was turned down by every U.S. publisher to whom it was offered, it finally found a publisher in France, where it appeared in 1955 under the title Introduction à l’Amérique raciste in Jean-Paul Sartre’s prestigious series Les temps modernes. Rather than the book publication that would make an enduring American edition available, portions of the illustrated text were published as installments in small-circulation left-wing newspapers and periodicals, including Survey Graphic, The Daily Compass, PM, and the Baltimore Afro-American. As a result, an exceptionally extensive and comprehensive depiction of Jim Crow regulations and signs reached an exceptionally narrow readership. This case was not unusual. The only publications that attempted to get the image of segregation into the public eye in the 1940s addressed a similar audience. The most consistent of these were the African American publications that, in keeping with the black press’s traditional watchdog function, played a vital role in monitoring the proliferation of the signage. Although the widening network of signs had been documented by African American newspapers such as the Southwestern Christian Advocate and the Dallas Express as early as the 1890s, coverage surged at the end of the Second World War, when the rising circulation of newspapers such as the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Baltimore Afro-American

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was complemented by the emergence of picture magazines such as Ebony, Color, Flash, Our World, and Sepia, which offered an alternative to the mainstream magazines such as Life and Look that had begun appearing a decade earlier.28 During this postwar era of heightened political consciousness, there was a less sharp distinction than eventually developed between some of the African American magazines, known primarily for their coverage of social events and celebrities in the black community, and the political commitments and traditions of the activist black press. Relying increasingly on the visual image, both formats provided employment for black photojournalists who, with a few notable exceptions, were rarely hired by the mainstream media, and both addressed a readership that, primarily concerned with the events within its own community, also wanted to be apprised of the latest outrages inflicted by the larger society. There was no need to inform such readers of the basic existence of the segregation signs of which they were all too painfully aware; rather, the goal was to call attention to novel or excessive and potentially actionable instances to mobilize protest or at least to sharpen awareness. The drive was investigative rather than documentary and directed toward the exceptional rather than the commonplace. As indicated by the scanty five Jim Crow photographs in the NAACP photo archive, one of which is accompanied by a letter requesting the NAACP director, Walter White, to bring the offensive item to the attention of local officials, and another of which was published, with an X across the front, in the NAACP’s Crisis magazine, the prospect of making a difference was a crucial incentive to counter the reluctance to photograph the signs. Especially in the North, the black press offered that opportunity, publishing photographs embedded in narrative and commentary that contextualized the advent of particular signs, presented as specific provocations rather than generic illustrations. Because the photographs appeared in the category of news, there was often a particular arc to their presentation, such as before-and-after shots of sites from which the signs had been removed. “Here’s what protests in the right places can do,” reads a caption to such a pair in a 1946 Chicago Defender story about the camera’s success in calling the county prosecutor’s attention to a “We Solicit White Trade Only” sign on a New Jersey diner. There were also sequential stories that traced the progress of the protest, as in a series launched by Skippy Adelman’s photograph of the “startling discovery” reported in a story by the Defender’s New York bureau reporter. The photograph shows a “Colord [sic] Crew Only” sign painted on the lavatory of the Francis Scott Key, a ferryboat to the Statue of Liberty (who holds her torch above a scenario sufficiently compelling to bring about the boat’s retirement from the line). Follow-up stories track the removal of a similar sign on the ferry that replaced it and a reprise of the entire story in the New York Post.29 A somewhat different situation pertained for African American photographers based in the South, where Jim Crow signs were the rule rather than the exception,

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and where reprisals were severe. As Alex Rivera, an award-winning North Carolina photojournalist and Southeastern correspondent for the Pittsburgh Courier, explains, although he personally “was never beaten, just threatened,” African American photographers were routinely attacked and their cameras smashed for simply being present at a scene.30 Like the better-known incidents of African American photographers who were beaten for covering the civil rights movement, events that made it into the news because the violence of the surrounding scene attracted media attention, the mere documentation of the signs themselves, and especially of “White Only” signs, provoked retaliation for what was perceived as an act of insubordination, a presumptuous assertion of a point of view. It took only a snapshot of a Coke machine with “White Customers Only” painted by the coin slot to provoke the arrest of the photographer, Preston E. Stewart Jr., dean of men at Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee, on charges of disorderly conduct.31 African American photographers who were based in the North and assigned to cover racial issues in a region whose codes were unfamiliar to them elicited some of the most violent responses. (Nonprofessional photographers like Milt Hinton, who restricted himself to taking pictures of his friends and fellow performers, were on considerably safer ground.) When Gordon Parks, dispatched to Alabama by Life magazine in conjunction with its series “The Background of Segregation,” finally arrived safely back in New York after eluding the hostile whites who had tracked him around Choctaw County for two weeks, he finally believed that “hell had come to an end.” He was not exaggerating. When two Life editors returned to Choctaw County after the story was published—to try to undo some of the damage that it had inadvertently inflicted on an African American family that had been run out of town for talking openly with Parks—they were informed by local whites in no uncertain terms of the risks that Parks had narrowly escaped: “If we’d a got that nigger who took them pictures,” announced the “head lady,” backed by men with rifles, “we’d a tarred and feathered him and set him to fire.”32 Parks’s position as a staff photographer for a national magazine was unusual, and his photographs are thus uncharacteristically available. Most African American photojournalists worked as freelancers and stringers rather than as staff photographers or syndicated members of the major newspaper agencies, and their images are rarely included in the easily searchable archives of international news photo agencies. Those who achieved sufficient recognition to mount retrospective exhibits or publish volumes of their work, such as Cecil J. Williams or Ernest C. Withers, have made a number of memorable images available. Yet even these collections contain only a few depictions of the signs, so we must reprise two questions in this altered context: What, beyond an intimidation that does not seem to have succeeded, accounts for the paucity of this record? And what has become of this record within the emerging canons of African American photography?

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One way to begin to answer these questions together is to trace the extension into the present of the ambivalence at the time. Just as African American citizens routinely attempted to navigate paths that circumvented the signs, African American photographers had to navigate a course between recording and ignoring their affront. “We were just glad to see them go,” Alex Rivera responded to an inquiry about the scanty documentation of Jim Crow; his own work focused instead on scenes of black agency, such as school desegregation struggles and lynching protests.33 Rivera’s point of view suggests a more pervasive set of assumptions that if the camera, which “offered power to people who found too little of it elsewhere,” was not deployed journalistically to make a record of African American political resistance, it should be used artistically to make a record of African American cultural achievement.34 As a result, once the signs had finally come down, their documentation by African American photographers received limited exposure. In pictorial histories of the African American experience, including those authored or coauthored by African Americans, the photographs of signs, which are invariably clustered in the post– World War II period in order to demonstrate both the necessity and the success of the civil rights movement, are almost entirely by white photographers and are typically culled from the FSA-OWI archive or the images made by its former staff members.35 Conversely, the histories of black photography that began to be written in the 1980s have largely ignored the record of the signage made by black photographers. Through a circular process, photographs that were taken under conditions that made them occasional images have been confined within that category by the reluctance to grant them a niche within the evolving canons of African American photography. For although, as we have seen, there is now considerable interest among African Americans in reclaiming and thereby redefining the actual Jim Crow signs, there has been little interest in recovering the visual testimony of those whose own subjection to the regime, inevitably registered along with the transgressive act of photographing it, seems to have made repossession more difficult. As numerous scholars have documented, from the origins of daguerreotype technology in the mid-nineteenth century, a long and strong tradition of African American photography has encompassed multiple genres and locales, from the studio to the street, from the private to the public sphere, from social affirmation to political critique. The camera used extensively by whites to document black oppression has been used far more extensively by blacks to document resistance to oppression, either directly, as what Deborah Willis calls a “tool of social consciousness” that bears witness to a proud history of social-justice movements, or indirectly, as a tool of aesthetic recognition that bears witness to the integrity of African American culture.36 No one has charted these many facets of African American photography more compellingly than Willis herself, whose 2000 exhibition “Reflections in Black” offers

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a counterarchive to the lynching photographs exhibited that same year. As Robin D. G. Kelley explains in his foreword to the catalog, the inclusion of only one Jim Crow photograph is not accidental:

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The camera became a mighty weapon in the hands of pioneering black photographers. . . . [It] was used to create counterimages of African-American life—images of dignity, pride, success, and beauty. . . . Most of the men and women responsible for visually documenting black America were not simply obsessed with race. As modern visual poets, they were equally concerned with locating and reproducing the beauty and fragility of the race, the ironic humor of everyday life, the dream life of a people. . . . Although racism certainly circumscribed their lives, their interior world was far more meaningful to them than the rantings of a white-robed Grand Wizard or the visible signs of Jim Crow.37

More than simply absent, the “visible signs of Jim Crow” are (with the single exception of Ernest C. Withers’s photograph of the segregated Memphis bus station, figure 26 in the previous chapter) absented from this volume. How, then, have these signs achieved visibility? If white Southerners didn’t see them, and white Northerners saw them in either spasmodic or generic ways, if government agencies found them too controversial and commercial magazines too pallid, if the African American photojournalists who defied the prohibition on seeing them produced a marginalized body of circumstantial images, how has a mental image been lodged in the Western memory museum? Visual memories, as numerous scholars have contended, are constructed through organizing schema.38 Photographs that delineate the shape of social concepts, that evoke generic rather than specific structures, are most likely to become markers of collective memory. The most famous photographs are the most emblematic, the style that, in contrast to the photojournalistic strategies adopted by the left-wing press, emerged in mainstream journalism as yet another feature of the postwar era.39 The photograph’s shift from an ancillary illustration of the written word to a self-contained emblematic image can be attributed, according to Barbie Zelizer, to the production and reception contexts of the atrocity photographs that came to encapsulate the distinctive horrors of the Second World War. The images that gained hold on the cultural imagination, she contends, purged the particular and contingent features of the concentration camps to distill their abstract and universal form, a goal discernible both within the composition of the image and in the nondescriptive language of captions that refrained from specifying the time, location, or identity of their subjects. A photograph of liberated prisoners at a specific camp and time, for example, would appear under a generic caption that designated neither, and a photograph of survivors in the Buchenwald barracks could be reprinted to commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz. Through the definition and recirculation of selected photographs, the “image of record” was abstracted into “the image of memory.”40

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An analogous, if less dramatic, process unfolded concurrently in the representation of the racial signs that were already so condensed that they lent themselves to summary by a few iconic images. The Northern white photographers responsible for Jim Crow’s most resonant postwar representation were far less acutely aware than their African American counterparts of the scope and specificity of segregation’s injuries, but they were more fully prepared to encounter the signs than their predecessors in the thirties had been, in part because of the prior visual record. This second wave of photographs by liberal outsiders was designed less to register the existence of the signs than to consolidate a cultural perception by evoking a symbolic structure. By abstracting a generic shape from specific instances, including previous photographic instances, such images acquired the status of myth. This was of necessity a gradual process since, as Umberto Eco explains, an image becomes a myth when it surpasses its particular circumstances and “refers to other images that preceded it or that, in imitation, have followed it,” but the process was further delayed in this case because of the resistance to publishing segregation photographs until the years following Brown.41 Nevertheless, emblematic photographs were made, and made available for posterity, primarily under the auspices of the “world’s most prestigious” and distinctive photo agency, founded in New York in 1947.42 Magnum was an international consortium of independent photojournalists who worked together to preserve their independence from commercial magazines by retaining copyright of their images and piggybacking on their commissioned assignments to pursue their own photographic projects. Driven by the desire to be the eyes of the world, to capture its defining structures and (to cite Henri Cartier-Bresson, its most illustrious founder) its “decisive moments,” Magnum became the repository of some of the most powerful images of the second half of the twentieth century, a storehouse that would consistently be tapped in the construction of cultural memory.43 The foundational structure of American racism was a subject of considerable interest among several of the American photographers Magnum recruited from the 1950s through the 1970s, especially Elliott Erwitt, Bruce Davidson, Leonard Freed, and Danny Lyon (who became the official photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC] in 1962). As the civil rights movement heated up in the sixties and seventies, their photographs became increasingly pointed and political, but they were also often overshadowed by the swelling media coverage of spectacular and typically violent scenes. It was easier to distill the emblematic structures of Jim Crow during the more quiescent 1950s, which Elliott Erwitt succeeded in doing particularly well in a defining pair of drinking-fountain photographs whose symbolic function is reflected in part by their shared and nondescriptive caption: “North Carolina, 1950” (figures 29 and 30). Reproduced widely, the second image has become the most frequently demanded photograph in Magnum’s extensive civil rights archive.44 It has also become, I would

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Figures 29 and 30. North Carolina, 1950. © Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos, Inc.

argue, the iconic Jim Crow photograph, the counterpart for the deep structure of racial inequality to Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother” for the Depression, Joe Rosenthal’s “Old Glory Goes Up on Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima” for World War II, Nick Ut’s “Terror of War” (the photograph of the napalmed girl) for Vietnam, the photograph of a hooded Iraqi prisoner precariously balanced on a box for Abu Ghraib, or the image of the man suspended in midflight in his leap from the Twin Towers for 9/11. Although, as the next chapter shows, the pair of drinking-fountain photographs reflects a particular mode and moment of liberal white 1950s racial ideology, one or the other has not only been included in virtually every textbook account of segregation but has also been selected as a defining image by some key African American cultural institutions: by Ebony as the beginning of the final installment of its series “Negro History” (August 1962), for example, and most significantly, especially given the photographs’ North Carolina setting, by the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, which projects an enlarged version of the second photograph onto the screen that divides the auditorium, into which visitors are initially ushered, from the main exhibit. When the screen rises after an orientation video, visitors enter the museum together through an open space in which they encounter a replica of the unequal fountains represented in the image: a corrective, from the site of the civil rights museum, to the separate-but-equal gateway to the

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“Field to Factory” exhibit at the national museum. What is striking, however, given Birmingham’s own iconic status as a site of traumatic civil rights iconography (some of which—the attack dogs unleashed by the police, the four little girls murdered in the 16th Street Church—is commemorated nearby the museum), is the decision to transcend the specificity of the local in favor of a universalizing gateway image that could epitomize Jim Crow.45 The conditions of iconicity derive in part from the binary structure of segregated drinking fountains, whose juxtaposition taps readily into ingrained ways of ordering experience. The formal simplicity, even abstraction, of these particular images distills that structure into a clear and memorable shape. The photographs, especially the one that includes a human subject, possess the “power of epic concentration” that allows an image to become iconic by condensing “the tragedy of history into a single arresting moment.”46 If we compare these with Walt Sanders’s photograph of the woman on a bench under a “Colored” sign (see figure 22), which also possesses the power of epic concentration, we recognize that historical tragedy must also be culturally particularized. The problem with iconic images is that this tragedy resides beyond the intervention of a viewer who is cast as a sorrowful witness of an irremediable past. Such images devolve too easily into substitutes for, rather than vehicles of, social and political memory. Against that entropic slide, we can resitu-

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ate these iconic images in the broader spectrum of photographs taken at particular sites whose changing representations suggest the agency that did and does exist in negotiating a point of view toward even the most seemingly intractable divisions. None seemed more intractable than the segregated restrooms and drinking fountains whose aura of inevitability rested on the foundation of sexual difference. Rather than supporting the convergence or homology between these binary divisions, however, the photographic record shows how sexual difference destabilized the image of racial difference as both became intensely negotiated terms.

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Part II

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Race and Space

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Restroom Doors and Drinking Fountains Perspective, Mobility, and the Fluid Grounds of Race and Gender I see two dingy little rooms with “for ladies” swinging over one and “for colored people” over the other while wondering under which head I come. Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South, 1892

I recall riding with Mom and Dad when I was eleven and not being able to go to a rest room because the doors were marked white women and white men. Sometimes we found one marked colored, meaning that it was used by black men, women, and children.

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Cecil J. Williams, Freedom and Justice, 1995

In a bold variation on its “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaign, the Regional Council of Negro Leadership designed a bumper sticker in the early 1950s— “Don’t Buy Gas Where You Can’t Use the Rest Room”—that attempted to pressure white station owners into letting African American customers use the facilities. The campaign testified to the urgency of gaining access to public restrooms; its failure attested to white resistance to sharing not only intimate physical space but also the symbolic space of sexual difference that is fundamental to culture. The more aggressive tactics of the Freedom Riders in the following decade were required to drive a wedge into those social and symbolic spaces, but the bumper sticker marked a significant if utopian step in both exploiting and exposing the circuitry of gender, race, and mobility that Jim Crow signs declared, and decorum kept from view. The photographers who traveled these same Southern routes also sought to make these networks visible. For if locomotion, whether fueled by gas or (for pedestrians) water, requires stopping for intake and output at stations where the regulatory structures of race and gender intersect, these stopping points mobilize representational as well as political action. The composite picture these photographers cre123

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ated set these immobilizing structures in motion by demonstrating their variability across time and space and their vulnerability to the camera’s lenses. The intermixture of race and gender variables—in the composition of the signs and of the photographic corps—makes these stopping points particularly fluid representational ground. In their most straightforwardly documentary mode, the photographs make visible the gender asymmetries of the actual signage (as opposed to its imaginative reconstruction). These asymmetries, and the cultural histories they both reflect and motivate, exert special pressure on the sign for women. The political pressure brought by African American women was single-minded; the photographic pressure, by contrast, was overdetermined by misogyny as well as egalitarianism, making a gendered point of view hard to distill from the photographic record. That difference in perspective emerges in the differential treatment of men’s and women’s restrooms: whereas “White Women” signs were photographed intermittently by both men and women from the 1930s through the early 1960s, “White Men” signs were photographed exclusively by white men and primarily during the period of the signs’ dismantling, when they were beginning to succumb to a political pressure of which photographs were more witness than agent. “Colored Men” signs— such a defining category in the white imagination—were photographed surprisingly infrequently, and almost entirely by women who were less concerned with pinning the category to its representatives than with juxtaposing it with other signs. White America’s vivid mental image of “colored men” derives not from the signage that imposed these terms but from photographs that transposed them to the segregated drinking fountains. Taken exclusively by Northern white men, these photographs reinforced a national imaginary in which the feminine position was represented by black men.1 From asymmetries within the signage for gender, re-presented through the lenses of gender, two fundamental scenarios emerged: African American men bowed beneath an implicitly gendered “Colored” sign; and African American women pressed against an explicitly racialized “Women” sign. These scenarios were both cause and effect of distinct representational histories. At stake in the depiction of signage for women were the boundaries of gender, destabilized through the juncture of race and waste, and renegotiated by the camera’s extension of the visual frame to embrace contradictions and contiguities. Whereas these strategies remained relatively constant across a period bracketed by legal and social initiatives, the photographic choices elicited by the more stable binary of the drinking fountains unfold along a temporal rather than spatial axis. The history of white men looking at black men beneath the “Colored” fountain sign tracks the evolution of racial ideologies and photographic practices across the middle decades of the twentieth century. This history, however, must be complicated by the other points of view that female and black photographers brought to the drinking fountains. Restrooms and drinking fountains were so rigidly segregated because they are

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sites at which fluids circulate and threaten to contaminate; these sites become visually arresting through the tension between functions typically withdrawn from social view and the attention they draw by their restrictive labeling. The photographers who interrupted their own circulation through the social body to document these segregated stopping points transformed them into backdrops for a changing cast of characters: that is, into junctures through which history flows. Little is stationary in the photographic archive of these rest stations, but to gauge what is both gained and lost by this fluidity, we must begin with a retrospective vision that stabilizes the structure.

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• • •

Using cinema’s narrative resources to translate a journey in space into a journey in time arrested at a developmental crossroads, Tim Reid’s 1996 film adaptation of Clifton L. Taulbert’s memoir Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored (1989) revisits the time and place of the Regional Council’s bumper sticker through the lens of psychoanalysis, rather than activism, in order to reimagine the symbolic register. In a wrenching scene of instruction Reid inserts into the film, Poppa initiates his five-year-old grandson, Cliff, into the construction of race in the Mississippi Delta in the early 1950s. Cliff, who has scampered to use the bathroom in a filling station on one of their Saturday morning car trips beyond the “colored” section of Glen Allan, is stopped by a white attendant who points censoriously to the “White Only” sign on the bathroom door, which the child cannot read. Poppa then takes upon himself the burden of teaching Cliff to decode the racial formation of the universe “uptown.” Reading and racialization are mutually constitutive: to comprehend racial difference, Cliff must enter the symbolic register, but the price of entry is submission to the racial regime. Initials are the instrument of initiation: writing the first letters of the words white and colored on two halves of a piece of paper folded down the center, Poppa teaches Cliff how to position himself in relation to the Jim Crow signs on the bathroom doors. That reading race is a prerequisite to reading oneself is reiterated in the next scene, in which Poppa teaches his grandson how to recognize his name by writing Cliff (which begins with the same letter as colored) on the magic pad the boy selects as his weekend treat at the white-owned toy store. Although Cliff ’s name disappears when Poppa lifts the top sheet, enacting the signature’s tenuous purchase on the body, the racial order remains absolute. Reid makes its disciplinary apparatus terrifyingly explicit in the culminating scene of this sequence—a policeescorted Ku Klux Klan march through town—but also reveals, by resignifying the initials W and C, how this order gains authority as a system of signs. By redefining the water closet, the classic site of sexual difference, as the site of racial difference, Reid suggests that race, not sex, is the gateway to the symbolic register. By dramatizing how racial signs are interposed between the needs of the body and their cultural relief, Reid revisits another scene of instruction that similarly piv-

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ots on bathroom doors, set during the same decade but on different cultural turf: Jacques Lacan’s famous anecdote of juxtaposed “Ladies” and “Gentlemen” signs viewed by two children on an imaginary train ride through rural France in 1957. In Lacan’s narrative, a brother and sister (there is no comparable symmetry for race) seated opposite one another as a train pulls into a station misread the signs on the restroom doors as the name of the station stop. “Look,” says the brother, “we’re at Ladies!” “Idiot!” replies his sister, “can’t you see we’re at Gentlemen?” Illustrated by a sketch of symmetrical doors (figure 31), the narrative serves to mock a naively referential view of language, but the choice of signs to illustrate the barring of the signifier from the signified is also designed to assert the universality of sexual difference, severed from biology, as a transhistorical, nonnegotiable, cultural law: “The image of the twin doors symbolizing, through the solitary confinement offered Western Man for the satisfaction of his natural needs away from home, the imperative that he seems to share with the great majority of primitive communities by which his public life is subjected to the laws of urinary segregation.”2 In some imaginary space of “home,” Lacan suggests, “natural needs” unmarked by culture might be generated and assuaged by polymorphously perverse bodies; but in the public world “away from home,” sexual difference is enjoined as a penitential structure exacting strict compliance. We must all line up for “solitary confinement” according to the cultural “imperative” of gender. This confinement is enabling as well as constraining, however. Marking a threshold within an anthropological as well as a psychoanalytic narrative, the door that both inscribes sexual identity on the body and hides that body’s natural functions from the eyes of the opposite sex draws a boundary not only between masculine and feminine, childhood and adulthood, and private and public spheres, but also between nature and culture, the animal kingdom and the social realm whose outer reaches extend to and end with the urinary structures of “primitive communities.” Reid rewrites the Lacanian symbolic to assert the foundational status of race, but Lacan had already conscripted the language of racial division to underwrite the metaphor of sexual law. By invoking “the laws of urinary segregation” (“les lois de la ségrégation urinaire”), Lacan imports into the hyperbole of gender legislation the racial meaning of the term ségrégation that had entered French usage a few years earlier.3 Reid and Lacan evoke each other’s models to bolster the foundational status of their own. The transposition entails certain elisions: Reid erases sexual difference within race by presenting the restroom signs as simply “White” and “Colored”; Lacan overlooks the ways the literal and brutal laws of racial segregation undermined, rather than reinforced, the primacy of the sexual division. Neither addresses the intersections of competing symbolic systems that disrupt as well as mimic one another.4 To engage with these disruptions, we must turn from foundationalist models to the material history of restroom signs. For the exhibit “Jim Crow: Racism and Re-

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Figure 31. From Écrits: A Selection, by Jacques Lacan, translated by Alan Sheridan. Copyright © 1966 by Editions du Seuil. English translation copyright © 1977 by Tavistock Publications. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

action in the New South, Richmond, 1865–1940,” the Valentine Richmond History Center in Virginia suggestively clustered several signs from the collection of Dr. Thomas Bridge (figure 32). We recognize at the top the sign at the center of the first illustration of Jim Crow signs (see figure 4): the often-reproduced 1929 L&N railroad sign whose symmetrical disposition of racial difference provides a historical instance of Reid’s fictional account. The racial binary is doubled by gender in the cluster of four decorative enamel signs from the 1940s, the pair “White Women” and “White Men” complementing the pair “Colored Men” and “Colored Women” that were instrumental to the plantation ambiance of Jan Lindenberger’s catalog Black Memorabilia around the House. The set of three keys marked “Colored men,” “White men,” and “White women” from the 1900s, which arguably provide keys to the social structure they unlock, suggest a different story. Although the key to the door for the “colored women” restroom may have simply been lost, its absence points to a more fundamental loss that is also suggested by a photograph of bathroom doors at a rest stop on another journey through the segregated South. Esther Bubley’s 1943 photograph of a Greyhound station in Nashville, part of a 445-photograph series sponsored by the Office of War Information to document the transportation facilities available for soldiers, both recalls Lacan’s diagram and throws its gender symmetry into crisis (figure 33).5 The “Colored Men” sign on the left-hand door is matched only by an unmarked door on the right. Presumably an exit, in the rhetoric of the image the door assumes the status of a question mark. What is the counterpart or other of “colored” men: “colored women” or “white men”? Where are the restrooms for African American women? On the other, unrepresented, side of this structure? Indoors, adjacent to where the bathrooms for white women presumably are? Does race or gender play the more decisive role in assigning the position of African American women? The larger racial sign only compounds the ambiguity. In the “rear” of what is the “colored dining room”? Behind the “white” dining room (where it would already have been seen by customers walking behind the main structure to use these “separate accommodations”)? Behind the structure on which the sign is placed (where there appears to be no space for it)? As if to compensate for this directional confusion, the sign overlays visual on verbal indicators, running a dark bar through the word dining and depicting a dark oval in the lower

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Figure 32. Restroom sign and keys from the collection of Dr. Thomas Bridge. Exhibit group from “Jim Crow: Racism and Reaction.” Courtesy Valentine Richmond History Center, Richmond, Virginia.

left-hand corner, two standard icons denoting “colored” space. Yet these visual redundancies do nothing to redress the ambiguities of location. The juxtaposition of front and rear with the lateral structure of gender was an especially disturbing feature of segregation’s geography in the eyes of another observer. Cleveland Sellers writes, “I yearned to live in a world where I would never again be confronted with restroom signs saying, white ladies to the right and colored women to the rear.”6 The absence of other references to this precise and painful wording suggests that it may reflect not so much direct observation as insight into an unspoken logic. By transposing onto gender the spatial disposition of public transportation—“Whites will be seated from the front, colored from the rear”—the phrasing reconfigures the symmetry of left and right, which models racial on sexual difference, as a distinction between front and rear that insinuates a difference within gender. It is not just that “white ladies” are contrasted to “colored women,” a standard rhetorical distinction that has made woman, prior to its recent reclamation, an aversive term among African Americans.7 Rear further degrades by alluding to an ungendered body part as well as a location. But why is this offense recalled for women in particular; why is this the wrong that must be righted?

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Figure 33. A rest stop for Greyhound bus passengers on the way from Louisville, Kentucky, to Nashville, Tennessee, with separate accommodations for colored passengers, September 1943. Photograph by Esther Bubley. FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress.

The affront of the address to “colored women”—most often as a shocking absence, a gaping hole in the symbolic structure—is a prominent and pervasive memory of Jim Crow, as the epigraphs to this chapter reveal. Instead of the equitable public face presented by the four decorative restroom signs in the Valentine Richmond History Center’s display, only three options—“White Men,” “White Ladies,” and “Colored”—routinely confronted African Americans. The encounter with this triad was a radicalizing moment for Northern activists who traveled South and a pivotal experience for African Americans who came of age in the South.8 Like the white sexual abuse of black women, the insult to black femininity registered as strongly for black men as for women, and was presumably intended to do so. African Amer-

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icans widely regarded racial affront at the restroom door as an assault on sexual difference that was not the emasculation that became the overriding issue in the white male imagination, but rather a repudiation of black femininity: the insulting fact that “black women got no more favors than black men, no luxury of making distinctions.”9 The deplorable conditions of the single “colored” restroom, typically located behind or beneath the main building, were a particular assault on women, not only at the level of the senses—“The water on the floor come almost to the top of your shoes. You could smell the toilets soon as you started downstairs. Very seldom a lady would go down there because it was so filthy”—but also at the level of the subject stripped of gender and a community stripped of a defining cultural structure.10 Removing the signs of sexual difference from the bathroom doorways whose labels, as Lacan suggests, delineate a threshold between nature and culture meant keeping that gateway closed, consigning the bodies behind the ungendered door to an undifferentiated biological domain that is as much a subhuman outside as a prelapsarian home prior to the law of gender. And yet, of course, that threshold was closed only away from home. For African Americans in the South, being “away from home” had the opposite effect from the Lacanian children’s ride: it meant being denied, not condemned to, sexual difference and the distinctions it confers. By substituting racial for sexual difference as if they were equivalent instead of antithetical, Reid’s rendition of Cliff ’s encounter with the “White” and “Colored” signs suggests an accession to culture, in however inferiorized a position, that is imaginable only if colored equals masculine. There is a historical basis for this assumption: segregated bathrooms originated in workplaces for men in the 1910s.11 “White” and “Colored” signs on outhouses and privies at factories, construction sites, and loading docks needed no gender designation. Racial difference referred to men, sexual difference to whites. But several decades before the restrooms themselves were segregated, along the routes on which race, gender and mobility were first negotiated, African American women had begun to exert pressure on the terms from which they were excluded. The great majority of the legal antecedents to the Plessy case resulted from suits filed in state courts by African American women. Following the precedents of Vera E. Miles’s 1867 suit against the West Chester and Philadelphia Railroad Co. for forcing her to move to the back of the railway car, which produced the first reported and highly influential judicial sanction of the separate-but-equal doctrine on public transportation, and Anna Williams’s 1870 suit against the Chicago and North Western Railroad for denying her access to the first-class “ladies’ ” car, the numerous suits filed by African American women (most notably Ida B. Wells) in the three decades prior to the Supreme Court’s Plessy ruling reveal that women preceded men as the most visibly injured and combative early victims of racial discrimination on public transportation.12 Middle-class African American women on public transportation in the second

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half of the nineteenth century experienced segregation as a denial of (class-based) gender privilege. Refused seating on the first-class “ladies’ ” cars reserved for white women and their male escorts, African American women were forced to ride in dirty, smoke-filled second-class cars, which were frequently only partitioned sections of the baggage cars located directly behind the engine and crowded with rowdy men. Ironically, the system designed to insulate white ladies from black men made black women its unintended foremost victims. Hence Frederick Douglass’s eloquent protest that a Southern railway conductor “may order the wife of the Chief Justice of the United States into a smoking-car, full of hirsute men and compel her to go and listen to the coarse jests of a vulgar crowd” defends African American womanhood through recourse to the same (classed) gender ideology (minus the racism) as that of white segregationists who argued that “a man that would be horrified at the idea of his wife or daughter seated by the side of a burly negro in the parlor of a hotel or at a restaurant cannot see her occupying a crowded seat in a car next to a negro without the same feeling of disgust.”13 Denied the benefits of this gender ideology, African American women gained access to the publicly designated space of lady only if they did not claim that title for themselves. Under the so-called nurse’s exemption excepting “nurses attending children of the other race” from the separate-car law, black nursemaids of white children could ride in the “ladies’ ” cars to enable white women to enjoy their privileges as ladies.14 With cruel irony, the gender-segregated cars from which African American women were expelled were in turn invoked to justify racially segregated cars. Court rulings endorsing separate-car laws often cited gender separation as a model for racial segregation that denied gender distinction to one race. In overturning Vera Miles’s lower-court victory, for example, the state Supreme Court of Pennsylvania cited the analogy of the “ladies’ ” car, which is “known upon every well-regulated railroad” and whose “propriety is doubted by none.” Because gender segregation “implies no loss of equal right on the part of the excluded sex,” the court argued successfully, couldn’t a carrier “separate passengers by any other well-defined characteristic than that of sex?”15 Whites in this analogy are equated, astonishingly, with the subordinate rather than the dominant gender; “white only” cars, like “ladies’ ” cars, are needed to defend a vulnerable group from unwanted racial or sexual intrusions. Whites effeminized as vulnerable excluders in the racial thrust of the analogy, albeit masculine as the dangerous excluded in the analogy’s sexual scenario, are portrayed as needing protection from the race they dominate. The equation of whites with ladies was strategic and short-lived, however. By the second decade of the twentieth century, white masculinity was firmly resecured, in part by designating African Americans, humiliated for years by Jim Crow regulations, as “the lady among the races,” a characterization that perpetuated, while purporting to acknowledge, the ruthless erosion of their civic status.16 Whereas the denial of gender privileges to black women was a flashpoint for African Americans,

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the denial of gender privileges to black men became a visual obsession for the white male photographers who began traveling south in the 1930s. From the record of segregation they composed, those images that conformed most closely to the preconceptions of the Northern liberal viewers were tapped for publication or exhibit. Doing justice to the larger picture requires delving behind these familiar images, starting with photographs that draw attention to and reinforce the pressure on the feminine.

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• • •

Public bathrooms are as embarrassing as they are necessary. They enable circulation through a social body whose imaginary purity they maintain by managing human waste behind closed doors. These doors must be marked yet kept unremarked, for calling attention to them brings the processes they regulate into public view. When regulated by race as well as by gender, and regulated more emphatically precisely because the racial boundary is more subject to dispute, their rearticulation through the camera’s lens exposes how the processes of biological and social elimination are mapped onto each other. By focusing on “white” rather than on “colored” restroom signs, and almost entirely on signs for white women, the photographic record renegotiates these boundaries at the site where they are most intensively drawn. For the fact that white women go to the bathroom—in Jonathan Swift’s memorable words, that “Celia, Celia, Celia shits”—calls into question their racial, along with their gender, distinction.17 Jim Crow signs that broadcast this embarrassing truth gave photographers openings into weak spots in the social body, sites of maximum contradiction between idealization and corporeality. Even euphemisms designed to distract from the digestive tract offered grist for the camera’s interpretive mill. Women’s bathrooms are verbally distinguished from men’s: whereas the masculine noun is presumed to be selfexplanatory, the feminine is more typically conjoined with the “room” or “restroom” that signals that more than bodily functions are transacted therein, indeed that the narcissistic injury those functions might impose can be repaired cosmetically in front of the mirror. Less euphemistic variations such as “White Women’s Toilet” presented ready opportunities for demystification along lines similar to Swift’s. Territorialized in a way masculinity is not, femininity poses the question, ripe for visual renegotiation, of the capaciousness of the “women’s room.” That question is further delineated by the more finely graduated verbal spectrum in the feminine, especially the distinction between ladies and women, in contrast to the portmanteau men, which gave photographers tools for calibrating degrees of separation between a female body held in common and a feminine ideal. One strategy was to highlight the exclusionary force of the “White Ladies” signs. In a photograph shot from below of a “White Only Ladies Rest Room” sign suspended from the white-columned neoclassical façade of an Ole Miss building, for

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Figure 34. Roadside sign, South Carolina. Photograph by W. D. Workman. W. D. Workman Jr. Papers, Modern Political Collections, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia.

example, white ladies are abstracted into marble columns that eliminate any hint of corporeality. A similar strategy takes a comic form in a photograph of a roadside advertisement for a ladies’ room at a Gulf station in South Carolina (figure 34). By adding eyebrows and eyeballs to the repeating letters at the center of the word look, the ad transforms the address to white female viewers into an image of a crosseyed, self-regarding stare. By advertising segregation along with a standard piece of restroom furniture, the sign converts the mirrors that are everywhere provided for the repair of disarrayed femininity into a figure of racial repair, a narcissistic plenitude unblemished by alterity. The photograph’s reproduction six years later in an Ebony story, “The Birth of

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Jim Crow,” suggests that African American women endorsed the strategy of targeting and ridiculing signs of exclusion. A more common photographic tactic that may have been closer to their priorities, however, was to push for broader representation under the sign for women. A somewhat ambiguous example is a photograph of an African American woman waiting at a doubled sign for women at a Workers’ Alliance Camp in Maryland in 1937. It is not clear from this photograph whether the two signs—each of which presents the single word “Women,” one painted on a bright white background, the other on a shaded one—actually referenced separate toilets or solicited separate populations to a shared facility through a color coding that communicated across literacy levels. The African American woman awaiting her turn makes clear her inclusion in an address to “women,” whose repetition both draws and erodes racial distinction. The potential for such repetition with a difference was exploited as a self-conscious strategy by Marion Palfi, whose perspective as a recent émigré may have made her especially sensitive not only to racial discrimination in general but also to the ways that translations of social categories could undermine the boundaries between those categories. One of her most effective images calls attention to a bilingual “White Women” sign in a Greyhound bus station in Miami in the late 1940s (figure 35). The photograph exposes what is lost—and consequently gained—in the translation: difference enters, virginity erodes, and the contours of whiteness falter. “Señoras Blancas”—most likely an invitation to Spanish-speaking women rather than a way to inform them in their native language that the restroom was out of bounds to them—are a shade of difference away from “White Women.”18 By capturing a moment when a pair of women sits beneath the pair of phrases, with nearly identical postures and expressions, Palfi reiterates the verbal translation in a visual form. On the right, a pale young woman, a platonic ideal of pure white femininity, sleeps. She wears a snowy-white blouse, tied at the neck, and her legs are sheathed in silk stockings. Her luminous oval face, with its arched eyebrows and closed eyes, constitutes (like the face of Kiki it resembles in Man Ray’s famous 1926 photograph Noire et Blanche) an impassive mask that seals her from our gaze. Impenetrable, asleep, eternally virginal in a world beyond time and change, she recalls the fairy tale figures of whiteness—Snow White, Sleeping Beauty—beyond the imprint of history written in the magazine open on her lap. Seated next to her is a middleaged woman, her legs similarly crossed at the ankle, her chin similarly cupped in her hand. This woman has been marked by the passage of time: her eyes are open, her brow is lined, her unstockinged legs are speckled with hair, her dress is open at the throat, her knowing expression registers the impact of the world. Her darker skin and hair color suggest she is Hispanic; but whatever her actual ethnicity, the image names her a señora blanca. Yet to designate a person of Caribbean (presumably Cuban) descent as white, even in a foreign language, is to unsettle the boundaries of whiteness. Adjacent (like Cuba) to the Anglo-American shores figured by

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Figure 35. Bus station, Miami, 1946–49. Photograph by Marion Palfi. Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson.

the sleeping beauty on her left, the señora blanca in Miami is both inside and outside the white mainland. Palfi has captured a scene in which the passage of time, as well as the expansion of space, sets in motion a feminine ideal that can be preserved only if its personification sleeps. From the shadowy background, a third woman looks toward the camera with a slightly furtive gaze. Beside her stands a man who appears to be bending over to drink from a fountain. Whereas the pair of women in the foreground are separated and defended from the masculinity represented by the back of a man’s neck on the opposite side of the bench, the couple in the dark background introduces a narrative dimension, insinuating sexual knowledge or secrets, a more explicitly erotic subsequent stage in the three ages of woman to which the composition alludes. The photograph unobtrusively registers both the restrictiveness and the fictiveness of white femininity. From a position within the space it represents, the photographer questions the point of fortifying a category against differences that are internal to it. In the slow time of this sleepy waiting room, the photograph suggests nonconfrontationally, one person will sit down next to her neighbor, one historical step will follow another, and the African American women toward whom the signifying chain white women–señoras blancas reaches will eventually be incorporated within a feminine space in which gradations of color are inevitably present.

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Figure 36. Untitled (Columbian thunderbolt tattooed on arm of Betty Penland), Atlanta, 1947. Photograph by Marion Palfi. Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson.

This gradualist approach is complemented by the more aggressive stance Palfi takes in the photo essay she composed with Stetson Kennedy about the trial of the Columbians for inciting a riot by beating an African American man in a racially tense neighborhood in 1946.19 Conspicuous in the photographs is the Columbians’ insignia, a thunderbolt derived from Hitler’s SS (the group leaders spoke in German and distributed copies of Mein Kampf ), but Palfi also makes a point of linking the Nazi icon with domestic inscriptions of white supremacy by photographing two of the Columbians against a Jim Crow sign above the drinking fountain in the Atlanta courthouse. By using the sign as the backdrop for a pair of male and female portraits, Palfi writes into the story’s visual language the gender that is absent from its narrative report. I reserve the portrait of the man (figure 45) for the discussion of drinking fountains; the portrait of the blond, Germanic-looking Betty Penland against a “White People Ice Water” sign (figure 36) is worth considering here as a monitory image of the dangers of resisting the spectrum that unfolds in the Miami waiting room. The two parallel phrases of the sign produce the metaphor of whiteness that Palfi has deliberately chosen for her frame. For rather than drink from the fountain (the obvious reason for its presence in the image), Penland poses with her right arm raised, explicitly to reveal her thunderbolt tattoo and implicitly suggesting a Nazi salute. The extended arm registers the consequences of extending to women a white supremacist ideology that assimilates them to the postures of masculinity. Dressed in the group’s paramilitary uniform, this sister of one Columbian leader and fiancée

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of another stages the phallic extension of Aryan femininity. Whereas the sleeping beauty in Miami will be nudged into time by the pressure of local history audible in the translation into Spanish, the Germanic inflection of Jim Crow exacts a performance of racial supremacy that repudiates sexual as well racial difference. The ice water that represents the purity of “white people” appears to run in Betty Penland’s veins, sustaining her arm’s erection in the service of her race. The victims of this ideology, the most inflammatory photograph in this series suggests, are men as well as women of color (figure 37). This photograph positions the object of the Columbians’ attack next to the door for the “white women’s toilet.” The juxtaposition is shocking: whereas posing the man next to a “white men’s toilet” sign would have implicitly attributed the attack to an imagined incursion into the rights of masculinity, the chosen composition inevitably conjures (in a way nothing in the written text supports) the cultural fantasy of a black threat to white femininity. But rather than mobilize these prejudices against their habitual object, the gratuitous inclusion of the Jim Crow sign raises the question of the complicity of white women. Why, the photograph makes us wonder, is this unnamed African American man being framed as a criminal suspect rather than a victim of crime? Why is he posed against a bright white wall lit from above by a flashgun whose brilliance evokes an interrogation lamp? Dutifully turning his upper torso and raising his eyes toward the camera, his stooped head and shoulders suggesting he would prefer to slink away unnoticed, the man is a caricature of black masculinity. His baggy pants, slouching posture, and furtive demeanor seem to confirm his guilty intentions in a shot better suited to D. W. Griffith than to a socially progressive photographer. (Except, of course, that Griffith would not associate white women with the “toilet.”) In this self-reflexive image, by contrast, Palfi redeploys the language of the gutter to express a point of view about the point of view that frames black manhood in a criminal proximity to white women. It is a far too volatile signifying mix, and Palfi cropped the sign when the photograph was prepared for exhibition. As a result, we can only imagine the outrage and anxiety the uncropped image would have aroused in African American viewers. Even without this risky conjunction, however, the “White Women’s Toilet” sign opens a wedge between a photographic strategy that seeks to debunk an idealized white femininity and a political strategy that seeks to extend the full entitlements of gender to African American women. The tension is especially acute when the marginal location of the “White Women’s Toilet” sign aligns its rhetorical force with the position—but not the voice—of African American women. “White Women’s Toilet” names neither the end nor the means of black women’s pressure on the sign for women; the misogynistic overtones of wielding the sign, even in a racially egalitarian cause, would be alien to activists with a stake in preserving, rather than degrading, their dignity as women. The difference in approach is clarified by two photographs: the first provocatively stretches a feminine cultural frame to include a

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Figure 37. Untitled (the victim of the Columbians in Atlanta), Atlanta, 1947. Photograph by Marion Palfi. Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson.

discordant “White Women’s Toilet” sign; the second pits a well-dressed African American lady against an exclusionary “White Women” sign. Without the sign at its edge, “Agricultural Exhibits at North Carolina State Fair, Raleigh, North Carolina, 1931” (figure 38) would be an innocuous photograph of the unsigned domestic arts of women whose divers biographies and bodies are reconstituted as a community of nearly identical jam jars. At the center is a window exhibiting women’s work, lovingly rendered through the play of light on reiterated shapes that draw disparate objects into harmony. Things yield their specificity to a larger aesthetic that composes a motley assortment of plants and preserves, shelves and wires, vegetables and textiles, wood and glass into a unified collective presence. In this material context, we are reminded that the American flag that hangs on the left is itself (our folklore has it) the work of a woman’s mind and hands, and that the alternating bars of dark and light are a material expression of unity in difference, a common national ground. This is what a woman’s America might look, or rather feel, like, a tangible world of touch and taste, jars and stripes, in which individual differences are woven into a common fabric and crowned by a fern, the pyramidal structure of jars culminating not in some singular American beauty, but in a household plant whose multiple prongs are rooted in a common soil. This romantic vision is jarringly recast by the display and disregard of the boundary established by the white wooden post on the right, a boundary whose outside is invariably cropped (my requisition form had to carry the instruction “Do not crop sign at right”) to preserve an unspoiled image of traditional womanhood by

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Figure 38. Agricultural exhibits at North Carolina State Fair, Raleigh, North Carolina, 1931. Courtesy of the North Carolina Office of Archives and History, Raleigh, North Carolina.

realigning the camera’s frame with that of the display window. Shifting the angle of vision to include the “White Womens Toilet” sign reveals that the social fabric woven under the sign of America is not one nation indivisible. The photograph holds together in a single but internally divided frame a gentle embrace of the spectrum of the feminine with a rebuke, administered through the sign’s shock value, to this continuum’s racial constraints. As in Palfi’s photo of the African American man, it is the incongruous diction that jars. Whereas deliberately including (for such a blatant transgression of the architectural frame would have to be deliberate) a sign for “White Women” or “White Women’s Restroom” would be a straightforwardly political outing, and exposing a “Women’s Toilet” sign an arguably misogynist slap in the face, including the “White Womens Toilet” sign is an overdetermined gesture because the racial distinction drawn by the sign is also withdrawn by language that implicitly acknowledges a common female bodily ground. Once evoked, that ground begins to erode the boundary. Bringing into the picture what was meant to be kept outside—a sign that signals both a white female posterior and a nonwhite female exterior—opens to flux the static world enclosed

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by this window. As the margin of the image enters into conversation with the center, the reference to the toilet raises the uneasy prospect that enclosure in the sealed bodies of the jars, as in the jar of the body, is imperfect, that the contents decompose and leak in both directions, changing the complexion of those luminous little jars and undercutting the artistry of their formal structure. The margin of the photograph rebounds against the center through a smear effect in which racial exclusion and bodily waste are signified together. These were hardly the terms African American women deployed on their own behalf when they reentered the public picture after decades of necessarily covert infractions into forbidden spaces. The Freedom Rides that set out from Washington, DC, in May 1961 to test access to public facilities at bus stations across the South reengaged the nexus of mobility, race, and gender that first captured national attention through litigation over the ladies’ car. As in these antecedents, but now with the camera’s support, a specific case for African American women, which ran in tandem with the larger case for the race, was routed through a claim to the status of lady. That historical continuity has been overshadowed, however, by the spectacular violence that met the Freedom Riders as they crossed from Georgia into Alabama, preempting the desegregation plans with the assaults on life and limb that were memorialized in photographs of fire-bombed buses in Anniston and bloodstreaked faces in Birmingham. The brutality of the white mobs and the refusal of local law-enforcement officials to protect the riders and preserve the peace transformed the ground route to Jackson, Mississippi, into an air route to New Orleans. But even after a new contingent from Nashville resumed the original route, the photographic corps that tracked their course to Jackson documented multiple instances of integrated groups, typically being arrested, for entering at both “white” and “colored” waiting rooms, but only a single act of protest at a restroom door. This photograph shows Gwendolyn Jenkins, one of three African Americans who flew down from St. Louis to join the riders in Jackson on June 7, 1961, the first day of what the New York Times dubbed a “Freedom Fly In,” staging her own arrest in front of a white women’s restroom at the Jackson municipal airport (figure 39). Jenkins commands the scene, as her radiant smile suggests, defining womanhood in her own terms outside the gendered doorway that has been closed to her. The policemen who avoid looking either at her or at the camera seem embarrassed by the role that she has summoned them to play. Rather than strive to undermine the category of the lady by showing that its margins compromise its center—not an attractive strategy for those on the outside—Gwendolyn Jenkins appropriates the signifiers of that center. It is because she has staged the scene so carefully that Jackson, the terminus of the Freedom Rides that engendered new Interstate Commerce Commission regulations desegregating facilities for interstate travelers, became a visual terminus of the ride toward the prerogatives of gender that had entered the public eye on nineteenthcentury trains. Clearly a lady who has prepared to be photographed (the Congress

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Figure 39. Police captain J. L. Ray (right) orders the arrest of Gwendolyn Jenkins, Jackson, Mississippi, June 7, 1961. AP/Wide World Photos.

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of Racial Equality had notified the press in advance of their arrival), she has dressed for her part in long white gloves, white blouse and earrings, stockings and heels, and a symbolically freighted black-and-white striped dress. The ladyhood she models is an effect of bearing, attitude, and grooming. The Associated Press photographer collaborates in this effect by separating Jenkins from her two male companions, one of whom staged a similar (but unphotographed) test of the white men’s room, and by capturing her in a quintessential gesture of femininity, smiling disarmingly.20 Along with her black-and-white-checked suitcase, Jenkins carries the weight of a gendered history that the camera seems to recognize instantly.

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• • •

A different gender history is on display at the segregated drinking fountains. Neither the white men and women nor the African American women who also presumably drank from these fountains are visible in the prevailing representations of this scene, which depict the stigma of race only on, or as, the bodies of black men, always vulnerably alone and usually in postures that reiterate the “colored” drinking fountain’s abject shape. By excluding actual female bodies that might weaken the metaphorical relation between colored and feminine, a relation whose force (from the white male photographers’ perspective) resides in the injury inflicted on black men, these photographers construct a drama of masculinity. This drama had its own historical embeddedness, however, manifested through the selection and pairing of drinking fountains and postures that allow us to trace the evolution of Northern racial ideologies from the New Deal liberalism of the late 1930s through the postwar period’s relentless production of a discourse of racial damage that culminated and terminated in the early 1960s, when the rhetoric of damage yielded to a more aggressive civil rights agenda that finally succeeded in bringing down the signs. By taking the thirties as the starting point of Northern encounters with racial signage that, by spelling out victimization also made it available for rearticulation, and by tracing the camera’s increasingly passive report until the activist interventions of the 1960s, this midcentury segment of history also reopens documentary’s defining poles by uncovering some features of a radical practice within (as well as after) the heyday of liberal documentary, represented in chapter 2 by John Vachon’s photograph of the station in Manchester, Georgia (figure 21). Two Farm Security Administration photographs, one of which reveals another side of Vachon, construct the scene of drinking around a single “colored” fountain that allows a more exploratory style than the “white” and “colored” pair. Because it situates a drinking fountain between the horizontal gender signs on restroom doors and complicates this analogy between gender and race with an explicitly racial vertical structure, Russell Lee’s often-reproduced 1939 photograph of a streetcar terminal in Oklahoma City (figure 40) is a good antecedent and antidote to the collapse of the “colored” with the “feminine” position. The photograph

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Figure 40. Man drinking at a water cooler in the streetcar terminal, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, July 1939. Photograph by Russell Lee. FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress.

shows a slender African American man in a white short-sleeved shirt, dark suit pants, and hat, drinking from a “colored” water fountain at a streetcar station at 7:50 a.m. as he waits for the streetcar that will presumably take him to work. His clothing and physique suggest that he holds a service rather than a manual job. Capturing a pause before the beginning of the workday, the image registers a moment of suspension, between gender zones as well as between work and rest, encapsulated in the position of the man’s right hand. Shown in three-quarter profile, the man’s youthful frame, smooth skin, delicate wrist bones, and long eyelashes elude the visual codes of masculinity. His partially extended hand signals a median position between the two directional signals on the rest room signs: the hand pointing to the men’s room with its index finger fully extended, and the hand, cut off at the palm by the photographic frame, pointing to the women’s rooms. Being positioned at the “colored” fountain sign means being positioned somewhere between the signs for “men” and “women.” These signs, printed in bold black letters and mounted symmetrically to the wall, in contrast to the faded, less authoritative “colored” sign tacked to the water fountain, establish a clear horizontal gender axis of a strongly coded photographic grid. But the lateral field of gender is itself split vertically by race. It is possible that the

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bathrooms themselves are not segregated, because the signs may direct both races to the same doors, barred from our vision by a dividing wall; but the structure of the sign clearly asserts a hierarchy of white over black. This hierarchy is reiterated by the lean male body, bisected by a white belt that establishes a color line dividing the white shirt on top from the dark pants below. Although inverted by the cup dispenser’s white cone cup below a long black cylinder, the normative structure is reestablished when the man lifts the cup to his lips to drink; participating in the racial order, however unwillingly, puts one’s body at its signifying service, the slight forward tilt of the man’s neck signaling acquiescence. The photograph’s critical edge derives not from the object of the camera’s gaze but from the photographer’s act of self-positioning. Whether chosen to avoid a physical obstacle or to achieve a vantage point that, unlike a view from behind, would reveal his subject’s dignity as well as vulnerability, the photographer’s position on the “women’s” side of this visual field introduces a tendentious angle of vision. His location both rectifies the “colored” fountain’s proximity to the “women’s” sign by making it appear closer to the sign for “men” and suggests the revisionist potential of the feminine. From this decentered camera angle, in contrast to Lacan’s neutral frontal stance, the symbolic register that orders race and gender is differentially (in)visible. The only entirely legible race-gender term is “White Men.” The M in “Colored Men” is tellingly obscured, and the words on the feminine side of the divide are even more dramatically amputated, transforming the bathroom sign into an anagram that reads as intelligibly vertically as horizontally, presenting for our consideration such plausible near-words as Holo, Imom, Teee, and Endn along the vertical axis, and the linguistic possibilities of Hite, Omen, and Lored along the horizontal axis. The doubling of Omen as the revised version of Women rewrites the second sex as a site of prophecy. These broken words call our attention to writing as a rebus. The relations of language, gender, and race—firmly established and asserted here—are suddenly scrambled and reopened by the camera at the very site of their inscription. Lee’s freedom to play with the racial symbolic, so different from Reid’s more tragic Lacanian perspective, is clearly enabled by his own racial location. It is the photographer, not his subject, who gets to play. That a quizzical stance is also visible (although expressed in different terms) in John Vachon’s “A drinking fountain on the county courthouse lawn” (Halifax, North Carolina, 1938) suggests a historical dimension to this freedom to play (figure 41). By representing a ten-year-old boy at a “colored” drinking fountain on a lawn in front of a courthouse whose imposing white-columned facade recalls the ethos of a plantation, Vachon’s photograph calls into question the dichotomies of house and field, culture and nature, rather than those of gender, but the critical strategy anticipates Lee’s. In the foreground, a prominently featured “Colored” sign tacked to a dark tree trunk boldly declares a color line, but the distance between the sign and the drinking fountain to which it presumably refers calls the system’s foundation into ques-

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Figure 41. A drinking fountain on the county courthouse lawn, Halifax, North Carolina, April 1938. Photograph by John Vachon. FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress.

tion by directing our attention to the gap between the racial signifier and its referent. The location of the sign initially demands that the tree itself be read as colored, a perspective reinforced by the parallel the photograph suggests between the dark, rough-barked, natural shape and its white cultural counterpart, the luminous column singled out by the play of light from the neoclassical facade diagonally to the left. The column’s sleek white marble body, topped by the sculptured leaves of its Corinthian capital, links the artful transformation of nature to culture to the social construction of whiteness. But the converse that is documented here, the projection of a devalued racial sign onto the world of nature, encounters certain difficulties. The sign on the tree that locates color in nature implies a biological source of racial difference, but the possibilities—whether the water in the fountain or the underlying figure of racial blood—resist that ascription of a difference in color. Nature, placed under the sign of race, denaturalizes it. This tacit resistance is echoed in the nearly erect stance and wary gaze of the boy at the fountain. A barefoot boy is thought to be closer to nature than an adult; as a consequence, however, this photograph suggests, he is less fully racialized rather than more. By representing the boy standing upright just before or after bending down to drink, not bowed under the sign of race, but standing to one side and looking back from it, Vachon captures not only the gap between the racial label and the child it designates but

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also, through the intent but guarded stare the child directs at the camera, a mirror image of his own discomfort with the geography of Jim Crow. The boy’s quizzical gaze—the white photographer’s interest seems as much of a mystery to him as the “Colored” sign is to the photographer, who singled this scene out thirty-five years later as marking his “first immersion into the mysterious South”—relays the shock of an encounter with racial boundaries into the photograph itself.21 This shock, and with it the perception of Jim Crow as an arbitrary and thus potentially mutable construction, eroded over the following decade, as the conception of race shifted to the “mark of oppression” that became the prevailing liberal metaphor from the late 1940s through the early 1960s.22 Visible in the increasingly standard juxtaposition of “white” and “colored” fountains and the growing separation between the photographer and his subject, the new construction is encapsulated in three drinking fountain photographs taken by Elliott Erwitt between 1950 and 1963. As we have seen in the preceding chapter, two of these have become iconic images (see figures 29 and 30); now, we can understand more fully why. Racial difference is no longer extruded to a cultural outside, in contrast to Vachon’s photograph, but is firmly incorporated within an interior whose fixtures belie Plessy’s formula. Set off starkly against a bare white wall, the juxtaposed fountains and the system they embody do not seem readily susceptible to change. Their entrenchment is reinforced by a point of view that faithfully reproduces the structure it exposes. Centered and spare, the composition eliminates any information or vantage point that could offer leverage on this racial structure and endows these doubled fountain with the endurance of other binaries, preeminently that of gender. The equipoise of the lateral alignment evokes the stability of gender. And the juxtaposition of the signs’ formal equality with the substantive inequality between the refrigerated “white” cooler and the ancillary “colored” basin, yoked by the extended arm of a drainage pipe that exposes the inferior fountain’s dependency, suggests the social compromise of gender. Lest we overlook the emasculatory meaning this parallel carried for the white photographer, the second of the photographs, for which he presumably waited until an appropriate subject appeared, represents an African American man in a posture of submission that gives human shape to the fountain’s degraded status. The photograph of a Texas courthouse interior that concludes Erwitt’s sequence after a thirteen-year delay (figure 42) both fulfills and critiques the political desire evoked by this pair of images: less to revoke than to actualize the separate-but-equal formula of Plessy. In 1963, nine years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the separate fountains that should have been abolished have now at least been equalized, but the photograph tracks a movement away from, as well as toward, equality.23 If the fountains represented in the 1950 photographs demonstrate (like the segregation cases leading up to Brown) that separate facilities are in practice rarely equal, the equality of the segregated fountains in the third photograph raises the question of principle that the Supreme Court, for the first time since Plessy, de-

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Figure 42. Interior of Williamson County courthouse, Texas, 1963. © Elliott Erwitt/ Magnum Photos, Inc.

liberately addressed in Brown: does segregation intrinsically violate the equal protection of the law, even when (in the language of the court) “the physical facilities and other ‘tangible’ factors maybe be equal”? Through the human body he represents, Erwitt echoes the court’s unequivocal conclusion that separate facilities are “inherently unequal,” that segregation itself inflicts irreparable harm. This man can wheel himself away from the “colored” fountain, past the “white” one, and out of the photographic frame, but not out of the disability implicitly inflicted by the sign of racial privilege. At the other end of the age spectrum from Vachon’s erect and questioning ten-year-old child, Erwitt’s adult man in a wheelchair offers graphic testimony to the court’s assertion that the invisible but indelible scars inflicted on the “hearts and minds” of segregated schoolchildren are “unlikely ever to be undone,” indeed, that they metamorphose over time from psychological into physical wounds that write the long-term crippling effects of segregation on the body.24 By literalizing the metaphor of racial wounds, representing them as biological and unalterable, however, Erwitt also removes them from the social realm and offers as a racial representative an individual who appears incapable of actively pursuing his own redress. His face shrouded in shadow, his shoulders slightly stooped, his left arm resting limply on the side of the wheelchair, this man is visually defined by his status as victim, a status the photograph perpetuates. Representing injury, how-

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ever sympathetically, reinflicts it photographically; the man’s carefully averted eyes suggest that he does not voluntarily or comfortably submit his disability to photographic scrutiny.25 There is no visual alliance here, no mutual surprise at confronting Jim Crow space, no hint of collaborative agency; this image reproduces the race relations it critiques. It does present one whimsical, humanistic figure of mediation: the transparent globe of multicolored gumballs, reminiscent of Zora Neale Hurston’s multicolored miscellany inside the skins of racial difference, which offers a rainbow of possibilities that blur the distinction enforced by the “white” and “colored” fountains on either side.26 But the gap between the unmarked, incorporeal white photographer and the embodied, injured African American object of his gaze can’t be mediated by a figure of internal heterogeneity. Framed by the vertical lines of two pillars, the erect stand of the gumball machine—in front of and a stand-in for the invisible and invulnerable photographer—suggests the phallic stakes of this visual display of inequality. Erwitt maximizes damage to black men in a way that safeguards a savior role for white men, pivoting the gendered connotations of the fountains to the interplay between the masculine photographer and the emasculated object of his gaze. This interplay emerged in force in the aftermath of the massive trauma that World War II inflicted on masculinity. Erwitt’s sequence enacts a strategy that recurred throughout the two decades after the war: displacing physical and psychological wounds onto the bodies of others, especially onto black male bodies, already perceived as unmanned by prejudice. Black men became the carriers of the culture’s survivor guilt, and of the gender angst produced both by the wounds of war itself and by the return of veterans to a civilian society that had shown them to be expendable.27 The discourse of black male crippling, especially the most physicalizing tendencies of what was subsequently termed the “damage hypothesis,” peaked in 1965 in the report The Negro Family produced by Daniel Patrick Moynihan for President Lyndon Johnson, and in President Johnson’s address at Howard University, which Moynihan coauthored, both of which abound with such metaphors as the “scars of centuries,” “open wounds,” and “crippled by hatred.”28 Erwitt’s 1963 photograph constitutes this moment’s ultimate visual form. By the middle of the decade, growing black resistance put an end to the rhetoric of damage. That the culmination of this rhetoric would also be its termination can be glimpsed in an almost contemporary photograph that presents a different picture of racial injury. Although produced a year before Erwitt’s courthouse photograph, Danny Lyon’s 1962 photo inside the country courthouse in Albany, Georgia (figure 43), anticipates a more militant strategy. Whereas Erwitt chooses subjects and objects that evoke both pathos and irrevocability, Lyon documents a manifestation of Jim Crow whose juxtaposition of flagrantly displayed (and illegal) white privilege with a deliberate and gratuitous assault on African American dignity provokes outrage rather than resigned disapproval or sympathy. In this courthouse scene, at the very

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Figure 43. Segregated drinking fountains in the county courthouse, Albany, Georgia, 1962. © Danny Lyon/Magnum Photos, Inc.

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seat of justice—the corner of the bench and chair to the right of the “white” fountain echoing and amplifying its massive authority—a travesty of the separate-butequal formula is entrenched as a piece of legal furniture, a structural component of a system so corrupt that it will have to be dismantled to enable change. The racial order pictured here literally leaves no place for a politics of reform; this diminutive “colored” fountain has not been given the space to achieve even a semblance of equality. If Erwitt’s photographs conform to the liberal documentary mode, in which, according to Martha Rosler, “causality is vague, blame is not assigned, fate cannot be overcome,” Lyon’s photograph, with its explicit assignation of blame and implicit call to action, constitutes a radical documentary practice.29 It is, for Deborah Willis, “the perfect visual metaphor for ‘Jim Crow,” one of the photographs that “helped mobilize the protest movement.”30 A key component of this more radical practice is the dissociation of the segregated fountains from the gender paradigm’s aura of stability and inevitability. By documenting instead drinking fountains whose discrepancy in height implies an adult-child analogy that lacks any pretense of foundation in biology, and whose conspicuous imbalance invites insurgency, Lyon denies Jim Crow one of its legitimating strategies. It is thus not entirely paradoxical that this image of black infantilization was triggered by an emergent black authority. James (Jim) Forman, executive secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that on the other side of town was converting Albany into a center of social revolution, deputized Lyon to take this photograph, which consolidated Lyon’s career as a political photographer.31

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• • •

Lyon’s photograph anticipates and calls for the dismantling of Jim Crow. But even during the Jim Crow era, the configurings of race and gender at the drinking fountain were more diverse than we would guess from photographs of civic sites by Northern white men. Absent from their pictures are not only the African American women, whom a discourse of emasculation had to remove from view, but also the white men and women whose presence at the scene might imply either responsibility for or common ground with the victims of Jim Crow. During the peak of white masculine anxieties in the late 1940s, by contrast, photographs by women avoided the poles of black abjection and white exemption. Marion Palfi and Esther Bubley, whose restroom photographs we have already seen, offer a more direct picture of postwar white masculinity and of the gender as well as racial strategies devised to fortify it. Two contrasting pairs of photographs bring that picture into focus. Drinking fountains are among the only social sites at which the male body publicly stoops. The awkwardness of that posture is discernible through its ingenious transformation by a Southern advertisement for Dairy Queen (figure 44). The ad poses Horace Harper, shot from below to exaggerate his height, holding a two-foot

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Figure 44. Dairy Queen advertisement, Elberton, Georgia, 1951. From the Vanishing Georgia collection, Georgia Department of Archives and History.

vanilla Dairy Queen cone (or its facsimile) against the unlikely but inspired backdrop of a diminutive “colored” drinking fountain. As an antidote to abjection, the advertisement promises erection. Blocking from our view the “white” drinking fountain that either was, or would have been imagined to be, beside its “colored” counterpart, the young man embraces the superior alternative. Instead of stooping, literally and figuratively, to drink pale water beneath a pallid “White” sign, he stands tall and proud and licks the curly tip of a creamy, rich vanilla cone, mainlining whiteness directly from a potent source of racial renewal that conflates into a single oversize object a mammoth white breast and the huge white phallus that

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Figure 45. Untitled (Ira Jett at drinking fountain), Atlanta, 1947. Photography by Marion Palfi. Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson.

results from sucking it. This is, at least, the unconscious of the ad or the unconscious it puts into play: otherwise, why choose, or choose not to crop, the backdrop of the “Colored” sign? One man’s ice cream is another man’s ice water. In her companion piece to the portrait of Betty Penland (figure 36), Marion Palfi exploits the concerns the Dairy Queen ad diverts. The photograph (figure 45) shows Ira Jett, a charter member of the Columbians, not posed beside but bowed beneath the “Ice Water White People” drinking-fountain sign. Gender reversal is striking in this pair of images, which concludes the photo essay on the Columbians: the ice water that appears to convert to erectile tissue for the white supremacist woman compels submission from the white supremacist male, whose stooped position and brittle angularity—the left hand clutching his stomach, the rumpled jacket, the age spot on his right hand, and the glint of oil in his thinning hair—contribute to the image of a fragile body struggling for, rather than assuming, mastery. White male subjection to the Jim Crow regime is also of interest to Esther Bubley, but she incorporates racial along with sexual difference and shifts the scene from the courthouse to the workplace. In a 1946 photo she took in a tobacco warehouse in Lumberton, North Carolina, after following Roy Stryker’s move to the publicrelations department of Standard Oil of New Jersey, she foregrounds a pair of segregated fountains and paired men stooped to drink (figure 46).32 The most suggestive feature of the photograph, however, is not the two men whose backs are turned to us, but a woman in a bathing suit looking directly at us from an advertisement overhead. Yet because the photograph also marks a shift away from civic sites, the consideration of sexual difference needs to be embedded in a consideration of class

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Figure 46. Drinking fountains in a tobacco warehouse, Lumberton, North Carolina, 1946. Photograph by Esther Bubley. Standard Oil (New Jersey) Collection, University of Louisville Photographic Archives.

Figure 47. Segregated drinking fountains in use in the American South. Courtesy Corbis.

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that is sharpened by comparison to another image of segregated fountains in the workplace, an undated, unsigned (but almost certainly male-produced) UPI photograph (figure 47). Both photographs reveal the class boundaries of a racial discourse structured around the terms of phallus and lack. The white middle-class body, kept largely out of sight in the scene of (in)justice, enters into the scene of labor, and the black body’s emasculated civic status is displaced by a hypermasculine physical stature; these photographs engage mythologies of a masculine working-class culture in which the common discipline of labor levels racial differences.33 Unlike the courthouse scenes, both photographs bring a black man and a white man together to the fountain and depict them bowing down to drink in a gesture that signals the common subjection of workers to a system they did not invent. In both, the fountains and the postures are racially indistinguishable; extreme contrasts in authority have yielded to a rhetoric of shared enclosure in a system of constraint. Bubley’s photograph actually reverses the adult-child relation between the “white” and “colored” fountains in the Albany courthouse that Lyon represents. The mature African American man, neatly dressed in slacks, long-sleeved shirt, and hat, has a more dignified and authoritative presence than the white youth, whose shortness is exaggerated by his too-long overalls, rolled up to reveal boyish white socks and scuffed shoes. No social or physical signs other than the faded word Colored over one fountain identify one man as African American. The long-handled rake on his side of the photograph and the small black object, perhaps a dart, in his left hand reinforce the image of mature virility, as do the adult men in the background on his left, in contrast to the faded, white, youthful image of what appears to be a sailor on the wall above the “white” fountain. In the UPI photograph, authority is distributed somewhat differently. The light glinting on the top and side of the black worker’s head in the foreground calls attention to its physical textures and size rather than its cognitive capacities. Cut off just below his broad shoulders beneath crossed overall straps, with his face turned downward away from the camera, this man appears the incarnation of sheer physical strength. By contrast, the white worker is clad in light street clothes and represented in profile, his square jaw and right-angled arm suggesting greater purposefulness, dynamism, and agency. This photographer gives greater authority to the white man than the female photographer does (and it seems noteworthy that Bubley and Palfi both depict white men who are either a little too old or a little too young to embody authority persuasively); but the visual frame that severs the black worker at the shoulders also seems to impose the white worker’s stooped posture, calling attention to capitalism’s disciplinary effects on all (male) bodies. The UPI photographer, moreover, compacts greater racial tension into the image. Whereas the sideby-side position of the two workers in Bubley’s photograph evokes the impression of fraternity, the UPI photograph’s close-up of two powerful upper torsos, prevented

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from head-on collision only by the fountains’ separation, conveys a sense of race at loggerheads. These segregated fountains as plausibly avert racial conflict fueled by centuries of inequality as they subvert or (one reading of Bubley’s paired bodies) foster racial harmony. If we credit Bubley’s gender position for her more radical reenvisioning of racial authority, we might attribute to her institutional position at Standard Oil her more conservative implication of a racial solidarity enabled by submission, rather than opposition, to the racial and economic status quo. But if the politics of theses two images ultimately balance out, there is one irreducible gender-related difference. Both photographs undo the gender drama that aligns the “colored” position with the “feminine,” but Bubley overtly reconfigures it. Instead of a metaphor for racial difference, sexual difference here forges racial commonalities. Diagonally above the “colored” fountain in Bubley’s photograph, a pinup girl seems to walk off the partition. With a radiant smile, she offers us her gleaming white body in a white bathing suit, along with the Camel cigarettes she advertises. More discreetly, in the background at top left, two severed female heads urge us to buy Raleigh cigarettes. Bubley constructs a photographic space divided between two gendered visual registers; all the men, fully clad, face inward toward the scene of commerce, and undressed or fragmented female bodies face outward toward the viewer. The partition on which the segregated fountains are installed also marks a gender boundary; tobacco products exchanged and manufactured in a masculine interior emerge as feminized commodities. Constructed to eroticize the cigarettes they market, female bodies also become the product advertised.34 The very white, forwardtilting, almost naked body of the woman in the Camels ad is designed to appear threedimensional, to burst out of the advertisement’s visual frame and walk into our social universe. Her cut-out body shape looms above a dark rectangular cigarette box, which reaches only to her crotch; but this box also sets off by contrast and seems to contain the two long, white legs peeping over its top like two slightly squiggly cigarettes. This leggy female creature could not only walk a mile for a Camel; she is the camel pictured in two-legged profile on the cutout cigarette box—indeed, she is the Camels themselves. Her slender white legs are not the only cigarettes she offers; in her right hand, just below her firmly outlined right breast, she extends an open box of Camels toward us. Her similarly positioned left hand holds a single cigarette, like an extended finger, pointing at us; we are invited to take a puff off her hands as well as her legs. And of course we are solicited as well to take a toke from those protruding breasts. When a white woman finally enters the setting of the drinking fountains, then, she is seen through the eyes of a woman who positions her not as a consumer (drinker), but as the consumed—and as one who mediates the scene of racial difference. The commodified white female body is constructed as binary pairings, its frontal symmetry emphasized through the vertical pairing of hands, breasts, and legs. Re-viewed by a white female photographer, it considerately offers one cigaretteleg to each of the two men at the fountain beneath her. The racial structure recedes

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through an associative chain that turns drinking water into smoking cigarettes and then (back) into suckling breasts; these two men at the segregated spigots become like children beneath the towering image of the white sex goddess–mother offering succor across racial boundaries. Cigarettes—and Camels in particular—were marketed in the 1930s and 1940s as modern forms of succor, as oral gratification with the “pleasant effect” of “promoting digestion” and soothing the “jangled nerves” produced by the fast tempo of urban life. Reassuring their viewers that its “slower-burning costlier tobacco” would “never jangle the nerves,” Camels ads proposed not a refuge from modernity but a homeopathic cure for cosmopolitan ailments through a product that symbolized modernity. The cut-out pinup girl is a similar symbol of modernity. Feeding the charges bent beneath her with tobacco instead of milk—the cigarettes protruding just below her breasts, rather than the fluid inside them—she displaces the mammy who actually nurtured children of both races. Excising the memory of the plantation culture featured in ads for cigars, pipes, and plug tobacco, the modern girl markets the modern tobacco product promoted as a cure for modernity.35 But by depicting her above the black and white men drinking, the photograph evokes the plantation past and the black maternal figure the cigarette girl displaces, making us wonder exactly what kind of hunger this construction of modern white femininity assuages. Cigarettes are not in fact nurturing, and the female body designed to advertise them feeds a need that is not primarily oral. This cigarette-wielding, cigarette-legged creature proffers a different kind of reassurance. Her phallically invested, glossy white body is the perfect fetish object, and her appearance in a Camels ad in 1946 is far from coincidental.36 It was during World War II that the American pinup girl was created and disseminated to soldiers around the globe, consolidating national and sexual identity in a time of trouble for both. She was, in André Bazin’s words, “a wartime product, a weapon of war,” produced to inspire and animate the troops; her lean, streamlined, phallic shape, quite different from its European precursors and clearly not intended for motherhood, was a weapon not only against foreign threats, but also against the performance anxieties elicited by war.37 Rapidly assimilated to the postwar industrial economy, she suddenly appeared in advertisements that capitalize on her capacity to persuade potential (primarily male) buyers that purchasing her product would compensate for or conceal their most anxiety-producing lacks. Her resemblance to the cigarette made for a perfect fit; after her appearance in postwar Camels ads (very different from their wartime predecessors, which were marketed to the different psychological imperatives of the home front), she became a staple of cigarette advertising. What Bubley captures in her photograph, then, is the white female counterpart, in its mass cultural form, to the African American male bowed at the “colored” fountain. Complementary strategies of disavowal, equally intensified by war, produce the white female fetish and the emasculated black male. All legs, the white

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pinup girl who can walk a mile for a Camel is the antithesis of the African American man in a wheelchair; yet they serve the same needs in the white male psyche. In the drinking-fountain space configured by this woman photographer, in which the men are aligned and the woman is above, it is not the black man but the female fetish who occupies the place of the feminine. It is not that the “Negro is half a man” but that both men are halves incorporated into fetishistic wholeness in the body of the woman.38

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• • •

Through the lenses of white photographers, the segregated drinking fountains present complementary images of white masculinity and femininity, but none of these photographs attempt to imagine the position of African American women. It took an African American photographer to bring these women into the picture, and he did so in a way that granted at the fountains the entitlement to gender withheld at the restrooms. This final turn of the lens thus revisits the shift of white photographers from restroom doors to drinking fountains, but rather than evading the prospect of a common masculinity, this move advocates a common femininity. A pair of photographs taken in quick succession by Gordon Parks as part of his assignment for Life magazine’s 1956 series “The Background of Segregation” uses the segregated fountains to restore to African American women the symbolic status of the “lady of the race” that had been displaced onto African American men.39 The pair (only the second of which is reproduced here) offers an antidote to the sequence Elliott Erwitt launched the same decade. For the abject man at the “colored” fountain so eagerly embraced by white photographers, Parks substitutes the African American lady who, anticipating Gwendolyn Jenkins’s self-presentation at the door for “white women,” does double duty as a figure of gender and racial dignity. Like Erwitt, Parks selected a site and waited (seemingly in a car, the outline of a window in the second shot suggests) for an appropriate human subject, but the “background” he selected is quite different. In contrast to Erwitt’s empty interior, Parks chose (from the “plenty” of “signs of bigotry and discrimination” he encountered on his trip) a street scene in an African American neighborhood in which the structure of segregation engages other social messages and relations.40 Segregation occupies a middle ground, visually and conceptually: it neither determines nor is it determined by the richer texture of social life. The dingy “White Only” fountain with faded lettering is a bypassed irrelevancy. The ice-cream ads in the window feature a spectrum of intermediate flavors—butter pecan and butterscotch, but not vanilla or chocolate—as if the globe of multicolored gumballs in Erwitt’s third photograph had exploded to mediate and comment on the space between the “white” and “colored” signs that dominate the middle ground. Against this variegated background, the first photograph, captioned “At segregated drinking fountain, a little girl gets some help from a passing adult,” captures

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Figure 48. Segregated drinking fountains, Birmingham, Alabama, 1956. Photograph © Gordon Parks. Courtesy Gordon Parks Foundation.

a moment in the progression of street life framed on the right by a pair of women and on the left by the only man in the scene, who turns around to steady a young girl on tiptoes taking a drink at the fountain. A younger girl patiently awaits her turn at the fountain. In the next photograph (figure 48), which Parks selected for the catalogue of his own exhibit, the youngest child now stands at the left, and the place at the “colored” fountain is claimed by an adult woman, paired with the child. In this carefully composed, perhaps staged, image of a woman in the posture that Erwitt’s second photograph consolidated as a masculine norm, photojournalism modulates into Parks’s other signature mode: fashion photography. In contrast to the casual multicolored clothing of the Life photograph, the woman and girl selected for this image are both dressed meticulously in white. The woman’s high-heeled pumps, shiny purse, earrings, and dress are a rhapsody in white; the strap of her slip, visible below her sleeve, highlights by contrast how well-composed her outfit is and offers a glimpse of the various layers of white that constitute it. The girl’s dress is similarly layered with a fluffy white pinafore. By standing to one side of the fountain, the woman allows the freshly painted white “Colored Only” lettering to be fully visible and to echo and reinforce the whiteness of her clothing. Through his visual insistence on the brightness of color, associated with a woman

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who is very much a lady, Parks revalues racial difference and its gendering. The “colored” position is still gendered feminine, but it is not feminized; if humiliated masculinity serves Erwitt as a figure of racial disempowerment, ladylike femininity serves Parks as a figure of racial entitlement. By affiliating the deferential posture at the “colored” fountain with the (white-denied) decorum of African American femininity rather than with the (white-alleged) deficiency of African American masculinity, Parks simultaneously restores African American women to the category of lady from which they were expelled at the beginning of Jim Crow and uses this conjunction to stake a claim to higher racial status. Femininity does iconic labor for men who cannot accomplish the same symbolic function in this visual scenario, but it is a service from which women also stood to benefit. The photograph offers a visual statement of Anna Julia Cooper’s famous assertion, which responds to the epigraph of this chapter: “Only the black woman can say ‘when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.’”41 By inflecting the structure of the drinking fountains through a range of human representatives, photographers were able to invest a rigid racial imposition with more fluid meanings. Produced across a spectrum of racial, gendered, and historical locations, these meanings were partially shaped by the photographers’ efforts to place themselves outside the represented structure: white men saw only black men, white women saw primarily white and black men, and black men saw black women. If the specular nature of these subject-object relations belies the presumption of exteriority, the photographers are implicated only indirectly in their rendition of the scene that is offered to their eyes. Their imaginative freedom is constrained more by the mental baggage they carry with their cameras than by barriers to their camera’s vision. The rules of engagement change with the consumption of solid food, where the cultural stakes, and thus the barriers, are higher.42 Instead of the side-by-side arrangement of drinking fountains and restrooms, race is mapped onto sites of eating as an inside/outside or face-to face-relation. Unable to claim a neutral position outside the racial division, photographers were forced to negotiate the constraints of their location. The shift from depicting signs that regulate the passage of fluids to those that govern the consumption of solids returns us by a different route to documentary’s formative decade, re-viewed as an encounter between the camera’s reparative mission and circumscribed position. Gender remains at issue, although as metaphor rather than as subject, within two complementary frames that enlist the figure of the white female body: in the register of eating as a metaphor of a sexually endangered interior, and in the register of seeing as a metaphor of a visually obstructed exterior. But the pathway to these metaphors begins with the material features of the signs that defended and extended restaurant walls.

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5

The Eyeball and the Wall Eating, Seeing, and the Nation By 1901 Jim Crow . . . had become a wall, a system, a way of separating people from people. Demagogue by demagogue, mania by mania, brick by brick, the wall was built: and by the 1890s America was two nations—one white, one black, separate and unequal. The cornerstones of the wall were two taboos: interracial eating and intermarriage. Anything approaching interracial eating was proscribed. Anything which might by any stretch of the imagination lead to intermarriage was interdicted. One law led to a hundred. One fear became a nightmare of ropes and chains and signs: white colored negroes and freight

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Lerone Bennett Jr., “The Life and Times of Jim Crow,” Before the Mayflower, 1962

Interracial eating and interracial sex: what joins this provocative pair? Writing two years after the first lunch counter sit-ins, Lerone Bennett Jr. understandably had restaurant discrimination on his mind; as senior editor of Ebony since 1958, he covered the sit-in movement. Yet after his insight into these twin foundations of national whiteness, Bennett turned from the still-turbulent scene of eating to the more fixed and familiar turf of the sexual taboos that had long defended the white nation from the risks of miscegenation. What threat to white nationhood was posed by interracial eating? What anxieties of national incorporation were assuaged by erecting a wall against the risks of eating together, risks that somehow parallel the biological threat that sleeping together poses to national purity? Bennett’s foundational metaphors suggest that interracial eating threatened social structure more profoundly than by offering opportunities for social intermingling: a limited focus on the slippage from the social to the sexual would simply elide eating with sex rather than pursue the more intriguing question of their structural parallels. These parallels are also strangely absent from the Jim Crow signs Bennett’s 160

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text reproduces, which similarly turn from the discussion of eating to signs for drinking and transportation via elevator or train. Bennett’s figure of the wall that divides America into two racial nations adheres with special force to the surcharged division drawn at sites of eating, however. Like drinking fountains and restrooms, restaurants are sites at which social boundaries are negotiated, but if the former draw from the structure of sexual difference an aura of transnational stability, the latter, sites of incorporation and exclusion, serve the more immediate aim of negotiating the imaginary and permeable contours of the nation. When those boundaries are felt to be in jeopardy, the rules of commensality are carefully patrolled. At commercial eating places, which open up the matrix of the family home, the walls that defend and stand for the sanctity of the private house and of the female body at its heart and hearth will be reproduced in the meanings ascribed to restaurant walls. These boundaries came under pressure from several directions in the 1920s and 1930s. The juncture of orality and nationality was strengthened in the twenties by the development of chain restaurants that standardized eating. Melting pots that relaxed the symbolic frontiers of the nation by assimilating diners across economic and regional differences to a common experience of eating, these inexpensive chains also posed a threat to the restrictive vision of the nation that was gaining currency simultaneously in response to changing patterns of immigration. The clash between incorporation at a national table and the fortification there of the boundaries of an endangered Anglo-Saxon nation was staged with special vehemence in the South, where a construction of the nation as the vulnerable body of white womanhood drew one of its key, if unexpected, lines of defense at the threshold of interracial eating. When this threshold became harder to maintain under the economic pressures of the 1930s, the scene of encounter moved to the interior of eating places, where the exterior wall was retracted to a screen dividing whites and blacks on facing sides of a U-shaped counter. Lunch counters became the only social site at which sustained eye-to-eye encounters between the races were both imposed and proscribed. Sitting “on the ‘Colored’ side drinking our sodas and watching the white kids across from us drink theirs”—and vice versa—was a regular and variously regulated experience, as curtains and hanging boards were improvised to enable diners to place their orders without looking directly at the race in front of them.1 As the racial boundary moved inward and became more permeable, the dynamics and anxieties of incorporation migrated from mouths to eyes. On a far larger scale, a parallel shift was unfolding concurrently and in response to economic exigencies that reoriented national attention from external threats to internal divisions that had widened during the Depression. Of the New Deal agencies established to unify a fractured nation ideologically as well as economically, the one that had been designated the nation’s eye assumed the task of making America visible to itself by surmounting economic and regional barriers to a compre-

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hensive vision. As Farm Security Administration photographers fanned across the nation to incorporate America’s obscure pockets of difference into an inclusive image, they had to negotiate the racial division that materialized as an obstacle to vision at the Jim Crow lunch counter. The visual politics of the nation dovetailed with and found an emblematic scenario in the visual politics of segregated eating. The recruitment of photographers to a national investment in the visual also had an impact on the social construction of gender. During the 1930s, as Paula Rabinowitz has argued, “a small army of female photographers” joined the workforce as documentarians, attracted to life on the road as an escape from domestic enclosure and routine.2 This small army followed the trail blazed by the first generation of white middle-class women photojournalists who had sought at the turn of century to enlarge the scope of their experience and vision. But whereas this earlier generation, as Laura Wexler demonstrates, succeeded in maintaining and putting into public service the “innocent eye” of the private sphere, the next generation’s encounter with the material evidence of segregation in the South in the 1930s made it difficult for them to “materialize the innocence of whiteness.” If “race was a divide across which the great white mother could not or would not see,” as Wexler declares about Gertrude Käsebier, then for successors such as Marion Post Wolcott, Esther Bubley, Marion Palfi, and Dorothea Lange the literalization of that barrier to vision made the challenge of seeing across racial divisions a self-conscious project.3 The explicitness of racial barriers also complicates the prevailing critique of the voyeurism of this second generation, newly licensed, sometimes problematically, to peer across the threshold of the working-class home. The obstacle to racial boundary-crossing impinged with special force on these women photographers’ recently acquired mobility and locates the question of gender in the representation of the conditions of representation, a project enacted most compellingly by the most famous woman of the FSA: Dorothea Lange, who became a national icon of the woman who took her camera on the road. It is in Lange’s photograph of a Mississippi lunch counter, the concluding image of this chapter, that the threads of race, gender, and visuality converge—with ironic consequences. The iconic value of gender is reworked: the enclosed white female body that had figured an endangered nation is now a white female voyeur attempting to see across the racial division to represent life on the other side. But as the board dividing service to whites and blacks obstructs her vision, it effects a perverse mirroring. By stripping Lange of her visual privileges and thwarting her mandate to extend the national gaze, the racial obstacle resurrects the image of the domesticated female body that—now shut out rather than walled in—becomes a figure of the failure of the nation’s visual goals. The story ends in stalemate. The scene of eating could not be integrated by a camera in the service of the visual politics of the 1930s. It would take direct action by different political agents to penetrate this frontier. “I myself desegregated a lunch

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counter, not somebody else. . . . I walked the picket line and I sat in and the walls of segregation toppled,” as one of the activists of the early 1960s boasted.4 But the story that ends with the crumbling of the walls begins with the construction of chain restaurants and lunch counters, for before African American students could wrest seats at the national table, and before the eye of the nation could test its powers against the walls of segregation, the structure and meaning of national eating had to be in place.

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• • •

In a speech designed, two weeks after the event, to quiet the anxieties aroused by the student sit-in at Woolworth’s segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, Dr. Frederick D. Patterson, former president of the Tuskegee Institute and chairman of the board of Bennett College in Greensboro, assured Bennett students (several of whom had joined the sit-ins) and the white Greensboro community that the protests were both legitimate and unthreatening because the changes they demanded were unlikely to lower the social barriers between the races, barriers he implicitly relocated around each customer instead of at the lunch counter or door. Warning against confusing “the day-to-day impersonal contacts which are necessary for normal existence” with “contacts of a personal and social nature which do not occur unless mutually agreeable,” Dr. Patterson redeployed the rhetorical strategy of the famed Atlanta Compromise proposed by his illustrious predecessor at Tuskegee. “The eating in public places by people who are perfect strangers can mean only one thing, and that is that they are both or severally hungry,” Dr. Patterson concluded. “In all things that are purely social, we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress,” Booker T. Washington had reassured his racially mixed audience at the International Exposition in 1895.5 Maintaining social separation is the constant here, plausible enough in the context of the impersonal lunch counters; yet the shift in bodily metaphors, from the fingers that can function individually or unite as a hand in the service of a common goal to the mouths whose potential for social conversation is diverted by the more primary and private urgency of hunger, nevertheless betrays the difference that Dr. Patterson attempts to discount. Eating together in public places means more than “only one thing,” which is why the prospect of interracial eating provoked the anxiety that needed to be calmed. Both integrated and differentiated, bounded yet partially permeable, the physical body is a central image of the social body; bodily orifices stage and represent defining, vulnerable, hence carefully regulated, points of entrance to or exit from social wholes.6 Ingestion figures absorption into the social body; hence, sharing a meal, or even an eating space, performs a more charged symbolic function than common labor or travel on a common carrier. It is not physical proximity that is the issue, but its social frame, as explained by an African American minister from

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South Carolina to a journalist covering the sit-ins: “It’s like when my wife and I went to the department store to get a car coat. Standing on the elevator, we were crowded up against the white women. But when we got off to get the car coats—where they’d take my money—we had to walk through a tea room where we couldn’t sit down because we might contaminate them.”7 Bodily contact in a moving vehicle is less threatening than sitting down at separate tables where food is served. Collective eating ritualizes the constitution of the social body through the shared consumption of common substances. What is incorporated in these acts is not only the consumed substance but also the individuals who collectively consume it. Meals are modes of socialization: cultures produce distinctive foods and table rituals as vehicles for assimilating the young and the uninitiated to social norms and groups. Such acts of construction of the social body are most visible in the primitive totemic rituals that designate the common substance as the common ancestor, or in such modern transformations as the family dinner that consolidates bourgeois kinship relations or the nation-building commemorative feasts (such as Thanksgiving) that reenact stories of national origin to concretize the abstract relations of the modern state.8 But they also assume more mediated, less quickly recognizable, mass produced, and distinctively twentieth-century American forms. Indeed, it was precisely the commodification and standardization of menus, prices, and settings in the 1920s and ’30s United States that converted diverse, contingent eating spaces into local instantiations of a national scene. The chain restaurants that first emerged as a consequence of expanded railroad service in the final decades of the nineteenth century surged after World War I to become highly visible and distinguishing features of the national landscape. Improved techniques of refrigeration, combined with the effects of Prohibition, increased the popularity of soda fountains and enabled them to develop into the lunch counters that shaped short-order eating for the rest of the century.9 As chains of inexpensive lunch counters snaked across the nation, bringing standardized food, service, and decor to very different geographic locales, one could purchase lunch anywhere and partake in identical scenes.10 Anonymous, mechanical, and devoid of emotional content, at the opposite end of the spectrum from the communitarian immediacy of family meals or totemic rituals, the uniformity of scenes of eating nevertheless constituted a particular kind of twentieth-century national imaginary. This vision was given enduring expression by the American Scene painter Edward Hopper, whose depictions of solitary figures at lunch counters in paintings such as Nighthawks (figure 49) captured a distinctively American urban landscape, as his recommendation that “American art should be weaned from its French mother” rendered an autonomous national aesthetic as an autonomous relationship to food.11 The afterlife of this painting at the beginning of the new millennium testifies to its status as a cultural icon. Hopper’s vision was widely disseminated, in slightly doctored form, through Owen Smith’s Nighthawks New Year on the cover

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of the millennial issue of the New Yorker, where disaffected diners in party hats, seated along a counter at midnight on New Year’s Eve, provide a dystopian image of the past American century. A more upbeat variation appeared a few years previously on a Christmas card designed by Hudson Talbott (figure 50), in which identical, unadorned reindeer taking a coffee break at 4 a.m. appear, unlike Santa in his holiday gear, to be lunch-counter regulars, the proletariat these eating places were designed to serve. It is the singular Santa, the named individual dressed for an occasion and turned toward the viewer as if in acknowledgment of his exceptionality, who seems out of place in this setting, his difference marked by his oversize cup of what the codes of holiday indicate is cocoa; the nameless, undifferentiated everyday reindeer-workers (no red-nosed special cases here) staring straight ahead over identical cups of coffee, as they have implicitly been doing for years, seem to make themselves at home in the culture of the counter as a lineup of one’s peers. The quintessentially American cast of this culture has recently been updated by America Online in an advertisement that translates Hopper’s lunch counter into the foundation for an always-accessible virtual nation that compensates its members for the deprivations of the lonely crowd. This American scene, whose economic and social leveling (customers reduced to the same lowest common denominator and aligned along a counter rather than affiliated in groups around a table) could serve as a mark of difference from Europe, required a specific and subtle kind of management, however. For the very accessibility and anonymity of the lunch counter made its symbolically invested boundaries dangerously permeable. Undefended by the economic mechanisms that regulate access to more expensive restaurants, lunch counters confer the mantle of social membership on anyone who enters, assimilating them indiscriminately to a kind of national space. At these uniquely affordable and American eating sites, the social distinctions traditionally drawn by norms of commensality, which differentiate those who are invited to sit at the social table from those who are excluded, were in special jeopardy. The symbolic potential of lunch-counter commensality had to be shaped into the image of a collectivity that was democratically but not promiscuously American. This image was crafted especially deftly by the chain that became the template for the generation of chain restaurants, whose salient design feature was the lunch counter, that launched the fast-food industry. White Castle achieved its breakthrough success by standardizing its exterior design (in 1921 it became the first chain restaurant to develop a distinctive architectural style) and by promoting the advantages of its standardized food preparation and interior decor: a lunch counter, hamburger grill, and five stools. A 1932 brochure distributed to customers reminded them of the intangible as well as economic gains of eating at this chain, gains shaped as a mass cultural compensation for the social exclusivity conferred by dining out at fancier establishments: “When you sit in a White Castle, remember that you are

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Figure 49. Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942. Courtesy Art Institute of Chicago. Figure 50. Christmas card designed by Hudson Talbott for Easy Street Publications. © 1995 Hudson Talbott. Courtesy Hudson Talbott.

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one of several thousands; you are sitting on the same kind of stool; you are being served on the same kind of counter; the coffee you drink is made in accordance with a certain formula; the hamburger you eat is prepared in exactly the same way over a gas flame of the same intensity; the cups you drink from are identical with thousands of cups that thousands of other people are using at the same moment; the same standard of cleanliness protects your food.”12 The brochure markets the desirability of standardization as a route toward membership in a collectivity that is filtered through hamburgers and coffee, national foods whose identical preparation and consumption guarantees the internalization of the same quantum of Americanness. The formulas for food were also formulas for dissolving social differences into a citizenship of strangers bleached of disparate national origins and assembled in a line (or as an assembly line). The value of this imagined community, however, depends on a perceptible limit and an acceptable social face. Unremarked but acutely and strangely visible is that these quintessentially twentieth-century Americans are consuming fast food at a lunch counter ensconced in a building designed to resemble a castle. The first American restaurant chain to present itself architecturally as a chain housed democratic dining in a structure of hereditary privilege: those miniature white castles that dotted the American landscape from the Midwest to the Atlantic coast made visible the traces of an exclusive medieval European heritage in a newly democratized mass cultural form.13 The boundaries of castles are very clear: their fortifications protect their inhabitants from threats from the outside, as the “standards of cleanliness” maintained in their modern counterparts’ interior guard against threats from germs inside. The Americanness consumed via hamburgers and coffee was defended along with them from alien influences. Whiteness traverses these discursive registers. White Castle was not only the first chain restaurant to proclaim on its exterior the “white sanitary look” that had become standard at the lunch-counter interior; it was also the first to associate this look architecturally with the privilege of Western European ancestry. Intentionally or not, the designers of White Castle gave architectural expression to a powerful contemporary cultural theme: the perceived threat posed by large new waves of immigration from southern and eastern Europe to the status of the United States as a white Anglo-Saxon nation.14 White Castle’s striking achievement spawned a generation of copycat chains with names like White Tower, White Tavern Shoppes, White Hut, White Clock, White Knight, White Turret, White Tavern, White Grille, and White Fortress, as well as those (Little Tavern, Toddle House, Howard Johnson) that imitated other features of the menu, design, construction, and procedures of what came to be known as the “porcelain palace.” Combining the best of New World hygiene with the best of Old World heritage, White Castle’s successful formula promised the health of the social as well as the biological body, extending carte blanche to an America whose northern European heritage was democratically but

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prophylactically redistributed. The “uniquely American ethnicity” that White Castle is credited with fostering may have consolidated a certain spectrum of European immigrants around a “powerful ethnic identifier,” but that identifier was not only the hamburger the chain transformed from a meatball sandwich into a “primary ethnic food,” but also an image of origin protected from dilution.15 When racial rather than ethnic differences were explicitly at stake, the boundaries of the melting pot were drawn explicitly: White Castle became “White Only.” In diverse local eating places affiliated only by a common interest in racially restricting their clientele, standardization took the form of the wording and design of the Jim Crow signs posted at their entryways. As whiteness shifts from the gain to the cost of entry, from a bid for inclusion to a principle of exclusion, the association of eating, race and nation necessarily changes: only in the most extreme cases could the rhetoric of racial exclusion coincide with that of nationhood. Instead, in a foretaste of the tactics massively deployed to resist court-ordered integration in the 1950s and ’60s, a verbal and visual rhetoric of a private, and hence legitimately exclusive, sphere prevails. An associative chain now links family, food and nation in a conservative alternative to the lunch-counter melting pot. The meal in the private home is an enabling fiction for a conception of the white nation routed through and defended as an extension of the family. Jim Crow signs at local eating places attempt to protect a white social body whose boundaries seemed at risk of penetration. Like the heavily guarded and domestically enclosed body of white womanhood that serves as a more literal reproductive conduit, the body of collective eaters, joined by the incorporative dynamics of a different orifice, constitute a permeable and consequently privatized site of social replication. Interracial eating and interracial sex both threaten to breach the fabric of white national reproduction. If miscegenation is the more severely criminalized threat, commensality is nonetheless regulated to assuage less explicit but no less primitive fears. The comparison was made explicitly—“Often we spoke of the sin it would be to eat with a Negro. Next to ‘intermarriage’ this was a most appalling thought”—and produced the same hysteria: “If anything would make me kill my children, it would be the possibility that niggers might sometime eat at the same table and associate with them as equals.” In the passage cited in this chapter’s epigraph, Lerone Bennett follows his reproduction of “white” and “colored” signs with the intonation: “Fear. Food. Frenzy. White Womanhood.”16 One index of the complex negotiation performed at the threshold of the eating place is that the Jim Crow signs at restaurant doors and windows, unlike the oneor two-word signs at other entryways, are typically formulated as a sentence: “We Cater to White Trade Only.” The choice of noun—trade instead of people—concedes, in order to circumscribe, the cash economy’s potential to erode the racial hierarchy. To minimize this potential, the wording strives to personalize commercial transactions. Unlike the effaced agency of “White” and “Colored” signs, the restaurant

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Figure 51. Sign on a restaurant, Lancaster, Ohio, August 1938. Photograph by Ben Shahn. FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress.

formula calls attention to the first-person pronoun, generalized in the plural form, yet bearing the linguistic marker of an implied host who could issue or withhold invitations, and whose agency is extended by the inclusion of the verb, a gesture, an action, directed toward an other. In a sign photographed by Ben Shahn in Lancaster, Ohio (figure 51), for example, the impression of a personal invitation is suggested through the decorative shape, whose curvilinear upper border diverges from the functional parallelograms of signs on most entryways. In situations in which such highly charged gateways were close to contested national boundaries, the stakes and rhetoric of exclusion escalated. The flexibly nonspecific language of the “We Cater to White Trade Only” sign, whose all-purpose screening mechanism made it both popular and portable, was displaced or reinforced by more abusive and particularizing rhetoric that shifted the emphasis from who could be let in to who must be kept out. In states along the nation’s southern border, for example, signs that regulate access to eating places diverge from the relative civility displayed in locations less susceptible to traffic across national frontiers. Eating places, with their highly invested boundaries, are the primary sites at which these dynamics are openly expressed; and these dynamics assume a particularly aggressive guise in locations where national whiteness is threatened from within by the physical proximity and degraded status of the nations that contrib-

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ute to the population of the state. Reversing the pattern of positioning European immigrants along the binary of Jim Crow, African Americans who for generations had been U.S. citizens were discursively assimilated to recent immigrants and migrant workers from Mexico and the Caribbean in language that repudiated them indiscriminately as aliens. Jim Crow signs at restaurants along the southern borders of the United States redefine national boundaries as human to foreclose any prospect of commerce over them. The expulsive force of their language was deployed to suggest a primal divide between an implicitly filthy, bestialized exterior and a civilized, human interior. If signs at eating places elsewhere attempt to regulate points of cultural entry through a relatively conscious process of selection, those on the border attempt to operate points of cultural exit through a more primitive reflex of abjection: the expulsion of that which, constitutive of the individual or national subject, consequently threatens its integrity. It is hardly accidental that sites of eating should function as these thresholds: as the earliest vehicle of the other’s presence in the self, food is also the originary and emblematic abject, expelled in the struggle for individuation yet always haunting the self ’s uncertain boundaries. Nor is the mapping of these dynamics onto a social site surprising: if, as Julia Kristeva suggests, maternal milk is the quintessential abject, it is perhaps inevitable that in a culture in which white babies were nursed by black mammies, abjection should be socially explicit and racialized.17 It was also inverted, as in the nation’s safely distant opposite corner, where the “nationally famous” Coon Chicken Inn chain (which in fact never spread beyond the West) cultivated plantation as national nostalgia through its Southern fried chicken specialties and its entryways through the enormous painted wide-open mouth of an African American waiter who offered to reincorporate alienated Westerners into a phantasmatic Southern-as-national home.18 What is more surprising is that the dynamics of abjection should become most visible where the inexplicably naturalized succor provided by black mammies is allied with what is seen as the denaturalizing, and denationalizing, effect of immigrants from below the border. Texas, with its history of shifting alliances with Mexico and the United States, offers the clearest example of how this merger operates. By conglomerating African Americans and Mexicans, restaurant signs in this state simultaneously estrange the intimate presence of black Americans and purge the traces of binational history to affiliate unambiguously with a white North America. By adding yet another term to the equation, they secure these boundaries, whose uncertainty contributed to galvanizing the statewide discrimination sign commissioned by the Lonestar Restaurant Association (figure 52). Shocking as much in its sequence as in its substance, the sign administers a very deliberate, almost palpable, slap in the face. By listing dogs first, all but stating explicitly that African Americans and immigrants from Mexico are subspecies of canines, and by equating the degree of separation between Negroes

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Figure 52. Lonestar Restaurant Association sign (reproduction).

and dogs with that between Negroes and Mexicans, the sign positions the descendants of slaves between the domestic animal and the foreign worker, assigning them the burden of mediating and absorbing the attributes of both. The sign could have been printed differently: instead of merging the three groups visually and syntactically through a single oversized and conglomerative No, the Lonestar Restaurant Association could have screened its clientele by designing separate signs for humans and for animals—“No Negro or Mexican Trade,” “No Dogs Allowed”—or, at a minimum, by designing one sign that accorded each group its own identity:

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No Dogs No Negroes No Mexicans

To disaggregate the categories and exclude each individually (as, for example, in the British counterpart chosen by John Lydon as the subtitle of his memoir Rotten— “No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs”) would be to grant each too much distinction, however, when the rhetorical point is to construct a composite and dehumanized exterior. By removing any common human ground that might be negotiable, and any common idiom in which to contest expulsion from the human family, the Lonestar Restaurant Association’s sign erects an invisible and impenetrable shield. What is visible is the ownership of language asserted by the sign’s design: these standardized block letters, devoid of curlicues and personalizing gestures, are the signature not of an individual and potentially approachable host but of impersonal, official, and unquestionable authority. To gauge both how extreme this boundary-patrolling language is, and how it operates on a rhetorical continuum, it is useful to look briefly at gateways to another site at which the boundaries of the human are also coordinated with those of race. Zoos would seem to draw much clearer divisions than restaurants between humans on one side and animals on the other (although from another perspective,

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both are sites where animals are delivered up for human consumption); yet zoos are also liminal zones where the boundary between human and animal is simultaneously enforced and eroded. By placing wild animals in cages so that humans at liberty can safely scrutinize them, zoos stage an otherwise impossibly intimate encounter: hence the tendency for people at zoos to make “animal” gestures and faces, licensed by the safe proximity of wild beasts to mimic their behavior and reconnect with their own evolutionary past in a regressive variation on the mirror stage. Dogs are the transitional and inassimilable creatures here: domesticated, tied to their human masters by a leash rather than divided from them by bars, they are still too much animal, too much at risk of shedding their civilized veneer and reverting to type in the presence of their less inhibited brethren, to be allowed to accompany their masters to the zoo. Hence the “No Dogs” signs frequently posted at zoo entries, averting the possibility that barking and romping canines would unleash a similar uproar in their wilder kin and upset the delicate balance between the human and the animal components of the zoo ecology. Because attendance at zoos in the South was segregated, however, either temporally (by days of the week) or spatially (by areas of the zoo), the negotiation of racial signs with “No Dogs” signs clarifies the coordination of race and species at the entryways of restaurants. I begin with an exceptional case of inversion, Ernest C. Withers’s photograph of the day (“black Thursday”) when whites, rather than blacks, were denied access to the Memphis zoo (figure 53). “No White People Allowed in Zoo Today” makes us laugh because in spite, or perhaps as a consequence, of the honorific “people” appended to the racial adjective, the image conjures an association of the whites locked out of the zoo (the sign is placed squarely in front of and bars entry to an opening in a wire fence that resembles a cage) with the animals locked in. White people become a curiosity, a spectacle, a species put on display like the other animals— especially those anomalous white versions of the species (white tigers, white rabbits, white elephants) whose exceptionality has made them the subject of both ridicule and fantasy, and in the last case the generic name for a useless curiosity. The sign at the right margin of the photo enumerates the categories permanently disallowed: heterogeneous human appendages related only by the threats they pose to pedestrians and animals. Deliberately framed together in photographic space, the two exclusionary signs are nevertheless kept distinct in social space: there is no visible intention on the part of the zoo managers to conflate them, and even Withers seems a little tentative about their association—a different angle of vision might have emphasized their relationship more forcefully. The placement and wording of the signs both associate white people with and differentiate them from bicycles, cars, and dogs. Even when the tables are turned, white people retain the exceptional status of caged exotic animals rather than the permanently domesticated status of dogs. If we turn from the Memphis zoo to the zoo in Jacksonville, Florida, we witness

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Figure 53. Overton Park Zoo, Memphis, 1950s. Photograph by Ernest C. Withers. © Ernest C. Withers. Courtesy Panopticon Gallery, Boston, MA.

the more typical situation in which African Americans are associated not with the captive but still-wild animals, but with the domesticated ones. Stetson Kennedy’s photograph of the Jacksonville zoo (figure 54) shows a tree on which a sign with a directional arrow pointing to the “colored area” is posted just above a much larger sign announcing, “Dogs Not Permitted In Zoo Grounds.” Why are the two signs, whose meanings are entirely unrelated but whose connotations are deliberately blurred, posted in such proximity, one right on top of the other, rather than on different trees that would keep their referents distinct? The arc of the word dogs points upward to “Colored Area,” further collapsing the distinction. To foreground the confusion, Kennedy photographs the back of an African American man passing by, and perhaps reading, the paired signs. The park grounds are deserted; the man, alone and seemingly arrested by the signs, assumes an existential guise. How is he being interpellated? The large block capital letters of dogs command our (and presumably his) attention, preempting the address to African Americans and subsuming them under the category of domesticated animals that, unlike their wild kin, caged because they retain their original autonomy and identity, have been disciplined to

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internalize their cages. The boundaries of zoos elaborate on those of restaurants to expose the conditions of Americanization for descendants of the African peoples who were forcibly transported to the New World in chains: neither incarcerated as African nor assimilated as American, intimately absorbed to the texture of daily life and aggressively denied its national investments, tied to the liminal status of domesticated and alienated other. Dog has been a pervasive and portable racial insult in this country, its connotations shifting with each iteration. Along the eastern seaboard, especially in areas with significant Jewish populations that constituted a “limit case of whiteness” not entirely included or excluded by “We Cater to White Trade Only” signs, the task was both to render Jews nonwhite by association with African Americans—that is, to attach the immigrant group to the more overtly racialized one, rather than the opposite, as along the southern border—and to exploit the association of African Americans and dogs, an association so strong that “No Dogs” signs could function as a code for “No Negroes,” in order to heighten the inherited perception of a Jewish threat to the health of the social body.19 Whether in the more restrained language of signs in Pennsylvania and Maryland proclaiming, “No Dogs or Jews” or “No Jews, Dogs, or Coloreds Allowed” or the more vitriolic “No Niggers Jews Dogs” that probably comes from farther south, this signage inflects the yoking of dog and Jew in a distinctive direction, spelled out by the rate card for an upstate New York hotel which supplies a mediating term: Applications from Hebrews not desired. Consumption being claimed as a contagious disease, we are compelled to direct persons afflicted with it to sanitary institutions.

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No dogs allowed.20

Not exactly nonwhite but implicitly carrying fleas or germs, Jews, like dogs, are seen to circulate within a social body that must be quarantined from the threat of contamination (from the ghetto rather than the jungle) that is posed by these social parasites. By contrast to both Jews and African Americans, for example, Mexican immigrants, whose inclusion in the Lonestar Restaurant Association’s sign facilitates the attribution of foreignness to blacks, are only indirectly associated with dogs, as we see in a sign that targets them specifically (figure 55). Painted on a restaurant wall photographed by Russell Lee in a district of San Antonio, Texas, in which migrant workers were concentrated, the sign strikes an interesting balance between the national formula and the modes of address specific to the border zones. The sign improvised in lieu of the state association’s official version reveals the special pressure of the migrant population here, yet this pressure generates a restrained xenophobia rather than virulent domestic racism. In contrast to the connotative seepage from

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Figure 54. Jacksonville Municipal Zoo, Florida, circa 1963. Photograph by Stetson Kennedy. SCEF Collection, Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library.

dogs to Negroes or Jews, the drift here proceeds from the more to the less foreign, from the nation across the ocean to the one across the border, whose cultural otherness is heightened by this association. “White” here is inflected less as a racial category than as a national and linguistic one, somewhat amusingly so given the grammatical error in the writing of the word. When African Americans are factored back into the equation, the rhetoric again devolves from exclusion to abjection. In a differently located border state, with other demographic pressures, restaurant signs vary the terms but not the strategy or sequence of conglomerating immigrants with African Americans. In Florida, whose

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Figure 55. Restaurant sign, San Antonio, Texas, June 1949. Photograph by Russell Lee. Russell Lee Photograph Collection, Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.

ocean boundaries facilitated access from the Caribbean, signs at the entryways of eating and drinking places add Puerto Ricans to the list. Mexicans and Puerto Ricans occupy interchangeable positions, but one group invariably heads the list. Dogs have disappeared, but their function and position are assigned to African Americans. The use of the racial slur at the list’s visual head, in contrast to the respectful names for the two national groups, secures the place of African Americans at the list’s social bottom. The rhetorical labor accomplished by dogs in Texas avoided the need for the racial slur that in Florida insures that the remaining groups are degraded through a trickle-down effect from the verbal blow delivered to the first. Although Florida, unlike Texas, lacked the standardized sign of a statewide restau-

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Figure 56. Restaurant sign, central Florida. SCEF Collection, Special Collections Department, Georgia State University Library.

rant association, the similarity of the wording at different sites reveals a regional discourse that either shrinks the national formula (“We cater to white trade only”) to a narrow band at the top of the sign or displaces it entirely (figure 56). Individual eating and drinking places deployed a common discourse that licensed an affront at once calibrated to nuances of social difference and calculated to dissolve them into a conglomerate identity that degrades the foreign and estranges the familiar. • • •

The conception of the white-only restaurant as the enclave and embryo of a racially pure nation came under pressure in the 1930s, as economic duress made it impractical to exclude any paying customers, especially at the inexpensive lunch counters where African Americans constituted a significant percentage of the potential clientele. The same economic pressures that led to the tacit desegregation of department and grocery stores in the thirties operated for restaurants as well. Although the taboos on interracial eating were far more stringent and tenacious than those on commercial transactions, eating places (unlike drinking fountains or restrooms)

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were subject to the same financial exigencies, and a range of compromises were struck between ideological purity and economic gain.21 To see an extreme case of effects of this economic pressure, we must revisit the Lake Okeechobee area of central Florida, the location of River’s Drink-All, but during the Depression. In Florida, the Depression followed several devastating floods and other natural disasters that together transformed the state’s agricultural economy to a system of migrant labor. In the desperate living conditions of the migrant camps, in which families were typically crammed six to a bed and twelve to a shack or tent without sanitary facilities, social distinctions, including racial ones, were inevitably eroded. Excluding paying customers was not an affordable luxury.22 A lunch room in the Belle Glade area photographed by the FSA photographer Marion Post Wolcott in 1939 somewhat comically reveals the ambivalence of this accommodation to necessity (figure 57). The Choke ’Em Down Lunch Room’s signs and design register not only the pressure of circumstances—it is highly unusual to have a single entrance for both races and to advertise service to both—but also the emotional work entailed in making these concessions. At River’s Drink-All, the fluidity connoted by the proprietor’s name spills visually and verbally into the beverages served at the interior; as antidote and prerequisite to this all-inclusive merger, figured by the restaurant sign’s cursive connectivity, a right-angled sign screening the entry is painted in block letters next to it. At the Choke ’Em Down Lunch Room, whose sign proclaims, “White & Colored Served,” by contrast, the connotative seepage from the restaurant’s vivid name—even more graphically descriptive than Drink-All of the process of consumption—conflates the descriptions of who and what are served. Rather than an antithetical relation between the restaurant and the Jim Crow signs—the condition of drinking all at River’s is that not all may drink—the food and its consumers are yoked by the syntactic ambiguities of two swing words: “ ’Em” and “Served.” “ ’Em” is a particularly curious choice: whereas a neuter singular pronoun, the “Choke It Down Lunchroom,” would refer straightforwardly to the food that was served, the ambiguous plural form them suggests a human antecedent. That the verb to serve takes both direct and indirect objects increases the ambiguity—one widely recognized during the sit-ins of the 1960s, when protestors parried the formula “We don’t serve Negroes here” with the rejoinder “That’s OK, we don’t eat them.” The sign declaring “White & Colored Served,” which parallels the format of the sign announcing “Hot & Cold Lunches [Served],” erodes the distinction between consumers and consumed: hot and cold, fluids and solids, white and colored, are all funneled indiscriminately through the walkway that extends like a long gullet to a single incorporative organ of digestion. The Choke ’Em Down Lunch Room, which is simply another migrant shack minimally differentiated in structure or location from those adjacent to it, functions as a kind of social stomach that assimilates the diners and their dinner to an undifferentiated mass. Under pressure of survival, anything goes

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Figure 57. Lunch room, Belle Glade (vicinity), Florida, January 1939. Photograph by Marion Post Wolcott. FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress.

(down). But not without some difficulty. The difference between the names River’s Drink-All and Choke ’Em Down Lunch Room signals more than the shift from fluids to solids. Something served in this lunch room is not easy to swallow, and the resistance is registered as choking. Accommodations are usually far less complete. A more common compromise was a rear door or side window carry-out option that preserved the front door/back door structure of plantation culture and avoided the symbolic implications of sitting down together; the hierarchy was further maintained by requiring African Americans to bring their own paper bags for sandwiches and buckets for ice cream and Coke. Nevertheless, their patronage was also solicited, as is reflected by the structure of an often-reproduced carry-out sign, whose date suggests the exigencies of the Depression: We Serve Colored Carry Out Only A. A. Signs May 5, 1931

Note that the invitational gesture precedes the qualification: economic imperatives have the upper hand. These imperatives, sometimes compounded by legal pressures, could force service to both races into the restaurant interior. With this shift, the walls dividing the

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nation were relocated within the space of eating rather than at its perimeter, and the terms of the encounter gravitated from the oral to the visual field. As solid walls thinned to more permeable barriers, the line of defense was reimagined as a visual blockage, and the defining organ of the social body migrated from the mouth to the eye, an incorporative orifice perceived to operate similarly. The sense of the nation that had been formed by collective eating was renegotiated in terms of collective seeing. The social body was constituted not by those who ate together, but by those who saw each other eating together. Oral and visual consumption formed an exclusive pair to which the other senses were irrelevant. It didn’t matter whether conversations could be overheard or food smelled across a visual barrier: to not see others eating (even if one heard them) was equivalent to not eating with them. This reconstitution of the social body in terms of those seen eating together is simply a strong version of a commonplace of social dining: that one goes to restaurants not only for their oral gratifications but also for the social incorporation gained by being seen, and by seeing oneself, eating in the company of others. We can witness the development both of economic pressures making it advisable to accommodate customers of both races and of a concomitant shift of regulation from oral to visual consumption in the evolution of municipal ordinances in Birmingham, the first city to require the systematic partitioning of all public places. The first segregation ordinance in 1914 requiring separate entrances and service for “white” and “colored” customers in eating places was strengthened in the City Code of 1917 specifying: “It shall be unlawful to conduct a restaurant or lunch counter at which white and colored persons are served in the same room” (Section 1130). In 1930, however, the code was amended with the following clause in what may have been a concession to post-crash economic realities: “Unless such white and colored persons are effectually separated by a solid partition extending from the floor upward to a distance of seven feet or higher, and unless a separate entrance from the street is provided for each compartment.” The requirements for streetcars were similarly amended to allow for an internal partition, but with a telling difference: rather than a seven-foot wall, all that was required was “a movable, thin, solid board or panel fastened on a pivot from the top of the seat and to the side of the car adjacent thereto, thus forming a partition approximately two feet wide at the base, and three feet high.” The solid wall seven feet or higher—that is, above eye level—is reduced on streetcars to a symbolic three-foot-high barrier. The revisions of the City Code in 1944 maintained this distinction and in 1951 further strengthened it by italicizing the word solid that for restaurants modifies the partition. Whereas entertainment sites were required to construct “well defined physical barriers” dividing the races, only eating places were instructed to guarantee racial invisibility.23 The Birmingham ordinances present an ideal case of the attempt to shut the mouth by sealing the eyes, but the will to construct such solid barriers rarely ex-

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isted elsewhere, and the more flexible compromises that were improvised opened the door to more complex visual negotiations. These are most apparent where the barriers were most fluid and subject to scrutiny: the dining cars of trains whose interstate runs fell under the jurisdiction of the Interstate Commerce Commission and hence could be tested in federal courts and subjected to national inquiry. After a 1937 Supreme Court case that required railroads to provide accommodations for African American passengers, the railroads negotiated a compromise between providing a separate dining car and serving black and white passengers together in a common dining car by curtaining off two tables near the kitchen and making the call for African American diners before or, more often, near the end of the regular meal hour. When the Henderson v. United States case contesting this arrangement drew national attention and was finally resolved in the plaintiff ’s favor in 1950, the curtain’s function as a visual shield was portrayed by Southern writers intimately acquainted with the culture’s rationale.24 In the journalistic installments of the Jim Crow Guide, for example, Stetson Kennedy explained to his fictional audience of African American readers: “In the dining car you will be required to sit at one end behind a drawn curtain which will largely shield you from the eyes of white diners. These curtains are to comply with the segregation laws, and are said to be necessary inasmuch as many white people ‘are made physically ill’ by the sight of non-whites partaking of food among them on a basis of equality.”25 The following year, shortly after the Supreme Court’s decision in the Henderson case banned the use of the curtain in interstate travel, Lillian Smith echoed the trope of indigestion in a New York Times Magazine essay titled “The Walls of Segregation Are Crumbling”: “Because of the old taboo about eating, Southerners know that the abolition of restrictions in dining cars is a profound cultural change. Today, it is a pleasant thing to report that Southerners are now watching each other eat as they travel through Dixie and no one has felt violent about it, no one has fainted, no one has had acute indigestion.”26 Both accounts point to the collapse of the visual with the oral in a way that depicts indigestion or nausea as a response to something seen: the sight not of others eating but of collective eating “on a basis of equality,” a reaction not to a difference in manners but to a sameness in status. Nausea is produced by something entering the eye: a breach of psychosocial boundaries, a puncturing of a social membrane through one orifice that produces a reflex to expel through another. Yet eyes and mouths, although both incorporative, are not entirely analogous, for the modalities of the eye are more complex. If eyes, like mouths, are gateways, they maintain a more heavily trafficked and reciprocally constituted boundary, drawn not only by the primitive reflexes of incorporation and expulsion, but also by more subtly ambivalent and interdependent relations. Eyes want both to see and not to see, to be seen and to be screened; they are vulnerable and seek shelter, voracious and seek mastery; their desires are mediated by those of the others whose

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acknowledgment they both solicit and disdain. The descriptions of the Jim Crow curtain point to this duality. When Stetson Kennedy explains that the drawn curtain (and even the verb draw pulls in opposite directions, meaning both to open and to close) “will largely shield you from the eyes of white diners,” he implies that the racial barrier offers protection both for and from white eyes that paradoxically seek to survey those they conceal, to penetrate the division on which they insist. This scene of eating, however, is constituted not as an interior and exterior, but as two parallel and private universes seated side by side. Behind the green curtain is another world shielded from white eyes. Rather than resolving the dilemmas of interracial eating, their translation into interracial (not)seeing produces a new set of contradictory desires and agendas, not least for the white photographer. The installments of the Jim Crow Guide were illustrated with photographs by Marion Palfi. A 1945 photograph that illustrates the installment on segregated eating shows three African American men—described as “three Negro soldiers” in the Daily Compass version and “three defenders of democracy” in the Afro-American— seated at a table behind the partly drawn curtain of a train’s partitioned dining car. Both captions underscore the irony that the victory for democracy did not benefit those who had risked their lives in its defense. The image (whose original has disappeared) supports the political point, but it also explores the photographer’s place in the visual exchanges across the curtain. On the “white” side of the curtain, black and white male representatives of their races assume their respective social costumes and positions. The seated white citizen in suit and tie announces his social status; the deferential black waiter in white service uniform stands at attention, his hands poised to pull back another diner’s chair. Their difference in rank is also marked by the direction of their gaze—the white man looking directly through his glasses at the standing photographer, the black man lifting his eyes to look discreetly over her head. Between and behind the backs of these two sentries, the green Jim Crow curtain, opened most likely at the photographer’s request, affords a different glimpse of a black male community engaged in autonomous and unposed relations. Yet much as the image is composed to depict this contrast, it also exposes the limits of its ability to do so. One effect of the juxtaposition is to make us see the black waiter’s performance as such. The curtain dividing the races also delineates a theatrical space in which the black actor dons a costume and persona that he presumably sheds behind the scenes; when the curtain falls and he retires behind it to serve his African American customers, his starchy white front probably dissolves into a less formal demeanor we can imagine but not see.27 The peek through the parted curtain can only hint at what transpires when the curtain is closed. The image includes a formal suggestion that its window on another world is a structure without substance: an empty white frame on the dining car’s far wall, a precisely delineated right-angled and blank space that echoes the shape of the camera’s viewfinder. Kept blank most likely because the train company

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couldn’t be bothered to hang a picture or mirror for the Jim Crow passengers at the rear of the car, this empty white frame functions in the image both to emphasize and to evacuate the consequences of framing. Much as she struggles to see beyond her own white visual frame, the photographer of Jim Crow is also trapped within its framework. Her position as uncertain voyeur is eerily mirrored by that of a passenger, perhaps in transit from another car, who hides behind the curtain on the left, reluctant either to enter or to take herself out of the frame. This partial presence, half inside and half outside, this half face peering back at the photographer from the far side of the curtain, is a ghostly reminder of Palfi’s own inability to absolve herself from or to fully accept the implications of her own location. Entering the space of eating forces the photographer as well as the diners to relinquish the illusion of neutrality. There was no way to stay out of the picture; the photographer was placed within and by the composition of the image. This situation was especially problematic for photographers who saw themselves as agents of a national project to see across barriers, to be in but not of discrete social spaces, to use the camera both to represent and to transcend differences. Palfi’s staging of the question of race and location provides a lens through which to re-view the stakes of the visual during the previous decade, before the Second World War redirected national attention from domestic to international divisions.

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• • •

The pressures which brought black and white diners together at eating places in the 1930s also shaped the ways this relation was perceived. The economic and social crises precipitated by the stock-market crash that destroyed the familiar image of the nation produced a decade of national self-scrutiny, the most intensively selfdocumenting period in American history—indeed, the period that gave rise to the concept and practice of the documentary, which attempted to reweave the social fabric by making its increasingly divided fragments more fully visible. “Never before,” according to Alfred Kazin, “did a nation seem so hungry for news of itself ”; nor did “America seem so magnetic a subject in itself to so many different minds.” The cultural production of the thirties indicates “how deeply felt was the urge born of the crisis to recover America as an idea—and perhaps thus to build a better society in the shell of the old.”28 Representation was given an unprecedented national mandate to bind social wounds by creating affective bonds across geographic and class rifts that fractured the nation as painfully as anything had since the Civil War. America was embraced not only as a subject, even by artists who had never before shown interest in national themes, but also as a word whose iterative force could revive a common vein of feeling and values that might resuscitate the disjointed national body. America is the key word in a host of titles across the arts of the 1930s, from Martha Graham’s American Document (1934) to Walker Evans’s show “American Photographs”

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(1938) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in which, Lincoln Kirstein writes in a metaphor that traces the passage from eating to seeing in reverse, “the physiognomy of a nation is laid on your table.”29 The consumption of the image was a way to feed a damaged national body that was starved for cultural as well as literal food, that needed to incorporate an image of itself to bind its wounds and make itself whole. Nationhood would be fortified by common seeing rather than by common eating. Diversity of experience was mirrored in a range of media, but the reality effect of the image gave the camera a privileged status as “the central instrument of our time.”30 At no other moment in American history were nationhood and visuality so intensively allied, as if the reparative power of the camera lens could make the fissured nation whole by traversing the walls of difference and indifference, reincorporating a fractured society as a virtual community. The development of new photographic technologies in the 1930s (35mm cameras, faster-drying inks, machine-coated paper, and high-temperature printing processes) gave this mandate its most effective tool: the picture magazines and commercial photojournalism that developed contemporaneously with the federal projects and, despite differences in motives and visual style, shared their missionary zeal. The appearance of Life in 1936 and Look in 1937, along with their less successful imitators (tellingly named Click, Focus, Foto, Photo, Picture, and See), so enraptured a national readership that its demands outpaced the illustrated magazines’ production capacities. The magazines’ project, like the FSA’s, was to create a comprehensive picture of America. Life’s founder, Henry Luce, instructed his editors to “get the photographers into the byways of America,” and the photographers went enthusiastically: “We had an insatiable drive to search out every fact of American life, photograph it and hold it up proudly, like a mirror, to a pleased and astonished readership. . . . America had an impact on us and each week we made an impact upon America,” claimed Carl Mydans, the first but not the last FSA photographer to move from federally funded documentary to its glossier commercial variant.31 Despite the broader influence of the commercial magazines, however, it was the federal project that produced not only the most comprehensive government-sponsored visual archive ever amassed in such a short time but also a common visual rhetoric that could assimilate without homogenizing the regional textures of daily life and the stylistic signatures of the professional staff.32 Charged to use photography to “introduce Americans to America,” Stryker mobilized the camera in both senses: putting it on wheels in order to put it into action to reveal and thereby to heal the fissures exacerbated by the Depression.33 To gather this visual data, FSA photographers had to fan out from the nation’s capital to its most remote byways, seeking unification through dispersion rather than concentration. The expansion of the central government went hand in hand with a commitment to regionalism, as the promotion of an inclusive national body was of necessity routed through the

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particularity of its parts. In contrast to the stationary force of the transparent eyeball proposed by Roy Emerson Stryker’s famous namesake, the theory and practice of the FSA were wedded to mobility: its syncretic figure was the eyeball in a car.34 The car was in every sense the vehicle of the visual. Offering access to remote regions inaccessible by the railroad, whose primary effect had been to concentrate population in urban areas, cars and highways were both agents and icons of the New Deal mandate to produce “a sort of road map for the cultural rediscovery of America from within.”35 The association of car and camera was overdetermined: by 1929 a presidential commission claimed that the nation had “become dependent on the automobile in a very real sense.” By 1930 the number of cars in the nation had jumped from fewer than 4,000 in 1900 to 26.7 million, or 1 car per 4.5 persons.36 There was a certain inevitable similarity between FSA photographers and their subjects, for to document the mass migrations produced by the economic and natural disasters of the decade, the FSA photographers had to hit the roads. But this resemblance was largely illusory, for the mass migrations occurred primarily on foot, and even when migrant workers could keep possession of their cars, they could rarely afford gasoline. Cars endowed cameras with a roving, unimpeded, panoptical vision that provided access to and difference from the situation of the viewed. The merger of mobility and vision that together “saw” America was especially attractive to the women who joined the ranks of the government photographers and photojournalists on the roads in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Freed by this opportunity from the constraints of studio photography and the domestic framework it reproduced, women photographers found in this deployment of the camera an entrée to the public sphere. Dorothea Lange dramatized the liberating nature of this shift in a number of photographic portraits that literalize the superimposition of the camera on the car. In 1937, during perhaps her most demanding FSA assignment on farm tenancy in the South, Lange had three photographic portraits taken by her two closest associates, her husband and coworker Paul Taylor and her apprentice and surrogate son Rondal Partridge, that stage the relationship among three terms: woman, camera, car.37 Camera and posture change, but not the position on the top of the car, a station wagon she bought to transport her photographic equipment while working in the field. The location is especially striking because she rarely photographed from there; but in these portraits, she is not photographing but rather posing with her camera. In each of the car-with-camera portraits, Lange’s body language celebrates a liberation of body and gaze that has more to do with the symbolic function of photography than with her actual practice, typically up close and on the ground. Seated in one portrait on the top of her barely visible car with outstretched arms that extend the reach of her smile, she strikes the pose of a bird in flight, as if the car on which she sits and the camera by her side have given her wings to soar above the earth, sprung from the domestic bondage of being “harnessed to the house—not a

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liberated woman,” not “free as a bird” to pursue the work she loved.38 Standing on the car in another portrait, she cradles the camera with one arm and crooks the other over her forehead to extend her range of vision in a gesture that associates the photographer’s gaze with a panoramic vista. In the most theatrical portrait (figure 58), with her new Zeiss Juwel camera, the emphasis shifts from the horizontal to the vertical: not only is the camera set on a tripod on a car roof, but the extension of the photographer’s arms over her head, presumably to remove a jacket that will serve as a cover for the camera, seems to reach to the sky. Lange’s unisex black clothing and elongated posture identify her with her photographic apparatus; the black camera mounted at eye level on a spindly black tripod seems a more precise version of her extended body, abstracted against an empty sky. The image invites us to anticipate the moment when the photographer’s head will be submerged within the jacket, and the human body will merge more fully with the camera on the car. Verticality and mobility are paired in a pantomime of unrestricted vision. The extraordinary authority of this pose, the defiance of constraints on her body (which was short, female, and lamed by childhood polio), the assertion of a visual command of the world, insist on the power of the camera, like the car, to travel anywhere, to see the world, to lift the photographer beyond any physical or social circumscription. This triadic unity of woman, car, and camera, this mechanical extension of the eyeball’s range, explains her apprentice’s summary: “She taught me I could go anywhere, photograph anyone.”39 What happens when the camera encounters an impediment? The usual criticism of the FSA is that it didn’t—that the photographers simply circumvented obstacles, disregarded physical and emotional boundaries, and in varying ways and to varying degrees forced their ways into their subjects’ private lives.40 Racial boundaries were less readily traversed than those of class, however. It was neither the private home (at which the threshold of class was tenuously drawn) nor the workplace that presented these barriers most forcefully. Roy Stryker gave his staff ambivalent encouragement to enter these spaces in order to capture some appropriately industrious and deserving African American faces for his photographic files of the worthy poor. Representing the problem of racial representation was not a priority for him. This was not the view of all of his photographers, however, and especially not of Dorothea Lange, whose correspondence with Stryker makes explicit some of their disagreements about the place of race in the picture of the nation. He met her requests for more, and more political, representation of African Americans by setting strategic limits. Lange questioned more than numerical or political boundaries, however; she was concerned (as Stryker was not) with issues of visual access. The problem as she saw it was not practical access—there were willing African American subjects in certain contexts of both work and recreation—but the consequences of an intractable and institutionalized racial barrier for the project of an imagined

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Figure 58. Dorothea Lange with Zeiss Juwel camera, 1937. Photograph by Rondal Partridge. © Rondal Partridge, www.rondalpartridge.com.

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community, both for those who would produce it and for those whose visages would need to be recruited from the other side. It was the color line itself, as a physical and social barrier, that she felt the need to photograph, an impulse she articulated forcefully in a different cultural context: on the eve of a trip to Egypt, she announced, in response to Beaumont Newhall’s claim that Cairo’s Arabic and European quarters and cultures were divided by a line down the middle of the city and through its central cultural sites: “I am going to photograph that line.”41 Several currents converge to produce an overdetermined scene: Lange’s commitment to inclusive representation; her scruples about visual access; and the site at which these issues are pressingly raised. Lange ranks highest among the FSA photographers in the numerical representation of African Americans, according to Nicholas Natanson, who bases his calculations on the percentage of photographs taken by each member of the FSA in states in which African Americans comprise a substantial percentage of the population.42 Her commitment was complicated by her scruples, however, for she held that legitimate restrictions on the camera came from the position of its subjects, not its users. Consent had to be negotiated rather than presumed.43 Institutionalized racial boundaries were less negotiable, however, especially when instantiated as physical barriers, as they were in scenes of eating. In the topography of eating in the 1930s, two racially divided worlds faced one another across a barrier that served the interests of both sides. It was a scene calculated to produce a crisis in vision as the photographer’s “bodyless eye” encountered segregation’s wall.44 The scene of visual stand-off was also a scene of gender for the photographer who lamented the antithesis between the “visual life” and the “woman’s life,” bounded by the reproductive body. The racial barrier and its affront to vision figuratively moved her back across the “gulf ” between “the role of the woman as artist and the man” to her own side of the gender divide from which the camera had failed to liberate her.45 In the most profound meditation on visuality, gender, and race produced by the FSA, Lange photographed the color line from a seat at a segregated lunch counter in rural Mississippi in 1938. “Killing Time” (figure 59) was shot during a sevenweek research trip while Lange was working on a commission basis for Stryker, who paid three dollars for each negative he selected. It was not among those selected, not only because of its subject’s marginality to the agency’s concerns, I would speculate, but also because of its troubling visual thematics. The photograph shows us one section of the standard structure for maximizing space at low-budget restaurants: a U-shaped counter that enabled one waitress to serve both sides. It was a solution that lent itself well to segregation. An inscription along the right edge of the back of the photo (not in Lange’s handwriting—perhaps that of Paul Taylor or an assistant) explains: “Wayside Restaurant The Board that divides service to whites and blacks.” Because the seven-foot barrier prescribed in Birmingham would hardly be viable at a lunch counter—there would be no way of serving food across

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Figure 59. Killing Time, Mississippi, 1938. Dorothea Lange, American, 1895–1965. © The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor.

it—the wall of segregation is suspended from above rather than constructed from below. Less wall than veil, it descends from a post in the service aisle to just below eye level, allowing space for food to be served underneath but blocking eye contact. As two nations divided by a wall are brought face to face, the barrier is thinned to a veil through which they face but cannot see one another. The scene of eating sets into play opposing figures of nationhood: the Emersonian eyeball confronts the Du Boisian veil. Du Bois has famously theorized the veil’s consequences for the African American subject, physically confined to one side, psychically split between them, “an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.”46 “Killing Time” examines the encounter with the veil from the opposite location.

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From the side of a white America, there is also a rupture, a sense of restriction, an interference in the reciprocal looks out of which an integrated subject might be born. The eye cannot incorporate what will not acknowledge it. The faces of the African American couple (whatever their actual relationship, they function visually as a couple) are obscured by more than the board that conceals the tops of their heads. It is as though a metaphoric veil descended below the material one, screening them from the camera’s gaze and masking their emotions. Their guarded expressions concede no legitimacy to the photographer’s gaze. They remain from Lange’s side of the color line impenetrable, opaque, an image of resistance not only to her camera but also to the larger project that it served. The face was this project’s ultimate trophy and privileged currency. “The faces to me were the most significant part of the file,” Stryker claimed of the FSA collection. “Look into the faces of the men and women,” Edward Steichen instructed the collection’s viewers, for “a living experience you won’t forget.”47 The face fulfilled a range of sometimes dubious functions: its expressions of pain and endurance were used to legitimate the investment of government money in recovery projects and to enlist the sympathy of viewers, as Margaret Bourke-White’s title for her volume of nakedly sentimental photographs of the down and out—You Have Seen Their Faces—makes clear. But condescension was not the only response that was solicited. In contrast to Bourke-White’s untroubled and emotionally exploitative attempt to extend the nation’s pictorial encyclopedia by exposing the faces of an undefended “they” to the eyes of a middle-class “you,” Lange reflects on the dilemmas produced by a scene which does not allow full access to “their” faces. The problem “Killing Time” poses is whether and on what terms it might be possible to make space for African American faces in a national culture that also intentionally shielded them from view. Ironically, the harder Lange tries to circumvent the cultural barrier, the more opaque it becomes. To see as much as possible of the couple’s faces, she ducks down to peer underneath the veil, lowering the camera to the surface of the counter to see under rather than over an obstruction. Increased access in one dimension decreases it in another, however, for although she gets a glimpse of faces that would barely be visible if she held the camera at eye level, the attempt to maximize the vertical exposure not only intensifies the couple’s defensive reaction, but also increases the horizontal distance, that broad expanse of in the foreground. To see under the veil, moreover, Lange had to stoop literally and figuratively to voyeurism by kneeling below the counter to place her eye at the level of the camera. She had, that is, to assume the classic posture of the voyeur at the keyhole, the peeping Tom that she disdained. The Jim Crow barrier shaped the photographer’s response as well as that of the couple on the other side, diverting her from her usual attempts to ensure “that you are not taking anything away from anyone, their privacy, their dignity, their wholeness.”48 As she peers under the veil, her body con-

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cealed beneath the counter, her presence contracts to the disembodied eyeball behind the camera lens. Unharnessed from human embodiment and unmediated by human contact, the determination to see, whose hyperbolic figure was the camera on the car, rebounds against her in the couple’s redoubled and resistant stare. In contrast to the two undeveloped negatives of this scene, the composition of the printed image centers the couple and an object that stands between and in contrast to them. At the midpoint of the photograph is a jar of milk that makes visible the photographer’s place and race—and, of course, her gender. As a dividing point between the seated man and woman, the milk jar marks the effects of the photographer’s interruption, her diversion of their attention from their relational world to hers. It is as if their look at her, provoked by her attempt to see more of them, elicits the forward extension of her own concealed position into the field of vision as a register of being seen. Caught in the act of attempting to see unseen, she is placed in her body, transposed and transfigured from its invisible location underneath the counter to the fully visible centerpiece on top, domesticated and contained, naked and biologized, solitary and miniaturized, stripped of her visual privileges by the signifier of the biological female, the bodily other to the disembodied eyeball. When the Zeiss Juwel camera descends from its tripod on the top of the car to the surface of the segregated lunch counter, the erect and androgynous photographer is refigured as a feminine container. Vision collapses back into food, quintessentially female food, the distillation of the female body that stands in this context for an all-white nation—but this time for its failure and not its preservation. It is not only the photographer’s body that is figuratively contained in the milk jar, moreover, but also her medium, light, which luminously fills its upper half, held with the milk in one containing shape. The light that enters from the window in the background and dances disembodied as reflections on the counter is trapped in the jar in milky, almost palpable form. The dematerialization of liquid into light is also the materialization of light into milk. At the point that marks the photographer’s position beneath the racial barrier that blocks her vision is a shape that condenses the transparencies of seeing into a carnal medium. Within the specular structure of this photograph—subjects returning the photographer’s gaze in ways that register her presence—a figure on the far wall also functions as a reflexive image. In an advertisement for Jax beer, the trade name for the New Orleans–based Jackson Brewery Company, a female body, clad in a white bathing suit, is draped around an oversize bottle of beer (the neck of which would tower over her) that is placed in the crook of her legs. Its implicit phallic function is underwritten by her presence. The bathing suit that intensifies the whiteness of her skin rhymes with the white milk jar in a composite evocation of the white female body that, whether eroticized by association with beer or maternalized by association with milk, is equally and only a body. Her decapitation by the segregating board clinches her status as torso and se-

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cures her function as a reflector of the photographer whose vision is likewise occluded by the board. The headless body condenses the photographer’s two alternatives. It offers an alarming premonition of the consequences of defying the racial barrier through a monitory image of the punishment administered to anyone who might be tempted to lay a head on the counter to gain a forbidden picture of the other side. But it also figures the sanctioned alternative: sitting in one’s racially ordained seat, head obscured by the board, with only a torso visible to those sitting on the opposite side. The decapitated body registers the double bind inflicted by the racial veil: too much vision or too little, voyeurism or blindness, culminating uncannily in the same visual dead end or blind alley. It thus seems overdetermined that the body in the advertisement is female; however coincidentally she may have entered the photographic scene, she extends its meditation on the costs of blocking vision. If the tall bottle of beer, inscribed with the Jax logo of a man on a rearing horse, carries some trace of the photographer’s phallic privileges, an echo of the vision from the top of the car, then the accessorizing female body is its beheaded, inert, and sightless female other. Her beached white body both returns the woman to her place and provides an image of the camera’s failure to change the face of the nation. To change that face, the camera would need to join forces with the students who deliberately challenged the restrictions at the lunch counter during the sit-in movement that constitutes the final chapter of this narrative. Before arriving at that conclusion, however, we need to examine the intersection of race and visual politics at a more acknowledged site of national formation: the movie theaters, where cameras captivated eighty to ninety million Americans weekly (equivalent to the entire U.S. population between the ages of six and sixty) between 1929 and 1949.49 Some viewed the screen from the balcony’s upper tiers, a location written on the theater’s outer walls by signs for the “colored balcony.” The perspectives of the upstairs and downstairs moviegoers were engaged through the lenses of the still and moving cameras that encountered one another at the theater’s outer wall. As the photographic camera migrates from the “white” side of the lunch counter to the “colored entry” to the movie theater, it cedes the advantages of mobility to cinema’s more complex technology and levies the authority of the single frame, allied with the racially marked location, against the lure of cinema’s comprehensive vision. To grasp the power of this critique, we have to begin with the movie camera’s claims and the obstacle posed by the segregated theater.

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Part III

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Still and Motion Pictures

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6

Double Take Photography, Cinema, and the Segregated Theater No doubt the darkened room and the screen bordered with black like a letter of condolences already present privileged conditions of effectiveness—no exchange, no circulation, no communication with any outside. Projection and reflection take place in a closed space, and those who remain there, whether they know it or not (but they do not), find themselves chained, captured, or captivated. Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” 1970

We always entered the side door of the theater, the one reserved for blacks, and invariably sat in the balcony, thus segregated from the whites. . . . We sat in the same place—the front row of the balcony—and propped our feet on the banister while watching the movies. When the pictures were boring, we would throw popcorn, empty soft-drink cups and water on the whites seated below. We got a big kick out of that.

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Cleveland Sellers, The River of No Return, 1973

Who is more captive in the movie theater: the African American spectators channeled from the side door to its segregated balcony, where, at a remove from the cinematic scene, they can exercise their opinions and their limbs, or the unmarked spectators in Jean-Louis Baudry’s scenario of isolation, at liberty to sit where they choose in the hermetically sealed and darkened cave in which they are severed from the outside world and chained to the flickering images on the screen? Or, to pose the question differently, why are boredom and bad movies imaginable only from the balcony? A signal theorist of the “ideological effects of the basic cinematic apparatus,” Baudry intentionally strips his scene of all distraction and distills it to the founding allegory of Western idealism. Plato’s cave is the prototype of the enslavement to the image that culminates in the identification with the movie camera’s seemingly 195

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transcendent gaze. To expose—and thereby break the hold of—the operations that forge this identification, the work of the apparatus (camera, screen, projector) must be illuminated and the rest of the cinema cave kept dark. Baudry both laments and perpetuates this forfeit of the object world. His comparison of the illuminated screen in a darkened theater to a “letter of condolences” bordered in black mourns the loss of sensory experience, but his chosen role as the analyst who exhorts the captives to liberate themselves by making conscious the unconscious processes that trap them in the movie cave restricts his focus to the interlocking psychic and cinematic machinery that, following Freud, he calls the “other scene.”1 Yet it is not only the material operations of the film apparatus that have been deliberately kept in the dark to allow the ideology they serve to do its work, but also the material structure of film consumption that Baudry’s singular focus on the productive apparatus contributes to obscuring. From the balcony where Cleveland Sellers sits, not only are movies are seen differently, but the movie environment is narrated differently: for one thing, it is narrated rather than abstracted to a single allegorical scene. In Denmark, South Carolina, there are points of entry into (and consequently exit from) the body of the theater that must be concealed from the inhabitants of the Platonic (Parisian) cinema cave that affords “no communication with any outside,” including the outsides inside the theater but beyond the border of the screen. The things that disappeared into the darkness of Baudry’s theater—banisters and popcorn, soft drink cups and water— reappear in Sellers’s, and with them reemerge the smells, touches, and sounds that challenge the sovereignty of vision that classical cinema consolidated.2 The bodies of the other spectators also return, strongly characterized and vertically stratified into a collective and consequently fortified African American “we” above a white “them” whose visible and audible presence below unglues the adhesion of eyes to screen. And the darkness that for Baudry is prerequisite for enthrallment becomes for Sellers a cover for resistance: “The ushers would rush up to the balcony with their little red flashlights, but they never caught anyone. We always moved to another section of the balcony before they arrived,” his narrative concludes.3 Writing within a couple of years of each other in Paris and South Carolina, Baudry and Sellers forecast the path that film theory would travel from the heyday of the apparatus in the early 1970s to the renewed focus on audiences and exhibition sites that emerged in the late 1980s and ’90s.4 That trajectory had been anticipated decades earlier through a different lens, however. The “Colored Entry,” “Colored Admission,” and “Colored Balcony” signs on the outside of the theater instructing Sellers and his companions where to sit had by the 1930s summoned a second camera to the movies. Although sometimes seen by cinematic teleologists as merely the movie camera’s antecedent, a technological way station between the camera obscura and the moving pictures that released the image from its capture within a single frame, the still camera became a movie critic when it trained its gaze

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on the movie theater. Making visible what the cinematic camera didn’t see, the still camera performed a kind of film theory avant la lettre, quite literally before the camera’s visual observations could be formulated discursively. By introducing a vantage point that was not incorporated into the movie camera’s vision, whose relay by a projector in a darkened theater creates the illusion of a single powerful gaze, the still camera restored a form of binocularity to the viewing situation in which the ideology of monocular vision had found its most beguiling form. Anticipating what a psychoanalytic discourse would subsequently characterize as the ability of an embodied look to expose the lack within the impossible fiction of a disembodied gaze, the photographic camera’s partial point of view uncovers what is elided in the movie camera’s sovereignty.5 In a more empirical discourse, we could say that the second camera’s presence at the movies recalls the physiological reality of binocular vision that, since the Renaissance invention of linear perspective, has been technologically and ideologically abstracted to a single, incorporeal point of view.6 Photography, of course, has been an acknowledged party to these empirical inquiries, but its role as a visual commentator on cinematic spectatorship has been overlooked, a neglect that may be partially due to the success with which the camera has been pressed into service as a master figure for the symbolic operations of the gaze.7 Photographs of movie theaters, by contrast, can stage encounters between two opposing cameras, as the earliest-known, and somewhat anomalous, photograph of a segregated balcony makes clear. Taken from the place of a reverse shot that is not edited back into the movie camera’s perspective, the photograph that documents the opening night of the Rex Theater in Hannibal, Missouri, on April 4, 1912 (figure 60), sees what the cinematic camera typically would not: the operative feature of the apparatus, the projector that relays the movie camera’s gaze, which looks back at the still camera from a circular hole in the window at the center of the back wall. The wide-angle lens of the camera on the stage exaggerates the depth of the photograph, creating the impression that the rectangular hall’s receding lines are converging toward the apex of a cone—the visual cone of linear perspective. The projector casts the point of light that aligns cinema with its antecedents in Renaissance perspective, which placed a sovereign eye at the center of, but unimplicated in, a rationally mapped universe. The photograph complicates this perspectival map with a scene of embodied spectatorship that encompasses a multiplicity of viewing perspectives and communities clustered voluntarily by gender, generational, and familial bonds—and stratified racially. Whereas the downstairs spectators, however differentiated as individuals, are embraced within the receding lines leading to the projector, those required to sit behind the railing in the shallow band of rows upstairs occupy a more ambiguous zone. The balcony “reserved” for African Americans appears sealed off from the orchestra, above which it is suspended as a separate, self-enclosed sphere

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Figure 60. Opening night at the Rex Theater, Hannibal, Missouri, April 4, 1912. Courtesy Q. David Bowers.

unconnected by visible passageways to the outside or downstairs. A nonnegotiable barrier divides the downstairs seats—whose front row is so close to noise from the stage that only young boys, one with hands over his ears, seem brave enough to sit there—from the balcony in which we can only dimly discern the distinguishing features of individual viewers that are so striking below. These effects of distance presumably work in both directions; if the camera on the stage sees the white and black viewing locations with greater and lesser specificity, that difference should also operate in reverse, especially when physical distance is compounded by the estrangement of a compulsory location. Both the railing and the darker tone of the upstairs walls and ceiling reinforce the impression that these viewers watch the movie from a different perspective and behind a second screen.8 It was not the purpose of this photograph, which inadvertently opened the visual archive on the segregated theater, to explore what we might call, contra Baudry, the ideological effects of the basic viewing structure, but it gestures toward them nevertheless. The difference in point of view it suggests, which is the difference between the abstract vantage point determined by the apparatus with which, in theory,

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all spectators identify, and a material viewing position, the only one (in contrast, for example, to sexual difference) to be located in physical rather than textual space, is socially rather than optically determined, but the social and the spatial converge in this instance. How to measure that distance was a question posed by a subsequent generation of photographers who restaged the scene of spectatorship on the outside of Southern movie theaters in the 1930s. Two and a half decades separate “Opening night at the Rex Theater” from the next photograph of a segregated balcony. Before turning to that side of the exchange, we need to examine how the segregated balcony was both seen and not seen through the discourses and lenses of the cinematic apparatus that achieved its classical form in the second decade of the twentieth century, when the concept of the cinematic spectator and the usage of the segregated balcony coincided and collided.9

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• • •

In or around 1910, a fault line surfaced in the conception of the cinematic spectator.10 This was the moment at which the spectator emerged as a distinctive category, constructed by the narrative and visual practices of the nascent classical mode as a disembodied vantage point within the film rather than an empirical member of the audience. Guided by an omniscient camera, and sustained by the greater narrative coherence and duration of the emerging feature film, the viewer was transported from his or her local situation in the world and in the theater to the ideal perspective constructed by the film. The emerging movie industry clearly stood to gain from reconstituting ethnically and economically diverse audiences with specific viewing expectations and traditions into a standardized and consequently predictable spectator—an abstract term that, as Miriam Hansen points out, came into usage in relation to cinema, especially in relation to cinema aesthetics, around 1910 as an alternative to more traditional descriptors such as audience and to particular social categories of viewers such as workingmen, drudging mothers, and cultivated folks.11 One set of strategies designed to abstract a generic spectator from a heterogeneous audience involved the internal mechanisms of editing and narration. A complementary set attempted to eliminate particularities in film reception by minimizing awareness of the material and social dimensions of the theater. These included eliminating ethnic vaudeville acts and songs in foreign languages that might call attention to the performance space and reinforce particular cultural traditions at odds with what D. W. Griffith famously called the “universal language” of film.12 The goal was to make film reception independent of the viewing practices of specific audiences.13 This disincorporation of the viewing experience was a further step in a project that began in the mid-nineteenth century to remake the vocal, interactive, and unpredictable audience that had been an active force in live per-

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formances into an impersonal assemblage of silent individuals. To transform the intermediate figure of the “primitive” spectator—who, as an effect of the more direct modes of address on the part of early cinema and the more direct modes of expression on the part of its predominantly working-class audience, retained a socially embedded vantage point exterior to the screen—into the disembodied spectator of classical film required reducing the margin of ethnic and economic particularity from the audience, the stage, and the screen.14 Drawing the viewer into the film meant turning down the background noise. Following Christian Metz’s account of the “segregation of spaces that characterises a cinema performance and not a theatrical one,” Miriam Hansen repeatedly describes the oppositional relation between the imaginary space of the screen and the physical space of the theater as a form of segregation: “The segregation of film and theater space involved a differentiation between the empirical moviegoer and the spectator as a structural term anticipated by the film, the invisible linchpin of the narration. It was through this segregation, as well as the implementation of classical codes, that the concept of the spectator emerged in the first place.”15 Segregation is not given a racial meaning by either Metz or Hansen, but as in Jacques Lacan’s “laws of urinary segregation,” the word’s passage into French both preserves and purges the echo of its racial usage in America. At least as the French application is readapted to the American context, the repressed returns in the insistence of a signifier that seems to acknowledge in spite of itself that race is the only social category that generated a separate margin of viewing at precisely the moment and precisely the site at which “the concept of the spectator” was most assiduously promoted. The segregation of the American film and theater space—meaning the derealization of the theater by the film space—was complicated and compromised by the segregation of the theater space itself, which by cordoning off a single group imposed the consciousness of a distinctive social and physical location that the cinematic spectator was constructed to negate. The racial segregation of the movie theater desegregated the theater and film space for the one group that, compelled to view the film from a designated position, reabsorbed the imaginary cinematic space into a compacted social space dense with both the bodies and the history that would generate what the classical mode was supposed to dispel. Whereas the creation of black theaters, especially in Chicago’s Black Belt, during this same period contained this distinction in a racially homogeneous space (as Jacqueline Najuma Stewart has demonstrated), the segregated balcony installed into a single viewing structure not only two races, but also two kinds of viewers or viewing publics—one constituted as conscious, the other as unconscious, of itself as such. These paradoxical developments emerged simultaneously in public discourse, although segregated seating at the movies had a history dating back to the earliest ruling on theater segregation: an 1875 Delaware statute that relieved theater owners of the obligation to present shows to “any person whose presence there would

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be offensive to the major parts of his spectators or patrons, and thereby ruin his business.” This position, articulated in the first state law to reverse the gains of Reconstruction, was sanctioned nationally by the Supreme Court’s 1883 decision in the Civil Rights Cases, which overturned the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and granted states the authority to pass legislation affirming the rights of theater owners to exclude African Americans entirely or to allocate seating by race, and to penalize violations by theater owners or patrons as misdemeanors punishable by fine.16 These rulings on live theaters set the legal precedent for the nickelodeons that began appearing around the country in 1905, but specific arrangements were left to the discretion of theater owners. By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the balcony’s availability as a discrete architectural space made it an obvious, although not the exclusive, solution to the competing economic imperatives that had shaped legal precedent and custom from the beginning: preventing the loss of white patronage while maximizing the use of the theater space.17 Northern theater managers began adapting existing balconies to segregated audiences for live performances by the turn of the century, and in movie theaters over the following decade. Rather than being spelled out on the wall, the two-tier seating policy in many theaters in New York and Chicago was articulated more discreetly by ticket agents and ushers who informed black patrons that no orchestra seats were available or, if these patrons did succeed in buying orchestra tickets, tried to confiscate or exchange them for seats in the balcony. By the end of 1909, an article by Lester A. Walton, drama critic for the African American newspaper New York Age, noted the consensus among white theater owners in New York that African Americans should not insist on the orchestra seats to which they were entitled under state law.18 Because the seating practice violated the antidiscrimination laws that existed in many Northern states, however, it was not accepted quiescently by African Americans, a number of whom deliberately tested the practice by filing lawsuits and writing letters of protest to the press, thereby bringing a debate over race and spectatorship to the attention of a general public. Beginning in 1910, the African American press in both New York and Chicago consciously sponsored the cause through news stories and editorials. From 1910 to 1912, a series of articles by Lester A. Walton praised the decision of the Crescent Theater to integrate its seating, criticized the reverse decision of the Lafayette Theater, and publicized plans for a new black-owned theater to be built in Harlem.19 In Chicago, where a strong black community on the South Side produced the nation’s first black-owned theater in 1905 and more than twenty white-owned theaters for African Americans by the mid-1920s, the Chicago Defender started in 1910 to carry stories about the discriminatory seating policies at the theaters downtown and to urge African Americans to “sue every time you are refused in theaters. . . . [B]uy your seat anywhere in Chicago theaters and sit there.”20

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The salience of the protests in New York carried the issue of theater segregation from the black press into the mainstream media. The New York Times not only reported some of the complaints filed by customers denied seating downstairs but also published editorials in defense of the segregated seating policy, which in turn drew letters of protest, including one by W. E. B. Du Bois.21 From 1910 to 1920, the debate over theater seating traveled both to trade publications such as the Moving Picture World and to popular magazines such as Life, whose drama critic, Robert Benchley, took the exceptional stand of condemning New York theaters’ segregated balconies.22 Two debates on spectatorship unfolded side by side: two points of view about point of view were being formulated concurrently and independently in the parallel universes of cinema aesthetics and civil rights. But if the discursive worlds were parallel, the viewing structure that undergirded them was perpendicular and, in relation to the racial hierarchy, upside down. Perhaps this inversion contributed to the striking silence on the part of white film directors, critics, and audiences, not about the ethics or legality of segregated seating, about which their indifference is hardly surprising, but about the aesthetic and affective implications for themselves of a seating arrangement that placed the subordinate race above the dominant one. For this material structure ran counter not only to the theoretical project of a universal spectator, but also to the social structure the vertical division was intended to support. During the decades when the prevailing doctrine was “All white men on top and all back men down”—as Lester A. Walton summarized it with reference to D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation—blacks were being seated on top of whites.23 Although there were architectural parallels for this inversion in the requirement that African Americans sit in the upper galleries of churches and courthouses, these sites of spiritual and social consequence, whose business was conducted in broad daylight and under the manifest authority of church and state officials, tempered the inversion’s provocative potential. By contrast, the darkness and more casual regulation of the movie theater (under the control of mere ushers and box-office personnel rather than ministers or judges) conjoined the advantages of height with the emotional license and obscurity of the theater. If, as Stewart has argued, one of the voyeuristic pleasures and social purposes of early cinema was to display white surveillance over African American activities, the concurrent evolution of a viewing structure that placed African Americans in a position of surveillance over whites seems to have provoked sufficient discomfort to repress the awareness of the “dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence” overhead: a repression betrayed symptomatically through the “coded language” of “significant and underscored omissions, startling contradictions, heavily nuanced conflicts” that, as Toni Morrison has eloquently argued, characterize the ambivalent recognition of an “unsettled and unsettling population” in a “vocabulary designed to disguise the subject.”24

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The ambivalence would have been especially acute because African Americans were being relegated to the traditional position of the “gallery gods” whose vocal presence in the uppermost tier of seats, halfway up to the heaven from which (along with their defiant behavior) they derived their ironic designation, had posed an obstacle to the project of gentrifying vaudeville since the middle of the nineteenth century. This project required not only cleaning up the acts on the stage but also toning down the interference from the galleries by educating their working-class and sometimes disreputable inhabitants in the codes of middle-class audience behavior, such as expressing approval by polite applause rather than by stomping feet or pounding canes and swallowing disapproval rather than spitting it out in the form of insults, raucous laughter, or peanuts from above. Yet despite improvements, the upper galleries were still perceived at the turn of the century as a site of disruptive nonassimilation to the prevailing audience norms.25 As an emerging cinematic style attempted to impose an even higher level of spectatorial silence and uniformity, theater managers, with a certain willful ignorance, were reconfiguring a class-based trouble spot of viewer unruliness as a racial zone. For the white audience seated below, whose silence on the subject makes a striking contrast to the volubility of their counterparts upstairs (as the next chapter shows), the discomfort entailed in this arrangement was expressed at most indirectly.26 Anxiety may be audible beneath the white vernacular for the segregated balcony. The term nigger heaven, a derisive inflection of the “gallery gods” (made [in]famous by Carl van Vechten’s adaptation of the phrase as his metaphor for Harlem’s crowded uptown location in relation to downtown New York), obliquely acknowledges, by anxiously disavowing, the prospect that this uppermost perch, as close to heaven as African Americans could get according to one gloss, might be beyond manipulation from below. The more widespread and equivocal phrase crow’s nest simultaneously references the inferior status of Jim Crow and the superior vantage point of a ship’s lookout. As the crows assume a more predatory guise in the phrase buzzard’s roost, the depiction of black viewers seated above and behind white heads becomes at once more derogatory and more apprehensive. Even the milder pigeon’s roost registers, however inadvertently, the possibility of droppings from above, a potential acknowledged more overtly in the extension of the nineteenthcentury peanut gallery to the segregated balcony. These hints of uneasiness were also manifested indirectly, through the lenses of the cameras that were shaping the cinematic spectator, or at least through the cameras in the hands of the director most responsible for the emergent classical mode. The wrinkle that the segregated balcony produced in a space that was supposedly empty of particularity surfaces only as an anxious subtext in the film that works hardest to coarticulate spectatorship with race. Briefly and obliquely, but with conceptual urgency, Birth of a Nation (1915) depicts a viewing position whose potential to upset the racial status quo must be deflected as decisively as the hyperbolic

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racial threats: indeed, it is an intervention from the balcony that makes visible the logic for absorbing the space of the theater into that of the film, and the audience into the vantage point constructed by the camera.

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• • •

Birth of a Nation is an inevitable, if also overused, fulcrum for opening the question of race and spectatorship in the early twentieth century.27 It opens it in more than one way, however. Griffith’s skillful manipulation of technology and history to produce a singular point of view has been amply demonstrated. This first full-length feature film (twelve reels and three hours) applied its spectacular breakthroughs in cinematic technique—the extensive use of parallel editing, close ups, pans, and tracking shots that enabled cinema to present a sustained and integrated narrative—to an equally spectacular distortion of Reconstruction history contrived to win white audience assent to the purging of African Americans from a national body or, in a compromise with political realities, to yoking them to service roles derived from slavery. The enforcement of point of view by crosscutting grossly distorted scenes of rapacious Negroes and white-shrouded Knights of the Ku Klux Klan galloping to the rescue of imperiled white femininity posed in the starkest terms what Manthia Diawara describes as the “impossible position” of the black spectator.28 Yet the film also staged, in order to negate, the conditions of that very possibility. The pressure exerted by the segregated balcony against the consolidation of the classical spectator exposes within the classical style the anxieties whose pressure on preclassical cinema Stewart has linked to the African American migration to the cities of the North. Although generated by a highly constrained mode of “upward” black mobility, this anxiety was also a reflex of a broadly shifting racial terrain, whose pressure on Birth anticipates that of a growing female audience on Griffith’s next feature film, Intolerance (1916). But rather than the incoherence within the classical codes that Miriam Hansen has traced to that pressure on Intolerance, the impact of a designated audience upstairs operates as the political unconscious of a single pivotal sequence in the history of the Union and of the unified cinematic vantage point whose necessity the scene is designed to legitimate.29 In a meticulous construction of the scene of Lincoln’s assassination in the Ford Theater that concludes part 1 and clears a space for the Reconstructionist takeover that legitimates the Klan’s intervention in part 2, Griffith dramatizes the threats posed by the theater’s heterogeneous and participatory space. The representational logic that governs the film requires that just as, in order to make its case for purging or subjugating African Americans, the film had to depict the agency, however demonized, of people of African descent, it also had to represent the agency of audiences in order to make the case for sublimating it into the predetermined perspective of the cinematic spectator. The depiction of Lincoln’s assassination not only dramatizes the traumatic outcome of the first act of the nation’s attempt to regen-

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erate itself from the wounds inflicted by the Civil War, but also dramatizes it as and in a theatrical form that will need to be displaced for the nation to be safely transported out of theater of unruly history into the safe space of the cinematic screen. The locus of unsafety is the balcony that harbors not African Americans—the glamorous occasion designed for high society to celebrate the end of the Civil War would be an unlikely venue for them—but white characters who function as their proxies by inverting the audience-stage relation in ways that (however contrary to their private intentions) also invert the racial status quo. The balcony’s salience in this historical drama attempts to work through toward a different resolution the balcony’s conversion to a racial zone in the historical present of the film. Griffith’s composition of the scene departs in several significant ways from his source text, Thomas Dixon Jr.’s Clansman.30 Whereas Dixon concludes book 1 of The Clansman, titled “The Assassination,” with a chapter called “The Frenzy of the Nation,” which traces the national spectacle of mourning for the assassinated president, Griffith foregoes the panoramic opportunities offered by Lincoln’s funeral cortege, opportunities he seized in his virtuoso filming of the Civil War battles, to conclude his part 1 with a narrow focus on the Ford Theater and the reaction of his principals to the assassination there. He also shifts the perspective through which the theater sequence is observed. Dixon represents the scene from the vantage point of Margaret Cameron, the paradigmatic “daughter of the South,” who has traveled north with her mother to nurse her wounded brother, Ben, recovering from battle wounds in a Union hospital. Margaret attends the play with her brother’s boarding-school friend Phil Stoneman in an early scene of the courtship that, after several deferrals, will culminate in one of the two marriages between North and South that cement the reborn nation. Conspicuously secondary to this scene is Phil’s sister, Elsie Stoneman, whom Phil and Margaret keep waiting at the theater and who plays an awkward and irritated third wheel to the courting couple. Griffith transfers the point of view from Margaret to Elsie, the paradigmatic daughter of the North. In the film’s familial geography, the North is personified by Austin Stoneman, a caricature of the House leader and abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, transformed into a radical Reconstructionist whose first public act after Lincoln’s assassination is to promulgate an “edict that blacks shall be raised to full equality with whites.” Stoneman himself is darkened in numerous ways: in his person, which, as Michael Rogin notes, is dressed in dark makeup, prominent lips and a wooly wig that make him the “most negroid looking” of all the major characters in the film, and in his affiliations, especially with his scheming mulatto housekeeper and mistress, Lydia Brown, introduced in an intertitle as “the great leader’s weakness that is to blight a nation,” and with his mulatto protégé Silas Lynch, whom he places in charge of Reconstruction in Piedmont, South Carolina, home of the Camerons.31 In the miscegenation-obsessed imaginary of the film, the positioning of intertitles works to transfer Lydia’s racial status both to Stoneman and to their

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symbolic progeny, the future generations their intercourse will “blight.” The placement in the middle of Stoneman’s conference with Sumner, the Senate leader, of an intertitle describing Lydia’s subsequent interaction with Sumner—“The mulatto aroused from ambitious dreamings by Sumner’s curt orders”—makes Stoneman the visual antecedent of the racial term.32 The hint of racial ambiguity also touches the blond, fair-skinned Elsie (played by Lillian Gish), their other symbolic child, whose biological mother has long been dead and who is implicated through her close association with her father in a metonymic linkage to the African American interests he cultivates in the private sphere and advances in the public sphere. Although Elsie lives in an apartment with her aunt, she is shown repeatedly in intimate physical contact with her father (and never with her aunt). The opening scene dwells on their bodily proximity as Elsie smoothes her father’s wig and pats his brow; the scene concludes with a tableau of the father with his daughter kneeling at his side, her left hand interlaced with his right. The theater sequence begins by reprising this connection: Elsie preens in a new dress for her father’s approval just before her brother Phil arrives to escort her— rather than Margaret—to the play. Tracking the course of the Stoneman siblings from their father to the theater, the film explores how Elsie, the more father-identified member of the pair, extends her father’s political desires into the cultural sphere from which, in one reading, he is excluded because of his liaison with Lydia, but from which he may also have been banned by the director who wants to obscure the pressure of Stoneman’s interests there. The sequence is an elaborate drama of perspective that displays Griffith’s signature use of multiple camera angles and the risks of placing them, like the nation, in the wrong—because susceptible—hands. The shooting script specifies fifty-five shots from diverse angles and of varying distances, but the salient device is the iris-in, which focuses attention by contracting the shutter on the camera lens to link visual cause and effect.33 It is used first to narrow our attention to Elsie and Phil, our entrée to the scene, taking seats in the location Griffith adapts from The Clansman, where Phil Stoneman proclaims them “the best in the house to-night, the first row in the balcony dress-circle, opposite the President’s box. We can see everything on the stage, in the box, and every nook and corner of the house.”34 Repeated iris-ins associate Elsie’s perspective with the actors and action they bring into focus. The vantage point further contracts to Elsie in the next shot, as Phil places into the hands that care for Austin Stoneman the opera glasses through which she focuses the viewer’s attention first on the play as a whole (the next two shots present the title of the play, An American Cousin, starring Laura Keene, and the rising of the curtain), and then the key players in the larger drama unfolding in the audience. Catalyzed by the arrival of the presidential party in its box above the stage, where the bowing Lincoln becomes the star of a different performance that the audience stands to cheer, the perspectival drama accelerates. In quick succession, Lincoln’s

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bodyguard abandons his post outside the presidential box and takes a seat in the balcony adjacent to the box “to get a view of the play”; a shadow encircles the lens of the camera placed directly behind the young Stonemans’ heads; and Elsie notices in the upper gallery a striking figure dressed in black, who is brought into focus through a “handsome vignetted portrait shot retroactively attributed to Elise’s point of view (by a round mask suggesting her view through opera glasses).”35 His name—John Wilkes Booth—which appears in the next title, similarly responds to a question Elsie mouths to her brother, and the name in turn provokes the second round of Phil’s passing his sister the opera glasses. This time she lifts them with her left hand, which had been interlaced with her father’s. (She shows no signs of lefthandedness elsewhere.) Having brought into focus the drama on the stage, Elsie now focuses our attention on the celebrated actor who stars in the drama that unfolds in the balcony. The actual assassination scene is suspensefully prepared and delayed through alternating shots of Lincoln, whose bodyguard has joined the theater audience, and Booth, as both actor and viewer, all arrayed in a balcony that neither Booth nor the bodyguard actually occupied. For despite Griffith’s proclaimed fidelity to every detail of the twelve-volume History of Lincoln by Nikolay and Hay that he cites as his source, he rearranges the historical players to create a mobile play of gazes in which the stage is only one, and not the most compelling, site. According to Nikolay and Hay, and all other historical accounts, Booth actually arrived at the theater well after the performance began (after a prior trip to chart his course through a space that his acting career had already made familiar) and made his way directly up the back stairs leading to the president’s box. Griffith resituates both Booth and the guard (who, according to eyewitnesses, never left his post outside the presidential box) in the balcony to rescript the scene as a perspectival drama in which Elsie’s optically intensified vision, and the camera behind her head, are the relay between Booth and the object of his intensely fixed stare.36 The scene is edited so that Booth appears to be drawn into action by Elsie’s close attention. From her vantage point, we trace his passage through a corridor behind the balcony to the door of the presidential box, into which he peers through a keyhole that narrows the distance between seeing and acting. The next shot is a closeup of Booth cocking his pistol. After breaking through the door and pulling the trigger to murder the president, who has starred in a performance on his own separate stage, the famous actor leaps from the box to the stage, where he upstages the performance of An American Cousin by declaiming, “Sic semper tyrannis,” as if his goal were less to kill the president than to get his moment as a Roman republican on the world historical stage.37 Like the president, his target, Booth steals the show. His dramatic crossover leap underscores the absence of secure boundaries in the theater, from whose shadowy reaches members of the audience can catapult themselves across the proscenium arch and into the national eye.

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To suggest that Booth—a Confederate sympathizer who, for reasons diametrically opposed to Stoneman’s, assassinated a president he saw as a Union tyrant—is the unwitting agent of Stoneman’s Reconstructionist schemes is to acknowledge Booth’s recruitment to Griffith’s notorious reemplotment of history. Booth’s dual function as, on the one hand, a historical figure who concocts a personal revenge plot and, on the other, a vehicle of a quite a different plot (Stoneman’s, but ultimately Griffith’s) is suggested by his dual location in the theater: he is seated in the back of the balcony that adjoins the presidential box but also prefigured by a shadow, in the form of a man with a gun, that is cast over Lincoln’s bodyguard and moves, as the bodyguard takes a seat in the balcony, to a shadow created by a mask over a portion of the camera lens. The description of Booth in the shooting script as a “man in shadows” is overdetermined: he is in the background, but he is also cast in the racial discourse of the time that deploys the shadow as the primary trope for a specifically racial foreshadowing, which Griffith inherited from Dixon, among other sources. “Over all the earth, hung the shadow of the freed Negro,” Dixon writes in the first volume of his Reconstruction trilogy about the consequences of the South’s surrender, which allowed “the towering figure of the freed Negro” to throw “the blight of its shadow over future generations, a veritable Black Death for the land and its people.”38 The racial valence of the shadow is made explicit when it reappears in the infamous Master’s House scene, in which Griffith purports to represent the first blackcontrolled legislative session after Reconstruction. The scenes of entertainment and politics are paralleled in several ways: beyond the representation of politics as spectacle, complete with shoe-removing, whiskey-drinking, chicken-eating legislators, these two public interiors, tendentiously presented as “historical facsimiles,” share an architectural structure viewed from a similar camera angle that allows us to observe the scene in the audience as well as on the official stage. In the legislative context, between the passage of a bill requiring all whites to salute Negro officers on the street and a bill legalizing interracial marriage, an intertitle directs us to the “white visitors in the gallery.” A partial mask over the camera lens, prefaced by the shadows cast by the speakers in front of the legislature, constricts our vision of the white observers, who depart when the bill is passed, leaving the gallery, like the main chamber, under the control of African Americans who join the celebration of the legislative victory with their colleagues downstairs. The consequences of this victory are spelled out in the next title, “Later, the grim reaping begins,” which initiates the stalking of the virginal Flora, the youngest Cameron daughter, by the African American “Gus, the renegade, a product of the vicious doctrines spread by the carpetbaggers.” As the legislative gallery passes from white to black supervision, the anxieties prefigured by the shadow of black autonomy in the Ford Theater balcony are embodied in the figure of the black rapist. In the scene that immediately follows the sequence in the Master’s House, Elsie again

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plays the role of intermediary, hugging Flora but then, to Flora’s dismay, shaking hands with Lynch, who defends Gus’s right to loiter at the Camerons’ front door and track Flora with his eyes, the prelude to physically stalking her, which precipitates her fatal leap. The shadow of the freed Negro, whose unknowing servant is John Wilkes Booth, wreaks a Black Death upon the white South. In the assassination sequence, Griffith employs a double frame to indicate who benefits from his rescripted history. In the prelude, an African American servant escorts the young Stonemans to and from the door through which they leave their aunt’s apartment for the theater. Conversely, news of the assassination is carried back to Stoneman, somewhat implausibly, by an African American servant. This interior framing in black of the passage between the theater and the Stoneman residences is enclosed within the larger frame of the triumph of Stoneman’s policies. The theater sequence is directly preceded by the scene in which Stoneman confronts Lincoln, in an unsuccessful bid to convert him to a policy of retribution toward the white South—“Their leaders must be hanged and their states treated as conquered provinces”—and the inversion of race relations described at the beginning of part 2 in language initially cited from Woodrow Wilson’s History of the American People and then repeated as Stoneman’s own words, as the Reconstructionist plan to “crush the white south under the heel of the black south” (underlined in the intertitle).39 The sequence at the theater that removes the primary obstacle to Stoneman’s plot “to Africanize ten great southern states” is bracketed on the other side by the scene of Stoneman’s triumph. Introduced by the title “Stoneman hears the news,” the sequence culminates in a view of Stoneman alone with Lydia, who crows triumphantly, “You are now the greatest power in America,” strokes his arm, and sidles up to him with gestures of intimacy similar to those that characterize Elsie’s relation to her father in the opening scene. Part 2 reveals that Stoneman becomes the “uncrowned king” in the new “executive mansion of the nation,” in which Lydia achieves her goal of being “first lady” of the land. Prior to this, however, the scene of Stoneman’s triumph is followed by, and contrasts sharply with, the stunned reception of the news of the assassination by the Cameron family in the South, where Dr. Cameron, Stoneman’s Southern counterpart, laments: “We have lost our best friend. What will happen to us now?” The answer detailed in part 2, of course, is the excesses of Reconstruction, powered by Stoneman. If it would be too strong to say that Stoneman desires Lincoln’s death (although Lydia seems to unambiguously), the sequencing that locates Lincoln’s assassination between Stoneman’s frustration and his triumph routes the fulfillment of Stoneman’s dreams through a different actor who sneaks from his concealed position in the balcony to the Presidential box and onto the stage of history. The well-illuminated theater is the containing space of dangerously intersecting plots, a repository of history in the making without divine guidance or dramatic

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oversight. Following Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Miriam Hansen argues that, in the absence of empirical evidence, the existence of an autonomous public formation can be inferred from the effort expended to negate it.40 In Birth of a Nation, that effort is exerted less at a specific public than at a viewing structure and mode that embrace errant points of view. The assassination scene dramatizes the urgency of sublimating an autonomous and unruly theater audience into a perspective determined by the camera. Within the diegesis, an analogous project is assigned to the Ku Klux Klan. As John Wilkes Booth is conscripted to Stoneman’s desires in Griffith’s revisionist history, Lincoln’s assassination serves Griffith’s encompassing historical design, which requires (even as it laments) the derailing of Lincoln’s plan to welcome the South back into a racially and sectionally integrated Union as a defeated and dependent prodigal child. The premature national rebirth that culminates in a bloody miscarriage in the presidential box, at the performance intended to celebrate Lee’s surrender to Grant and the reconsolidation of the Union, sets the stage for a postReconstruction rebirth of the nation in other terms and with a different cast. As the climax of part 1 is the sequence in the theater, the climax of part 2 is the Klan’s ride to the rescue in a virtuoso sequence which intercuts the white-shrouded Knights on their horses with the besieged cluster of former Union soldiers and Cameron family members huddled together in a log cabin, “former enemies . . . united again in common defense of their Aryan birthright” against an unruly Negro mob outside, and with the symbolic distillation of their effort to preserve their common “Aryan birthright” in the sexual struggle between Elsie Stoneman and Silas Lynch. The scene of Lincoln’s death in the Presidential box is replaced by the scene of Presidential origins in what Michael Rogin notes is a Lincoln log cabin, the nucleus of an Aryan nation reborn through the military and spiritual ministry of the Ku Klux Klan that gathers to dispel black pressure on the national womb. The Klan’s ride, the dramatic possibilities of which initially prompted Griffith’s desire to translate Dixon’s novel into film, has become his signature piece of cinematography.41 The self-authorizing, unifying, and unified power of the Klan that, as Linda Williams observes, literally whitens the screen as it disperses the black crowd also gives dramatic form to the film director’s mission to consolidate the heterogeneous theater audience into a singular vantage point determined by the camera and delimited by borders of the screen.42 The theater scene that prefigures national rebirth is also a protocinematic scene. The circulation of looks among audience members calls out for the invisible and coordinating hands of a director to repossess the camera-mimicking opera glasses from the chain of influence that reaches to Elsie Stoneman’s hands. Within the film, invisible influences are dangerous: “secret influence” is the code for the mysterious authority that condemns the hospitalized Ben Cameron to death as a guerrilla, a

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code that picks up Dixon’s reference to Stoneman in the hospital scene as “the mysterious power threatening the policy of the President and planning a reign of terror for the South.”43 Extending Stoneman’s deadly influence from the hospital to the theater, Birth suggests that his devious work behind scenes must be countered within the diegesis by the Invisible Empire of the Ku Klux Klan, and outside the diegesis by the invisible editing performed by the paternalistic director and editor— Griffith was a rare and telling instance of this merger—that insures a narrative outcome and point of view antithetical to Stoneman’s. Whereas Stoneman extends his covert influence through the structure and audience of the theater, Griffith works his art of concealment—his phrase for the cutting and stitching of an unprecedented number of shots into the continuous narrative and coherent perspective that were the hallmarks of the classical style— through the cinematic practices that absorbed the spectator into the screen.44 Concealed by Griffith’s art were not only the editorial processes that established his claim to fame, but also the material dimensions of the theater that were not just an antecedent to classical cinema but also an enduring counterweight to its aesthetic goals. By holding Birth’s opening night in New York at the traditional Liberty Theater, which had never shown a film before, and by charging the same price—two dollars—as for theater tickets, Griffith self-consciously presented his film not only as theater’s equal but as its culmination, the victor in the struggle for survival of the aesthetically fittest.45 It has become a commonplace that feature film had to absorb the duration and emotional depth of theater (as well as of fiction) in order to transform itself from an inexpensive working-class entertainment into a respectable middle-class cultural form.46 What Birth’s carefully scripted opening also demonstrates, however, is Griffith’s drive to displace, as well as to appropriate, the appurtenances of theater. A review in the Moving Picture World noted that “the stage at the Liberty Theatre appeared merely as a black background on which the screen was placed. Mr. Griffith, it is said, refused all suggestions for scenic decorations, holding that attention should not be distracted from the picture.”47 The birth scene at the Liberty Theater fulfills the potential, by negating the distractions, of the death scene at the Ford Theater. Griffith also gave his isolated screen, set off from the black background in an early intimation of Baudry’s black-bordered screen, iconic representation within the film. In Griffith’s racially coded universe, however, the screen, like the nation whose inner core is purged and whose boundaries are secured by the white-robed Klan, is bordered in white. The intertitles provide a visual metaphor of the screen whose action they interpret. Surrounded by a white ribbon securely tied at the bottom with Griffith’s initials and inscribed at the upper left and right corners with his name, the framed texts make Griffith’s cinematic signature visible as tightly bounded screen. “This is the trade mark of the Griffith feature film. All pictures made under

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the personal direction of D. W. Griffith have the name Griffith in the border line, with the initials ‘D. G.’ at the bottom of captions. There is no exception to this rule” (emphasis in original). Like the closed book it resembles, the screen that displaces the body of the theater is impervious to outside influence. Griffith, unlike Baudry, does not mourn what is swallowed in the darkened outside; instead, he casts this exterior as a racialized repository of the pressures that both threaten and sustain the imaginary boundaries of nationhood and screen. The “more perfect union now and forever” enabled by the Klan requires the abjection from the national womb of the “seeds of disunion” that, the film’s opening title tells us, were sown by “the bringing of the first African to America.” The final scene, successfully censored by the NAACP, but strongly implied by the narrative logic throughout, showed the deportation of African Americans to Africa. This self-conscious narrative framing is figured spatially as the exterior of the tightly bordered screen. As Africa is the dark outside that encircles and enables a white America, the overdetermined darkness of the body of the theater is a constitutive and threatening outside to the “more perfect union” of spectator and screen. Because Birth of a Nation offered an imaginary solution to real contradictions in the history of cinema exhibition, the boundaries it imposed had to be policed. Fear of protest in the aftermath of NAACP objections led to the banning of African Americans from the film’s opening in New York and subsequently in Boston, where two hundred policemen were called to the scene when a group of African Americans attempted to purchase tickets. Eleven were arrested; the two who succeeded in gaining entrance to the theater threw eggs and an acid bomb at the screen, leading to their arrest, a large protest, and additional NAACP-mandated cuts in the film.48 The outside was pressing back against the sanctuary of the screen, extending into the present the scene of intervention the film had dramatized in order to purge. That scene continued to resonate even in the all-black theaters in which most African Americans saw the film in the years directly following its opening. One viewer’s reaction to the film suggests the imprint of the balcony scene he has just observed: “Some people were crying. You could hear people saying God. . . . You had the worst feeling in the world. You just felt like you were not counted. You were out of existence. I just felt like . . . I wished somebody could not see me so I could kill them. I just felt like killing all the white people in the world.”49 William Walker’s vengeful wish to be invisible is, as Linda Williams argues, a reflex of the eradication of African Americans from the screen, but his conversion of invisibility into an asset is also an uncanny register of a revenge scene that hinges on a viewing position from which “somebody could not see me so I could kill them.” The shift in Walker’s object from singular to plural reflects the global nature of the rage the film elicits at the same time that it echoes in reverse the model the film provides for channeling global rage into practical action by targeting a singular symbolic figure, as if the balcony scene lingers in Walker’s psyche as an enabling site that imaginatively

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transports him from the all-black theater to one in which “white people” would be spread beneath his gaze.50

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• • •

The balcony’s afterlife in Walker’s response is hypothetical, but a more overt response, from the opposite perspective, suggests some of the repercussions of the viewing structure that Griffith’s magical thinking could not make disappear. The earliest visual representation of a segregated balcony was provoked by a film whose subject teased out into the open the anxieties provoked by the seating arrangement, suggesting how Griffith’s historical displacements sidelined, but did not resolve, more complex contemporary tensions. The antithesis of Birth was a boxing film that, in the assessment of the film historian Dan Streible, was “as widely discussed as any single production prior to The Birth of a Nation.”51 The exhibition of the film of the stunning victory by the heavyweight Jack Johnson, the “Ethiopian Colossus” who had recently been crowned the first African American world champion, over the retired champion Jim Jeffries, who had been drawn back into the ring to serve as the Great White Hope in a nationally publicized contest of racial superiority, spawned almost as intense a controversy as Birth of a Nation did.52 It would be hard to overestimate the symbolic weight attributed to Johnson’s victory on July 4, 1910, “the most important event since Emancipation” from one perspective, and from another an intolerable answer to the “absorbing question of whether a white man or a negro [sic] shall be supreme” not only “in the world of fisticuffs” but also “in the world at large.”53 Johnson’s unexpected victory provoked a national debate over the exhibition of the film that had been made in the anticipation of a white victory, and hence of a major box-office draw. Viewed, like the fight, as evidence of black superiority, the film was widely (although not universally) banned by state and local authorities, with the strong support of religious and civic leaders, newspaper editors, and political figures (including the boxing enthusiast Theodore Roosevelt), who masked the racial motives behind their cries for censorship in a Progressivist antiviolence rhetoric. The hypocrisy of censoring the fight film for its violence while overlooking the racial violence of Dixon’s Clansman (performed as a two-act play in 1906) and of Birth of a Nation itself was obvious to the African American public and exhibitors, who devised alternative exhibition sites for the film in black communities, including a tent-show revival of the Johnson-Jeffries Fight to run concurrently with, and oppositionally to, the Chicago opening of Birth of a Nation.54 The controversy generated a number of cartoons on both sides of the debate. Those in the mainstream press called attention to the dangers of exhibiting scenes of racial inversion. In a cartoon in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger (July 21, 1910) captioned “Educational?,” for example, a film poster positions the two boxers in the opposite relation from that of the two boys who are looking at it: the taller white

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boy on the left loses his advantage to become the shorter white boxer on the right, and vice versa. Mapping the vertical inversion of the theater onto the racial inversion enacted by the film intensified the anxieties. The white-owned Alhambra Theater in Harlem was deliberately chosen for the film’s opening because its segregated balcony (plus the elevated admission prices and the invited, precautionary presence of the fire battalions of New York and Boston) seemed able to avert the anticipated riots by keeping the races sufficiently far apart.55 But the design intended to assuage white concerns also heightened them, prompting an image that exploited the medium’s resources for hyperbole to open up the problems of, even while recommending, the segregated balcony. On August 20, 1910, a cartoon appeared in Moving Picture World with the arch caption “There’s a reason” (figure 61). Identified by Miriam Hansen as H. F. Hoffman, “an exhibitor with strong views on the need to recuperate the most desirable class,” the cartoonist shares Griffith’s project of securing cinema as a respectable form of entertainment, but the exhibitor engages the worrisome features of the theater that the director worked to obscure.56 Hoffman’s proposal to take advantage of an existing architectural division to remove from sight those members of the audience whose bodily proximity appears to offend the desired clientele makes a kind of obvious sense, but the context and the medium converge to give a nightmarish tinge to the solution he recommends. The cartoon’s depiction of the faces in the balcony suggests, for example, that the concealment enabled by the removal upstairs is more than physical, for bodies removed from sight are also removed from knowledge. Whereas Griffith’s blacks, played by whites in blackface, are stereotypes produced and exploited to white advantage, Hoffman’s blacks in blackface, whose identical white-lipped grins and white-rimmed eyes glow against a background of uniform black, appear to be hiding behind a collective mask. Although a useful device for depersonalizing African American spectators, in contrast to the particularized expressions and clothing sketched for the whites, the multiplication of a single impenetrable unit converts the sign of acquiescence into mockery or menace behind which an illegible intentionality plays. The masked spectators point to another advantage, moreover, for although their enigmatic grins evoke a row of Cheshire cats, the bodies that disappear in the displacement upward are registered below in the offending brethren whose strongly embodied presence, marked by the radiance emanating from corsages, tie clips, and boutonnières, seems to contribute to their spectral neighbors’ desire to remove them upstairs. Although Hoffman endorses the white point of view, he also exposes the frailty that fuels the anxious apprehension of black embodiment. Dressed in white shirts and suits that both cover up and amplify the paleness of their skin, the middleaged white male audience members, some asleep, some bald, some seemingly sporting wounds to the head, make a ghostly contrast to the radiant African Americans.

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Figure 61. Cartoon from Moving Picture World, August 20, 1910.

Lacking both sexual and generational difference, the white male audience has neither the means to reproduce itself nor the evidence that it can. Because women, although barred from seats at the ring, were frequent attendees at boxing films, as the African American women in the cartoon audience attest, the absence of white women seems telling: the racial generativity suggested by the large multipetaled flower over the heart of the African American woman seated in the front row next to her man has no Anglo counterpart. “There’s a reason,” as the caption coyly acknowledges, for this disparity in bodily display, as well as for the architectural solution that appears more Band-aid than remedy. In the midst of the furor over the Johnson-Jeffries Fight, Hoffman implicitly weighs in, on prudential rather than pseudoethical grounds, on the side of not exhibiting a film that, by representing, would also elicit the proud display of African American bodies within the movie theater. But he also tacitly acknowledges that neither banning the film nor segregating its viewers would resolve the underlying dilemma. Tapping a rich vein of cultural anxieties, Hoffman’s cartoon suggests in spite of itself that the solutions it proposes to protect both the screen and the theater from the visible evidence of black embodiment fail to address an underlying difference in virility that can be concealed but not dispelled by spatial manipulation. “There’s a reason,” in the furthest resonance of the caption, to fortify white masculinity in the boxing ring as well as to appease it in the theater, for only by complementing passive spectatorship with active training could the racial imbalance in manliness be redressed. The theme would be familiar to a readership already well indoctrinated in Teddy Roosevelt’s promotion of the strenuous life as a

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remedy for the “softness of fibre in civilized nations,” especially when that softness is compounded by “a very pronounced tendency among the most highly civilized races . . . to lose the power of multiplying and even to decrease.”57 In fact, the cartoon codes Roosevelt’s twin obsessions with physical fitness and eugenics as strategies for shifting the procreative balance from the lower to the higher classes and races. In the relay triggered by the open-ended series of circumstances the caption catalyzes, if the Johnson-Jeffries Fight had not been shown, or better yet if it had shown the fulfillment of the Great White Hope that an adequately prepared white masculinity could have produced, African Americans bodies would not be proudly exhibited in the audience, and the reason for the segregated balcony, and its attendant anxieties, would disappear along with the bodies the balcony was designed to remove from sight. Hoffman’s cartoon provides a glimpse of the energy expended to circumvent or attenuate the solution it recommends by resecuring white supremacy in ways that would either absent African Americans from the audience or subordinate them so unambiguously that their position overhead would lose its symbolic resonance. Even in the teens, the cartoon suggests, an undercurrent of discomfort with the segregated balcony waxed and waned with the discursive content and context of the film being exhibited. But except for the cartoon, there was no overt expression of anxiety, and the cartoon itself is not entirely overt. The issues the balcony raised for white film directors and exhibitors remained nagging, subliminal irritants through the first three decades of the century and finally became moot as the segregated balcony itself fell into disuse in New York during the 1920s, in part because of the pressure brought to bear by the increasingly mixed audiences drawn to the all-black shows on Broadway.58 When the racial use of the balcony came back into view in the 1930s, it was through different lenses in a different place.

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Upside Down and Inside Out Camera Work, Spectatorship, and the Chronotope of the Colored Balcony Scare you to death to climb up there. When you get up there and look down, you’d think you were on Mars, it was so far down to the stage. Ad Orkin, former Mississippi-based film exhibitor, recalling segregated balconies, 1993

In all photographs, we have this same act of cutting off a piece of space and time, of keeping it unchanged while the world around continues to change. . . . In contrast, film is less a succession of photographs than, to a large extent, a destruction of the photograph, or more exactly of the photograph’s power and action.

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Christian Metz, “Photography and Fetish,” 1985

Balconies in Northern theaters were discreetly adapted to separate the races. The more stringent demands for segregation in the South generated more extreme solutions—packed upper galleries walled off from the rest of the theater and accessible only through an exterior flight of stairs—that were both fostered and brought to public attention by the hardships of the 1930s. The economic pressures of the Depression led to the closing of many of the black-owned movie theaters in the South and to the expanded use of a segregated uppermost balcony at previously allwhite theaters struggling to maximize the use of theater space to offset box office losses.1 The evolution of the punitively, pervasively, and explicitly segregated Southern theaters coincided with the advent of documentary photography as a significant cultural force. The Depression conditions that brought Southern whites and blacks together in greater numbers in a vertically stratified viewing structure also brought a second set of lenses to the rear door of the cinema. Photographers at this site discovered less an obstacle to vision (as at the lunch counters) than a specific angle of vision through which to reconsider the produc217

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tion and consumption of the movies. The intervention of a second camera at the “colored” entry turned the movie theater—and its theory—inside out: from a dark and dematerialized cavity illuminated only by the single beam of light from the projector, the theater was rematerialized along an outer edge that betrayed the interior viewing structure through racial signage and exterior stairs. The camera on the outside also reminds us that the films exhibited inside are also extended outward as posters designed to entice passersby inside. By restaging the scene of viewing on the theater’s outer wall, the still camera gains an advantage (or loses some of its disadvantages) with respect to the static picture of the movies, deprived of the illusion of mobility and depth and drained of the auratic quality of light that invests the film image with its power to enthrall. Against this highly mediated rendition of the screen (derived from film stills recreated as oil paintings and then rephotographed), the photographic camera brings into focus the African American viewers who carried their point of view upstairs.2 In the reconfigured scene of spectatorship assembled from the image of the screen projected outward and the image of the audience projected inward, the camera implies a point of view from, as well as toward, the segregated balcony. Photographs of movie theaters thus engage in two overlapping conversations: with the movie camera and with the moviegoer. Film’s vengeance against photography is not as unilateral as Christian Metz describes. Representing the constraints of the “colored” balcony through the formal limits—and authority—of the single frame, the photographic camera levies the pressure of location against cinema’s illusion of transcendent vision. If film is a “destruction of the photograph,” photography can also be a “destruction” of the cinema, or at least its deconstruction. The horizontal passage between inside and outside sets the stage for photography’s engagement with the movie camera, but that exchange is mediated by the vertical climb that charts the course of the moviegoer. As the epigraph from Ad Orkin vividly recalls, that climb was precipitous, and yet it was undertaken more and more often during and after the Depression.3 Despite the efforts of race leaders to discourage attendance at the “Jim Crow Department” of the segregated Southern theaters, where the audience’s legs would be “cramped up, where there are poor sanitary conditions in the second gallery or rat hold,” and “where, with a little unbalance, they would fall over and break their necks, and there would be nothing done about it,” given the choice, as Gloria Wade-Gayles recalls it from growing up in Memphis in the 1940s, between going to the black theaters on Beale Street, where they would sit “in darkness for as long as fifteen minutes while the projectionist spliced cellophane damaged from many showings, many months ago, at white theatres,” and “walking up fifteen flights of stairs” to the Jim Crow gallery at the segregated Malco Theater, where the seats were broken and old but the movies were new, many chose the latter.4 Ignoring the exhortations of spokesmen such as Benjamin Mays, who admonished the students at Morehouse College in 1940, shortly after becoming their

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president, “I wouldn’t go to a segregated theater to see Jesus Christ himself,” as the separate black-owned theaters declined in quantity and the white-owned theaters for blacks (approximately 90 percent of the total) declined in quality over the course of the 1930s, audiences increasingly disregarded the benefits of self-respect and community building for the more alienating and ambivalent viewing experience of the segregated balcony.5 That estranged perspective—the vantage point “from Mars”—has slipped between the cracks of historical interest in the kinds of public sphere provided by the African American theaters, and literary interest in the subjectivity of the solitary African American spectator in a predominantly white downstairs.6 The complexity of this viewing situation can be glimpsed by a brief comparison of two FSA photographs of the single-story, black-owned Rex Theatre for Colored People in Leland, Mississippi, which captured the attention of both Dorothea Lange and Marion Post Wolcott. Both photographs provide information about the material conditions and tastes that shaped the selection of the films. Wolcott’s “The Rex Theatre for Colored People” (figure 62), which calls attention to the display of posters seemingly produced by the theater itself of the film of defending champion Joe Louis’s heavyweight victory over Bob Pastor, is particularly legible through the lens of the reconstructive practices through which African American audiences negotiated their relationship to mainstream cinema, which is represented here by the commercial posters for Westerns, pushed by the announcements for the boxing films to the outer walls, yet commanding the attention of a pair of young African American men.7 In Wolcott’s photograph (below, figure 66) of a vertically segregated theater in Belzoni, Mississippi, by contrast, we will see how the more complex configuration of social space generates more mixed and mediated viewing relations both inside and outside the theater. A similar case can be made about the difference between Dorothea Lange’s photograph of the Rex Theatre, in which a horizontal banner for The New Adventures of Tarzan above the entry doors appears to be a defining gateway to the cinematic, and Peter Sekaer’s photograph (below, figure 68) of a two-story theater’s solicitation to a jungle thriller. By suggesting ways of theorizing the vantage point from the segregated balcony, photographs allow us to extend in a new direction the project of anchoring a resistant or oppositional black spectatorship in the constraints and opportunities of specific viewing situations.8 Theorize we must, as the subject of spectatorship is notoriously elusive, suspended between the textual construction of the spectator within the film and the responses of empirical audiences, accessible only through such partial measures as the quantitative evidence of theater attendance and the qualitative evidence of occasional and unrepresentative reviews, which led the film historian and critic Jane Gaines to declare the moviegoing of the historical spectator “among the most ephemeral of phenomena to track.”9 The inadequacy of such measures has brought literary accounts of spectatorship increasingly into play. Although they do

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Figure 62. The Rex Theatre for Colored People, Leland, Mississippi, 1939. Photograph by Marion Post Wolcott. FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress.

not allow us to peer into the theater or the minds of its inhabitants, photographs supply a different toolkit, derived from a visual field that allows us to piece together some possible relations among a viewing structure (rather than the perspectives of individual viewers), new cinematic technologies and genres, a more intrusive commercial environment, and a repository of local vernacular practices that together constitute the conditions of balcony spectatorship in the 1930s. Thinking through these conditions is one way to launch the imaginative project proposed within parentheses by Jacqueline Najuma Stewart: “(Imagine the Black viewer forced to move into the Jim Crow balcony).”10 Preeminent among the photographer’s tools for negotiating between the movie camera and the moviegoer is the balcony’s visual signifier, the exterior flight of stairs whose individual steps imply a relationship of parts to whole, process to product, and labor to knowledge. The stairway to the screening runs both parallel and counter to the movie camera’s vision. Cinema, as the epigraph from Christian Metz reveals, has a stake in disavowing its historical and material base in serial photography.11 In the 1930s, that investment gained new techniques through the overhead and tracking shots enabled by suspending cameras on moveable vertical cranes. The climb to the colored balcony likewise affords an elevated perspective, but through

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the step-by-step labor, rather than transcendence, of the body. Against the “superhuman mastery of space . . . predicated on the refusal of contingency and embodiment” the movie camera promised in the 1930s, the still camera brings into view the material structure of the segregated theater.12 How, it asks, does the impression of that structure—on the film of the photographer and the body of the moviegoer— recast the movie camera’s offer? The answer is often mediated by another set of terms that were also a consequence of the Depression. The exigencies that led to the expanded use of the balcony and to its visual documentation had a further result that, like the balcony, was represented on the theaters’ outer walls. Struggling to court a dwindling clientele, the movie industry developed a range of advertising strategies that promoted new opportunities for consumption. To expand their independent sources of revenue, theaters also opened food concessions, featuring candy, popcorn, and soft drinks, whose association with the lower-class entertainments that cinema displaced had made them taboo in the movie palaces of the 1920s.13 The representation outside of the enticements offered inside—from food and drink to raffles and giveaways—filtered the mix of race and spectatorship through the discourse of consumption—and therefore, potentially, of a nonconsumption that could register agency. New strategies of marketing converged with new technologies of synchronized sound and Technicolor to enhance the impression of the screen’s materiality, the counterweight to the disembodied spectator. That impression was placed at risk, however, by the insistence of the visual figure through which race and cinema have historically converged. Shadows, whose salience in photographs of theaters was overdetermined by the late-afternoon setting that was usually required to capture someone going to the movies, also have a long history of rhetorical deployment to contest the claims to substance staked on behalf of both cinema and African Americans. In the scene of spectatorship transposed to the movie theater’s outer wall, shadows project the perspective from the colored balcony against the illusionistic resources of cinema. In the context of production, shadows cut into the fiction of the moving pictures’ continuity; in the context of consumption, they contest the illusion of a cinematic substance whose intake binds the viewer to the social body. Cinema’s efforts in the thirties to cast off silent film’s denigrated status as a “kingdom of shadows” were challenged by photography’s chosen position in a racialized encounter between substance and shadow.14 The contest was mediated by specific cinematic genres, of course. Three primary visual anchors, all produced by photographers traveling through the South in the late 1930s on assignments from New Deal agencies, and all elaborated through cinematic, photographic, or narrative intertexts, will allow us to look at a range of perspectives set in play by photographs of theaters exhibiting three popular genres of the decade: a romantic comedy, a Western, and a jungle thriller. Against a backdrop of posters that take us from Paris to the American West to Africa, progres-

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sively narrowing the conceptual space between the represented cultures of the balcony and the screen, the chapter charts a course from the most self-reflexive photograph, in which questions of cinematic production are raised through the engagement with a specific film, through increasingly casual images in which questions of cinematic consumption and counterconsumption are posed primarily by the intervening screens of advertisements produced by the prevailing and local cultures. Each photograph provides a nodal point for a key issue of cinema theory: production, consumption, and critique. We start with the most carefully composed and stripped-down scene: Arthur Rothstein’s photograph of a segregated movie theater in Birmingham, viewed in relation to its exhibit of a romantic comedy whose Parisian mise-en-scène accommodates, even seems to invite, a view through Metz’s and Baudry’s critical lenses (figure 63). The second example brings us closer to home: the American West on the screen in rural Mississippi, brought together in a photograph by Marion Post Wolcott against a backdrop of advertisements for a classic American consumer product that shifts the target of the still camera’s critique from the disembodied viewpoint of the movie camera to the illusion of embodiment on the screen, characterized by association with the language of the ad as tangible, desirable, and nourishing (figure 66). By representing the vernacular culture of the community that converges at the balcony stairs to view a jungle thriller at a theater in rural Alabama, the third photograph reprises a familiar crux of race and spectatorship through an unfamiliar association with the register of the oral that has been a hallmark of African American studies (figure 68). Jungle thrillers are a defining instance of Hollywood’s ability to enthrall the black male spectator into identifying with the triumphs of white masculinity not only in America but in Africa as well.15 That this identification might be shaped by the context of reception was argued in a different context by Frantz Fanon, who observed that in the all-black context of a theater in the Antilles, the audience unself-consciously identified with the Tarzan figure; but in a mixed-race audience, that response was inhibited by the presence of whites assumed to identify blacks in the audience with the savages on the screen.16 Fanon had in mind the integrated European movie theater; in the vertically segregated American version, the racial hierarchy that was stringently enforced was also complicated by the structural inversion that made whites subject to black surveillance rather than the opposite. How this structure might have affected the reception of the film is explored by Peter Sekaer’s photograph, which places Hollywood’s Africa in conversation with an African American vernacular displayed on local signage that constructs verticality as an axis of agency, resituating the balcony from a position of knowledge in relation to the cinematic apparatus (as in Rothstein’s photograph) to a position of power over the audience downstairs. The most popular item of consumption at the movies became a vehicle for that power and for the culminating gesture of the narratives of moviegoing that are dis-

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cussed in the chapter’s concluding section. The segregated balcony encompasses multiple viewing positions, of course, but these heterogeneous perspectives share a narrative structure that photographs of the viewing structure bring into focus. By “cutting off a piece of space and time,” to redeploy Metz’s words, these photographs allow us to see how space and time are folded together in a common frame; photography serves narrative while calling into question cinema’s narrative continuity. By following a path from the self-reflexive camera to the local culture, from film production to its (non)consumption, from visuality to orality, and from knowledge to agency, this chapter concludes where the preceding one began, with Cleveland Sellers’ narrative of popcorn throwing, translated through the intervening frames from an adventitious gesture to a social signature or Brechtian social geste, an action that conflates gesture and gist into a single emblematic movement “in which a whole social situation can be read.”17

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• • •

Eddie Mitchell, an unemployed youth, leans against the brick wall of a movie theater in Birmingham, Alabama (figure 63). He is poised between two posters: one on the right advertising Ninotchka, the theater’s coming attraction, one on the left promoting its “colored balcony.” Although he looks resolutely outside the photographic frame, the frustration on his face echoed by his bent left leg and clenched hand, he is framed by his position at the midpoint of the theater’s defining poles: the representations of the screen and of the viewing structure. The composition is deliberate; from a previous and less compelling shot showing Eddie Mitchell walking down the street, we can infer that photographer Arthur Rothstein stopped him, inquired about his name and occupation, and asked him to pose between the billboards that transpose the scene of spectatorship to the outer wall.18 Although we know from this earlier shot that the balcony entry is to the right of the film poster, the composition is designed to create the impression that the balcony is accessed by the fire escape above the balcony sign. The shadows cast by the rungs of the fire escape overwrite the language of the balcony sign. “Open,” proclaims the word at the center of that sign, reminding us of the need to fill the theater. “Closed,” declares the grid cast across the sign by the shadows from the slats of the fire escape. If the “colored balcony” is open temporally, these diagonal bars suggest, it is enclosed spatially, the restrictive balcony railings and barriers amplified in number and symbolic weight to the bars of a viewing cage; and if the balcony is open on weekends, it is closed during the week (the deceptive ellipses after Sunday notwithstanding). The shadowy striations propose a structure of intermittency: not only the opening and closing of the balcony, but also the blinking of the organs of perception, human and mechanical. The grid through which the balcony sign is viewed by the camera’s eye implies the grid through which the screen is viewed from the balcony. The photograph maps

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Figure 63. Eddie Mitchell, unemployed youth, Birmingham, Alabama, 1940. Photograph by Arthur Rothstein. Courtesy Corbis.

onto the barriers to the transcendent vision promised by the movie camera—barriers imposed both by the marked position in the theater and by the still camera’s separate frames—an insight into the mechanical production of the moving image. The pattern of alternating light and shadow suggests the technological feature of the cinematic apparatus responsible for the illusion that the moving pictures move. Flickers (or flicks), cinema’s colloquial and mildly pejorative nickname, obliquely

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acknowledges the intermittency of the image whose motion is an illusion created by the production and projection of a sequence of still images at speeds that allow the persistence of vision and the phi phenomenon to compensate for the dark spaces of unexposed film that divide the separate frames.19 Without the “flicker fusion” that persistence of vision enables, we would perceive the alternation of light and dark on the screen as each projected image succeeds the next. The illusion is supported technologically by a rotating shutter on the projector that conceals the gaps between the frames, allowing the impression retained by the retina to cover the transition to the next frame. Rothstein’s photograph cuts to the quick of cinema’s foundational illusion of smooth, uninterrupted, natural movement that differentiates moving from still photography. The barriers that are sites of blindness are also sites of insight into the dark spaces the luminous image obscures, the “abyss between individual frames,” in Mary Ann Doane’s compelling formulation.20 It is an insight toward which Eudora Welty also gestures in her photograph of the “colored” entry to a movie theater, “Jackson/1930s,” whose dramatic framing calls attention to the click of the camera shutter that—in cinema as in still photography—severs substance from shadow (figure 64). Framed on the left to cut out the bodies of the passersby who cast their shadows on the sidewalk, and to splice in half a poster whose partially visible letters tease us to reconstruct the words color picture, the photograph undercuts cinema’s aspirations to recuperate what is absented by still photography.21 The split is reiterated at the center by the division between the embodied spectator and the shadow he casts across the threshold of the cinema; and it is repeated in a gentler gradation at the right side of the frame by the cut that, excising the women’s front legs from the image, blurs two bodies into one shadowy mass. Calling into question Metz’s contention that the “irreversible absence” of the photographic off-frame, resulting from “a singular and definitive cutting off . . . figured by the ‘click’ of the shutter,” is a defining difference from the successive frames of cinema that constantly “caress” the off-frame, Welty’s meditation on substance and shadow uses the still camera’s single frame to draw attention to the severance that also constitutes (but is better disguised by) cinema.22 On display on the poster at the Birmingham movie theater, cinema’s favored mode of disguising the cut is vulnerable to the single frame’s critique. Juxtaposed with the grid of the “colored balcony” sign is the icon of the movie screen and the screen in its iconic form: the face of Greta Garbo.23 Represented on the poster that represents the screen, she is the distillation of the screen body, her white flesh divided from that of the screen only by an outline, her luxurious hair and smile offered up as the promise of a more fully embodied screen inside. She is, in a particularly blatant display of an often-theorized juncture, the screen as female body and the female body as screen, a conflation whose self-evidence requires (in contrast to the lesser lights) only the star’s famous last name, written as a cursive signature with the same pretense of intimacy that offers her upper torso to our gaze.

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Figure 64. Jackson/1930s. Photograph by Eudora Welty. © Eudora Welty, LLC; Eudora Welty Collection—Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

The female body’s convergence with the screen’s foregrounds their common function as a fetish: a lustrous, overinvested object that averts dangerous knowledge by arresting our gaze before it can see what isn’t there, the cut that delineates the fetish boldly inscribed on the poster just above Garbo’s breasts. The famous “nothing to see” of the maternal body, bereft of a penis, is the flip side of cinema, whose plenty to see conceals the fact that nothing is there, the absence of the body that is the condition of the presence of the image. The fetishized film body, built up “into something satisfying in itself,” a “perfect product” in which the “beauty of the woman as

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object and the screen space coalesce,” allows the classic compromise, “I know [that nothing is there], but nevertheless” to work, to hold in abeyance the knowledge of what’s absent in order to sustain (or even to intensify) the pleasure of the image.24 That pleasure requires exaggerating the materiality of the screen that, like the fetish, “covers the wound” or lack, for “the fetish is the cinema in its physical state,” and “a fetish is always material.”25 Consequently, the other of the cinematic fetish’s “pellicule or ‘little skin’ ”—both the celluloid strip and the screen onto which its images are projected—is traditionally figured as the shadow that calls attention to cinema’s incorporeality. Although Metz holds that, for the cinephile, the knowledge that cinema is merely a “theater of shadows” (his emphasis) can heighten appreciation of the technological feats that produce the illusion of embodiment, the more typical usage of the shadow is to call the cinematic illusion into question. The photograph that invites us to view the fetish/screen through the alternating bands of light and shadow dissolves the viewer’s stance into the oscillation of contradictory positions: not the fetishistic compromise that keeps the eyes glued to the screen, but the flickering of belief and disbelief, knowledge and disavowal, enthrallment and estrangement that maintains a skeptical distance from the screen. Like the apprehension of the abyss between the frames, the image implies the knowledge of an absence behind the perfect body on and of the screen, and of a mechanical presence that the body conceals, an invisible background to the beautiful display. Reading the poster’s flattened and hyperbolic scene through the grid of the balcony sign opens a conversation with the film on the terms of film theory; read in the other direction, the film reinterprets the balcony sign. Whereas the scene on the poster eliminates narrative along with spatial depth, abstracting the film’s most fetishizing moment, the narrative of the film itself contextualizes the represented, but unrepresentative, scene on the poster. Ninotchka (dir. Ernst Lubitsch, 1939) tells the story of the seduction of Comrade Nina Yakashova Ivanoff (Greta Garbo), a Soviet special envoy sent to the West to restrain the self-indulgences of three endearingly wayward comrades (a performance of Marxism worthy of the Marx Brothers), by the combined energies of capitalism and heterosexuality in the person of the wealthy Count Léon D’Algout (Melvyn Douglas), and the mise-en-scène of Paris. The scene represented by the poster shows what money and love can buy: Ninotchka’s transformation from a buttoned-up Soviet spokesperson, whose opening declaration to her comrades is “Don’t make an issue of my womanhood. We’re here for work, all of us,” into a bare-shouldered woman in an evening gown at Paris’s elegant Café de Lutèce. The film touts capitalism’s triumph as a sexual awakening that frees the forces of desire rather than of the marketplace; but it also exposes the process through which woman is not born but made—or rather bought. The scene in the cafe that is supposed to represent the release of femininity from its restrictive ideological garb also represents femininity’s constriction into an object of de-

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sire to Léon and the camera whose gaze he relays. To be divested of one social garment is to be reinvested in another: the garment of the body dressed in light and makeup and an haute-couture but low-cut white evening gown that is simply the material extension of Ninotchka’s carefully produced white flesh. To be the fetishized object of the gaze—of an enraptured Léon who has bought Ninotchka’s dress and dinner, and indeed Ninotchka’s person as well as of the audience that views her comparably enhanced by Hollywood’s production values— is to be transformed into a commodity that stands at the opposite pole from the worker in whose name Comrade Yakashova speaks. Ninotchka attempts to legitimate the remaking of its eponymous heroine, and of the visual pleasures that remaking makes available, as the judicious middle ground between Soviet repression and aristocratic decadence. Through a sleight of hand, Ninotchka’s deposed White Russian rival, the Grand Duchess Swana (Ina Claire), becomes the foil that justifies the capitalist heroine instead of the Red Russian. Ninotchka evolves from comrade to woman by acquiring some, but not all, of the grand duchess’s attributes: the erotic and monetary attentions of her man, but not her hereditary jewels. But against the fantasy of excess that naturalizes the investment in Ninotchka’s makeover, the film’s affectionate parody of the Marxism with which it flirts but never fully renounces makes available the tools for reading the “little Bolshevik” against her own conversion. These tools are provided through the character of the unreconstructed Comrade Yakashova, whose Marxism is represented as an analytical turn of mind that counters the embodiment that represents femininity. “You analyze everything out of existence. You’d analyze me out of existence, but I won’t let you,” reprimands Léon, whose triumph in the romantic contest does not negate his adversary’s ideological stance. Comrade Yakashova relentlessly analyzes the mechanisms of social production, from the mechanical engineering of the Eiffel Tower (whose inspection requires her to walk up all 1,083 steps rather than take the elevator ride included in the admission price), to the social engineering of stratified class relations whose inequities she dutifully annotates and the engineering of desire between herself and Léon, which she attributes to the laws of chemical attraction. Although Léon protests her unromantic attitude, it is also what tweaks his interest in her, albeit to persuade her to trade in the materialist analysis of causes for the enjoyment of their surface effects. The turning point in the contest is staged at the symbolic pinnacle of Western technology: the upper platform of the Eiffel Tower, “one of the wonders of the modern world.”26 “Are you interested in a view?” Léon has inquired. She sets him straight: “I’m interested in the Eiffel Tower from a technical standpoint.” We are treated in this scene to a comic encounter between a feminist Marxism and a patriarchal capitalism, with visual technology securely in the hands of the latter. When they arrive at the top of the Eiffel Tower—Ninotchka on foot, Léon by elevator— his optically enhanced point of view trumps hers. After proudly pointing out the famous sights of a sparkling nighttime Paris (“a waste of electricity,” she laments),

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Léon drops a franc into the coin-operated telescope and, inviting her to peer through it at the spot he selects, contracts the panoramic vista to the site at which he hopes his Ninotchka’s trajectory will culminate: his own house, the domestic space in which, via a brief detour through the Café de Lutèce and a longer one through Moscow, the social critic will be installed as a permanent visual possession. Securing the link between Léon’s gaze and the camera’s, the telescope on the top of the Eiffel Tower also registers the movie camera’s recently enhanced vertical mobility: the Olympian perspective that created the illusion that material constraints could be easily surmounted. In Ninotchka, the opposite of this effortless transport, via camera or (its analogue and prelude) elevator, is self-propelled locomotion. Comrade Yakashova is the quintessential pedestrian; we meet her carrying her own bags along the station platform, and her first social encounter with the West is to refuse a railway porter’s services. The comrade walks on her own two feet and carries her own social weight. The paradigmatic form of working in Ninotchka is walking, presented as a form of knowledge, and indeed its privileged form, an effort recompensed not in wages but in information on the ground. Taking a taxi to Léon’s house after the scene in the Eiffel Tower is an early warning sign that Ninotchka is relinquishing her status as a knowing subject, reneging her identity as the androgynous, autonomous “girl with a map” who navigates her self-reliant course through Paris. Her pedestrian way of knowing culminates and terminates in the long climb up the Eiffel Tower, whose telescopic vision eclipses the step-by-step analysis of its technological base. “Eddie Mitchell, unemployed youth, Birmingham, Alabama, 1940” recuperates that knowledge through the filter of race. If the perspective from the “colored” balcony interrogates the final, fetishized product of the movie camera’s vision, it is in solidarity with the incremental knowledge gleaned by the girl who climbs the Eiffel Tower. Within the materialist framework that Ninotchka disclaims and the photograph reclaims for other purposes, the knowledge of productive mechanisms is gained by footwork on the ground. Eddie Mitchell, or the moviegoers he represents, is the inheritor of the female pedestrian’s way of knowing. Although he probably does not climb up the balcony stairs himself, his point of view is pivoted toward the screen by the echo between the wooden bar that bisects the poster and guides his line of vision elsewhere, and the diagonal bars that slash across the balcony sign. By extending the rungs of the fire escape toward the ground, the shadowy bars evoke a staircase that links the passage to the balcony with the viewpoint it confers. These shadow-stairs register that going to precedes captivation by the movies, and that the point and mode of entry have a bearing on the reception of the image. Rather than a seamless transport into the movie camera’s vision, the work of climbing the stairs to the colored balcony, like that of climbing the stairs up the Eiffel Tower, breaks that vision down into its stages of production and writes them on the body. The imprint of climbing was emphasized by the African American photogra-

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Figure 65. “ ‘Buzzard’s roost’ where Negro moviegoers must go at big downtown Fox Theater is up five flights of stairs.” Atlanta, 1948. Photograph by Griffith J. Davis. Courtesy of Dorothy Davis.

pher Griffith J. Davis in a photograph he took for a 1948 Ebony story on segregation in Atlanta (figure 65).27 Here, Rothstein’s shadow stairs are given substance as a steep and seemingly interminable stairway leading up the five flights of exterior stairs to the “buzzard’s roost” of Atlanta’s Fox Theater, the South’s most lavish picture palace, whose Orientalist architecture and illusionist aesthetic cast the body of the theater as an imaginative miracle equal to the screen’s. The magic was designed to begin with the 140-foot arcade over the front entry, an “Arabian carpet, transporting patrons out of the mundane into a land of dreams” through a “lushly carpeted main lobby.”28 Against the central trope of the magic carpet that extends cinematic transport to the threshold of the theater, an Orientalist counterpart to Western technology’s elevator at the Eiffel Tower, Griffith J. Davis pits a serial structure of individuated stairs. Shot at night from below and dramatically lit from the front, the photograph highlights each step in a formal geometry of horizontal bands bracketed by shadowcrenellated walls. The downturned heads of the couple whose steps are synchronized, as if they were performing a solemn dance at once deliberate and coerced, let us know that each new stair must be surmounted attentively and individually. The woman’s strong calf muscles and flat shoes, which contrast with the playful

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asymmetry of the flower in her hair, measure the work entailed when going out requires going up. The muscular imprint of this step-by-step climb parallels the movie camera’s shot-by-shot inscription. The work of the camera is preinscribed on the body of the moviegoer. Reversing the Fox Theatre’s attempt to map the movie camera’s vision onto the body of the theater, Davis maps the body of the theater onto the perception of the movie camera’s vision. Extending Eddie Mitchell’s course up the stairs, the photograph supplies the missing link between the alternating bars that in Rothstein imply recognition of the camera’s discontinuous work, and the process through which that recognition might be gained. Through a route Baudry could not image, Davis answers the central question he poses about cinema: “Is the work made evident, does consumption of the product bring about a ‘knowledge effect,’ or is the work concealed?”29 By exposing the stairway to the Fox Theater’s colored balcony, concealed (like the camera work) behind the facade’s decorative screen, Davis suggests that the work concealed by the product is exposed by the process prerequisite to consumption.

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• • •

As Baudry’s choice of terms suggests, “consumption of the product”—the mindless practice of swallowing it whole—is the desired end of the culture industry’s production cycle. The film consumer, brought into focus in the 1930s by the overlapping spheres that converted the theater into a site of oral as well as visual consumption, sits in the opposite position from the critical spectator. How these positions might be mapped onto the body of the segregated theater is the question staged by our next photograph, in which questions of production raised by the structure of the theater and the film in Birmingham yield to questions of consumption posed by the advertisements in Belzoni. As numerous film scholars have noted, Hollywood’s mutually beneficial relationship with the business world, which supplied studios with free props in exchange for on-screen exposure for the products, peaked as a result of the economic downturn of the thirties, when dramatically reduced box-office profits (down at least 25 percent in the first two years of the decade) prompted Hollywood’s most intensive flirtation with advertising, including the exhibit of sponsored shorts in commercial theaters and the display of product brand names in commercial films that were elaborately “tied in” to marketing campaigns. The reconfiguration of the spectator as a consumer especially targeted women, recognized as the nation’s premier shoppers and moviegoers, through specific genres of “women’s films,” advertising strategies that exploited the power of the female star, and cinematic strategies that capitalized on the structural parallel between the film frame and the display window.30 The use of film to sell products, including the commodified female subject, depended on a prior seduction, however. Before spectators could be lured into the

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world of visual consumption, they had to be drawn, despite competing financial pressures and less expensive modes of entertainment (such as radio), into the movie theater. To entice economically strapped viewers in the thirties, movie theaters, especially the local theaters that did not benefit from the major studios’ advertising profits, became sites of different modes of consumption, which they publicized extensively outside. As recomposed through the lenses of a different camera, these ads had unintended consequences: by enticing moviegoers into becoming consumers of the products newly available inside, they also made consumption a feature of the visual rhetoric of moviegoing, not only on the screen, where it played out in terms of gender, but also on the wall, where (at least in some locations) it played out in terms of race. In a rich example of this process of revision, Marion Post Wolcott’s “Negro man entering a movie theater by ‘Colored’ entrance” (Belzoni, Mississippi, 1939; figure 66) places the same components used by Arthur Rothstein—the single male viewer poised at the midpoint between the balcony entry and the poster-screen—in a relation mediated not only by the stairs but also by the cultural screen defined by the ads propped and painted on the theater wall. That Mississippi Delta theaters may have been particularly hard hit by the economic crises of the thirties is suggested by the ad for a “cash-nite” that apparently offers a lottery prize of $400 on a Friday (rather than the slower weeknights when lottery incentives were more typically offered), as well as by the signs at the rear entry, which imply that African American customers were actively solicited. The stage is set more centrally, however, by the large ad painted on the theater’s upper wall for the beverage sold inside, extending the address to moviegoers through the promise of the “bite to eat”—in the can and on the screen— prescribed by the fictitious country doctor “Pepper” as “good for life.” The association of soda and screen is facilitated by the prior conversion of soda to solid food. The liquid “bite to eat” was Dr. Pepper’s signature advertising slogan, enabling the company (based on the research of a chemist it hired to investigate human energy cycles) to categorize the sweetened carbonated beverage as a food. Put into circulation in 1927, the promotional campaign took on added force in 1939, when the company decided to substitute vitamin B1 for the caffeine it had added to its formula twenty years earlier in an attempt to compete with its decadent rival, Coca-Cola. The slogan achieved the company’s goal, in anticipation of wartime rationing, of justifying the beverage’s sugar content As its name suggests, Dr. Pepper was marketed from its inception as a nutritious pepper-upper associated with natural energy sources, in contrast to the unhealthy stimulants added by Coke and Pepsi. As a 1913 ad proclaimed: “Dr. Pepper is liquid sunlight. As the sun rules and governs the day, so should you govern your appetite. . . . Drink a beverage that promotes cell building, not one that simply deadens the sensory nerves. Drink Dr. Pepper. Solar energy—liquid sunshine. Vim, vigor, vitality—that is what Dr. Pepper means.”31 Beyond offering evidence of consumption at the movies, the Dr. Pepper ad offers a metaphor for consumption of the movies.

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Figure 66. Negro man entering a movie theater by “Colored” entrance. Belzoni, Mississippi, 1939. Photograph by Marion Post Wolcott. FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress.

That association is more firmly secured by the company’s famous clock logo, originally a sunburst, that conforms the drink’s vital energy source to the schedule of the workday. Ten, two, and four, the only numbers on the clock face, mark the pauses in the workday when, according to the company’s research, a periodic drop in blood sugar requires the remedy of the liquid bite to eat. Tied to the corporate clock, rather than to recreational times and uses or to the nighttime highs of caffeinated beverages, the consumption of the tonic at regular intervals replenishes the workforce and increases productivity. By imbricating consumption with the structure of production that is good for the life of the social body, Dr. Pepper diagnoses the cultural work of the movies. The clock marks cinema’s place in a rationalized temporality that restores the work force to its tasks through the regular infusion of recreational juices. Against this structure of advancement, the “colored” entry casts a shadow. Extending from the doorway to the balcony, the shadow precisely bisects the clock, arresting its forward progress at a perpetual 2:00. The click of the shutter and the relative positions of the sun and of the “colored” balcony toward which the shadowy spectator ascends converge in a decisive moment that writes race across the clock face of consumption. Against fabricated substance—screen food, liquid food—there is empty space: both the pathos of negation by the dominant culture

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and, reconfigured through the camera’s lens, the pressure of negation against that culture’s program of consumption. In contrast to Rothstein’s photograph, in which the balcony’s shadowy bars implicitly overwrite the screen with the productive work of both the camera and the moviegoer, the colored balcony here is an engulfing and undifferentiated shadow zone. Toward it the shadowy, unidentified spectator seems to glide effortlessly up a stairway whose individual steps are hidden from our view, as if he were drawn upward by the arrow’s directional force. If he is, on the one hand, the passively interpellated spectator of color, without the individuality and will of Rothstein’s named and fully visible subject, he is also, by virtue of this abstraction, absorbed into a more dynamic picture that sets the upward and backward climb against the forward march of time. One pole of the encounter is the anonymous shadowy spectator silhouetted against the white brick wall; the other is the cowboy hero played by Bob Steele on the poster at the bottom right. Instead of the oscillation of knowledge and disavowal evoked by Eddie Mitchell’s juxtaposition with the female star, the mirroring dynamics of identification and incorporation—but also disincorporation—are elicited by the encounter of the black male viewer and the white male ego ideal. The shadowy profile of one and the contoured face of the other, painted in color on the poster for Feud on the Range, an uninspired instance of the many Westerns released in 1939, are presented as mirror images. Alone, singled out from a blank background, each figure wears a broad-brimmed hat and turns toward the camera in three-quarter profile. As the spectator is the human locus for the photograph’s play with shadows, Cowboy Bob is the human locus for the substance promoted by the Dr. Pepper advertisement. Rhyming with the “bite to eat,” the cowboy’s gleaming white teeth suggest that he has consumed the food his viewers will consume through him. Cowboy Bob is the interface between the camera and the spectator who incorporates the cowboy’s image of “phallic, narcissistic omnipotence.”32 The process is not entirely unilateral, however. If the spectator enhances his self-image by internalizing the ego ideal on the screen, that ideal is only actualized through the spectator who “help[s] it to be born.”33 But what if the spectator does not buy, or bite, into this collaborative endeavor? One answer is suggested by another photograph Wolcott took in the same month, “The entrance to a movie house on Beale Street” (figure 67), which shows a young African American man examining the billboard for Law for Tombstone in front of what is probably a theater for African Americans. The scene of spectatorship is one of nonrecognition: the cowboy, played here by Buck Jones, looks away from the spectator toward some readily surmountable, Hollywood-scripted threat. His failure or refusal to acknowledge his black viewer rebounds against him as that viewer’s shadow, a triangulating spectral presence on the billboard’s left side. Developing the deathly implications of the tombstone in the film title, the photograph projects lack back onto the screen whose cowboy incarnation must be realized by the viewer. Like a tombstone, the screen covers an absence, made palpable as the vacuum be-

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Figure 67. The entrance to a movie house on Beale Street, Memphis, October 1939. Photograph by Marion Post Wolcott. FSA-OWI Collection.

hind the billboard at the entry. At this theater, the photograph implies, the audience watches the film without backing it, or in the language suggested by the other photograph, purchases the ticket without swallowing the bait. Both photographs mobilize the racial connotations of the shadow to register the lack on which cinema is based and the anxiety that the medium might fail to compensate for its intrinsic emptiness and consequent dependence on the spectator to give it life. The more complex “Negro man entering a movie theater” situates the shadow in the frame of racial doubling created by the two-story theater. That doubling has its own duplicity: if the dominant early twentieth-century version, popularized by the song and dance routine “Me and My Shadow” (composed by Al Jolson, Billy Rose, and Dave Dryer in 1927 and performed by the Ted Lewis/Eddie Chester duo in the thirties), works to reduce the racial other to a passive imitation, that very effort bespeaks the threat posed by a reflection that might upstage the original (Dixon’s “towering shadow of the freed Negro”).34 “Negro man entering a movie theater” renders the tension between mimicry and threat through a pattern in which shadows that should be faithful indices of things actively complicate them instead. At one level, the photograph depicts the formal relation between white and black masculinity through the contrast between the full-size restroom door proclaiming

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“White Men Only” (lower left) and the adjacent, shorter, unmarked door, probably a storage room or exit, but functioning rhetorically as a counterpart for “Colored Men” through its location below the “Colored Adm.” sign. At first glance, the pairing of the ladder with its shorter shadow seems to function analogously, but rather than a passive reflection of the original, the shadow cast by the legs of the ladder makes its disposition difficult to read. Determined by light, shadows here mock its control—most pointedly in the elongated shape that droops surrealistically from the light fixture hanging on the wall at the right, exceeding and upstaging its source. The potential of shadows to make substance illegible by distending or confounding, instead of confirming, its shape invests the shadowy spectator and the space toward which he climbs with the agency that culminates in the spectator’s own shadow, which partially obscures the cowboy actor’s name. Emerging from the darkness of the lower right-hand corner, this shadow of a shadow carries the photograph’s visionary force. Both certifying the moviegoer’s substance and recruiting it to the world of shadows, the human shadow is untethered to the form it follows at an eerie distance. An uncanny, stalking presence, in a composition stylistically affiliated less with the frontal codes of documentary photography than with the diagonal lines and looming shadows designed to evoke anxiety in silent expressionist cinema, the shadow recasts the solitary moviegoer as the leader of a ghostly file whose steady upward climb carries the force of intentionality.35 The shadow’s blurred and unindividuated shape has an unknown capacity to proliferate, to portend a future gathering of shadows moving steadily and in untold numbers from beyond the photographic frame to swell the theater’s upper reaches with their unconsuming presence.

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• • •

Movie theaters generate some of the most powerful and haunting Jim Crow photographs, in part because the lengthening shadows impart a distinctively melancholy tone, and in part because the challenge the site provoked to hierarchies of media, as well as of race, elicited special attention to the formal values of composition, contrast, and framing. These aesthetic values and quarrels also filtered out more local cultural frames, however. For both aesthetic and political reasons, photographers tended to dwell on the expressive power of the single figure at the center of the single frame, the lonely male viewer whose afternoon swerve away from the social world registers not only (as at other sites) the economic and social burdens of black manhood in the South, but also their conversion through an upward climb into a skeptical posture toward the screen. Moviegoing narratives, by contrast, are invariably written in the first—and second, and third—person plural and typically climax in power rather than knowledge. To place these narratives in conversation with photography’s visual rhetoric requires shifting to a less aestheticized image that puts the culture of consumption

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Figure 68. Colored movie entrance, Anniston, Alabama, 1936. Photograph by Peter Sekaer. Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Copenhagen.

into conversation with the balcony’s cultural surround. By depicting an informal slice of the daily life of a community, captured in midst of its activities and conversations, Peter Sekaer’s “Colored movie entrance, Anniston, Alabama, 1936” (figure 68) shifts the terms of analysis from solitude to solidarity, from work to play, and from a language of the visual to a vision of the oral as a mode of nonconsumption that, recalling African roots, talks back to Hollywood’s Africa. One of the series of more than five hundred photographs the Danish-born photographer took in the two months during which he accompanied Walker Evans on a Resettlement Administration assignment in the South, “Colored movie entrance” reveals Sekaer’s interest (acquired in part from Evans) in coordinating architectural and social relations, but the composition also reveals that Sekaer put the camera to more confrontational uses than did his formalist mentor, whose engagement with the aesthetics of the sign did not extend to their appropriation by segregationists.36 By mapping the spatial coordinates of an “amazing jungle thriller” together with

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the segregated theater’s racial coordinates, the photograph calls attention to the parallels between the stratification of the movie theater, announced boldly on the outside through the oversize letters rising up the stairs, and the composition of the screen represented by the large framed poster for Call of the Savage (one of the many popular Tarzan clones Hollywood spawned after the success of the film in 1932). Both the poster and the viewing structure plot race on a vertical axis that seats the darker race above the lighter one. Following the tradition originating with Edward Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes, in which the anthropoid apes bestow their foster relative with the optical potency derived from their observational post in the canopy above (a position similarly represented in the poster for The New Adventures of Tarzan on display in Dorothea Lange’s photograph of the Rex Theatre), the cartoon version of Africa displayed in Anniston renders the “call” of the film’s title as the illicit but potent gaze of the “savage,” pictured in an overdetermined slippage by the ape in the upper right-hand corner at the woman who answers raptly with her upward-turned eyes.37 But the call of the poster-screen, the voice of Hollywood ventriloquized as the savage’s, solicits not the woman on the screen but the masculine audience on the street, yet on the terms the photograph makes clear by foregrounding the parallel between savage on the poster and colored on the stairs. The immediate effect is to make visible the white American project of splitting the African “savage” from the “colored” American. The call the poster issues is to witness (or hear) the visual call of the “savage” from a domesticated position that is safely differentiated from it. But the “colored” staircase that is intended to erect a barrier against the savage call ironically ascends to a location parallel to it. Colored and savage converge in a common viewing position. Designating the movie entrance as “colored” reframes the film’s degrading “savage” as a return of what the term colored represses—indeed, as a consequence, rather than a cause, of the color bar. The photograph asks us whether it is imaginable that the compulsory climb up those stairs could provoke any gaze other than a “savage”— uncaptivated, unpacified, unenthralled—one. It asks what sort of “black looks,” to adapt bell hooks’s provocative phrase to a particular viewing location, might be triggered by a seat in a partially screened space that is neither subject to surveillance from the orchestra nor held in the embrace of an autonomous community, a liminal space in which subordination could be materialized as insubordination, in which identification would be forged with an aggressive mode of looking rather than with the camera or the racially polarized figures it presents.38 Although we cannot see through the theater walls, we can try to infer from the evidence outside what cultural practices might travel inside. The community of viewers is represented by two pairs of men: an older pair of working men in overalls, presumably the Ladd brothers, standing beneath the “colored” staircase, and a younger pair, dressed more assertively in hooded jackets and jeans, at the bottom of the stairs they are poised to climb. By turning to face the camera, the erect young

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man on the left, singled out by a “10¢” sign that seems to punctuate his thoughts, commands our attention as a viewing subject rather than the passive object of the camera’s gaze. Through the relay between his direct gaze at the camera and the camera’s at the poster that represents the screen, we anticipate that the look he will turn toward Tailspin Tommy (Tarzan’s infelicitously named clone) will be equal to the hero’s stare. The glasses or goggles over his knit hat, moreover, heighten the impression of the moviegoer’s active vision. Perched on his forehead like a second set of eyes, these glasses suggest a capacity for a twofold or ironic vision acquired by navigating between upstairs and downstairs.39 That suggestion is echoed by signs that reveal a community practiced in the arts of re-vision. Even the oversize letters of the brightly painted “Colored” sign present an ambiguous statement of subordination. Handpainted, removed from its official frame, and ingeniously adapted to fill its particular staircase space, the word that typically points to back doors and alleys here boldly commands attention, its extension in space suggesting more a banner of pride than a badge of inferiority. And who has painted it? Although we cannot know, the image makes a strong visual, if not causal, link between the white-painted word and the white splashes of paint on the overalls and hat of the man directly under it. The ability to reinflect the structure of the sign is more conspicuous in the Ladd Brothers’ own taxi sign, mounted on the wall beneath the balcony stairs. By situating their taxi stand in a strategic position sheltered from the elements and poised to take advantage of the movie clientele, the Ladd Brothers turn spatial restriction to economic advantage. They similarly adapt the coordinates of plane geometry to advertising gain by bisecting the horizontal axis of their phone number (345) with a vertical axis that forms a crostic that reads in two directions: or, we might say in a slightly different vocabulary, by intercepting a horizontal axis of forward motion and linear sequence by a vertical axis that signifies on it. 3 345 5

Sekaer’s is one of the few photographs that shows the embeddedness of Jim Crow signage within a black expressive culture that demonstrates both entrepreneurial and signifying agency. The numerical crossroads traced by the Ladd Brothers’ ad is a sign of signs, or rather a sign of signifying, a graphic image of the doubling with a difference (what Henry Louis Gates calls “Signifyin[g]”) that characterizes the black vernacular. The signal figure of this practice is the Signifying Monkey, the African American descendant of Esu-Elegbara, the divine trickster figure and messenger of the gods in the Yoruba mythologies that traveled from Africa to regions of Latin America and the Caribbean. The Signifying Monkey is a crossroads figure who both enacts and

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represents the strategy of repetition as revision. As elaborated by Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Monkey’s prime scholarly exponent, he marks the intersection not only between Africa and Africa-America, but also between the African American rhetorical strategies of verbal misdirection and punning designated by the capitalized word Signification and the semantic register designated by the Standard English lowercase signification. Through an inspired (that is, Signifying) revision of Saussurean linguistics, Gates maps the relation of black rhetoric to white semantics as a relation of vertical doubling through which a perpendicular “y axis of blackness” intercepts and disrupts a horizontal “x axis of white signification.”40 By opening up a rule-governed syntagmatic axis that advances meaning horizontally toward semantic closure to the disruptive play of the unrepressed “associative relations” that are released along a vertical paradigmatic axis of rhetorical substitutions, the Signifying Monkey “who is also called the Signifier . . . wreaks havoc upon the Signified” (49, 52). Standing at the crossroads of Africa and America, of black rhetoric and white semantics, and (to adapt the oral vernacular to the looking relations that it typically overlooks), of the “colored balcony” and the line of visual address from the screen to the white audience, the Signifying Monkey is a figure of mediation that, as Gates points out, turns to new uses the racist construction of people of African descent as simian. In the crossroads mapped by the photograph of a segregated theater exhibiting a jungle thriller, the ape that marks the juncture between the place of the African on the screen and of the African Americans who view the screen is converted by the camera lens into a monkey that signifies visually to the viewer of the photograph that the viewer of the screen may be capable of Signifyin(g). It is because of his location that the Monkey can do his business. Beyond a figurative axis and the axis of figuration, of associative free play in relation to the normative axis of syntax and sequence, the perpendicular on which the Monkey operates is also a tree that offers immunity by placing him physically out of reach of the powerful jungle kings he taunts on the semantic ground below. From this shelter, the Signifying Monkey throws down words as if they were things—taunting, tangible provocations. His rhetorical play foregrounds the materiality of the signifier, “the use of words as things” (58). This non-transparent “thingness” shades into a density that doubles as a weapon, a barbed taunt tough enough to wound or smear. The formulaic opening stanza of the Monkey poems launches this aggression: Deep down in the jungle so they say There’s a signifying monkey down the way There hadn’t been no disturbin’ in the jungle for quite a bit, For up jumped the monkey in the tree one day and laughed “I guess I’ll start some shit.”

“Shit” stands for trouble here, verbal trouble, that converts into language the monkey’s propensity to pelt those below with food. But it is not so much food as its end

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product, a smearing whose force is scatological, that the monkey’s language activates. As transposed to the balcony, the conversion works in the opposite direction: in this displacement downward, literal food and its containers, the detritus of consumption, are cast down instead of words, but they function as a language, a distinctively material and gestural form of Signifyin(g) “with the hands,” a tactile vernacular that answered the call of the screen through the mediating presence of the audience downstairs.41 The model of the Signifying Monkey directs us to the exterior and posterior of narratives of segregated film consumption, their endpoint in expulsion rather than digestion. The Monkey’s antisocial behavior, and the anger generated by the trajectory from the theater’s backside to its uppermost regions, foreground the scatological, but the model of orality works as well: if we emphasize the action rather than its content, we could say that throwing down is a form of throwing up. The expressive materials for this gestural language were made available by the signal item that the Depression introduced to the movie theaters: popcorn. Of the many forms of consumption the industry embraced during the 1930s, by far the most successful was the sale of this inexpensive and wildly popular snack. As Douglas Gomery reports, popcorn sales at the movies between 1934 and 1940 led to a twentyfold increase in the farm crop. This quantity quadrupled during World War II, when four pounds of popcorn were harvested per year for every American citizen. Consequently, the film industry wisdom became: “Find a good location for a popcorn stand and build a movie theatre around it.”42 As the smell of popping corn saturated the moviegoing experience, popcorn became (and has remained) the signifier of the cinema—but it proved to be a mobile one. Food in the hands of the audience, especially food produced in little pieces, provided ammunition for registering the nonconsumption of a visual medium by those located in the optimal position to mobilize those morsels as expressive vehicles. What had been intended to grease the wheels of visual consumption, to function as an immediate sensuous reinforcement of the more abstract visual structurations of libido, instead provided tools through which the component instincts—oral and anal—could break off and be heard. Food that had been banished as a class marker made an unexpected comeback as a racial marker, played out not in the language of the peanuts that had given their name to the galleries from which the unruly classes had made their opinions known, but in the language of popcorn thrown from the “nigger heaven.” • • •

The neglect of photography has kept the segregated theater in the background of studies of the everyday forms of black working-class resistance. In his classic work on this subject, for example, Robin D. G. Kelley takes Gloria Wade-Gayles’s summary of her moviegoing experience—“In the dark, we vented our rage”—as his gov-

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erning metaphor for the “pleasures and politics of black communities under segregation,” but he swerves away from the literal site of the movie theater to its reconfiguration as the “moving theater” of public transportation, a phrase in which the displaced site continues to make its presence felt, but in a setting whose theatrical dimensions can be elicited entirely from the written record of passenger complaint.43 Borrowing James C. Scott’s figure of the “hidden transcript” of everyday acts of resistance and survival that are conducted in the forms of jokes, conversations, and songs that are kept “like infrared rays, beyond the visible end of the spectrum,” Kelley insists that we must “slip into the darkness . . . and search for ways to gain entry into the private world hidden beyond the public gaze” (8, 36). The metaphor of darkness is key for Kelley, as for many African American cultural critics, but only as a metaphor for a subtext whose decoding requires learning to read between the lines of seemingly compliant behavior. To see in the dark we must enlist visual tools of detection as well: not the flashlights that failed to identify the popcorn throwers in Denmark, South Carolina, but the cameras that capture generative structures instead of individual culprits. The transcript of segregated spectatorship is hidden in the darkened theater, and in the minds of spectators whose responses went unvoiced, but it is also hidden in plain sight. Uncovering the story within these obscure cavities is a reciprocal process of visualizing the material structure that makes the written record legible For there is a written transcript of spectatorship from the colored balcony, but it is scattered in the oral histories, interviews, testimonies, and memoirs of ordinary individuals. Perceiving these fragments as a coherent narrative requires countering their textual dispersal with a visual frame that brings them into focus. The fullest elaboration is the narrative from which Kelley abstracts his central metaphor. For although the ribald verbal tricks of the Signifying Monkey may seem to mark a masculine preserve, the voice of the balcony—materialized as popcorn, ice cubes, and soda cans—crossed gender if not generational lines, affording a rare outlet for well-behaved young African American women to participate in a vernacular of viewer independence.”44 Gloria Wade-Gayles’s narrative of going to the Malco Theater in downtown Memphis traces the full journey, from the point of entry to the theater to the point of view upstairs, which also touches on each of the issues raised by the photographs. Because every step counts, the narrative bears quoting from beginning to end: White girls, ushered by white boys, entered through the shiny brass front doors and stepped onto the thick red carpet of the foyer beneath large chandeliers. We entered through a small door on the back side of the theatre near the Mississippi River and the Bluff City Fish Market. The combined odors of dead fish rotting on the muddy river bank and cleaned fish lying on white ice overpowered the inexpensive fragrance I wore. There was no foyer for us. No red carpet. No chandeliers. We began our climb in a narrow and barren brick hallway. One flight after another

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of concrete steps. Minutes later, sometimes out of breath and usually angry, we reached the “colored section,” called the “pigeon’s roost,” where the seats were hard, many of them broken, and all of them old. Heat might rise everywhere else in the world, but not in the roost. I always had to take what we called a “wrap,” something to keep me warm. I remember wondering if there were heat and an elevator for the projectionist who worked a few feet behind us in a glass-walled booth. The projector was so close behind us that a colored stream of light rested on our shoulders, and the scratchy sound of turning reels made it difficult for us to follow the dialogue emanating from the silver screen miles below us. Sometimes in defiance, we threw popcorn on white people who sat beneath us in cushioned chairs, secure, they thought, in their power.45

Insisting that point of view has a prehistory, the passage begins by marking the theater’s normative front entry. Although we know from Wade-Gayles’s earlier comments that the we in her narrative is a couple on a “serious date” (the black theaters on Beale Street being sufficient only for Saturday matinees with friends), that fact is left unspecified here, sharpening the contrast to the white girls and boys whose entry through the shiny brass portals marks their passage into a sexualized, reproductive space. Thickly carpeted in red, the uterine environment they enter is a site of psychological and social reproduction, a safe, enclosed, and cushioned universe in which they are relieved of the burdens of embodied personhood, suspended in amniotic bliss, reborn by identifying with the camera’s point of view, and replenished by consuming its images. A different version of the theater body is accessed through “a small door on the back side of the theatre” leading to a “narrow and barren brick hallway.” African Americans are channeled through this backside entry directly into a constricted, dark, smelly, nonreproductive (“barren”) conduit that leads through waste products to the chilly upper regions of an anal cavity. (Photographs by Marion Palfi of the “colored” entries to unspecified theaters in downtown Memphis in the late 1940s reiterate the association of rear entry and trash.) The language enacts a process of stripping away: no antechamber, no chandeliers, and especially no red carpet, with its merged connotations of fertility and royalty, an absence tallied (as by Griffith Davis) on the soles of the feet by “one flight after another of concrete stairs” whose ascent leads the narrator to wonder, in a moment reminiscent of Ninotchka, whether the projectionist has a private elevator. Without protective cushioning, the narrator, exposed to the impact of broken, old and cold things, requires a “wrap”—a second layer of skin primarily for warmth (rather than glamour), but also as a buffer against the pressure of hard edges. That pressure is olfactory as well. The backside of the Malco Theater is by the Mississippi River, whose metonymic figure is dead fish rotting on the muddy banks (another anal channel) that contrast with the “cleaned fish lying on white ice” in the Bluff City Fish Market. The commingled odors of the fish breach the body’s fragile perfume shield.

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The implied racial difference between the mud-covered and the white-iced fish is more than skin deep. Beyond figuring the social production of two populations of moviegoers, the two sets of fish—equally dead, but one set caught, cleaned, and carefully prepared for consumption, while the other degenerates directly to decay— suggest two routes through the social body represented by the movie theater. Consumption at this site is two-directional: the audience is assimilated to this social body by consuming its visual food. Being readied for consumption thus applies to the viewer as well as to the viewed. To be shunted, alternatively, through the rear door to the upper gallery is to pass through the alimentary canal in reverse by beginning with the end that is blocked from social view. Proceeding from the bottom up, this passage traces to the vantage point upstairs the consequences of entry through the portal at which things are broken down. Rather than leading to identification with the camera’s projected vision, the process that begins with the theater’s rear end concludes with that vision’s decomposition, a conclusion reached both from the path that is traveled and the point to which it leads. In a stunning insight whose self-evidence seems to have kept it from being more generally observed, Wade-Gayles notes that the viewing position that imposes knowledge of cinema’s material apparatus is the “pigeon’s roost.” Not the entire apparatus, of course, but the ideologically complicit component that masks the camera’s work. The single, continuous, transfixing beam from the projector that rivets eyes to screen dissolves into an overly close, almost tangible stream of colored light directly behind the head. If the captivated spectator could simply turn around, Baudry notes, “he would see nothing except the moving beams from an already veiled light source.”46 But in the pigeon’s roost, one need not turn around, for a stream of light rests on the shoulders with an almost tactile pressure, as if the apparatus were reaching out to tap the viewer with its fingers of color. By contrast, the “silver screen” miles below is but a distant cliché, its physical distance mirrored in an emotional detachment at the opposite pole from a captivated stare. And in a step beyond film theory’s customary focus on the visual, Wade-Gayles notes that in the “pigeon’s roost,” human speech—which enhances the illusion of cinema’s embodiment—devolves into the mechanical sounds of audio equipment. Because the gallery is embedded in an anatomy of the theater, however, knowledge is not its final yield. Both theater bodies anatomized in this narrative—one described, one implied by contrast as its familiar other—map the Freudian developmental body onto the theater space, each with its appropriate outcome. The familiar version, most eloquently described by Metz, casts the theater as a womb and the screen as a breast. Regressed to embryonic origins in the plenitude of the theater womb, the “spectator-fish” who swim through the front door take in “everything with their eyes, nothing with their bodies.” Although theirs is a “furtive feast,” for the actors on the screen do not see them and the food that is proffered is not

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real, the eye-mouths that constitute their sole organ of sensation hungrily consume the substance they are given. Unlike the fish “filtered out into pure vision,” viewers funneled upward through the rear door to a cramped, cold, cluttered space are assaulted by a battery of sense impressions that lock them in their bodies. Never “acrobatically hooked up” to the source of vision—primarily the camera’s, secondarily its scenarios—through “an invisible thread of sight” that is also an umbilical cord, their journey culminates in aggression rather than digestion, expulsion rather than reproduction.47 “Sometimes in defiance, we threw popcorn on white people who sat beneath us in cushioned chairs, secure, they thought, in their power.” Cast down from the pigeon’s roost, these small white morsels do not spell consumption. “I flashed on sitting upstairs in the balcony again—tossing shit over the rail on folks just like them,” Mel Watkins recalls in a different idiom after overhearing an elderly white woman in the audience of the recently desegregated State Theater in Youngstown, Ohio, ask her husband how Sidney Poitier could bear to “wake up every morning and look in the mirror at that black face?” The nature of the tossed shit is unspecified, but what motivates both the action and the diction is clear. Downstairs, where Watkins overhears the comment, there is no ready means of retribution, which may be what triggers the memory of an earlier moment in his own and his hometown’s biography. The upstairs/downstairs relationship is echoed by the memory of an earlier incident at the Palace Theater when, having arrived late and taken a seat downstairs, the twelve-year-old Watkins was asked by an usher to move to the balcony: “It was all done so courteously that, as I stood to leave, I felt a sudden obligation to thank him. Nearly asked if there was anything I could do for him. After all, it was my place—where I had intended to sit all along.”48 The anger swallowed by the downstairs boy is regurgitated by the one upstairs, whose location both imposes and provides the platform for relieving the indignity of being there. Tossing down projectiles, or imagining tossing them down, may be the condition of possibility of staying and watching the movie. Like the balcony, a space that houses diverse viewing subjects and experiences, the arc of the projectile inscribes a nexus of social experiences and relations rather than a specific substantive reaction. Generated at a flexible intersection of insult and opportunity, memory and image, the object’s flight is an inverse measure of absorption: food that remains in its container when a film is riveting, and travels dutifully from hand to mouth during moments of moderate absorption, sails through the air in the opening carved by boredom. But if the popcorn-ometer can calibrate degrees of disengagement, it cannot specify substance or cause, for the projectile gathers into its arc an affective register spanning rage, playfulness, and disgust. It does not deny but traces a containing shape for a multiplicity of viewing responses and strategies. Catalyzed by attitudes expressed either on the screen or in the orchestra, the popcorn toss is fueled by a reservoir of bitter memories, primed by the

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upward climb, that brim and overflow in tactile form in the space that darkness and disaffection afford. The white audience might be a precipitating cause or a hapless recipient, but its consistent presence in the balcony narrative suggests that consciousness of the downstairs viewers filtered the perspective from upstairs, both during the film and retrospectively. In Willie Wallace’s recollection of Saturday matinees at the Ritz Theater in Natchez, Mississippi, for example, his neutral opening statement, “They had movies with cowboys,” is quickly displaced by his memory that the movies were the only site at which blacks and whites encountered one another. Cowboys and Indians may have been the regular opponents on the weekend screen, but they dissolve into the antagonists of the less common Civil War scenes that are remembered on the screen because they were restaged in the audience: “Now if the movie was something about the North and the South, the rebels and the union soldiers, then when you finished your soda pop, something would be happening, you’d just tip it downstairs. All of a sudden, whap! You’d see it come back upstairs. We’d throw a few cups, they’d throw a few cups back and that was it.”49 As the North/South geography is literalized as the upstairs and downstairs, and the action migrates off the screen that should command rapt attention, the Civil War’s reenactment in the theater unravels the project of Birth of a Nation. Fulfilling Griffith’s worst apprehensions about the interventionist potential of the balcony perspective, the scene in the Natchez theater suggests that Griffith’s use of the camera to screen out dissonant viewpoints was countered by those viewpoints’ materialization in the structure of the segregated theater. In Wallace’s account, it is impossible to see from other than a racialized perspective. If one is not identifying with, in order to replay, the roles of the Union soldiers, there is virtually nothing to be seen. Wallace’s only description of onscreen action is “something would be happening,” a “something” whose apparent function is to distract the downstairs viewers from the plots being hatched upstairs. “And that was it!” In a defining feature of the balcony narrative, the moviegoing experience is epitomized as a vertical food fight in which the advantage is held by the viewers upstairs. Diverse in other respects, the balcony narrative is almost never told without a variant of the popcorn toss: it is a constitutive, not merely a consistent, feature of the story, the punch line that makes the story worth recounting, and perhaps the movie worth seeing. Punctuating the viewing experience at various points, presumably, the throw of the projectile is the climax of the viewing narrative, as if the story is driven by a social and architectural logic to culminate in a gesture of revenge, even when the “nigger heaven” is invoked only as a metaphor for urban geography, as in Carl Van Vechten’s novel: “Nigger Heaven! That’s what Harlem is. We sit in our places in the gallery of this New York theatre and watch the white world sitting down below in the good seats in the orchestra. . . . It never seems to occur to them that Nigger Heaven is crowded, that there isn’t another

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seat . . . that we sit above them, that we can drop things down on them and crush them, that we can swoop down from this Nigger Heaven and take their seats.”50 The narrative of the throw of the projectile, a less dramatic recapitulation of John Wilkes Booth’s leap from the balcony, is generated by a specific intersection of race and space. Verticality in itself is insufficient; the two-tier structure of segregated churches and courthouses produced no such stories, for example. A recreational context was likewise a necessary but not sufficient condition, for although popcorn was undoubtedly cast from balconies by kids of every race, only the segregated balcony has produced a popcorn narrative. Unsegregated balconies generated a different cultural story of libidinal license and amorous refuge, a story in which concealment serves erotic rather than aggressive aims.51 Although there was presumably smooching in the segregated balcony, as there were projectiles cast from the unsegregated ones, these architecturally indistinguishable spaces generated mutually exclusive and complementary narratives of race and of sex. Together, photograph and testimony conjoin the coordinates of space and time that constitute a chronotope, that interdependent “time space” in which temporality “thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible” and “space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.”52 By identifying a space that produces a distinctive narrative, Jim Crow photographs move the colored balcony from a barely visible and passive social background to a significant narrative catalyst and frame. Inscribing the balcony in the annals of racial chronotopes (the plantation and the slave ship are better-known and more horrific examples), the conjunction of image and stories function as an optic into the contradictory forces that converge in the segregated theater: the ideological forces the apparatus serves and the racial inversions the viewing structure mandates. This conjunction’s paradoxical nature made it memorable for those seated at its crossroads: at no other Jim Crow site was seduction packaged together with the means to resist it, or humiliation with the tools of revenge. Whether enacted or simply fantasized—and the silence of white audiences and employees suggest that the projectile traced an imaginary arc more often than an actual one—the imaginative possibilities of the segregated balcony not only made it palatable but also, for at least some viewers, converted the worst into the best seats in the movie theater.53 This may be why the vantage point from the segregated balcony, rather than the separate black theaters that have been the subject of cinema history, has been the subject of popular memory. The still camera’s single frame, which intercepts cinema’s foundational illusions and makes the work of the movie camera visible through that of the moviegoer, also provides a frame for narratives of moviegoing in which what goes up comes down, what comes in comes out, and work yields play and protest rather than knowledge. But the potential for aggression built into the structure of the segregated theater did not lead to that structure’s dismantling. That was achieved instead incon-

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spicuously in the early 1960s, less through the picket lines and stand-ins that were organized at white ticket booths than through the combined forces of the political pressures brought to bear by the Kennedy administration and the economic pressures brought to bear by white flight from urban theaters and everyone’s flight to television.54 Where direct action was instrumental in bringing down the Jim Crow signs was at the segregated lunch counters of the early sixties, the scene of a different mode of encounter between cameras.

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Part IV

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Dismantling Jim Crow

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8

Remaking Racial Signs Activism and Photography in the Theater of the Sit-Ins Look at me, Mr. Wade I was born of America . . . Serve me Coffee Today Completely integrated One half cream and One half coffee NAACP Youth Council chant, Oklahoma City, 1958

You present your body as a living testimony that you’re prepared to suffer violence, to suffer maybe even death itself, to reach out and redeem this person and our larger society.

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John Lewis, interview, 1961

The chant that thirty teenage members of the NAACP Youth Council directed at Mr. Wade, the owner of a downtown Oklahoma City lunch counter, put into circulation a signature trope of the sit-in movement: the cup of coffee whose passage across the counter would confer the national legitimacy that birthright had failed to bestow. This passage would also “redeem . . . our larger society” by incorporating multiple bloodlines into a single national cup. The Greensboro Coffee Party, the title conferred to honor the request that officially launched the sit-in movement in North Carolina in 1960, registers that event’s historic significance as a reprise of the Boston Tea Party, with the integration of people of African descent replacing independence from England as the twentieth-century’s national imperative.1 The frustrations of fulfilling that imperative and, as a result, its questionable value, were quickly observed by commentators such as James Baldwin, whose famous lament that “all Africa will be free before we can get a lousy cup of coffee” contrasts an autonomous black continent with the integrated cup of coffee that eventually became an object of derision for black nationalists.2 251

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Dismantling Jim Crow

As the contestation over this single trope suggests, the sit-ins were sites of intensive and self-conscious signifying activity. The request for service at the white lunch counter challenged more than the regulatory power of Jim Crow: it also called into question the signifying power of the racial sign system. By insisting on representing themselves rather than being represented, black students sitting down at white lunch counters precipitated a crisis of racial legibility by challenging the assumption that Jim Crow signs simply spatialized biological givens. Does gaining service at a white lunch counter define the customer as socially white? As American? How might these expanded definitions rearticulate race with nation? By refusing the authority of one set of signs, the activists put into play others that—like the cup of coffee—became vehicles for imagining the contours and complexion of an integrated nation. These imaginary maps anticipate the structure of ongoing debates about the place of race in a post–Jim Crow society. More than other sites of civil disobedience, lunch counters brought the covert practices of signifying out of the darkness of the movie theater into the light of political theater. The display of inventiveness was most immediately apparent on the picket lines outside where, for the first time during the civil rights movement, a battle of signs erupted on the sidewalks of America. Using their bodies as props for sandwich boards, the students honed their sign-making skills both linguistically— “Let’s be Just for a Change. No traditions attached,” “Khrushchev ate here. Why can’t we?”—and technically: “We had special laminated signs that wouldn’t wash off in the rain. We were hell.”3 Inside, the protesters crafted a more subtle kind of signage: they “presented” their bodies as their signs—“living testimonies,” in John Lewis’s words. Through carefully designed corporeal signs of comportment, grooming, and posture, naturally tailored by the accessories that accompanied and declared their student status, and intentionally inflected by the display of American flags, the demonstrators crossed the signifiers of race with those of nation and class. No longer spectators who could signify only obliquely on the screen below, the students transformed themselves into actors on a new political stage, to which they recruited the symbolic props and resources at their disposal. The photojournalists and television crews that were drawn en masse to this unprecedented drama translated the live theater performed for a local audience into still and moving pictures directed to a national audience. The national media were essential to the movement’s goal of forging “a new national culture,” for “to succeed, it needed to have its picture taken and its stories told,” both to get its message out and to galvanize the general watchfulness that could provide some safeguard against local retribution.4 Secondary to the dramatic agency of the sit-inners (as they were quickly labeled), the cameramen who defied the norms of journalistic neutrality to embrace the students’ cause helped create the students’ public image. Different cameras produced this image differently. Television’s motion and sound effects were better able to convey the immediacy and terror of “the drama of good

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and evil playing itself out on the stage of the living, breathing world,” but the still camera’s shaping influence was at once more visible and more enduring than the riveting but ephemeral scenes on the nightly network news. Through their more obvious selection, composition, and framing of these scenes, the photographs of the sit-ins both justify Susan Sontag’s claims for the memorability of the single image and call attention to that image’s constructedness.5 The legitimacy and gravitas that, as Sasha Torres has argued, the television networks strategically achieved through their sympathetic depiction of the civil rights movement may have been photojournalistic goals as well, but the better-established print media had less need to claim an Olympian perspective; by contrast to the television camera’s formal allegiance to an omniscient overview to offset its political allegiance to the movement, the still camera assumed a partisan position on divided turf. This photographic record, a central component of the civil rights collection that Stephen Kasher rightly deems “the deepest and broadest photographic documentation of any social struggle in America,” has been acclaimed for its emotional power, political efficacy, and documentary value, but its interpretive intervention has been underread.6 Yet these relatively quiet images, more than the dramatic scenes of violence that were favored by the media, are eminently readable products of a sustained collaboration between highly self-conscious, mostly Southern students in command of the image they wanted to present and equally self-conscious, mostly Northern photographers who embraced their role as producers of visual meaning. The circumstances for this co-construction were ideal: during the long hours when the students “just sat—and sat—and sat” in ways contrived to put their discipline and dignity on display, the photographers who tracked the movement’s spread across the South had sufficient time and space to make deliberate compositional choices.7 Featuring a constant cast of characters against a stable backdrop, the photographic record of the sit-ins during this three-year period invites us to interpret the recurrence of certain social configurations and props. With varying degrees of self-consciousness, the photographers fashioned new signs out of what the activists brought to the table, investing incidental objects—coffee cups and cigarettes, coins and purses, pens and flags—with cumulative significance. More attentive than the written record to the movement’s theatrical dimensions, the serial images also endowed these with new narrative potential. Multidimensional and multidirectional, the visual narrative that is articulated through the postures and possessions of anonymous individuals reads backward and forward toward multiple resolutions that complicate the narrative arc of a written chronicle whose primary ingredients are proper nouns and verbs. These images fruitfully provoke the “irresistible urge” that, according to Walter Benjamin, photography elicits to “find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it.”8 We rediscover it in unfamiliar terms. As depictions

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of grassroots actions whose leaders emerged only gradually, these photographs direct our attention less to the heroic figures whose exploits we have come to recognize than to the shifting tides of a social movement whose narrative density is necessarily diluted in the written record. Although the overarching story—the extraordinary courage and vision of the young men and women who, impatient with the circumspection of an older generation, determined in spite of aggressive opposition to take Jim Crow’s dismantling into their own hands—remains, of course, the same, its multiple substories, distributed across a spectrum of subjects and objects, find expression through a language of gesture and positionality rather than action and individuality. From our location in the present, the interchange between hindsight and foresight allows us to tease out the public implications of private moments, to broaden the historical horizon by glimpsing futures that might have materialized, and to apprehend the theoretical dimensions of political action in advance of their discursive formulation. One critical substory is routed through the insistence of gender in a visual medium. Whereas newspapers reported the number of demonstrators but rarely their gender, that information was an inevitable component of the photographs that accompanied them. The most immediate gain was the correction of the written record, which prioritized the voices of the male leaders, through the visible presence of the female activists who worked and sat by their side.9 The equal jeopardy and courage of the women are especially apparent in photographs that documented the eruption of violence. These broadly inclusive and crowded images, however, are historically stronger but imaginatively weaker than the depiction of smaller groups in more selective compositions whose contribution to the record is more interpretive than evidentiary. Whether the smaller groupings that lent themselves to more compelling compositions tended to be made up of one sex, or whether the camera was especially drawn to same-sex groups, the photographs that convey a larger picture through a smaller frame select for clusters of either men or women, each with gender-appropriate props. Although the male and female demonstrators were passionately committed to the same goals, their distinctive comportment and modes of address invest the exchange across the counter with a complexity foreclosed by the trope of integrated coffee.10 Gender was also an overdetermined feature of the visual frame because, in the drama of good and evil played out on this particular stage, evil wore a woman’s dress instead of a policeman’s uniform. The young protesters in Oklahoma City address their demand to “Look at me” to the store owner, Mr. Wade, but in the visual frame (as figure 69 illustrates), he is represented by his female employees. This feminine surrogacy changes the picture from classic scenarios of cultural accession pinned to the name of the father and complicates the image of race in America as “the endless spectacle of conflict between black and white men.”11 Granted different modes

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of address to this female surrogate, male and female petitioners at the counter enabled new narratives of acknowledgment and reform. Sweeping in scope, these narratives are funneled through a circumscribed yet intensively represented set of scenes. From the dense and varied archive of sit-in photographs, further textured by the editorial filters through which they were disseminated and shaped for different audiences, I have selected a few key junctures, amplified by sideways glances at other temporal and spatial locales. I focus on the movement’s opening and concluding months, when political and representational energies were at their peak. From the canonical origin of Greensboro, I track the movement’s evolution through the first few hectic weeks across North Carolina to Portsmouth, Virginia, where the first outburst of large-scale violence, and hence expanded publicity, occurred. Photographs of this initial period begin with a volatile and hence quickly mediated attention to the black male face. Although women were early participants in the movement, media interest was galvanized only by the entry of three white Woman’s College students on the fourth day of the Greensboro sit-in; the African American women who appeared in the margins of that day’s photograph disappeared from the caption and accompanying story and remained, despite their visible presence at the counter, outside the media’s interpretive frame until the violence at Portsmouth gave the female face a new function. Portsmouth is thus a juncture at which I both turn to the feminine and return to the signifying function of a face that, whether turned toward camera or waitress, provoked less anxiety than its masculine equivalent. The scene at the lunch counter unfolds against a traumatic backdrop—both a catalyst and “the first great media event” of the modern civil rights movement—that was etched into national memory by a photograph the African American press forced the world to confront: the horrifically disfigured face of the fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, whose brutal lynching and defacement exposed the costs of addressing, or appearing to address, a woman on the far side of a racial barrier (also a store counter). For the black press in 1955, and for the black press and protesters five years later, the risks of looking, and the risks of looking at the risks of looking, had to be faced.12 The mainstream media, which had refused to publish the photograph of Emmett Till’s blotched and bloated face in the open coffin demanded by his mother so that “all the world” should see, took a more cautious approach again in 1960 of directing attention away from the male protesters’ expressions to other communicative tools through which their demands of the white waitress, and of white viewers, were negotiated.13 By contrast, in the depiction of the women protesters, the face’s untranslatability to other terms, its power as a site of irreducible identity, cultural rather than personal in this scenario, is central. Not subject to the same sexual taboos, the face-to-face encounter between black and white women opened a new perspective on a reformed social body.

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These perspectives correlate roughly with two schools of thought about the place of race in a constitutional democracy: a liberal commitment to the principle of universal rights protected by a neutral public sphere, and a multiculturalist commitment to the public recognition of difference as an intrinsic ingredient of individual and national identity. The shift of focus from male faces to systems of exchange that allow differences to be reconceived as equivalencies makes the conceptual underpinnings of the liberal notion of abstract equality visible. The attention directed to the interplay of female faces anticipates the multiculturalism that would propose another image of a post–Jim Crow America. In political history, these models are sequential: the civil rights movement that is taken to be the “greatest, most recent victory” of the principle of equal citizenship is both extended and amended by a politics of recognition (whose canonical origin is the second wave of the women’s movement) that corrects the neutral liberal state’s blindness to difference.14 These alternatives are both present in the visual narrative, by contrast. Rather than the struggle over the status of sexual difference succeeding and shifting the terms of the struggle for racial equality, the representation of sexual difference in the sit-in photographs propels the two models into conversation. The outlines of this debate, implicit in the depiction of the sit-ins’ early months, were reprised in the representation of their final months in the spring of 1963, when the strategies of direct action advanced beyond the boundaries of the moderate South to Alabama and Mississippi, the nation’s two most racist states. Bookending the inaugural images of Greensboro is an equally iconic photograph of Jackson, Mississippi, arguably the traumatic and climactic end of the sit-in movement despite some less consequential subsequent instances. Bridging these two poles is an underlying question: how can a sign system be conceptually as well as physically dismantled? These photographs, in contrast to those of the signs’ physical removal, suggest the symbolic practices through which the meaning of racial difference was reworked. At stake throughout this chapter is the question of how much of racial reference must be neutralized through other representational systems and how much should be revalued and retained. The foundation for these questions must be prepared, however. Prior even to arriving at Greensboro, the stage has to be set for the social and seeing relations that had evolved by the 1960s, when Woolworth’s replaced White Castle as the paradigmatic scene of American eating. • • •

When four undergraduates at North Carolina A&T University sat down at the Greensboro Woolworth on February 1, 1960, and requested a cup of coffee, they targeted a national institution that proudly promoted itself as such: “As the bazaar was to the Middle East, Woolworth was to the nation,” the store’s anniversary literature proclaims.15 Beyond enabling and encouraging sympathy protests at Woolworth stores across the nation, the students’ choice dramatized the question of access

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to this symbolic heart of national consumption, one whose carefully standardized architecture and furnishings provided “an architectural background for a collective social experience.”16 Woolworth stores were a standard feature of the Main Streets of America and a national destination of Saturday afternoon shopping expeditions whose attractions included spontaneous yet guaranteed encounters with friends. An integral dimension of all the five-and-dime stores were the lunch counters that functioned as drawing cards for shoppers. As the consumption of inexpensive food and merchandise increasingly converged in the downtowns of America, the lunch counters of variety stores became a primary national site of eating and meeting. The more they evolved into sites of community gathering, however, the more rigorously segregated their lunch counters were across the South, where African Americans, whose patronage was encouraged at the merchandise counters (at which they constituted approximately one-fourth of the clientele), were refused service. The U-shaped counters in local cafés that had been divided down the middle between black and white customers were here restricted to whites, who now looked only at each other or, when assembled along an extended counter, at the white waitress, often backed by mirrors that reflected their membership in a virtual community of their peers. By the early 1940s, some of the five-and-dime stores made the minimal concession of building stand-up bars, sometimes limited to carry-out service, that were either designated “for colored only” or came to be so in practice. Waiters were selected to match their customers’ complexions: whites were served by whites, blacks were served by blacks in completely differentiated worlds of eating located in disjunct and disparately valued areas of the store. The stand-up bars broadcast the message that African American customers might be allowed to purchase drinks or food as the cost of securing their patronage at the merchandise counters, but they should harbor no hope of tenancy in the social environment of the store. Even in relatively benign versions, such as a malt bar Marion Palfi represents at a Memphis five-anddime, which accommodates some socializing among the customers and a proprietary sense strong enough to elicit wary stares at the white photographer, the defining conditions are on display: the discomfort of standing registered by a man leaning on the counter, the sense of transience by overcoats and hats. A similar message was reiterated verbally. By designating these sites not as “counters” (much less as the “Soda and Lunch Departments” that glorified eating arrangements at Kress) but “bars,” the management both evokes the word’s other connotations of physical, social, or legal obstruction and prioritizes low-class, casual drinking relations over the more reputable and enduring bonds of eating. Barred as standing transients from the social membership vested in the stores’ seated diners, African Americans performed the ultimate gesture of protest: sitting down. By sitting down in front of a white waitress, the protestors made visible a tacit color line and exposed the counter as a racial barrier. Players on both sides were

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invested with new significance. The waitress charged with maintaining this frontier was thrust into a heightened and altered visibility. From a self-effacing mirror of her customers’ desires, she became the visible face of an invisible management: an interface between the students and remote authorities. Powerless and inconsequential in herself, a puppet of invisible puppeteers, she became the adventitious gatekeeper of the white community, the instrument of policies in which she had no say but which her actions put on national display. The white uniform that marked her subordination as individual to her function as employee accrued a racial meaning from this custodial function. As the students embodied and advanced one racial sign, the white-uniformed white body of the waitress (garbed, like members of the KKK, in a second layer of white skin) reinstantiated the “White Only” sign that arrested their advance.17 In her hands, or rather in her eyes, lay the operation of a boundary. A mirror that does not look back becomes an opaque surface; stretched one Southern waitress to another, it expanded into the solid white wall dividing America into two nations, a human instantiation of the “line in the dust” drawn indelibly on the American social landscape as the reigning figure of segregation that Governor George C. Wallace immortalized in his inaugural speech to the citizens of Alabama in 1963, in which he pledged to defend “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.”18 Dissolving the wall required eliciting some flicker of recognition. One of the A&T students described the third day of the Greensboro sit-in: “I sat down and there was a waitress standing directly in front of me, so I asked her if I might have a cup of black coffee and two donuts please. She looked at me and moved to another area of the counter.”19 Catching the waitress’s eye gains new meaning in this context because the eye is the organ through which social acknowledgment is channeled, a vehicle of a transpersonal and socially determinative gaze, “the presence of others as such.” As Jacques Lacan explains: “What determines me, at the most profound level, in the visible, is the gaze that is outside. It is through the gaze that I enter light and it is from the gaze that I receive its effects. Hence it comes about that the gaze is the instrument through which light is embodied and through which—if you allow me to use a word, as I often do, in a fragmented form—I am photo-graphed.”20 By putting into practice the conditions of social legibility, the waitress functions as one of the gaze’s lowly social agents. She is the figure through whom Lacan’s equation of being with being seen, of being “photo-graphed,” assumes a particular social form. Traveling through her individual, situated “look” at her customers, the gaze confirms or confers visibility and hence membership in the social body the lunch counter delineates. A scene of social installation, the lunch counter is also an instance of the Lacanian “photo-session” in which the waitress performs the function of the camera through which subjects are constituted in the field of the visible. Passing

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through the lens of her metaphoric camera, the subject seen and served at the lunch counter enters the national picture. No wonder the national wire-service photographers, whose cameras served a more inclusive vision, had a charged and competitive relationship to the gaze that is filtered through the waitress’s perspective. The waitress’s selection as a lightning rod is visible from the first syndicated sitin photograph, a 1958 UPI photograph of the Oklahoma City sit-in that produced the trope of the integrated coffee (figure 69). The deliberateness of the point of view is evident (especially in contrast to an NAACP-sponsored photograph of the same scene from ground level) in the photographer’s decision to climb to the split level leading to the balcony and, from that elevated vantage point, to include in the foreground a large ad propped on a counter. The bottom of the sign has been carefully burned out in the development process, transforming an announcement of an August white sale (the upper tips of the letters S and l are still barely visible) into an outing of the Jim Crow policy that discretely regulates service at the counter. The photographer’s location also enables him to associate this reinstantiated “White” sign with the symbolic posture of the white waitress who returns his gaze (rather than the students’) and whose centrality to his design he makes explicit in his caption: “A waitress stands behind the counter with her arms folded, refusing to serve Negroes at the soda fountain at the downtown branch of the Katz drugstore.”21 The “White” sign and white waitress relay management policy into the visual field. When Jet magazine reprinted the image on September 4 in its feature “The Week’s Best Photos,” by contrast, it prefaced the caption with a bold-print declaration, “Teen Bias Fighters,” demoted the waitress to a subordinate clause, reduced the manager to a “druggist,” and concluded with the protesters’ success. The editors of Jet were more interested in the agency of the demonstrators than in the blocking force of whiteness that constitutes a point of disidentification for the white photographers: whereas the students needed to be seen by the waitress, and through her by the social gaze, the photographers needed to see themselves as different from her, and through this opposition to purge the taint of whiteness from themselves (a goal assisted here by the triangulating force of the gaze returned by three young sit-inners). The attention to the waitress was especially conspicuous when a reconstruction of the scene allowed the subjective dynamic full expression, as in a retrospective television documentary on the sit-ins which superimposed recent voice-over interviews on documentary footage to restage the key symbolic moments of the Nashville movement. One carefully orchestrated sequence that begins with a participant’s verbal recollection—“It was February thirteenth and we had the very first sit-in in Nashville. When I took my seat at the lunch counter, I asked for a hamburger and a Coke”—is followed by the camera’s leisurely pan up the solid white wall of a uniformed body designated indeterminately as “waitra.” The camera sustains suspense

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Figure 69. NAACP-sponsored sit-in, Oklahoma City, August 20, 1958. Photograph UPI. Courtesy Corbis.

as long as possible about who will utter the cultural “No” before freezing on the face of a large and dour middle-aged waitress who recalls the language she had used during the sit-in: “I said, I’m sorry our management does not allow us to serve niggers here.” Momentarily filling the visual and narrative frame, this near-parodic blocking figure rolls up into her ample girth and years the accumulated social weight of all the diversely sized and experienced waitresses who burst into tears or fled the scene as often as they stood their ground.22 Her verbal and bodily posture at once generic and extreme, her self-exonerating recitation of management policy undermined by her personal choice of racial epithets, she marks the intersection between individual and type. However inconsequential and powerless in herself, however much the mere figurehead or relay of policies entirely beyond her control, the waitress was the available representative of cultural law, a feminine counterpart, in the sphere of eating, to the genuinely powerful Southern governors who literally and legally blocked the doors of opportunity for African Americans in more immediately recognizable civic spheres: Orval Faubus of Arkansas, Ross Barnett of Mississippi, and George C. Wallace standing in the doorways of public high schools and universities to defend them and the states they represented not only from the few heroic African American stu-

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dents seeking entry but also from the reach of federal law. Fueling this magnification was the photographers’ need to create a negative alter ego. Constructed as a larger-than-life figure of obstruction, the waitress provided male photojournalists with a point of imaginative entry into and moral exit from the scene. Even when the waitress wasn’t physically present, the photographers’ adversarial stance is apparent from the location of their cameras. Despite the fact that the students were more visible from the far side of the counter, the photographers refused to occupy the position of white nonrecognition even when the waitresses had already been sent home (as was frequently the case). This reluctance does not appear to derive from social inhibition, for when turmoil erupted—as in Chattanooga, for example—photographers actually climbed onto the counters in much more flagrant boundary transgressions. Instead, they chose to stand literally as well as figuratively behind or beside (or sometimes above) the students in a variety of positions that strike a compromise between capturing their faces and tallying their numbers. Not until the protesters are served do the photographers cross over the counter and show the protesters from the waitress’s location: it is as common for photographs of students being served to be taken from the far side of the counter as it is uncommon for the unserved students to be photographed from there.23 The alignment with the unserved students made it difficult to perform the offices of the countermirror that acknowledged the faces the waitress disregarded. The costs of the camera’s ideological location helped shift its focus from the students’ facial expressions to the objects through which they enlisted the attention of the waitress. These objects and the objectives they served were shaped by class and gender. Seemingly aware that the taboos on black males looking at white females encouraged the male students to communicate through other modes, the photographers concentrated on the tools of mediation the scenario made visible. The photographs of the women depict less-mediated looking relations across a racial barrier that is qualified by gender, and they soften the characterization of the waitress from a figurehead for masculine authority, a Southern governor in drag, into a potential ally. These differences were further shaped by the expansion of the stage to other wings and players. The arrival of counterdemonstrators on the fifth day of the Greensboro sit-ins broadened the cast of characters in ways that impinged most directly on the representation of the men. Although women can occasionally be glimpsed in the crowd of white “townies,” as in a disturbing photograph of the violence that erupted in the Nashville sit-in on February 27, they are shown exulting rather than participating in the violence. It is only when, late in the game, women actively join the hostilities that their behavior galvanizes media attention, and then it is shown as the closing rather than the opening scene of the political drama. Whereas the advent of male townies in Greensboro prompts a series of visual tropes that endorse the black male struggle to enlist the waitress’s services,

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the actions of a female townie in Jackson clinch a construction of the black female face as the visage of a regenerated nation. Both paths take off from the movement’s unfamiliar physiognomy.

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• • •

Ezell Blair, one of the original Greensboro Four, characterizes the social revolution he helped to initiate as the “vast difference today between the ‘old Negro’ in the South and the ‘new Negro.’ . . . As new Negroes, we can speak up loudly, now.”24 Aside from the polite “I’d like a cup of coffee,” which doesn’t register as loud speech, the outspokenness of these new Negroes was voiced through the language of the body, and especially its most articulate surface, the face. Blair’s “new Negro” revises its antecedent in the Harlem Renaissance, when “the features of the race,” a “visual or facial priority of concern” that had been required to combat racist caricaturing in the early years of the century, yielded to the articulations of “the black voice by which the very face of the race would be known.”25 In the sit-ins of the early 1960s, it is the face that gives voice to the next incarnation of the new Negro, who is the product not of the geographic migration that enabled the Harlem Renaissance but of the generational shift that displaced the sonorous voices of religious leaders with the expressive faces of the democratic student movement. Transmitted by the national wire services, the language of these faces traveled farther and faster than word about the sit-ins, which was relayed on the basketball circuit. The expressive power of physiognomy is immediately visible in what has become a stand-in for the originary Greensboro photograph (the press arrived too late to depict the first day), an image from the sit-in’s second day that shows four students sitting at the counter (figure 70). In the place of the white waitress who had refused their request for coffee the previous day is an African American kitchen worker sent out not to serve them—the counter is bare—but to serve as a reminder that the racial bar can be crossed only in the guise of the server, not of the served. Standing in effect beneath (or as) an unwritten “Colored” sign, he, unlike the students, evades the camera’s gaze. Rejecting the monitory image he presents, and refusing to grant him the recognition they seek from his employers, the students hone to political purpose their training in endurance: less passively resisting than actively insisting, they are prepared, in the words of a student spokesperson “to keep on coming for two years if we have to.”26 No one leads: the common purpose that has drawn them together to the counter is distributed in similar and equal measure across their four bodies, turned briefly and symmetrically toward the photographer, whom they regard with nearly identical unsmiling expressions. By soberly and almost reluctantly (and presumably at the photographer’s request) turning to face the camera, they acknowledge, despite the risk of reprisals that the publication of their image in the newspaper could provoke, that their actions are worthy of historical record, and they assume responsibility for them.

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Figure 70. Four North Carolina A&T University students sitting in at Woolworth’s, Greensboro, North Carolina, February 2, 1960. Photograph by Jack Moebes. Reprinted with permission of the News & Record, Greensboro, NC.

These unapologetic and resolute faces, and those that succeeded them day after day, with varying features but unvarying expressions, became the movement’s visual signature and catalyst, offering a point of imaginative entry for African American viewers across the nation who needed to be able to put themselves in the picture, to find their way into the movement by identifying with a new political subjectivity. No one articulated this process better than Robert Moses, then a twenty-sixyear-old high-school teacher in New York, who found in the contrast between the “sullen, angry, determined” looks on the faces of the North Carolina students in a newspaper photograph and the “defensive, cringing” expressions of the past “the answer” to the question, famously posed by W. E. B. Du Bois, of “being a Negro and at the same time being an American.”27 This conjunction or race and nation was interpreted differently in the black and white presses, however, for the physiognomy of resistance was diluted by editorial filters designed to soften the impression for white readers. By contrast, in the black press that provided a crucial alternative to the local newspapers that frequently sup-

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pressed or submerged coverage of the student protests, the resolute expressions of the protesters catalyzed the journalistic voicing of passions disavowed by the spiritualizing rhetoric of the movement leaders.28 Across a broad ideological spectrum, black publications, from activist news weeklies such as the Defender to upscale monthlies such as Ebony, practiced a kind of social physiognomy that expanded the affective boundaries of the nation by reading the students’ faces as carriers of more impassioned foreign traditions. The first interpretive essay on the sit-ins in both publications consistently conjoins face and revolution. Titled “The Revolt of Negro Youth,” Ebony’s first story opens by asserting “Faces tell the story” and concludes: “In the burning eyes, in the set jaws, in the enigmatic smiles are the real meaning of the unprecedented student protest movement which shook the South to its foundations.” This “real meaning,” it continues, is “a determination to change the whole social order, beginning with a challenge to the article of faith . . . that Negroes and whites do not break bread together.” The essay proceeds to quote ironically, as an inadvertent prophet, a “prominent sociologist” who had written about food strikes at black campuses a few years earlier: “Students have always been radical. In Europe, they are almost always in the advance guard of movements for social change. But the American Negro student is a social adolescent. He never strikes or demonstrates over anything but food.”29 The previous month, the Defender had initiated its series under the title “Sit Ins Reveal the New Face of Young Negro America.” The paper’s senior editor, L. F. Palmer (along with four other African American reporters and photographers), had been arrested the previous week for interviewing participants in the Memphis sitin. The series frames the question of the “Negro’s convulsive struggle to become an American in America” in terms that are similarly international. “Where did it come from—this feverish, stubborn determination? Why all of a sudden have college students—often referred to as the ‘country club bunch’—erupted like the fanatic Latin American collegians who are famous for their impassioned displays?”30 Black students import the impassioned faces of Europe and Latin America into the stony visage of cold-war North America. Although white photojournalists showed what they could see of the students’ faces, the newspaper stories screened these faces out to engage a readership that needed to be persuaded, not to join the movement, but to find some common ground with it. Where the black press saw a radical break with the middle-class values of an older generation, the white press saw an accession to the middle class, with class displacing race and face as insignia of nationality. The description of class commonality derived not from the expressive indices of inner states but from the external accessories—hairstyles, clothing, demeanor—in which revolutionary intentions were clad. Redressing the foreign in the familiar, the first (and not illustrated) story on the sit-ins in the New York Times on February 2, a UPI story that must have been circulated widely, makes no mention of the facial expressions we

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see in the UPI photograph from that day. In contrast to the “sullen, angry, determined looks” that Bob Moses noticed, the Times reports simply: “A group of welldressed Negro college students staged a sitdown strike in a downtown Woolworth store today.”31 The attention to dress and student status tempers the force of the strike, presumably out of a desire to make the action palatable to white readers, especially those with negative memories of the Harlem race riots, but also because what was salient, from the perspective of the white press, was the spectacle of educated, well-groomed, refined young people that was hardly news to the black community. Subsequent Times stories take a similar tone.32 The assimilation of radical tactics to middle-class codes was assisted not only by the students’ own strategic attention to comportment and dress, but also by the appearance of the white counterdemonstrators who showed up by the fifth day of the Greensboro sit-in to assert that “We weren’t brought up to sit next to them.”33 The sit-ins had the unanticipated effect of drawing into national view the unsavory and usually invisible faces and bodies of young white Southern working-class men, the townies who recognized that the success of the well-dressed, well-behaved, and upwardly mobile African American students threatened to leave them on the social ladder’s lowest rung. Their violent rearguard action was designed to evict the middleclass college students from a space in which their own status was precarious, to remediate their own marginality by ensuring the existence of a group yet further on the outside. They needed to keep those seats at the table available only for themselves through a racial entitlement that in principle, if not entirely in practice, drew the sting from class disadvantage. But their display of working-class virility also provided visual codes that were elaborated verbally in a composite narrative of classed masculinity. There were clear and recurrent sartorial tags for both sides: duck-tailed haircuts, blue jeans, and leather jackets for the white toughs; suits, ties, and books for the African American students. In an essay in Life magazine, Harry Golden describes the “white hecklers” who “wear black leather jackets, skinny tight Levis, are constantly combing their ducktail haircuts, and walk about with their Mighty Mouse comic books rolled into a back pocket. They stand and grin, spit on the sidewalk, race by and backfire their cars, and jeer.”34 Two things stand out here: the transposition of the grin, that stereotypical feature of blackface, to the faces of white boys; and the figure of Mighty Mouse in the back pocket as a sign of insecure and consequently inflated white masculinity. (Are you a man or a mouse?) More surprising, perhaps, is the redistribution of racial signifiers by the conservative segregationist James Jackson Kilpatrick in a widely circulated description of the sit-in staged by almost two hundred Virginia Union University students at lunch counters at five downtown variety stores in Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy: “Here were the colored students, white shirts, ties, and one of them was reading Goethe and one was taking notes from a biology text. And

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here, on the sidewalk outside, was a gang of white boys to heckle, a ragtail rabble, slack-jawed, grinning fit to kill, and some of them were waving the proud and honored flag of the southern states in the last war fought by gentlemen. Eheu! It gives one pause.”35 Of all the transpositions compacted here, most of which testify to the success of the protesters’ strategy of carefully controlling their public image, the one that stands out by virtue of its excess is the implicit transfer of the “proud and honored” Confederate flag being waved by the white ragtail rabble to the gentlemanly, educated, European-identified, Goethe-reading African American students, who are presented as the more appropriate standard-bearers of the old South. That these students—who were carrying so many American flags that the Associated Press captioned its photograph of the scene at Thalheimer’s Department store “Flag-Waving ‘Sitdown’ ”—would presumably not have welcomed their ascribed position as heirs to the Confederacy rather than as fully entitled U.S. citizens is no more discordant than the assumption that they had become the vehicle of the highest traditions of the gentleman class of the South. A situation in which the demonstrators could be variously perceived as Latin American revolutionaries and as Southern gentlemen suggests an excess of competing sign systems that the photographers tried to control by selecting and reiterating certain visual motifs. In addition to obtaining the best view they could of the contrasting sets of faces, they focused on specific items that could both assert the students’ ethical advantage over the townies and convert it into a strategic advantage over the more powerful figure who refused them recognition from the opposite side of the counter. The most efficient became a pair of contrasting racial metonyms that are barely mentioned in the verbal texts but are salient in the visual ones. On one side the cigarette, frequently deployed as a weapon raked across the protesters’ backs, functions as the agent and icon of white working-class masculinity from the first photograph of the counterdemonstrators, who showed up during lunch hour on the fifth day of the Greensboro sit-in to prevent the students from taking seats (figure 71). The three young working-class men in this image, in contrast to the women shoppers and middle-aged businessmen, clearly are not lunchcounter regulars; turning neither toward the counter to eat nor toward one another to talk, they face outward, awaiting something other than service from the waitress. Arms folded across their chests or propping up their chins, they wear their class style on their bodies. The dangling cigarette pointing outward in an aggressive posture in the hand of one who seems to be a leader appears (unlike the businessman’s) an instrument less of oral satisfaction than of class display that will spring to life fully when the protesters arrive. Three weeks later, when Life devoted its cover to the sit-ins, this detail was magnified into the synecdoche and prop of the working-class toughs’ racial ideology. The photograph shows a close-up of two faces in profile. Stuck into the cigarette in the mouth of one of the “resentful whites who picketed a Greensboro, North Carolina lunchroom” is a small Confederate flag that “spikes his smoke.”36 With the visual acu-

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Figure 71. White youths take up counter space at Woolworth’s to block sit-ins by blacks, Greensboro, North Carolina, February 5, 1960. Photo by Jack G. Moebes. Courtesy Corbis.

ity for which Life is famous, the photographer has zoomed in on the telling detail while darkening the other (probably white) face to create an impression of racial contrast. Against an indistinct, dark mirror image, the cigarette joins the sharply featured face of the “white heckler” to the visual assertion of white supremacy. A hat is the only distinguishing feature of the shadowy figure in the background of this stylized image. In the photographs taken at the lunch counters, however, the cigarette is countered by a comparably color-coded but more empowering racial metonym: the pens and pencils the camera associated with educated young black men. Writing implements were an overdetermined and pivotal feature of this scene. Standard equipment both in the academy and at the lunch counter, where they were used by both customer and waitress to write down orders, they point in two directions: backward at the white working-class toughs whose cigarette-swords these mightier pens could readily trump, and forward at the more formidable threshold figure whose command over the gaze they offered to circumvent. As a reminder in the visual field of the verbal request for coffee (similarly associated in movement folklore with the masculine voice), the pen on the counter is represented by the camera as a hopeful but ultimately disappointing tool that translates the terms of the exchange across the counter from the visual to the verbal and the spoken to the written. The juxtaposition of black masculinity with implements of writing routes a voiced request that depends on the recognition of presence through a medium that undoes the grounds for claiming or conferring presence. The change in medium changes the message of the interaction. A photograph taken by Bruce Roberts of a quiet moment during the Nashville sit-ins, for example, shows a series of small white waitress’s order pads receding at regular intervals down the counter, turned toward and standing in for the absent waitresses, and a row of bored African American men, the two closest to the cam-

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Figure 72. Sit-in at Woolworth’s lunch counter, Little Rock, Arkansas, November 1962. Courtesy Corbis.

era with pencils in their hands. The pencil, severed from the writing pads, occupies a similarly salient position in a photograph of the March 4, 1960, sit-in staged by Texas Southern University students at a Houston supermarket lunch counter down which a row of protesters recedes as far as the eye can see. Stranded on the edge of the countertop closest to the camera, where we might instead expect to see a cigarette, lies a solitary pencil that signals the unrealized potential of an exchange across the counter. By choosing a camera angle that includes an overhead sign shaped like an arrow that directs our attention away from the students to the sign offering “cigarettes, cigars, tobacco, pipes, novelties, candy, gum, razor blades, etc.” for sale behind their backs, the photographer enlists moral support for negotiating social legitimacy through the instruments of literacy rather than aggression. This goal, however, is as elusive as it is inspiring, and the more explicitly the photographs embrace the act of writing, the more they acknowledge its futility, at least in the short term. A photograph of a 1962 sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Little Rock, for example, reveals the extent to which the habits that provoked the jeer that Nashville townies hurled at their productive African American peers— “This ain’t no study hall”—had become a daily drill (figure 72). The lunch counter has been transformed into a library table. All heads bend steadfastly over books with an almost military discipline—no wandering eyes, slouching shoulders, jabbing elbows, or jocular conversations—that evokes the urgency of a final exam. Made practically a member of this intently focused company by the camera’s location behind the student taking notes in the foreground (a location that singles out the masculine writer in a lineup of predominantly feminine readers), the viewer is drawn into the collective effort funneled through the pencil in the dark hand on white paper. Yet by looking over his shoulder, we also see what he does not: the long empty corridor where the waitresses should be, which extends as far as the eye can

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Figure 73. Silent treatment, Raleigh, North Carolina, February 10, 1960. Courtesy Corbis.

see, beyond the menus folded shut in a stand. The camera that brings us to the counter also takes a longer view. No matter how much intellectual and political energy the students bring to bear along the perimeter, the text they both produce and constitute operates only at, rather than across, a boundary, unless there is a reader at the cultural interior. There is a long road ahead and no end in sight. This impasse is evoked more fatalistically by the beautifully composed (and thus often reproduced) photograph of the February 10, 1960, sit-in staged by students from St. Augustine’s College at a Raleigh lunch counter (figure 73). Here, the camera angle points less toward an uncertain future than toward an overly familiar past.37 The sit-in, which targeted three downtown restaurants, drew a substantial number of protesters, forty-three of whom were arrested the following day on charges of trespassing; this first mass arrest of the student movement contributed to Raleigh’s selection two months later as the site of the meeting that generated the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Shot from an angle that includes only two students with empty stools next to each of them (a standard practice intended to leave spaces for sympathetic customers), the photograph offers only one clue to this development: the right elbow and left hand at the extreme left edge of the frame, which bear witness to the larger student body that extends around the rectangular counter to the corner at which two waitresses sit. A formalist aesthetics and a quietist politics collaborate to shape the juxtaposition of two racially divided and symmetrical pairs whose mirroring copresence at the counter is enabled by the reversion of the waitresses, relieved of their duties but not released from the scene, to customers on the opposite side. By creating a visual standoff across an evacuated middle space between a pair of white women in white uniforms and a pair of black men in black suits, the bonds of gender and clothing reinforcing those of race, the photograph reaches back into the long history of segregated eating, as if the effect of the sit-in

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were to roll time backward rather than propel it forward. The food iconography reiterates the stalemate: the iconic cup of coffee visible only in front of each of the waitresses is echoed by a tantalizing but forbidden counterpart on the black side, where a piece of the American dream, a chocolate layer cake whose intercalated layers of white cake and chocolate frosting could be integrated coffee in stratified form, remains encased beneath a plastic cover. The one possibility of mediation across the racial gulf is routed through the pen of the note-taking student in the foreground. If in Little Rock the proximity of the notebook to the unattended waitress pad, beyond which extends an empty corridor, creates an image of deferral, the juxtaposition of the Raleigh student’s pen with the cigarette in the hand of the waitress who should be taking orders creates an image of entrenchment in which the icon of white resistance, transformed in feminine hands from aggression to indifference, confronts the figure of figuration in the fingers of the student. These instruments measure separate temporal frames. Below the student’s cupped left hand, his wristwatch has been turned inward, a position that both aligns the progress of his pen with the forward march of time and encloses them together in a self-contained sphere that will not lift the cover off the chocolate layer cake, transport the coffee across the empty space, or restore the pen to the waitress’s hand. On the other side of the counter, the cigarette suspended in one waitress’s hand marks the wasted time for employees whose immobility—they neither talk, nor eat, nor read—measures the inertial force of the status quo, as well as of commerce ground to a halt. The underlying silence acknowledged in the caption “Silent treatment” extends beyond the conversational vacuum to the absence of a medium that could negotiate the gulf between the two sides. This gulf could be bridged not through the sign of writing but through an affiliated but more persuasive currency that similarly translates incommensurable differences into a common set of terms. It took an increase of student pressure to bring into the visual frame the medium of exchange that had been the key to the sit-in strategy from its origins. For if the Raleigh photograph captures the calm before the storm, the violence that erupted a few days later, when less disciplined high school students staged a sit-in at a lunch counter in a Rose’s department store in downtown Portsmouth, Virginia, not only moved the coverage of the sit-ins from inner-page news story to full-page visual displays, but also moved the defining features of that display from the implements of writing to the more highly motivated medium of money. Although the most visible consequence of the surge of violence that spilled over into the parking lot and surrounding fields and streets was the overflow of the allotted social and representational space, the heightened emotional temperature also effected a more subtle turn in the sit-ins’ visual priorities and codes.38 One photograph of the lunch-counter interior, published in two African American publications—The Afro-American and the Atlanta Daily World—but displaced in mainstream publications by more dramatic scenes of hammer-wielding white thugs and black students on the streets, marks the culmination of a certain repre-

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Figure 74. Segregation flare up, Portsmouth, Virginia, February 16, 1960. Courtesy Corbis.

sentational trajectory that approaches but stops short of depicting physical violence (figure 74). Captioned “Segregation flare up,” it shows the convergence on the second day of the sit-in of bareheaded, ducktailed white male townies and black male students in coats and hats; but the iconography of the encounter has shifted away from cigarettes and pens to coins and cups. Vying for the attention of the absent figure the extended caption identifies as a store clerk—“White and Negro students converged on a local dept store soda fountain this afternoon. . . . One negro [sic] boy is shown asking the clerk for a coke”—standing and jostling young African American students crowd around white toughs who have taken seats and been served. Hands rather than faces encapsulate the drama. White hands cradle white paper cups; dark hands extending from dark suit jackets thrust coins forward toward the clerk. The most assertive of these hands reaches across over the counter, holding a coin between thumb and forefinger, the index finger pointing straight out toward the desired Coke. On this figure’s shoulder rest the hands of a fellow protester, over whose head another hand clasping a coin stretches forward in an effort to purchase the sacred fluid that bestows membership in the collective body in this perverse communion scene. The value of the liquid in this secular frame, as in the spiritual prototype it distantly evokes, derives exclusively from a symbolic act: the exchange of money for services and goods. At the center of the counter lies a single unclaimed cup, the empty vehicle of a value that must migrate from the counter’s opposite side. Heightening the pressure on this exchange, almost all eyes are turned in the same direction, toward the invisible figure who can work this mundane miracle. This scene of actively solicited and frustrated exchange (a thematic echoed by the telephone bisected by the right-hand margin) is rendered entirely in the masculine: the only feminine traces are the top of the head we see below the counter, where the waitress has apparently ducked to escape the pressure of the situation, and a purse abandoned on the counter. By representing the extension of the hand that holds the pen into the fingers that

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thrust the coins, the Portsmouth photograph marks the translation of one medium of exchange into another and constitutes this as the moment at which the rhetorical power of money entered the visual scene. A photographic counterpart to the fabled scene in Greensboro when “One Negro waved a five dollar bill at a Woolworth waitress, calling out that he would ‘give five dollars for a drink of water,’ ” the image situates the drama of exchange within a broader interpretive frame.39 From the originary moment at Greensboro, where the four protesters deliberately bought sundries at the other Woolworth counters before ordering coffee at the lunch counter, the drama of money was self-consciously exploited by targeting variety stores, rather than restaurants, that would force into public awareness the contradiction between soliciting African American patronage at “nine counters out of ten” and refusing them service at the tenth.40 The dramatization of money was an effective strategy throughout the moderate South, bringing lunch-counter segregation to an end in Nashville in early April through a televised encounter between Diane Nash and Mayor Ben West, whose response to her pointblank question about the policy led to his personal concession that it was not “morally right for someone to sell the merchandise and refuse them service” and, as a result, to the integration of the city’s lunch counters the following day.41 The policy’s inconsistency had already gained the protest movement ambivalent editorial support in the Greensboro and Raleigh press, including one admonishment of management policy that both concedes and resists the argument of money by deploying a counter-rhetoric of food: “You can’t have your chocolate cake and eat it too.”42 By translating cash into cake, consumers into consumed, the editorial strategically counters money’s transformative potential by securing racial essence as nonnegotiable. It was this capacity to translate qualitative into quantitative differences that made money the movement’s primary symbolic as well as strategic vehicle. As an instrument of recalculating differences, money serves not only as an agent of integration— whether through the power of the boycott as an economic tool or the power of consumption as political tool for leveling a stratified citizenship—but also as a figure of integration.43 Money speaks, not only to its recipients but also of the mediations it performs. As the common yardstick or “universal solvent,” money knows no substantive or intrinsic differences, which are dissolved through its intervention into equivalencies. By virtue of its function as the “commodity which renders possible the commensurability of the value of all other commodities,” money has the capacity to recalibrate social as well as material incommensurabilities, to reconstitute the participants in, as well as objects of, exchange by dispossessing the hands through which it passes of essential properties.44 The students deftly exploited this potential: arguing overtly for the equal value of their money at different store counters, they also enabled observers to read the relation in reverse as the equivalence effected by a system of exchange in which individuals are contingent and moveable placeholders. The antithesis of the auction block at which money confirmed an absolute

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division between white subjects and black objects, the lunch counter is the threshold at which imputed racial essences were rendered fungible. The integrated cup of coffee that money could transport from the far side of the counter is the outward form of a deeper solvency that would not simply blend color differences together but recast them as irrelevancy. In one framing of the early sit-ins, money functions as a mode of writing that represents both the means and the end of the unwriting of Jim Crow signs. Perhaps a bolder figure of dismantling than the integrated cup of coffee it was supposed to buy, the language of money anticipated as well as advanced the principle of color blindness (rather than color blending) that would find legal expression a few years later in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. By outlawing “discrimination or segregation of any kind on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin” in all places of public accommodation, including “any restaurant, cafeteria, lunchroom, lunch counter, soda fountain, or other facility principally engaged in selling food for consumption on the premises,” this first significant piece of civil rights legislation since Reconstruction formally renounced the logic of Jim Crow.45 The “more than” a cup of coffee toward which the coin-extending fingers of the protesters pointed is a vision of the movement’s outcome in a color-blind society that would actualize the promise of equal citizenship guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. That principled effacement of embodied differences from the conception of citizenship has a less attractive underside, however, in the facelessness of the abstract citizen. The principle of formal equivalence that dispels the burden of difference from the political realm also obscures the enduring burden of difference in the social realm, a burden that contradicts the abstract form of citizenship and calls out for recognition. That call and its social implications are registered through a different set of faces that reverse the path from the embodied subject’s expressive registers to representational systems (linguistic, economic, political) that evacuate the body. Reframing the sit-ins through their female participants suggests an alternative trajectory backward toward the nonnegotiable currency of faces and the alternative they pose to models of exchange. This trajectory begins by revisiting Portsmouth along a different axis of vision. • • •

The L-shaped lunch counter at Rose’s department store in Portsmouth, Virginia, formed a crossroads in the visual rhetoric of the sit-ins. Shot at right angles to the line of vision that culminates in the outstretched hand, a photograph taken shortly before or after “Segregation flare up” shows a quieter scene of African American women (and one white man) seated at the counter (figure 75). The Coke-drinking crowd is now on the left, and the gesturing male demonstrators have ceded, or not yet occupied, spaces for the women. Although the photograph includes several women, the caption, “A Negro girl sits at a Portsmouth, VA lunch counter while

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Figure 75. A Negro girl sits at a Portsmouth, VA, lunch counter while whites eat. February 16, 1960. AP/Wide World Photos.

whites eat,” identifies the center of visual interest: the anonymous woman at the counter’s right angle. In the welter of gazes in the disorderly scene around her— blacks and whites, men and women against a background of jumbled merchandise— her composure commands our attention. The photograph that singles her out has likewise had a singular status derived from the foil it offers to the escalating violence. In Life’s full-page spread on the violence at Portsmouth, this image is placed directly above the headline “Flare-up over a sit-down,” which borrows the caption of the “Segregation flare up” photograph but displaces that more agitated scene with this pacific version that better represents the “sit-down” invoked to counterpoint the “flare up” depicted in the other photographs of street brawls, police, and hate signs in the parking lot and streets. The impetuous high school students, the accompanying text informs us, “found Gandhi-like passivity confining.”46 Somewhat surprisingly, given the prominence Life had already granted the photograph, the New York Times Magazine reprinted it the following week, in its first extended coverage of the sit-ins, a story titled “Civil Rights: Struggle on Two Fronts” (the other front being the Senate filibuster designed to stop the passage of a civil rights bill). Here, the photograph, labeled “Sitdown,” is juxtaposed with one image, labeled

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“Protest,” of about-to-be arrested male demonstrators in Raleigh, and another image, labeled “Rush,” of “a moment of tension in Chattanooga, Tenn,” where the February 23 sit-in triggered two days of rioting and drew a crowd of three thousand people, on whom the police turned fire hoses.47 The following year, the New York Times Magazine published a different version of the photograph as the emblematic image of the sit-ins in a two-page spread that proceeds from this photograph to the escalating series of protests: a “wade-in,” “stand-in,” “read-in,” “ride-in,” “quiet march,” and “assault by fire” in a more comprehensive retrospective of the movement titled “The Negro Tries Passive Resistance.” Positioned directly below a photograph, labeled “Exemplar,” of “Mohandas K. Gandhi, who used passive resistance to help free India,” the pensive “Negro girl” has become Gandhi’s American face, a stable visual repository of the values of nonviolence that were jeopardized by the rising masculine tempers.48 This generic “Negro girl” also sits at a less explicit juncture of the sit-ins’ representational history that reimagines the objective, while reaffirming the value, of Gandhian passive resistance. At the corner of the L-shaped counter, sandwiched between two white men and seated beneath a row of standing figures turned in all directions, she is the still point in a turning world. Eyes turned downward, chin cupped in hand, lips sealed, bangs curled under, she is the introverted focal point of the image: impenetrable, self-contained, with an almost sculptural presence that brings Auguste Rodin’s Thinker to mind. The ruff or collar of fur that frames her oval face further delineates her private space. No books are open in front of her; no pens are by her side. Although no one in the photograph looks in her direction, her composure commands our attention without soliciting it. In contrast to her male counterparts stretching coins across the counter in the previous photograph, this inward-turning figure is associated with the closed purse standing upright on the counter in front of her, as if her self-extension forward onto the counter is a form of self-enclosure. The upright purse’s anthropomorphic quality echoes the upright figure in the chair. Placed and claiming a place, the purse holds its own between the stacks of books in front of the men on either side. The closed purse, deliberately and conspicuously set on the counter or the lap or slung over an elbow in what would be an uncomfortable position for more than a hasty cup of coffee or snack, became as common a trope of the woman sit-inner, and especially of the solitary woman sit-inner, as the pen and pennies were of the men. However circumstantially it was present at the scene, the purse was absorbed into the visual rhetoric as a sign of abiding and uncompromising presence. A relatively inconsequential feature of the Oklahoma City photograph, where its upright position on the counter in front of Mrs. Clara Luper singles her out as the one adult leader (see figure 69), the purse is, by contrast, central to the depiction of the Lexington, Kentucky, sit-in (figure 76), where the photographer foregrounds a solitary protester, Nietta Dunn. The solitary purse, standing upright on the counter directly in front her, is twinned with its owner as an intact presence detached from other

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Figure 76. Nietta Dunn at a sit-in demonstration at H. L. Green’s lunch counter in downtown Lexington, Kentucky, early 1960s. Photo by Calvert McCann. Courtesy Calvert McCann and the Lexington Herald-Leader.

interchanges.49 Nietta Dunn’s style of self-enclosure—arms wrapped around her midriff rather than propping up her head—is echoed in the arched semicircular handle of the straw purse. Markers of intentional and enduring presence, the closed purse on the counter and the closed face of its owner present guarded interiors indifferent to the coin of the realm. The picture of the “Negro girl” in Portsmouth, like “Segregation flare up,” pivots on money, but only as unspent. Like a purse whose contents are removed from circulation, the woman who has withdrawn from the exchange while asserting her right to a seat at the table makes an unfamiliar claim on our attention. Instead of reaching across the counter to buy (into) what it is offered, she sets the terms of the encounter. By sitting outside the economy of buying and selling, but inside the symbolic economy of belonging, she calls into question the project of crossing into the cultural interior while leaving one’s embodied history behind. As coins across the counter pointed toward exchange, the moral capital that accrues to unspent money points toward the authority of an embodied presence that asks to be accounted for on its own terms. The “Negro girl” in Portsmouth is the first of many who suggest that recognition may be an end rather than a means. The image returns our consideration to the hu-

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Figure 77. Sit-in at Kress Variety Store in St. Petersburg, Florida, November 5, 1960. AP/Wide World Photos.

man face that, as Emmanuel Levinas has eloquently argued, resists translation to other terms.50 Within the political scene, however, it is not the universal but the racial face that is irreducible. The depiction of the Negro girl and her successors points toward a model of integration that incorporates rather than neutralizes differences. The power of the face to move its viewers to a different place reverses the direction of the traffic across the counter. Replacing the exchange of coins for abstract citizenship is a request for recognition in the flesh that would draw the cultural center toward the margins. It is not the assimilation of the other that appears to be at stake, but a displacement of the center, for an acknowledgment of minority difference that failed to change the self-perception of the dominant culture would be mere tokenism.51 The terms of this displacement begin to emerge when the waitress reenters the photographic frame. Having taken the initiative in changing the rules and the roles of femininity, the women protesters confronted the waitress with a model as well as a request. Perceived as flustered by but not antagonistic to the women at the counter, the waitress brings into the picture the position of the Southern white woman who might be turned around by the claims of gender to feel the weight of

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the other side.52 A photograph of a sit-in later that year at a Kress store in St. Petersburg, Florida (figure 77), suggests the force that the bonds of gender could exert across the counter. Angled to include only three women out of twelve presumably male and female protesters, the camera highlights the commonalities within the feminine and the effort the waitress expends to avoid acknowledging them. Not the paradigmatic (and phantasmatic) lily-white waitress, but a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman who appears Hispanic, the waitress is shown as a point of pliability whose logical position is on the other side, where alliances of gender and color both call to her, a call expressed visually through the raised forearm of the woman in the center, not extending coins but seeming to hail her. The waitress, however, focuses resolutely on the customer to their left, apparently, from the jacket sleeve and beverage, a white male customer. From the fixity of her stare and the stiffness of her body, we measure the force of the exertion required to avoid the gaze of the seated women, one of whom looks directly at her. It is not just the weight of numbers, but also the striking commonalities—gender, skin, and hair color—that seem to exercise a gravitational pull. The image presents the four women as a continuum, rather than an opposition, with one of the four turned to face in the wrong direction. Even more than in Portsmouth, the counter here appears a trap, an enclosure that pens the waitress into a tight space rather than shutting the protesters out. The visual logic of the image points less toward the three women’s passage across the barrier than toward the waitress’s alignment with them on the other side. The pull is toward the margins rather than the center. This pull ultimately leads to jail. Despite the regularity with which both men and women were arrested, the trajectory from the gateway to the outpost of the nation was visually gendered feminine. The association was launched by an often-reprinted photograph of the arrests outside Thalheimer’s department store during the Richmond, Virginia, sit-ins, at which the display of American flags and the presence of the women had alike been written out of the picture by James Jackson Kilpatrick’s depiction of gentlemanly sit-inners clad in white shirts and ties. The American flag and the female body return together here. Of the thirty-four students who were arrested on trespassing charges, the photographer shows two, a man and a woman, being shepherded by law-enforcement officials toward a paddy wagon (figure 78). The woman, carrying a flag, textbook, and purse, strides purposefully in front—a distinction registered by Ebony magazine, which reprinted the photograph as the opening image of its first sit-in story in May 1960 and singled her out in the caption: “Arrested in Richmond, Va., department store, two Virginia Union University students march to jail. Attractive coed carries U.S. flag, textbook.” Both the photograph and the caption construct the woman as the standard bearer, transporting the flag from lunch counter to jail with a firm and forceful stride as if she is not only leading the way but can hardly wait to get there. Her leadership is acknowledged by the gaze of the three men—policeman, store or city official, and fellow protester— who, dressed alike in jackets and ties, walk behind her in a line and watch her

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Figure 78. Students arrested after a sit-in at Thalheimer’s lunch counter, Richmond, Virginia, February 23, 1960. AP/Wide World Photos.

warily—or admiringly—as if she might exceed their grasp. With flag in hand and open white coat flowing, this young protester, her face illuminated by sunlight, resembles a modern-day “Liberty Leading the People”—but this Liberty leads to jail. Freedom and jail were frequently associated, especially in publications directed at African American women. The Ebony story that opens with this image concludes by transferring to the Nashville sit-in leader Diane Nash the epithet and action with which it describes the anonymous flag-bearing coed. “Diane Nash, the attractive young coed who went to jail for what she believes in,” is given the essay’s final word: “When we started this thing . . . we had a strong purpose. But after we stood in a

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court in a courthouse in American and had been tried for our freedom, our dedication doubled, tripled. This fight hasn’t begun yet.”53 It made sense for Ebony, given its readership, to frame its sit-in story this way, but the conjunction of women and jail proved a generative nexus for a broader audience, as Nash herself was supremely aware. Unanimously selected as the spokesperson for the “jail, no bail” policy that James Lawson formulated but which Nash articulated after sixteen students were arrested during the Nashville sit-in on February 27, she “stood and spoke for all of us” by explaining to the judge the group’s desire to go to jail rather than to pay the fines that would be “contributing to and supporting the injustice and immoral practices that have been performed in the arrest and conviction of the defendants.”54 Beyond stating the general policy that proved highly effective in drawing media attention and in transferring the economic and moral burdens of imprisonment from the demonstrators to the municipal authorities, Nash knew how to deploy the dramatic potential of female incarceration. Arrested in Mississippi in 1961 when she was pregnant, she refused to appeal her two-year jail sentence, informing the judge that she chose to have her child in jail: “We in the nonviolent movement have been talking about jail without bail for two years or more. The time has come for us to mean what we say and stop posting bond. . . . This will be a Black baby born in Mississippi and thus, wherever he is born, he will be born in prison. I believe that if I go to jail now it may help hasten that day when my child and all children will be free—not only on the day of their birth but for all their lives.”55 At once the point of furthest exile from the nation and the nucleus out of which a new nation might be born, the jail cell was conjoined with the reproductive body in movement rhetoric and media image. This was a new conjunction of gender and jail, as distinct from the ascetic image of hunger-striking Suffragettes as from the curious blend of liberation and degradation produced at the site of the “white female” lockup of a New Orleans prison in a contemporaneous photographic series by the Magnum photographer Leonard Freed. Mugging for the camera and seeming to embrace rather than to suffer the terms by which they are literally boxed in, these “white females” stripped down uncharacteristically to the language of biology are also released from the strictures of gender to indulge in the performance of sexuality as they recede into their cell (figure 79). As the site of political imprisonment, by contrast, the jail cell carried an opposite potential by association with the regenerative promise of the African American female body. Whereas incarcerated male leaders of the movement were represented primarily by their words (Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” or John Lewis’s description of the “crowded, cramped, dirty” paddy wagon as a “freedom vehicle”), the camera focused on the attractive, well-dressed young African American woman (in the singular) through whom the jail cell was refigured as the germ cell of the nation.56 The first time Jet devoted its cover to the sit-ins, for example, it chose an inspirational image of a solitary, upward-looking African American woman in jail. Jeanne

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Figure 79. Segregated “white female” ward in a prison, New Orleans, 1963. © Leonard Freed/Magnum Photos, Inc.

Fleming, who is nowhere mentioned in the annals of the movement, is selected out of thousands of jailed students as the representative student body, the one who can stand in for all the “Sit-In Student Freedom Fighters” referenced by the boldlettered text. The juxtaposition of freedom with jail bars identifies incarceration as a forward step in Liberty’s march, while the abstracted image of the solemn figure is the next step in the female freedom fighter’s allegorization. A domestication of the movement through a pretty face, perhaps, the beautification of militancy is also the radicalization of femininity, an implication strengthened by the headline of an inside story printed above the jail bars: “Real Reason Sammy [Davis Jr.] and Blonde Fiancée Broke Off Engagement.” The juxtaposition implies clearly (and falsely) that Sammy—standing in for black manhood—has recognized the superiority of African American freedom fighters; he is the ironic vehicle for setting up the contrast between blonde fiancées and black women behind bars (ironic because he married another blonde actress shortly afterward). If white women don’t follow their sisters’ lead to the outsider position that is also a new beginning, the cover implies, they will be repudiated as the counterexample, the one outside the jail bars. When Jet’s cover image from April was reprinted in the June issue of Ebony, however, it served a different project, shifting the burden of recognition from black men to white women and men. The photograph appeared on the June issue’s back page

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in an even more allegorized form, as a close-up without any identifying tags, including the subject’s name. On the magazine’s front cover is another unidentified but smiling woman whose presentation tweaks the jailed freedom fighter into a figure of national rebirth. The framing texts here are “What Sit-Downs Mean to America,” the title of the lead story by Lerone Bennett Jr., and “Are American Habits Dangerous?” Visual and verbal rhetoric mark a shift from politics to ethics, from “The Revolt of Negro Youth,” an essay in Ebony’s previous issue, to the salvation of the nation through the cover girl presented as the cure for the dangerous habits of white America that are spelled out at the beginning of Lerone Bennett’s essay: “moral confusion . . . spiritual flabbiness, lack of purpose and loss of nerve.” Although the remedy that he announces begins with the request for the cup of coffee, it concludes with a different “dramatic scene.” A weeping mother who offers to pay the fine for her daughter, who is serving a term in the Tallahassee jail for her participation in a sit-in, is confronted by the following response: “Mamma, I love you. But I am not free. And I’m not free because your generation didn’t act. But I want my children to be free. That’s why I’ll stay in jail.”57 The jail cell is freedom’s birth canal, but not only for African Americans; for the scene enables the essay’s final rhetorical turn to the president of Howard University, who, “moved by the determination of students like the Tallahassee girl,” explained to an audience in the national capital that “the sit-inners were fighting for the purity of the nation.” If the photo editorial explicates the scene of the African American woman in jail, the magazine’s cover gives visual form to the symbolic benefits of incarceration. Wearing a striking white headband that suggests both wound and healing, the cover girl is dressed in a stylish black-and-white-striped dress that functions both as a displacement of the jail bars and as an allusion to the Stars and Stripes, reinforced by the textual references to America. Smiling brightly and looking directly at the camera, this carefully composed female face of the sit-ins is at once representative of and oppositional to America. Framed by references to the nation, her face signifies less that the Negro can also be an American than that the Negro— and only the Negro, and perhaps only the Negro woman—can represent the America that could emerge when whites as well as blacks perceive themselves in her image. Rather than neutralize race, the integrated society she invites us to imagine would reverse the authority of “White” and “Colored” signs, repudiated as tools of discrimination but refunctioned and revalued as signifiers of an ethical distinction. Recognition in this scenario operates in reverse: it is not the demonstrator who strives for recognition, but the waitress and the women for whom she stands, who might recognize the demonstrator as their ideal mirror image. During the proud and peaceful interlude of spring 1960, when sit-ins involving as many as fifty thousand students spread to 125 cities, provoking only limited violence and jail terms, the African American press could dream of this reversal. This interlude was far from the last chapter of the story, however. To understand its con-

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clusion, we must advance to the traumatic culmination of the sit-in movement three years later in the bitterly hostile terrain of the deep South, where a repressive state machinery and intransigent white population responded with the systemic violence and mass arrests that returned the sit-ins to the mainstream media with some of the intensity of their opening weeks.

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• • •

Fire hoses, police dogs, and billy clubs aimed at unarmed teenagers in Birmingham’s Kelly Ingram Park; children marching to jail by the hundreds outside the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, where four little girls were later murdered; masses of demonstrators parading with American flags past stick-wielding policemen along Capital Street in Jackson, Mississippi: these are some of the shocking images that filled newspaper pages and television screens in the spring of 1963. Within a conflict increasingly described as civil war, the lunch counters continued to offer a relatively stable front at which the camera could still pause to reflect. Photographs of the sitins’ final phase, before the escalating violence turned the movement’s attention away from direct action to the marginally safer project of voter registration, both reprise and revise previous representational choices in ways that contextualize the movement’s optimistic early phase. In the photographs that encapsulate the sit-ins’ dual denouement in the hard-core bastions of white supremacy—Birmingham (“Bombingham”), Alabama, and Jackson, Mississippi—the gendered trajectories remain legible within a more pessimistic frame.58 In Birmingham, the sit-ins on April 3 and 4 were the well-rehearsed opening act of a carefully orchestrated sequence coordinated by Martin Luther King Jr. under the code name Project C (for confrontation), and running from a pre-Easter boycott through King’s Good Friday arrest. This was followed by the arrest of nearly a thousand schoolchildren and the unleashing of dogs and fire hoses on peaceful protestors in Kelly Ingram Park. An awkwardly composed photograph of a waitress, two women, and a long row of empty stools registers not only the calm before the storm but also the enduring desire to envision some kernel of futurity in a feminine form (see figure 80). In Jackson, where the more spontaneous sit-in on May 28, improvised by Tougaloo College students and faculty with the ambivalent support of the NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers, was a turning point in the local movement that Evers had launched with a boycott over Christmas, violence spilled into the representational frame. In a photograph by Fred Blackwell, a stringer for the Jackson Daily News, the interest in the feminine is embedded in a more compacted and comprehensive frame in which the empty space that dominates the scene at Birmingham is crowded with contending bodies and competing narrative frames (see figure 81). Sacrifice is a central and increasingly pressing theme, but although it also pertains to the women, who were attacked and subsequently arrested, it is associated primarily with the masculine cast of characters. That expanded cast extends

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backward spatially to the mob of toughs and forward temporally to the murder of Medgar Evers two weeks later, the first assassination of a prominent civil rights leader, a tragedy that coincided with a presidential address to the nation announcing legislation to end discrimination. This tortuous and traumatic figuration is juxtaposed with the depiction in a self-enclosed space of the only two women sitinners, whose interaction, reworked in the media over the next several weeks, continues to present a different image of dismantling segregation. That image, however, had already been anticipated in Birmingham. “The Long Wait” is the caption of the photograph (figure 80) that has come to represent the Birmingham sit-in that culminated in the peaceful arrest of twentyone students, of whom Dorothy Bell, alone at the counter, is the representative here. The image immediately raises the question of its frame: why was it taken at this unnewsworthy moment and from this off-center location, and what visual claim does its skewed perspective make on the viewer? If the photographer had just depicted Bell and the backward-turning waitress, it would have been a straightforward image of the patience and composure of the disregarded protester. Instead, it records the moment when the gazes of the two central figures converge on an unidentified third figure half inside and half outside the frame. Her position is ambiguous: seated three seats away from Bell in a long line of unoccupied stools, she is neither close enough to be clearly affiliated with nor far enough to be clearly disassociated from the sit-in movement. That Bell ignores the “face the counter” instructions of the sitins to observe this pale figure’s interaction with the waitress suggests that she perceives some common ground. Whatever this third woman’s political position or intentions, perhaps kept deliberately outside the frame, the composition constitutes her as a point of potential, and badly needed, mediation in a scene whose racial divisions are echoed by the ads for SnowCrop and German chocolate cake and whose principal players appear to acknowledge that the possibility of unmediated interaction is foreclosed. The waitress turns her back to Bell, whose decision to wear her sunglasses indoors suggests a need to screen herself from the indignity of not being seen (as well as a refusal to be emotionally readable). It is both inside and outside this frame that the partially visible figure, whose salient feature is an elbow or pivot, makes us wonder what triangulation she might offer. This single-sex scene in Birmingham recalls the scene in St. Petersburg (see figure 77), where the waitress seems to be summoned by the sit-inners to cross over to the other side, and yet it also differs because the point of mediation here is a Southern white customer. The long wait signaled by the caption “for service that never came” operates somewhat differently here, for nothing in the image suggests that Dorothy Bell is waiting to be served. Her closed purse held firmly on her lap, in contrast to the one in the crook of the white customer’s arm, suggests an intention simply to remain in place, to gain recognition of her cause—but from which source? By including the triangulating presence, the image both signals and kindles a de-

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Figure 80. “The Long Wait.” Birmingham, Alabama, April 4, 1963. AP/Wide World Photos.

sire for that partially visible potential to enter the frame fully, to use her mediating influence to fill the empty stools by drawing the waitress to the other side. Vesting its interest and hope in the utopian potential the imagination must flesh out, the photograph offers an alternative to the dog-bitten, fire-hosed flesh that became the Birmingham movement’s visual signature. The camera lingers again on this potential in the depiction of the first and, except for a minor replay, last sit-in in Jackson (figure 81). Unlike Birmingham, the sit-in at a downtown Jackson Woolworth’s was the catalyst as well as the preamble to the dramatic events that ensued: round-the clock demonstrations, nightly rallies that regularly drew more than a thousand participants, and spiraling mass arrests that transformed Jackson into such a “hotbed of racial demonstrations in the South” that its mayor, Allen Thompson, converted the state fairgrounds to a mass lockup to contain the thousands of demonstrators who overwhelmed the city jails.59 Media coverage of these events heightened the visibility of the usually circumspect Medgar Evers, elevating him into Jackson’s equivalent of Martin Luther King. Al-

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Figure 81. Jackson, Mississippi, May 28, 1963. Photo by Fred Blackwell. Courtesy Corbis.

though long threatened, Evers’s assassination was virtually assured by the explosive events triggered by the sit-in, which led that evening to a firebomb hurled at his house and two weeks later to the gunshots in the back that killed him on the threshold of his home, where, carrying NAACP sweatshirts stenciled with the slogan “Jim Crow Must Go,” he collapsed in a pool of blood just after midnight on June 12. Blackwell’s photograph seems, at least with hindsight, to herald as well as to hasten the sequence of events that began when John Salter, a Tougaloo sociology professor and NAACP campus coordinator, and Evers’s more radical, less conspicuous, and hence less vulnerable ally, left a meeting in the NAACP office downtown. Salter departed to galvanize the sit-in by enlisting the participation of Anne Moody, a Tougaloo student activist and future author of Coming of Age in Mississippi, and several other African American students, who took seats at a downtown Woolworth’s shortly before noon. Evers, who couldn’t risk such high-profile exposure, contacted the media from the NAACP office phone. The violence that erupted when white students from Jackson Central High arrived at Woolworth’s during their lunch break was extensively captured on film because Evers’s phone calls had alerted both the press and the television networks, which broadcast the events nationally on that evening’s news.60 Although one especially shocking photo of Benny Oliver, a former Jackson policeman, stomping on the face of Memphis Norman, a prostrate,

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peaceful demonstrator, appeared the following morning on the front pages of both the New York Times and the Jackson Daily News, it was the more complex and reflective photograph by Blackwell, himself a recent graduate of Jackson Central High, that evolved into a textbook classic. The photograph, and a similar and sadder one taken a few minutes later, focuses on one of the two interracial groups of three that sat at opposite ends of the counter after the waitress took flight, white replacements arrived to fill the places of the sitinners who had been dragged from their seats, and hordes of white high-school students, egged on by several older men, crowded into the store. Taken from an angle that aligns some of the principal players—John Salter in the foreground, Anne Moody in the background, and at the center Moody’s white Tougaloo classmate Joan Trumpaeur, who had crossed the color line to sit by her side—the camera also looks back into the store to include the white crowd gathering there.61 Except for one stray female face that, looking elsewhere, seems accidentally swept up in the crowd, that crowd is entirely male. Almost to a man (the exceptions being two older men, perhaps store officials, who seem to survey the scene), this muscle-bulging, set-jawed, single-minded crowd directs its fixed and hostile stare at Salter’s back, on which one member of the crowd instructed another to “paint the word nigger.” With salt in his hair and ketchup on his shirt, Salter is the race-traitor target of the violence that converges on his back, a sacrificial victim who is literally white (although actually part Cherokee) and symbolically black, and whose battered body— beaten on the back and jaw with brass knuckles and doused in the eyes and wounds with pepper water—bears witness to the costs of transgressing racial boundaries in either direction. “We could get shot very easily just sitting here,” he remembers thinking.62 The angled bodies and faces of the anonymous white crowd that constitutes Salter as the vertex of its violence fans out in both directions, reaching backward and outward to fill the visual field and making visible the backlog of white opposition that the early sit-in victories had kept from view. The photograph thus reprises some of the motifs from the earliest days of the movement. In an ironic testimony to passive resistance in the first of the two photographs—ironic because the mob’s brutality led Salter to renounce his commitment to nonviolence—Salter performs a symbolic laying down of arms by passively extending his own, palms down, on the counter, in contrast to the muscles flexed for action behind his back. A lone, unsmoked cigarette he has placed with seeming purpose on the counter, inches from a closed matchbox, seems likewise to display a refusal to inflame passions. In such a situation a lit cigarette could switch in an instant to a weapon, as suggested by the photo taken minutes later, showing one of the toughs reaching for a cigarette while another pours sugar over Trumpauer’s head. As the crowd presses in on the sit-inners, it also impresses its signifying will on the blank slates of the undefended bodies forced to bear the violent meanings etched in ketchup and blood.

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These meanings are reworked, however, by a chain of figuration linking the symbolic blood that flows from the wounds inflicted by the killing looks of the mob behind Salter’s back to the literal blood that would gush two weeks later from the wounds of the man in whose place Salter stands. Foreshadowing the pool of blood in which Medgar Evers, gunned down from behind, would die, Salter’s stained body is constituted as a switchpoint through which past and future momentarily cross. If his wounds expose the cumulative burden of multiple previous acts of violence, they also bear the advance imprint of the singular act that would galvanize the conscience of the nation.63 The photograph presents, to recall John Lewis’s words from this chapter’s epigraph, the “living testimony” of the undefended body whose willingness “to suffer violence, to suffer maybe even death itself to reach out and redeem this person and our larger society” was tragically exacted two weeks later;64 but the redemptive gain of sacrifice was also legible in the matrix of events through which Evers’s murder would be entered into the larger public record. In one of history’s mythical conjunctions, President John F. Kennedy went on television on the evening of June 11, a few hours before Evers’s assassination, to prepare a national audience for the legislation he intended to submit to Congress to formally abolish the Jim Crow laws. Characterizing what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a necessary response to a “moral crisis” that required immediate and wide-ranging action, he asked the nation to be true to its founding principle “that all men are created equal” and to act legislatively and individually to ensure that “the law will be fair, that the Constitution will be color blind, as Justice Harlan said at the turn of the century.”65 As noteworthy for its eloquence as for its substance, the address that Martin Luther King described as “one of the most eloquent, profound and unequivocal pleas for Justice and the Freedom of all men ever made by any President” derived some of its rhetorical force from a strategy that Evers had also deployed in a televised speech a few weeks earlier: a direct address to whites to question, in Evers’s words, “If you suffered these deprivations—would you not be discontent?” and in the president’s, “If an American, because his skin is dark, . . . cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin change and stand in his place?”66 The point is less that the president was specifically echoing Evers than that the resonance marked the moment when the movement’s rhetoric entered the national voice. Watching the president’s speech at home a few hours before her husband staggered toward the door of the home in which his family was still gathered around the television set, Myrlie Evers certainly recognized the echoes between the two leaders’ voices. In a coincidence that also seemed historically determined, “so flushed with history as to seem perversely proper,” the assassination proved the necessity of the president’s address, which inscribed that death in a larger social text.67 The photograph of the Jackson sit-in opens onto a sequence of mutually implicated scenes that retrace the passage from lunch counter to legislation in terms that

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are far more somber than, yet aligned with, those of the Portsmouth photographs that were their distant antecedent. The later scenes make palpable that flesh and blood bodies would have to be sacrificed literally as well as figuratively to achieve a color-blind society. But if Salter’s body affords a preview of the ultimate prize and its ultimate cost, it defines only one axis of the photographs that, like those of Portsmouth, sustain alternative narratives. Salter may be at the vertex of the action, but the more recessed yet luminous African American face constitutes the photograph’s moral center. Seated at the end of the counter, Anne Moody is the figure toward whom the two white sit-inners and the camera turn: hers is the only African American face that we see. Moody, however, looks only and directly into the eyes of Joan Trumpauer, who was greeted with jeers of “white nigger” and, along with Moody, was torn off her stool, thrown against the counter, and dragged thirty feet across the floor by the hair.68 Within the moment captured by the camera, however, the two women occupy a different conceptual space. Held in one another’s gaze, they constitute a quasi-autonomous and self-sustaining nucleus apart from the masculine violence. Even when, in the next photograph, they are shown to be targets of that violence—Moody’s hair already streaked with the salt or sugar that is being poured over Trumpauer’s neck— they tilt their bowed heads toward each other. The interracial female pair thus caps another narrative. Having crossed symbolically to the other side, abandoning her place at the social interior to put her body next to Moody’s on the line, Trumpaeur occupies the most distant position at which the waitress figure could arrive. Not an anonymous Negro girl, but a named activist, Moody confers recognition not only on Trumpaeur but also on the viewer, who is similarly positioned to seek illumination in her pained yet hopeful face. The intensity of the gaze the two women share marks a culminating moment of mutual recognition that holds out the prospect of a different social order. The future that may be nesting here proceeds less toward dismantling than toward traversing the color bar—but in the direction that submits whites to the authority of color.69 Thus it is both troubling and telling that Trumpauer is elided in the spin given the sit-in by a media slant directed to a Northern liberal audience that needed to be enlisted in the ethical crisis compelled by civil warfare in the South. While the media acknowledged and applauded the work of Southern moderates who struggled behind the scenes to negotiate desegregation, those efforts were eclipsed by the need to impress Northern readers with the severity of the split between African Americans passionately committed to fighting for their rights and whites militantly committed to opposing them, especially in Jackson’s tightly interwoven business and political communities. Both Newsweek and Look reconstructed the Jackson sitin to produce an image of unmitigated white extremism and, more surprisingly, to regender it as feminine. Under the heading “The Battle of Jackson,” illustrated by the second of the Blackwell photographs, Newsweek began to redraw the battle lines:

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“The first shot in the battle of Jackson, Miss., was a jet of mustard, fired by a bouffant blonde in defense of the Southern way of life and the racial integrity of a dime-store lunch counter. Her target was a Negro coed, sitting in at the counter with two Tougaloo Southern Christian College schoolmates.”70 The shift of focus to a feminine origin that neither Moody nor Salter mentions appears to be an attempt to translate the masculine violence the photograph documents into a less familiar, hence apparently more shocking, feminine form. This motive surfaced when the story was reprised the following month by Thomas B. Morgan in Look magazine’s “Five Days in Mississippi,” illustrated by photographs by Douglas Jones and a still from NBC’s evening coverage that had presumably informed Newsweek’s story as well and that more fully, yet far from fully, substantiates both magazines’ accounts. Morgan structures his story as a thwarted cherchez la femme narrative whose object (forewarned and concealed by her community) is the bouffant blonde, recharacterized here as “shaking catsup on a sit-in girl’s hair. . . . The catsup blonde, even more than Benny Oliver [stomping on a peaceful demonstrator’s head], had the power to shock us. So we looked for her in Jackson, hoping she could tell us why.”71 This framing of the quest raises the more interesting question of why the Look and the Newsweek reporters—but neither the activists nor the African American press—were so deeply shocked by this infraction of the codes of femininity and why both reporters insist, one explicitly, the other implicitly, that the catsup blonde’s target is a “Negro coed.” Shot from a perspective 180 degrees from Blackwell’s, the NBC still, which shows in reverse order the same line-up of Moody, Trumpauer, and Salter, substantiates the action of the woman shaking catsup, but it also shows quite clearly that she dispenses her wares not on Anne Moody’s dark hair but on Joan Trumpauer’s blonde head. Trumpauer, however, is entirely and shamelessly elided both from the caption—“Sit-in at left is Annie Moody; far right, John Salter”—and from the body of the text, which quotes interviews with Salter and Moody but never even names Trumpaeur or acknowledges her presence. Trumpauer’s elision and the catsup blonde’s emergence are mutually constitutive sides of a single strategy. By taking Trumpauer out of the picture, eliminating the mediating figure, the phototext confronts its readers with a black-and-white distinction. Repelled by the catsup blonde (the waitress’s aggressive avatar) and denied the alibi of a Southern liberal proxy who could advance the cause of justice in their stead, Northern readers are presented no alternative except to project themselves imaginatively into Trumpauer’s evacuated seat by Moody’s side. Moody’s back is turned to us in the NBC still; perhaps in part to compensate for this, Look’s story opens with a photograph of one of the thousands of demonstrators who participated in the mass parades that were triggered by the violence inflicted on the sit-inners. Against a backdrop of American flags waved by her fellow protesters, a “winsome Negro demonstrator” turns to face the camera, her plaid shirt echoing the stars and stripes behind her. The captioning makes sure that we grasp

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the stark contrast between the catsup blonde, captioned “The Face of Prejudice,” and the African American protester, captioned “The Face of the Future.” Like the “attractive coed” who bore the flag toward jail in Richmond, Virginia, this young female figure of the future, the caption concludes, is “undaunted by arrest.” The viewer is implicitly invited to join the troops that follow her to and through the jail cells out of which this future might emerge. That the invitation extends beyond the players in the immediate scene is implied by the removal of the regional markers from a boldfaced question, “Will Negroes save the white South from itself?” which the text rephrases as an open-ended speculation: “Perhaps only Negroes could save the whites from themselves, but one could not be sure that they would.” It will be up to whites to forge their own salvation by reforming themselves through a different mirror image. It will be up to the nation to discover a future bred by the “Colored” sign’s legacy. The second civil war that simmered in Birmingham and Jackson resumed the unfinished business of the Civil War that had rent the nation a century earlier. As the activists struggled to dismantle Jim Crow and to actualize the promise of Reconstruction, the photographers who tracked their efforts to give birth to a new nation inverted the guiding principles of D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. Instead of the abjection of African Americans as the precondition of a sectionally integrated nation, these images situate unregenerate whites beyond the imaginative pale of a racially integrated nation. Whether that integration should neutralize or affirm the sign of color, whether it should emphasize the absorption of people of color into a color-blind nation or the refraction of a white nation through the prism of color, are questions the photographs open that remain unclosed today.

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Afterword Contemporary Turns The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discrimination on the basis of race.

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Chief Justice John G. Roberts, 2007

During the NAACP’s “Parade for Victory” in 1944, four pallbearers in tuxedos solemnly carried a casket down a busy Detroit street. Above the casket stretched a banner proclaiming “Here Lies Jim Crow.” It was one of several such funeral celebrations, as Jim Crow had to be reburied after each new manifestation. Even after his legal demise, rumors of his death were greatly exaggerated. This did not dissuade photographers from documenting the public dismantling of his signs in the aftermath of legislation banning their display. Some of these photographs feature sober transportation officials unfastening the screws attaching signs to walls; others show jubilant passengers pointing to signs about to be taken down. A favorite scenario displays discarded signs heaped in the trash bin of history. One example, published in the NAACP journal Crisis, with an X through the image for extra emphasis, is a close-up of signs piled in a garbage can with crumpled old newspapers; two brooms and a dustpan, against which a “White Only” sign has seemingly been propped, complete the picture of finality (figure 82). Like the figurative body of their namesake, however, these signs did not stay down. Their recurrence in a variety of contexts and forms, not only as privately owned collectors’ items and novelties but also as symbolic interventions in the public sphere, has been insistent a century after the signs’ first appearances. As the debate between the negation and affirmation of racial difference continues to undergo new twists and turns in the early years of the twenty-first century, these recurrences have served a range of often-surprising purposes. One simplified map of this terrain would identify the political and cultural domains as complementary spheres in which opposing sides of this debate have found comfortable homes. In the years bracketing the turn of the century, with the ex292

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Figure 82. Discarded Jim Crow signs. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Visual Materials from the NAACP Records.

plicit sanction of the George W. Bush administration, the discourse of color blindness was cynically adopted to legitimate dismantling programs to redress the enduring legacy of segregation. The policy that Ian Haney López has dubbed “color blind White dominance” could be epitomized by the tautology, cited in the epigraph, with which Chief Justice John Roberts summarized the majority’s logic in the culminating decision of the Supreme Court’s 2006–7 term, a decision invalidating programs in Seattle and Louisville that allowed race to be a factor in efforts to achieve school diversity.1 It is apparently very simple: a wave of the magic wand, and the accumulated burdens of centuries of economic, political, and social discrimination will simply disappear. Conversely, because diversity is also an American value, it has been celebrated as the embrace of a politically neutral color in a cultural arena that makes no policy demands. Over the past two decades, a perversion of color blindness has been buttressed by an attenuated version of the call for recognition. What work could Jim Crow signs perform in this new terrain? Two pairs of exam-

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ples, one from the political and one from the cultural sphere, begin to provide an answer. Perhaps the most surprising development has been the redeployment of repressive signs for progressive purposes. In a pointed challenge to the claim that color blindness represents a current reality rather than a future dream, segregation signs have been redisplayed to protest the rolling back of the affirmative action policies that were implemented to redress segregation’s effects. This use has been especially visible in my own state, California, which has the dubious distinction of being the first (in 1996) to pass a proposition barring affirmative action from university admissions and state hiring procedures. Students at the University of California at Berkeley (as well as at other campuses) have demonstrated repeatedly against Proposition 209 and its predecessor, a decision by the University of California Regents the previous year. On at least two occasions, these protests have specifically and effectively used Jim Crow signs. In both, the signs were deployed to signal both that racial distinctions have not vanished from a social order that has prematurely declared their passing and that the dismantling of social programs designed to equalize opportunity will have the effect of reinstating the conditions of segregation. They operated, that is, both negatively as monitory images of what was in danger of returning and positively as indicators of what endures and therefore functions as a goad to change. In the first case, the call to oppose the Regents’ decision was disseminated through a poster designed by Guillermo Prado (figure 83), which features a photograph by Jenny Epstein of a racially and sexually ambiguous demonstrator holding up a sign declaring, “Defend Affirmative Action.” In a corner, tilted provocatively at an angle, is Danny Lyons’s 1962 photograph of segregated drinking fountains in an Albany, Georgia, courthouse, a graphic reminder of the past into which the present threatens to devolve and a reinforcement of the poster’s call to action. The choice of photographs does not seem accidental. In an active reshaping of cultural memory, Prado bypasses the obvious choice of Erwitt’s iconic drinking fountains for a more aggressive image by an activist photographer.2 A sense of urgency is also registered by the ragged edge of the text on the left side of the poster; this is memory not in complacent separation from the present, but raw-edged and laced with pain. As the affirmative-action poster revisits the scenario of drinking fountains, a photographic series of the action triggered by the Supreme Court’s refusal to review the constitutionality of Proposition 209 revisits the scenario of segregated gateways. Here, memory is deliberately reworked by an action staged by the organization Students against 209, who blockaded Sather Gate, the symbolic gateway to the Berkeley campus, forcing everyone to enter through a narrow side gate over which a “White Men Only” sign had been hung (figure 84). The purpose was to demonstrate how the proposition would “narrow the door” for those seeking access to the

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Figure 83. Poster protesting University of California Regents’ decision to ban affirmative action, September 1995. Photograph by Jenny Epstein. Poster by Guillermo Prado. Courtesy Guillermo Prado.

university.3 Photographs taken by Jesse Ehrman, a Daily Californian photographer, capture a scene in which students of color—the last generation to have made it through the door—extend an ironic welcome that blocks their successors. Threatening to resurface, the segregated past is only kept at bay, the recurrence of the “White Men Only” sign proposes, by deliberate laws and policies. In contrast to the parallel gateways at the National Museum of American History, this reconstruction takes away the fiction and the burden of personal choice and relocates questions of access in the work of institutions. A more ambiguous situation pertains to the flip side of the coin, which tempers the bland abstraction of the claim to color blindness with the cultural celebration of diversity as a palette of social color. It is trickier to wield Jim Crow signs against an aestheticization of difference that neutralizes race as color, and in at least one

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Figure 84. Protest by Students against 209, Berkeley, November 1997. Photograph by Jesse Ehrman. Courtesy Jesse Ehrman.

case the signs have been disturbingly co-opted. Unsurprisingly, Hollywood provides an appropriate target. Pleasantville (directed by Gary Ross, 1998) makes dramatic use of Jim Crow signs, although they are only slyly insinuated as such—so slyly that the signs have gone unmentioned in film reviews, which occasionally note the racial subtext in passing but don’t comment on the troubling way its conversion into a discourse of color appropriates the language of Jim Crow while draining its political meaning. The film’s governing device is the sensory deprivation produced by the involuntary time travel of two teenagers (David, played by Tobey Maguire, and Jennifer, played by Reese Witherspoon) through a television set from the hip, brightly colored nineties to the bland world of the lily-white suburban fifties, represented through the lens of a black-and-white television sitcom modeled on Father Knows Best. Color in this context becomes the sign of change introduced by the transgressive sister, whose sexuality injects vitality and danger into the homogeneous, perpetually contented, placid world of Pleasantville. This is a seductive aesthetic effect: bits of color bloom on the screen as characters begin to discover their artistic, erotic, and epistemological desires (the excitement of reading banned books is paired with sexual discovery), a spectrum of emotional possibility excluded from a black-andwhite world safely enclosed within a circular Main Street. The crisis erupts in a piv-

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otal scene in which a soda-fountain proprietor simultaneously uncovers both his true vocation as a painter (and paints his shop in an explosion of vibrant colors) and his true desire for the teenagers’ perfect sitcom mother. In the aftermath of this scene, as the middle-aged white men who constitute the town’s political base fight back against the eruption of desires coded by this illicit color, the racial reference surfaces—and then vanishes. As the growing number of local converts to color, turned on by the initiation into sexuality, are relegated to the upper gallery of a town meeting at which a strict new “code of conduct” is promulgated, conservative advocates of the pleasantly repressed world of black-and-white distinctions begin hanging up imitation Jim Crow signs decreeing “No Coloreds.” An ugly brawl reminiscent of a race riot breaks out when traditional youths tear apart the soda-fountain shop turned artist’s studio, and one of them subsequently refers to a lily-white young woman who has transferred her affections to Buddy as “your colored girlfriend.” The scenario careens from the Midwest to the South, and the subtext of racial terror finally erupts in violence against the “coloreds.” This subtext is quickly dissipated, however, as we come to realize not only that, whether represented in color or in black and white, Pleasantville’s population remains all white, that the repression of color as life force also encodes the exclusion of people of color. The film tries to propose that a vibrant civic life is contingent on a rainbow-colored populace, but the color is entirely metaphoric. Because there are no people of color in the film, but only white people increasingly represented in color, the racial exclusion signaled by the mock Jim Crow signs is also eventually reexcluded. Serving to heighten the film’s drama and moral gravitas, segregation is recuperated to a figure of emotional repression, race is subordinated to psychology, and color is internalized and assigned a teleology (“It’s in you, and you can’t stop something that’s in you,” Buddy explains) that elides the need for political action. Just as the mock Jim Crow signs, whose historically inaccurate s on “colored” mutes the historical reference, are recruited to the project of white self-improvement, the post-fifties world toward which the film gestures is not the civil rights movement, whose signal multiracial moment might be represented by the Freedom Summer of 1964, but the psychedelic Summer of Love that issued in the era of sexual freedom in 1967. The film’s closest political referent is the women’s movement. It is as unthinkable at the end as at the beginning that African Americans would move into Pleasantville, and they are as absent from the film’s imagined audience as they are from its fictional universe. Pleasantville presents a monitory example of the ways that an increasingly blurred memory of Jim Crow can be recruited to translate harsh racial divisions into multicultural harmony. For a more ambivalent, nuanced, and historically responsible deployment of the signs, we could turn to a contemporary African American artist who has specialized in reclaiming and refunctioning artifacts from the segregated past. “I buy anything black,” says Emory Biko, who has placed the more

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Figure 85. Emory Biko, Peg Leg, 2006. Courtesy Emory Biko and the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.

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than thirteen thousand items he has collected in his personal Museum of the African’s Experience in America.4 Recycling found objects from trash cans and flea markets is also central to his artistic practice. “Remember, Reclaim, Re-envision, Renew” declares one of the posters for his museum. Inexpensive reproductions of segregation signs feature prominently in this aesthetic of reinvention and collage. Another of the museum posters, titled The World My Mom and Dad Grew Up In, intersplices the printed name of the museum with graphic images of Jim Crow signs. We would hardly expect nostalgia about this world of signs; mordant humor is Biko’s more characteristic tone, and yet one particularly vivid recent painting frames the question of nostalgia together with the framework of Jim Crow. It seems appropriate to conclude this book with a contemporary work that transforms collecting into artistic practice and that looks back at the world of Jim Crow and makes that retrospection a self-conscious subject. Biko’s Peg Leg (2006), a watercolor onto which Jim Crow signs have been printed (figure 85), depicts the highly successful Pittsburgh Crawfords, a star team of the Negro League in the 1930s, in a lineup drawn from a historical photograph. The title refers, of course, to the hobbled circumstances under which the Negro teams had to play, and the signs, which range from Alabama to New York, specify the conditions under which they traveled. Placing the members of the team in front of their bus qualifies mobility with constraint. The more intriguing question the painting poses, however, concerns the imaginative constraints of the Jim Crow frame. Biko brings these to our attention by framing the painting itself as a Jim Crow sign, with the same rectangular dimensions and thin wooden frame. What kind of agency is conceivable within this narrow frame? The artist’s answer takes the form of countersigning. The commercially printed Jim Crow signs along the right side of the painting are countered by the hand-painted signs that bracket the ballpark entry on the left side: the “White Only” sign in sinister black, the “Colored Entrance” sign in luminous white. With more explicit whimsy, a “Negro” sign is attached to the bus’s fender and brow, at once pegging and animating the mechanical. Signs in this painting—in which all language is depicted as a sign—are malleable and portable, arbitrary and overdetermined. As single letters, signs pin down identities and open them up: the P on the players’ shirts could stand for both Pittsburgh and Peg Leg, the C on their caps for Crawford and Colored. The most extreme reinvention is the free-form sign by the ballpark entrance, which breaks the discursive and historical frame of Jim Crow to assert the artist’s viewpoint in a script that refuses to yield full legibility while exploiting the resources of materiality: not just one K in Amerikkka, but the three that inscribe the Ku Klux Klan’s initials in the name of the nation. The sign’s form also exploits the vernacular, rejecting the normative rectangle for a shape that resembles a hand with either two fingers raised in a peace sign or victory salute or a single finger raised in an easy-to-read gesture. The final sign is the artist’s signa-

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ture, the surname he adopted to commemorate the martyred South African nationalist Stephen Biko, signed in a script that transforms the K, a potential link to Amerikkka, into a triangle. Beyond using the medium of signage to write within and against the language of Jim Crow in tones that modulate from humor to anger, Peg Leg makes a strong emotional impact through the medium of color that, more complexly than in Pleasantville, bears an ambiguous relationship to race (see back cover). Biko chooses vivid red and yellow, emotionally charged colors, especially in conjunction with the things they represent: a bright yellow school bus (not the obvious transport for a baseball team) and the red brick wall of the ballpark that, by association with the bus, evokes the proverbial little red schoolhouse. This is a childhood world of bright primary colors and simplified forms, an American pastoral, the childhood of the nation at its national sport. Peg Leg shares Pleasantville’s desire to redeem the past through the lens of color, but not its presumption that color can cure the history of race. Both evoking and revoking nostalgia, Peg Leg seduces us by color and forces us to recognize that color does not offer liberation from race, that even the most innocent vision of the past must reckon with that knowledge. The yellow school bus drives to a segregated school; the world of red and yellow is also black and white. It is this both-and vision that the painting proposes, a vision well suited to its collage aesthetic. Racial signage provides a necessary but not sufficient frame for reconsidering the past, a corrective to the recent lures to efface segregation through the multicolored lenses of culture or the color-blind lenses of politics. As to how to envision the imprint of this past on the new national ball game of our first black presidency, perhaps Peg Leg offers a clue through its depiction of the gateway to a game we can’t discern through the red brick wall or the black-painted archway. All we can read are the signs on the wall: an “Entrance” sign that echoes the shape but not the substance of a Jim Crow sign and that spans a triple archway in a dualistic world. If we cannot fully escape the inscription of Jim Crow, we need not be imprisoned by it. There may be another way, a third way, that depends on reading the traces of these signs in order to displace them.

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notes

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P R E FAC E

1. Eudora Welty, “Eudora Welty and Photography: An Interview,” Eudora Welty Photographs (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989), xxv. 2. Hortense J. Spillers, “ ‘All the Things You Could Be by Now, If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother’: Psychoanalysis and Race,” in Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, ed. Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 137. On the Manichean structure of colonial relations, see Abdul R. JanMohamed, Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983). For recent theoretical attempts to triangulate the Jim Crow binary, see the special issue of PMLA “Comparative Racialization,” PMLA 123 (October 2008), 5. Ironically, as Shu-mei Shih discusses in her introduction, the Native Americans who were displaced by the binary structure have been the group least successfully reincorporated into new triangulations. For evidence of the earlier division among “white,” “colored,” and “Indian,” especially in certain counties on North Carolina, see Christopher J. McKenna, “Tri-racial Theaters in Robeson County, North Carolina, 1896–1940,” in Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema, ed. Richard Maltby, Melvyn Stokes, and Robert C. Allen (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007), 45–59; and Harry Golden, The Best of Harry Golden (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1967), 256. 3. On the distinction between the ostracism of Asian Americans and the inferiorization of African Americans, see Claire Jean Kim, “Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans,” in Asian American Politics: Perspectives, Experiences, Prospects, ed. Gordon H. Chang (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 39–78. Colleen Lye summarizes attempts to understand Asian American racialization through the binary model of Jim Crow in “The AfroAsian Analogy,” PMLA 123, 5 (October 2008), 1732–36. For the negotiations the Jim Crow structure imposed on Chinese Americans in the South, see James W. Loewen, The Missis301

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notes to pages xix–5

sippi Chinese: Between Black and White (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). For the social and legal construction of immigrants from Asia, see Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore (New York: William Morrow, 1989). 4. Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso, 1990), 64. 5. For some examples, see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); David Roediger, “Whiteness and Ethnicity,” in Race Critical Theories: Text and Context, ed. Philomela Essed and David Theo Goldberg (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 325–37; Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); Karen Brodkin, How the Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998); and David Theo Goldberg, Racial States (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), especially chapter 7. 6. Okwui Enwezor, Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art (New York: International Center of Photography, 2008), 33. 7. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 255.

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I N T RODU C T ION

1. On the history of racial classification in South Africa, see Roger Omond, The Apartheid Handbook (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985); William Finnegan, Crossing the Line: A Year in the Land of Apartheid (New York: Harper & Row, 1986); and David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002). For the broader comparison of South African apartheid and U.S. segregation, see George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). 2. Gloria Wade-Gayles, Pushed Back to Strength: A Black Woman’s Journey Home (Boston: Beacon, 1993), 2. No one really knows how many signs there were; the collector and writer James Allen estimates hundreds of thousands (June 4, 1998, personal communication). 3. This highly abbreviated summary draws from C. Vann Woodward’s foundational work, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974 [1955]), and “Strange Career Critics: Long May They Persevere,” Journal of American History 75, no. 3 (December 1988), 857–68; Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998), 229–43; Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: BlackWhite Relations in the American South since Emancipation (New York: Oxford, 1984); Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (New York: Oxford, 1993); and Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Pantheon, 1998). 4. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993); Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 5. In addition to the works by Litwack and Williamson cited above, see William H. Chafe, Raymond Gavins, Robert Korstad, et al., eds., Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell

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about Life in the Segregated South (New York: New Press, 2001); Charles Spurgeon Johnson, Patterns of Negro Segregation (New York: Harper and Row, 1943); Pauli Murray, comp. and ed., States’ Laws on Race and Color and Appendices (1951; Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), and Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family (New York: Harper and Row); John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me (1960; New York: New American Library, 2003); Henry Louis Gates Jr., Colored People: A Memoir (New York: Knopf, 1994); Deborah E. McDowell, Leaving Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin (New York: Norton, 1996); and bell hooks, Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood (New York: Henry Holt, 1996). In “Racial Formation,” in Race Critical Theories: Text and Context, ed. Philomela Essed and David Theo Goldberg (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), Michael Omi and Howard Winant condense and partially reformulate their classic argument from Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s (New York: Routledge, 1989). On the continuing legacy of this foundational text, see the contributions by Shu-mei Shih, Susan Koshy, James Kyung-Jin Lee, and Viet Thanh-Nguyen, and the response by Michael Omi and Howard Winant, in PMLA 123, no. 5 (October 2008), 1640–72. 6. Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 7. Soja goes on to say that, as “the embodiment or medium of social life itself,” space has a “fundamental materiality” that exists “in substantial forms” (119–20, 124). See also Michael Keith and Steve Pile, “Introduction, Part 1: The Politics of Place,” to their edited volume, Place and the Politics of Identity (London: Routledge, 1993), 1–21; and The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Barney Warf and Santa Arias (London: Routledge, 2009). 7. Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London: Verso, 1990), 14. 8. Irit Rogoff, “Studying Visual Culture,” in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (London: Routledge, 2002), 17–19. 9. For the argument that the theft of the Jim Crow dance was the origin of white popular culture, see Michael Paul Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); and Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface, Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 10. According to Dale Cockrell, the song’s many variations suggest that “the meaning of ‘Jim Crow’ is thus slippery—all contestation and ambiguity” (Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 89). For a reading of the ruses and slippages of black performance, especially dance performance, see Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 11. Elizabeth Eastlake, “Photography” [1967], in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 65. On the dialectical relation between photographic interpretation and historical context, see Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1978 [1955]), and Sturken, Tangled Memories. 12. Phrases used, respectively, by Ian Haney López in White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006 [1996]), 10, 12; Matthew

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Frye Jacobson in Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 2; Robert S. Schwartz, “Racial Profiling in Medical Research,” New England Journal of Medicine 344, no. 18 (May 3, 2001), 1393; David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell), 81; Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill & Wang, 1972), 14. 13. Goldberg, Racist Culture, 81; Jacques Derrida, “Racism’s Last Word,” in Henry Louis Gates Jr., ed., “Race,” Writing, and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 331. 14. Stuart Hall, “Reflections” on “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance,” in Essed and Goldberg, eds., Race Critical Theories, 453. On the dangers of this linguistic turn, see Arif Dirlik, “Race Talk, Race, and Contemporary Racism,” PMLA 123, no. 5 (October 2008), 1363–79. 15. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Editor’s Introduction: Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes,” in Gates, “Race,” Writing, and Difference, 5. On the breakthrough nature and enduring significance of this volume, see the contributions by Farah Jasmine Griffin, Eric Lott, and Valerie Smith in PMLA 123, no. 5 (October 2008), 1516–39. Eric Lott summarizes the volume’s “battle cry” as “Race was not an essence but an inscription, a signifier of instituted differences” (1522). 16. Anthony Appiah, “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race,” in Gates, “Race,” Writing, and Difference, 35. 17. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 48. The W. E. B. Du Bois citation is from “The Conservation of Races,” in The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 40, cited in Appiah, “Uncompleted Argument,” 23. In “Reading ‘Race,’ Writing, and Difference,” PMLA 123, no. 5 (October 2008), Henry Louis Gates Jr. notes that “perhaps the most fitting sequel to ‘Race,’ Writing, and Difference would be a special issue of Critical Inquiry entitled ‘Race,’ Science, and Difference” (1539). 18. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The First Universal Races Congress,” in Sundquist, Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader, 56. 19. For a critique of the model of formal equality, see Neil Gotanda, “A Critique of ‘Our Constitution Is Color Blind,’ ” in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, ed. Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas (New York: New Press, 1995), 257–75, and the jointly authored introduction to the volume. 20. For a reading that unpacks the contradictions between legal discourse and bodily signs, see Eric J. Sundquist, “Mark Twain and Homer Plessy,” Representations 24 (Fall 1988), 102– 28. See also Charles S. Johnson’s account of a conductor’s scrutiny of a light-skinned African American man’s bodily signs in an attempt to muster sufficient evidence to move him out of the Jim Crow car, in Patterns of Negro Segregation (New York: Harper and Row, 1943), 286; and Barbara Young Welke on the conductor’s legal obligation to determine each passenger’s race by reading his or her bodily signs, in Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 356–57. 21. See Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981); Naomi Zack, Philosophy and Science and Race (New York: Routledge, 2002), 25–40; Cornel West,

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“A Genealogy of Modern Racism,” in Essed and Goldberg, Race Critical Theories, 90–122; Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963), 32–42; and Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 27–29. For a critique of the theory that cultural contact was the crucial impetus to racial theory, see Kalpana Seshadi-Crooks, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race (London: Routledge, 2000). 22. For an exhaustive account of the interplay between scientific methods and racial signs, see Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960 (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1982); Wiegman, American Anatomies, chapter 1; Erin Edwards, ed., Anthropology and Photography, 1860–1920 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); and Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986), 3–64. 23. For a Foucauldian reading of the role of the human sciences in producing “a simultaneous strengthening of the corporeal as the bearer of race’s meaning and a deepening of that meaning as ultimately lodged beyond the assessing gaze of the unaided human eye,” see Wiegman, American Anatomies, chapter 1 (quote, p. 23); for a similar reading that extends the analysis into the evidentiary technologies and ideologies of the early twentieth century, see Sarah E. Chinn, Technology and the Logic of American Racism: A Cultural History of the Body as Evidence (New York: Continuum, 2000), chapter 1. For a powerful account of the transformation of “differences that are only skin deep into . . . deep skin, a melanoma of the imagination,” see Harry J. Elam Jr. and David Krasner, eds., African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 102. 24. On the manipulation of craniometric evidence, see Gould, Mismeasure of Man, chapters 2 and 3. For a list of craniometric instruments and the shifting designation of racial signs, see Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science. 25. See Zack, Philosophy of Science and Race, chapters 3 and 4; Ann Laura Stoler, “Racial Histories and Their Regimes of Truth,” in Essed and Goldberg, Race Critical Theories, 369– 91; and George W. Stocking Jr., “The Turn-of-the-Century Concept of Race,” Modernism/ Modernity, 1, no. 1 (January 1994), 4–16. 26. See, for example, W. E. B. Du Bois, “The First Universal Races Congress,” in Sundquist, Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader, 58. 27. On the distinctively American contours of this story, see Smith, American Archives; Gould, Mismeasure of Man; and Gossett, Race. 28. Gossett, Race, 415. For an overview of Boas’s arguments about race, environment, and heredity, see the essays collected in his Race, Language, and Culture (New York: Free Press, 1940). For a comprehensive assessment of his contribution to anthropology, see George W. Stocking Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1968), chapters 7–9. 29. Stocking, “Turn-of-the-Century Concept,” 11. For fuller versions of this school of thought, see Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution, 48–68, and Gould, Mismeasure of Man, chapter 2. 30. On nominalism versus essentialism in racial theory, see Zack, Philosophy of Science and Race, chapters 1 and 7.

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notes to pages 14–18

31. See, for example, the stories of childhood disillusionment when “colored” water turned out to be clear in Charles Flowers, Snaps (London: Phaidon, 2001), 15; Rosa Parks and Jim Haskins, Rosa Parks: My Story (New York: Dial Books, 1992), 46; and James Forman, Sammy Younge Jr., 55. The stage design of the Greenwich Players’ production of Langston Hughes’s Jericho–Jim Crow (1964) played with the same expectations by mounting two huge signs at the front of the stage reading “Colored Water” and “White Water.” 32. Karl M. Figlio, “The Metaphor of Organization: An Historiographical Perspective on the Biomedical Sciences of the Early Nineteenth Century,” History of Science 14 (1976), 28; cited by Stepan, Idea of Race in Science, 14. 33. Wiegman, American Anatomies, 23. 34. Henri Lefèbvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991), 143. 35. David Delaney, Race, Place, and the Law, 1836–1948 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 96, 99, 29, 13. See also David Theo Goldberg’s account of the “sociospatial imperative” that emerged globally as well as domestically in the late nineteenth century, in The Racial State (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002). 36. Robyn Wiegman, “Visual Modernity,” American Anatomies, 21–42. 37. Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Pantheon, 1998), 186, 189, 185. 38. Robert R. Weyeneth, “The Architecture of Racial Segregation: The Challenges of Preserving the Problematical Past,” Public Historian 27, no. 4 (Fall 2005), 11–44. 39. Blyden Jackson, The Waiting Years: Essays on American Negro Literature (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), 3. 40. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” diacritics 16 (Spring 1986), 23. Based on a lecture he delivered in 1967, the essay has a somewhat provisional status in his oeuvre. For a reading of the resistant and heterotopic features of a different racially segregated space, see Lisa Lowe’s analysis of Chinatowns in Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 120–27. 41. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 22. For the trajectory of spatial theory from French through British Marxisms, see Andy Merrifield, Metromarxism: A Marxist Tale of the City (New York: Routledge, 2002), and Edward W. Soja, “The Spatiality of Social Life: Towards a Transformative Retheorization,” in Social Relations and Spatial Structures, ed. Derek Gregory and John Urry (Houndmills, UK: Macmillan, 1985), 90–127. The essays collected by Keith and Pile in Place and the Politics of Identity offer good examples of the various directions in which this theory has traveled and the debates among alternative schools of thought. 42. Editors’ introduction to “The Spatial Dimension of History, ”special issue of Radical History Review 21 (Fall 1979), 4–5; Dick Hebdige, “Subjects in Space,” New Formations 11 (Summer 1990), vii. See also the essays collected in Keith and Pile, Place and the Politics of Identity; Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, George Robertson, and Lisa Tickner in Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change (London: Routledge, 1993), part 1; and Heidi J. Nast and Steve Pile in Places through the Body (London: Routledge, 1998). 43. For example, neither the Radical History Review nor the New Formations issue cited above includes essays on race. The studies of race and space that began to appear in Britain in the 1990s focus on contexts outside the United States. The transnational focus of diaspora

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studies necessarily engages space, but in ways that have not been readily transportable into a single national frame. Conversely, studies of the distinctively postmodern spatiality of American cities (such as Los Angeles) have subordinated race either to the global operations of capital (as shown in Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism [London: Verso, 1991]) or to the local fluctuations of the variables that comprise the physical and social environment (as shown in Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles [London: Verso, 1990; New York: Vintage, 1992]). Hence Doreen Massey’s pathbreaking Space, Place, and Gender has found no counterpart American volume titled Space, Place, and Race, and the closest approximation, Delaney’s Race, Place, and the Law, reveals through the alternative choice of terms how the geography of race in the United States has prioritized the stability of place over the mobility of space. 44. For the argument that space stabilizes race, see López, White by Law. 45. W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co, 1940), 153. 46. I am grateful to Milburn J. Crowe, city clerk of Mound Bayou, for the information about the signage (personal communication, December 2, 1997). The town’s fascinating history can also be found in the brochure for the first annual Mound Bayou Heritage Festival (July 12–14, 1996), and in “Mound Bayou: Biggest Building Boom Hits All-Negro Town,” Ebony, September 1946, 19–24. 47. Lopez provides a thorough account of this legal history in White by Law. On the social politics and metaphors of color, see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 48. “Segregate Chinese in Mississippi School,” Cleveland Advocate, February 28, 1920. The newspaper is reporting a 1920 decision by the attorney general that was upheld by a state supreme court ruling in 1925. 49. On Chicago, see Lizabeth Cohen, “Encountering Mass Culture at the Grassroots: The Experience of Chicago Workers in the 1920s,”American Quarterly 41, no. 1 (March 1989), 16; for the reference to Italians, see Eileen Browser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907– 1915 (New York: Scribner’s, 1990), 9; on California, see Carey McWilliams, “California Pastoral,” Antioch Review 22, no. 1 (Spring 1942), 103–21. Since, as David Roediger points out in “Whiteness and Ethnicity,” Okies tried to exploit the Chinese presence in California as a way to fortify their own claims to whiteness, this construction of their blackness must have been an especially bitter pill (Essed and Goldberg, Race Critical Theories, 336.) 50. Étienne Balibar, “The Nation Form: History and Ideology,” in Essed and Goldberg, Race Critical Theories, 228; Goldberg, Racist Culture, 81. 51. John Dos Passos, cited in Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 262. This turn was greatly facilitated by the Leica revolution that made portable cameras available to ordinary citizens. 52. Coco Fusco, “Racial Time, Racial Marks, Racial Metaphors,” in Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, ed Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis (New York: International Center of Photography, 2003), 16, 47. 53. Pete Daniel and Sally Stein, “Introduction,” in Pete Daniel, Merry A. Foresta, Maren

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notes to pages 20–24

Stange, and Sally Stein, Official Images: New Deal Photography (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987), viii. 54. Brian Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes,” in Fusco and Wallis, Only Skin Deep, 177. For a full account of these photographic practices, see the essays collected by Erin Edwards in Anthropology and Photography, 1860–1920 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), especially Edwards’s “Introduction” (3–17); Rosalyn Poignant, “Surveying the Field of View: The Making of the RAI Photographic Collection” (42–73); Christopher Pinney, “The Parallel Histories of Anthropology and Photography” (74–96); and Frank Spencer, “Some Notes on the Attempt to Apply Photography to Anthropometry during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century” (99–107). See also David Green, “Classified Subjects,” Ten.8 14: 30–37; and Coco Fusco, “Racial Time, Racial Marks, Racial Metaphors,” in Fusco and Wallis, Only Skin Deep, 13–50. 55. Poignant, “Surveying the Field of View,” in Edwards, Anthropology and Photography, 49. See also Christopher Pinney’s essay in the same volume, 76–77. Frank Spencer’s contribution to that volume includes an account of the alternative measuring system proposed by Thomas Henry Huxley, 99–100. 56. On the daguerreotypes, which were discovered in Harvard’s Peabody Museum in 1975, see Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science,” in Fusco and Wallis, Only Skin Deep, 163– 82; Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Matthew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989), 52–60; and Nicholas Mirzoeff, “The Shadow and the Substance: Race, Photography, and the Index,” in Fusco and Wallis, Only Skin Deep, 114–16. 57. Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography” (1931), in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–1934, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 527. 58. On the implied claim to cultural knowability conveyed by the camera’s frontal gaze, see Sara Blair, Harlem Crossroads: Black Writers and the Photograph in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), especially chapter 2; and “The Photograph as History: Richard Wright, Black Power, and Narratives of the Nation,” English Language Notes 44, no. 2 (Fall–Winter 2006), 65–72. 59. Maurice O. Wallace, Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775–1995 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 60. For the cropped version of the photograph, see David Leeming, James Baldwin: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1994); and Wallace, Constructing the Black Masculine. The photograph was not included in the photo-text for which it had been taken, Jane Howard, “At a Crucial Time a Negro Talks Tough,” Life, May 24, 1963, 81–90. On Baldwin’s status as iconic figure in the early 1960s and the mass media’s exploitation of that status “under a number of predictable evidentiary rubrics,” see Blair, Harlem Crossroads, 193–97. 61. Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” 3–64. 62. Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 2. 63. On the sources and strategies of a distinctively American project of transparency, see Philip Fisher, “Democratic Social Space: Whitman, Melville, and the Promise of American Transparency,” Representations 24 (Fall 1988), 60–101.

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64. Rogoff, “Studying Visual Culture,” 32. 65. For an analysis of the paradoxes inherent in the construction of an archive as an act of consignation or gathering together signs that “aims to coordinate a single corpus in a system of synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration,” see Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 3 (emphasis in original). 66. See, for example, Ben M. Hall, The Best Remaining Seats: The Story of the Golden Age of the Movie Palace (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1961); John Belton, American Cinema/American Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994); Eileen Browser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915, vol. 2 of History of the American Cinema, ed. Charles Harpole (New York: Scribner’s, 1990), 1–20; Judith Mayne, “Immigrants and Spectators,” Wide Angle 2 (1982), 32–40; and Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (London: Routledge, 1993). This commonplace has come under increasing scrutiny from critics who question the industry’s intentions and analyze the viewing strategies and contexts that diverse populations brought to the cinema. For an overview, see chapter 2 of Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), and the studies she cites. 67. For firsthand accounts of a range of resistant practices, see Chafe, Gavins, and Korstad, Remembering Jim Crow. Robin D. G. Kelley provides a theoretical context in Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994). In “Reading the Holocaust Cartoons in Tehran,” Roya Hakakian describes a parallel set of practices deployed by Muslim and Jewish students in defiance of the “For Muslims Only” signs posted on drinking fountains and toilets in Iran in the 1980s (New York Times, September 2, 2006). 68. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Soja, Postmodern Geographies. 69. John L. Jackson Jr., ed., “A Little Black Magic,” Racial Americana, special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly 104, no. 3 (Summer 2005), 393–402.

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1 . A M E R IC A N G R A F F I T I

1. Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition (1901; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 57. 2. James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (Washington, DC: Open Hand Publishing Inc., 1985), 20. For other narratives of defining childhood encounters with Jim Crow signs and regulations, see Sarah L. Delany and A. Elizabeth Delany, with Amy Hill Hearth, Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years (New York: Dell, 1993), 95, 105; Pauli Murray, Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family (New York: Harper & Row), 269–70; Mary Church Terrell, A Colored Woman in a White World (1940; Salem, NH: Ayer Press, 1986), 15; Louis Armstrong, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (New York: PrenticeHall, 1954), 14–15; Richard Wright, Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (New York: Harper & Row, 1945), 41; Rosa Parks and Jim Haskins, Rosa Parks: My Story (New York: Dial Books, 1992); James Forman, Sammy Younge Jr.: The First Black College Student to Die in the Black Liberation Movement (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 55; Clifton L. Taulbert, Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored (Tulsa, OK: Council Oak Books, 1989), 19; and many of the

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notes to pages 34–46

narratives included in Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell about Life in the Segregated South, ed. William H. Chafe, Raymond Gavins, and Robert Korstad (New York: New Press, 2001). 3. Since Igor Kopytoff put this phrase into circulation (in “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986], 64–91), it has become a standard concept in cultural anthropology; see, for example, Susan M. Pearce, ed., Interpreting Objects and Collections (London: Routledge, 1994). 4. Some intersections between race making and the cultural biography of racist things have been theorized in terms of the uncanny. In “Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny” (Critical Inquiry 32, no. 2 [Winter 2006], 175–207), which centers on the “revenge of the black collectible come to life” in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (New Line Productions, 2000), Bill Brown derives the “historical ontology congealed within” objects such as the Jolly Nigger Bank, “the most despised and most prized object of black memorabilia,” from the ambiguous status of the slave as both person and object (183, 197, 199). In “Jim Crow Signs in Post–Civil Rights American Fiction,” a paper delivered at the 2008 meeting of the Modern Language Association and reprised in his forthcoming book Neo-segregation Narratives: Jim Crow Signs in Post–Civil Rights American Literature, Brian J. Norman analyzes the “historical uncanny” staged by the representation of Jim Crow signs in post–civil rights fiction. Whereas emphasizing the return of the repressed directs attention to the unconscious dynamics sustaining the traffic in racist objects, Signs of the Times charts the ways race is reconfigured through the transformation and circulation of Jim Crow signs. 5. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xii–xiii, xiv–xv, emphasis in original. 6. Cited by Anthony Ramirez, “Black Collectors Hate and Buy Them,” New York Times, July 5, 2006. Pilgrim’s position extends the critique of commodifying history that was launched by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). 7. In his study of signs in public space, David M. Henkin argues that regulatory signs, and the notion of public authority on which they rest, did not develop in New York until the middle of the nineteenth century. See chapter 3 of City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 8. For some other specifications, see C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), 98, 116; Stetson Kennedy, Jim Crow Guide: The Way It Was (1959; Boca Raton: Florida Atlantic University Press, 1990), 179–84; Pauli Murray, States’ Laws on Race and Color (Athens: Georgia University Press, 1997); and Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, The Making of a Southerner (New York: Knopf, 1991 [1946]), 133. 9. Murray, Proud Shoes, 268. For the effect of graphic design on the message of presidential campaigns, see Scott Dadich, “What You See Is What You Get,” New York Times, October 9, 2004, and the responses on October 13–14. 10. Chesnutt, Marrow of Tradition, 54. 11. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Travels in the United States in 1847, 56. cited in Henkin, City Reading, 55. 12. See, for example, Victoria Pedersen, “Photography and Modern Movement: Link, Loewy and the Roanoke Station,” Modernism (Spring 2004), 100, available online at www

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.modernismmagazine.com. Critics were well aware of the ways that modernist design contributed to legitimating segregation. Under the title “New N.O. Terminal: Chrome Jim Crow,” a story in the Southern Patriot (February 1954) comments caustically on the ways that the “gaudy plastic placards—the latest in swank” recast outmoded racial signage in the image of the new. 13. The story of Virginia Beach is related in a 1974 interview with Anne M. Coleman at the Black Archives, History and Research Foundation of South Florida in Miami. The story of American Beach is presented at the exhibit “American Beach: A Haven in the Time of Storm” in Tallahassee, Florida, which includes an interview with MaVynee Oshun Betsch, the great-granddaughter of one of the company founders, who recalls: “We were never told about segregation. . . . We were just so proud that we had our own. It was a black pride thing.” 14. Kennedy, Jim Crow Guide, 234. 15. See Phyllis Speidell, “Suffolk Man Collects Relics of Racism,” Virginia Pilot, September 4, 2001, www.ferris.edu/news/jimcrow/links/collector/; Douglas Martin, “Constance Baker Motley, 84, Civil Rights Trailblazer, Lawmaker and Judge, Dies,” New York Times, September 29, 2005. 16. Brian Breyé, founder of the Museum in Black, interview, Los Angeles, March 2000. Thomas C. Bridge, cited by Sylvia Charmaine in “Dr. Thomas C. Bridge’s Live-in Museum,” About . . . Time, February 1990, 12. 17. Jeanette Carson is cited by Carol Hernandez, “Black Memorabilia Finds Big Demand,” Wall Street Journal August 10, 1992; Karen Lee Ziner, “Collecting Items of a Hurtful History,” Providence Journal, www.projo.com/special/black/blk.htm; Dick Friz, “Black Memorabilia & Artifacts Show,” Maine Antique Digest, September 1997; Mike Karsnak, “Black (Bric-a-Brac) Is Beautiful and Has Educational Value,” Star-Ledger (Newark, NJ) December 23, 2005, www.ferris.edu/news/jimcrow/links/bricabrac.htm; P. J. Gibbs, Black Collectibles Sold in America (Paducah, KY: Collector Books, 1987), 6–8; and Gerald Early, “Collecting ‘The Artificial Nigger’: Race and American Material Culture,” in The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1994), 160–62. 18. Chuck McDew, telephone conversation June 24, 1997. He also suggested that shame is another motive for the reluctance of some whites to sell racist material to African Americans. 19. Clarence Page, “Collecting Memory,” NewsHour Online, Public Broadcasting Service, May 30, 1996(www.pbs.org/newshour/essays/page_5–29.html), and “Post–O. J. America Needs to Get Past Symbols,” AZ Republic, February 12, 1997. In “Buying History: Top Dollars for Collectibles,” BET Week End Magazine (http://msbet.rocketworks.com/content/life/ 1412.asp), Angela Dodson notes that a Jim Crow sign from 1931 stating “We Serve Colored Carry Out Only” sold for $805 at an annual black memorabilia show at the Swann Gallery in New York in 2000. 20. The key psychoanalytic account is Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting,” in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 7–24. In On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 151–69, Susan Stewart also emphasizes the subjective dynamics and dimensions of collecting; her implicit critique becomes explicit when the collector is a member of a Western culture appropriating

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artifacts from indigenous cultures. The anthropological critique has been mounted forcefully by James Clifford in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 187–254. 21. Julian Bond, “Collecting Black Americana,” Black Americana Price Guide, ed. Kyle Husfloen (Dubuque, MN: Antique Trader Books, 1996), vii, ix. 22. Julian Bond, personal communication, January 6, 1998. Out of the thousands of artifacts collected over many years by Phillip Merrill (the owner of Nandy Jack & Co, an organization that researches, collects, and exhibits black artifacts), only one is a Jim Crow sign (telephone conversation, June 23, 1997). James Allen, whose persistence and skill in uncovering relics of the racist past captured national attention through his exhibit of lynching postcards, owns only two Jim Crow signs, although he has been searching for about twenty years (telephone conversation, June 4, 1998). Skip Mason, director of Digging It Up, an African American research and consulting firm in Atlanta, has no Jim Crow signs, which are, in his words, “extremely hard to come by” and prohibitively expensive (telephone conversation, December 9, 1997). Dusty Rose, who advertises “all types of collectible Black Americana for sale” in her Brooklyn shop, confirms that no original signs have been on the market for a long time (telephone conversation, June 12, 1998). Sallie Hurt of ETC Collectibles, who has been collecting black memorabilia for forty years, makes the same observation (telephone conversation, February 27, 1998). 23. For a typology of collectors determined by their motives (nostalgia, investment, liberation, education), see the DVD produced by David Pilgrim of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia. Although Pilgrim does not differentiate these categories along racial lines, it seems clear that the first two motives prevail among white collectors and the second two among African Americans. 24. Jan Lindenberger, Black Memorabilia around the House (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, 1993), 7. Although a particularly egregious example, it is on a continuum with catalogues by other white women. See, for example, Jackie Young, Black Collectibles: Mammy and Her Friends (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, 1991). 25. Florence Davis-Wilson, director of public relations at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, noted that the Institute was unable to obtain original Jim Crow signs and used reproductions in its display (interview, July 17, 1997). Even the Black Memorabilia Collectors Association, reluctant to lend its rare originals out for display, commissions copies for its educational exhibits. 26. Phillip Merrill is the source of the figure for researchable signs (telephone conversation, June 23, 1997). Slave papers are rarely priced at more than $1,000 in the Black Americana Price Guide and often at considerably less. On the function of the signs as a badge of cultural membership, see Zachary Pincus-Roth, “Next on His Docket: A Supreme Challenge,” New York Times, April 27, 2008, on the actor Laurence Fishburne. The risks of investing in this cultural membership are dramatized by Spike Lee in his 2000 film Bamboozled. 27. I thank Thomas C. Bridge for the tip about the coffee, Dan Williams for the account of the confection ovens, and Rose Fontanella for the clue about the phony warehouse ads. For a broader discussion of “counterfeit antiques,” see David Pilgrim, “New Racist Forms: Jim Crow in the 21st Century,” Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University, www.ferris/edu/news/jimcrow/newforms/.

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28. Early, “Collecting ‘The Artificial Nigger,’ ” 155–62; Lynn Casmier-Paz, “Heritage, Not Hate? Collecting Black Memorabilia,” Southern Cultures 9, no. 1 (Spring 2003), 43–61. See also Julian Bond’s response to Casmier-Paz in that volume, 62, and the conversation among Michael Harris, L. Bowery Sims, and Karen C. C. Dalton, “The Past Is Prologue but Is Parody and Pastiche Progress? A Conversation,” International Review of African American Art 14, no. 3 (1997), 17–30. 29. Although they would not reveal the sources of their merchandise, many of the store owners I interviewed expressed the belief that reproductions were made in Asia. Production centers for other kinds of black memorabilia are located in Japan, Germany, China, England, France, Australia, and parts of Africa, according to Gibbs in Black Collectibles and LaCheryl B. Cillie and Yolanda White Powell in From Darkness to Light: A Modern Guide to Recapturing Historical Riches (Birmingham, AL: Creative Inspirations, Ltd, 1997). In Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), Marita Sturken notes the Asian production of America’s favorite memory objects. The vexed relation between history ad memory has generated considerable recent debate. For some assessments, see “Memory and Counter Memory,” special issue of Representations 26 (Spring 1989), and Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). 30. On the dangers of inferring historical information from contemporary reproductions, see Richard Jensen about a related case in “ ‘No Irish Need Apply’: A Myth of Victimization,” Journal of Social History 32, no. 2 (2002), 405–29. 31. Some examples of urban stores that double as information centers are Virgil Mayberry’s V.J.M. Unlimited, Inc., in Rock Island, Illinois; Dan Williams’s Nightmares and Notions in Oakland, California; Mary and Glenda Taylor’s Aunt Merriam’s in Harlem; and Rose Fontanella’s Dusty Rose in Brooklyn. 32. I am grateful to Marchel’le Renise Barber for sharing information about the store, which closed in 2005 in response to the economic downturn that reduced the market for memorabilia. In our most recent conversation (August 19, 2008), Barber also noted that she no longer includes Jim Crow signs in the merchandise she sells at art fairs, where she cannot control the interpretive framework as she could in her own store. 33. Mildred Franklin, former president of the Black Memorabilia Collectors’ Association, telephone conversation, December 16, 1997; Henry Louis Gates Jr., Colored People (New York: Vintage, 1994). African American interest in Jim Crow signs represents an edgy relation to the “memory markets” that Andreas Huyssen analyzes in Present Pasts. 34. Cited in Maureen Jenkins, “Crafting a Positive Image: Store Owner Offers Lessons in History,” Chicago Sun-Times, December 19, 1997. The request for the “White Only” sign was reported in “The Martha’s Crib 1996 Jim Crow Sign Series,” an article posted on the store’s former website. The sign in her bathroom is described by Lisa Lenoir in “At Home with . . . Shop Owner Marchel’le R. Barber,” Chicago Sun-Times, December 19, 1997. 35. Quoted in Danielle Hirsch, “Merchant Unshackles Past with Jewelry,” Star (Chicago), October 1998. See also Nicole Stil, “Shackles Make Debatable Statement,” Chicago Tribune, December 27, 1998. 36. Cited by Jenkins in “Crafting a Positive Image.” 37. The Redneck Shop of the Ku Klux Klan Museum, which opened in 1996, appears to

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have survived repeated protests and a lawsuit brought by the Rev. David Kennedy in 2008. On country stores, see Neil Strauss, “Concerts Rock the Tiny Kingdom of Skullbonia,” New York Times, June 1, 2001; on the Internet, see Pilgrim, “New Racist Forms.” I am grateful to Virgil Mayberry and Chuck McDew for information about white interest in Jim Crow signs. 38. Interview with Marchel’le Barber, March 3, 2001. 39. Information about the sign’s popularity at Nightmares and Notions is from an interview with its owner, Dan Williams (January 13, 1998). The museum director’s claim is cited by Hernandez in “Black Memorabilia Finds Big Demand.” Clarence Page’s comments are from “Collecting Memory.” Similarly, David Pilgrim notes that “signs that have obvious derogatory racist words are the most expensive” (e-mail, February 27, 2003). 40. As of the most recent check, Alamo Flags (www.flagline.com) has dropped the “Parking for African Americans” sign and lists among its offerings only “Country Parking Signs.” There are still no African nationalities on its list. 41. Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” and Kopytoff, “Cultural Biography of Things,” in Appadurai, The Social Life of Things, 3–90. 42. Casmier-Paz, “Heritage, Not Hate,” 56. 43. Conversation with Mary Taylor, November 10, 2006. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les lieux de mémoire,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989), 7–25. One such conversation involved an African American man in his sixties whose encounter with a reproduction of a “For Colored Only” sign at Aunt Meriam’s triggered a memory of bringing the entire football team of Grambling State University to a Louisiana coffee shop for the pleasure of watching the white owner break their dishes after they left (Ramirez, “Black Collectors Hate and Buy Them”).

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2 . T H E SIG N S OF R AC E I N T H E L A NG UAG E OF P HO TO G R A P H Y

1. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Coco Fusco, “Racial Time, Racial Marks, Racial Metaphors,” in Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, ed. Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis (New York: International Center of Photography, 2003), 47. 2. Roland Barthes, “The Rhetoric of the Image,” in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 276, 280. On the entrenched hierarchical division between logos and icon, see W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). In Mitchell’s trenchant account, logos as the “essential human attribute” of “the speaking animal” is pitted against icon as “the medium of the subhuman, the savage, the ‘dumb’ animal, the child, the woman, the masses” (24). 3. Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 50; Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography” (1931), in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–1934, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 527. 4. Charles Sanders Peirce, “What Is a Sign?” (1894), The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 2, ed. Peirce Edition Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 5.

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5. Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, “Daguerreotype,” in Trachtenberg, Classic Essays in Photography, 11; Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” ibid., 74. 6. Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” in Image Music Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), 17, 18, 20; “Rhetoric of the Image,” 283, emphasis in original. 7. Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” 279. 8. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 281. 9. “The Pencil of Nature” is the title of William Henry Fox Talbot’s quarto of prints, with accompanying text and a governing metaphor, discussed in William Fox Talbot, “A Brief Historical Sketch of the Invention of the Art,” in Trachtenberg, Classic Essays in Photography, 28–36; the phrase “solar pencil” is from Elizabeth Eastlake, “Photography,” ibid., 43; “words of light” comes from William Henry Fox Talbot’s notebook entry, March 3, 1839, which Eduardo Cadava cites and chooses as the title of his meditation on Walter Benjamin, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), xvii. On the deployment of indexical signs in avant-garde photography and painting, see “Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Part 1” and “Notes on the Index: Part 2,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 196–219. 10. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981), 88, 80–81. 11. Roland Barthes, “Photographic Message,” 22. 12. Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” 282. 13. See Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), 15–18. 14. For a meticulous elaboration of this core concept, see W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), especially part 3. 15. Cited by Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 228. Jacobson unfolds the extremely complex issues involved in the shifting legal terminologies of race, which between the 1870s and 1920s succeeded in both consolidating a unitary notion of a “Caucasian race” and in drawing distinctions among competing European “races.” 16. In addition to Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, see David Roediger, “Whiteness and Ethnicity,” in Race Critical Theories: Text and Context, ed. Philomena Essed and David Theo Goldberg (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 325–37; Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, ed. Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gottanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas (New York: New Press, 1995), 276–91; and David Theo Goldberg, Racial States (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 179–86. 17. For some examples of Nazi signage, see Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Sippermann, The Racial State: Germany, 1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and Leo Spitzer, Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism (New York: Hill & Wang, 1998), 9. 18. Well documented visually in cities across Tennessee, this verbal distinction was common throughout the South; see, for example, Charles S. Johnson, Patterns of Negro Segregation (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1943), 49.

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notes to pages 69–74

19. Dyer, White, 76. 20. On the new national respectability that America’s 1898 imperialist adventures conferred on what had been perceived as a provincial Southern racial ideology, see C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974 [1955]), 72–74. Charles W. Chesnutt satirizes this development by having his African American protagonist read “an editorial which set forth in glowing language the inestimable advantages which would follow to certain recently acquired islands by the introduction of American liberty” immediately after he has been consigned to the Jim Crow car of a train and immediately before he is harassed by the ignorant and brutish white Captain George McBane (The Marrow of Tradition [1901; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969], 57). 21. For state-by-state variations on the one-drop rule, see Ian Haney Lopez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 83. In one case, the terms Black Men and Black Women were initially chosen as the counterparts to White Men and White Women for station waiting rooms, but Colored was quickly substituted as the more inclusive term; Southwestern Christian Advocate, April 20, 1899, cited by Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998), 232–33. 22. Crisis, March 1928, 96; cited, along with George Washington Williams’s History of the Negro Race in America, by Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 461. The Chicago Defender, by contrast, considered Negro derogatory and preferred the terms race and race men. See Litwack, ibid., 459–63, for a thorough and illuminating discussion of the terminological controversy; on the observation about the Defender, see Mary Carbine, “ ‘The Finest Outside the Loop’: Motion Picture Exhibition in Chicago’s Black Metropolis, 1905–1928,” in Silent Film, ed. Richard Abel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 1996), 239. 23. Her rhetorical project was updated in 1991 by Sean Dennis Cushman, who captions it a “photograph by Marian [sic] Post Wolcott of an African-American citizen entering a movie theater by the ‘colored’ entrance in Belzoni.” African-Americans and the Quest for Civil Rights, 1900–1990 (New York: New York University Press, 1991), 77. 24. “The Background of Segregation,” Life, September 3, 1956, 43; part 4, “The Restraints: Open and Hidden,” Life, September 24, 1956, 101. The revoicing did not go in one direction only. In his autobiography, Parks remembers photographing Albert Thornton’s son and his family beneath a sign that read “Blacks Enter Here” (To Smile in Autumn [New York: Norton, 1979], 108). 25. Allan Sekula pointed this out in his lecture, “Walker Evans’ Seriality,” delivered at the conference “Walker Evans: Art and Document,” San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, June 3, 2000. 26. Ray Stannard Baker, Following the Color Line: An Account of Negro Citizenship in the American Democracy (New York: Doubleday, 1908), 29; Lerone Bennett Jr., Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America (New York: Penguin, 1993 [1962]), 256. 27. In Following the Color Line, Baker describes the controversy over the funding of public libraries in turn-of-the-century Atlanta (35–36). When Andrew Carnegie offered to fund a branch library for those racially excluded from the new “public” library, city officials demanded that African Americans contribute the land for the building. Although this plan fell through because the city refused to allow African Americans on the supervisory board and

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African Americans refused to raise money to buy the land without some control over the facility, the dispute suggests not only African American determination to achieve some measure of community control, but also the shared assumption that they would bear some responsibility for creating and maintaining their libraries. 28. Telephone interview with Cecil J. Williams, March 3, 1998. The photograph’s power, and the courage required to take it, was appreciated in the black press; it appeared in both Jet and the Afro-American and can be seen along with other examples of his work in Cecil J. Williams, Freedom and Justice: Four Decades of the Civil Rights Struggle as Seen by a Black Photographer of the Deep South (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1995). 29. On Christianity, embodiment, and whiteness, see Dyer, White, chapter 1. 30. Alan Trachtenberg, “Introduction: Photographs as Symbolic History,” in Trachtenberg, Classic Essays on Photography, xxvii. 31. “Friedlander,” brochure accompanying the exhibit of the photographer’s work at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, June 5–August 29, 2005. 32. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 236–37. 33. Ibid., 235–37. 34. David M. Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 60. 35. Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 237. 36. Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 510. 37. Dyer, White, 14. 38. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 1977), 70. For an account of different versions of this recurrent topos of photography theory, see Martin Jay, “The Camera as Memento Mori: Barthes, Metz, and the Cahiers du Cinema,” in his Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 435–92. 39. Ruby C. Tapia, “Suturing the Mother: Race, Death, and the Maternal in Barthes’ Camera Lucida,” English Language Notes 44, no. 2 (Fall–Winter 2006), 203–8. 40. Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 510. 41. Of the extensive bibliography on documentary’s implication in the power relations it seeks to redress, see especially Martha Rosler, “In, Around, and Afterthoughts (on Documentary Photography),” in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Who Is Speaking Thus? Some Questions about Documentary Photography,” in The Event Horizon: Essays on Hope, Sexuality, Social Space and Media(tion) in Art, ed. Lorne Falk and Barbara Fischer (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1987), 193–214; Paula Rabinowitz, They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary (London: Verso, 1994); and John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988). On documentary’s historical role in constructing the black subject, see Paul A. Rogers, “Hard Core Poverty,” in Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography, ed. Deborah Willis (New York: New Press, 1994), 158–68; Stuart Hall, “Reconstruction Work: Images of Post-war Black Settlement,” in Family Snaps: The Meanings of Domestic Photography, ed. Jo Spence and Patricia Holland (London: Virago, 1991), 152–64; and Nicholas Natan-

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notes to pages 90–104

son, The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992). 42. On victim photography, see Rosler, “In, Around, and Afterthoughts.” The compelling features of billboards are spelled out by the FSA director Roy Stryker in “Documentary Photography,” cited in James Guimond, American Photography and the American Dream (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 133–34. 43. On the distinction between portrait and type, see Brian Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes,” in Fusco and Wallis, Only Skin Deep, 177–81. 44. For more on documentary style and the effect of accessibility, see Guimond, American Photography, chapter 2; and Sara Blair, Harlem Crossroads: Black Writers and the Photograph in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), chapter 2. 45. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). 46. Walt Sanders arrived in the United States in 1937, after working for German picture magazines, and returned to Germany as a Life reporter in 1946 to cover the aftermath of the war. 47. Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 50. 48. My interpretation of Keating’s project is shaped by a telephone conversation with him on August 16, 1995, in which he related his conversion in the early 1950s to the belief that segregation was “preposterous.” He was at that time an established photojournalist whose work was beginning to appear in the New York Times, Life, Look, Holiday, Pageant, National Geographic, and Travel and Leisure. The series I discuss was made for a story on segregation that he was preparing for Pageant. 49. Telephone conversation with Cecil J. Williams, April 22, 2001. 50. Dyer, White, 120, 113. 51. Milt Hinton, in Milt Hinton, David G. Berger, and Holly Maxson, OverTime: The Jazz Photographs of Milt Hinton (San Francisco: Pomegranate Art Books, 1991), 9. 52. Milt Hinton and David G. Berger, Bass Line: The Stories and Photographs of Milt Hinton (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 134; and telephone conversation with Milt Hinton, December 18, 1997. Although Hinton was born in Mississippi, he was raised from the age of nine in Chicago. 53. For a broad sample of Withers’s photography, see Ernest C. Withers, Pictures Tell the Story: Reflections in History, with contributions by F. Jack Hurley, Brooks Johnson, and Daniel J. Wolff (Norfolk, VA: Chrysler Museum of Art, 2000). 54. Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 518–19. 3 . C U LT U R A L M E MORY A N D T H E C ON DI T ION S OF V I SI B I L I T Y

1. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 26; emphasis in original. 2. Leigh Raiford, “Restaging Revolution: Black Power, Vibe Magazine, and Photographic Memory,” in The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory, ed. Renee C. Romano and Leigh Raiford (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 233.

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3. Vicki Goldberg, The Power of Photography: How Photographs Changed Our Lives (New York: Abbeville Publishing Group, 1991), 135. 4. John Berger, About Looking (New York: Vintage, 1980), 62; Susan Sontag, “Regarding the Torture of Others,” New York Times Magazine, May 23, 2004; Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 6–8. 5. According to Clifford M. Kuhn, Harlon E. Joye, and E. Bernard West, Living Atlanta: An Oral History of the City, 1914–1948 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990): “On streetcars, in waiting rooms, at the train stations, in restaurants and at City Hall, the signs read ‘White’ and ‘Colored’ ” (10). In Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn (New York: Scribner, 1996), Gary M. Pomerantz claims that Atlanta remained a “strictly segregated city” until 1962, when the new administration of Ivan Allen Jr. ordered the removal of the “White” and “Colored” signs over the drinking fountains in the City Hall (206, 303). 6. In a telephone conversation on May 7, 1997, Petie Bogen-Garrett, curator of pictures at the Library of Virginia, noted both the frustration of being unable to meet the current interest in photographs of segregation and the speculation that many of these photographs had been destroyed to remove embarrassing reminders of a system that had failed. 7. “Tennessee Valley Authority Architecture,” Pencil Points 20 (November 1939), 704. 8. After opening at the New York Historical Society in 2000, the exhibit traveled to several cities. The companion volume, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, includes essays by James Allen, Hilton Als, John Lewis, and Leon Litwack (see n. 9 below). 9. J. R. Moehringer, “An Obsessive Quest to Make People See,” Los Angeles Times, August 27, 2000, www.latimes.com/news/nation/updates/lat_lynch000827. According to Roberta Smith, the postcards “were produced in the hundreds and occasionally the thousands” (“An Ugly Legacy Lives On, Its Glare Unsoftened by Age,” New York Times, January 13, 2000). This claim must also be qualified, however, by Jacqueline Goldsby’s assertion that “lynching photographs were fewer in number and moved more surreptitiously within the public sphere than did other types of photocards generally” (A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006], 248). For other accounts, see Leon F. Litwack, “Hellhounds,” in James Allen, Hilton Als, John Lewis, and Leon F. Litwack, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms Publishers, 2000), 8–37; Leigh Raiford, “The Consumption of Lynching Images,” in Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, ed. Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis (New York: International Center of Photography, 2003), 267–73; and Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 113–45. 10. Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret, 275. Allen describes both his process and his motives in his afterword to Without Sanctuary. Not all viewers, and especially not all African American male viewers, believe he has succeeded, and the volume includes a strong protest against the necessity of re-viewing these scenes of torture (Hilton Als, “GWTW,” in Allen et al., Without Sanctuary, 38–44). 11. “Loomis and Burke Doing Business Again,” PM, February 23, 1947, 5. 12. These numbers depend in part on how the photographs are catalogued. The total number of prints and negatives (proposed by Ulrich Keller in The Highway as Habitat: A Roy

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notes to pages 108–109

Stryker Documentation, 1943–1955 [Santa Barbara, CA: University Art Museum, 1986], 25; Grace M. Mayer in her introduction to The Bitter Years: 1935–1941, ed. Edward Steichen [New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1962]; and Maren Stange in Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America 1890–1950 [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989]), is larger than the group that were ultimately housed in the Library of Congress, which took custody of the photographs after the end of the Second World War. According to Carl Fleischhauer and Beverly W. Brannan in their appendix to Documenting America, 1935–1943 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), there are 88,000 photographic prints in the FSA-OWI classified file in the Prints and Photographs Reading Room of the Library of Congress. Approximately 77,000 were produced by the FSA-OWI; about 11,000 photographs were added by Stryker from other sources. In a different organization of the images according to “lots” and known as the FSA-OWI Collection, however, there are approximately 107,000 photographs and approximately 144,000 negatives. The discrepancies are partially attributable to Stryker’s “killing” of images he deemed uninteresting or unsuitable. In addition to the FSAOWI photographs, members of Stryker’s photographic team produced another 67,000 blackand white images after he moved with some of his staff to direct the public-relations division of Standard Oil of New Jersey in 1943. 13. Quoted in Great Images of America (New York: Time Books, 1999), 1. Edward Steichen echoed Stryker’s ambitions by referring to a selection of these images as “the most remarkable human documents that were ever rendered in pictures” (ibid., 44). Paul Vanderbilt, who organized the FSA-OWI file for the Library of Congress, described the collection as “the nucleus of a great photo documentation of all America, the collective repository for the work of tens of thousands of photographers,” a “panoramic central file” (“Preliminary Report on the Organization of a Master Photograph File for the Publication Section of the Office of War Information,” 31 October 1942, cited by Alan Trachtenberg, “From Image to Story: Reading the File,” in Fleischhauer and Brannan, Documenting America, 55). Alan Trachtenberg himself deems the project “perhaps the greatest collective effort (though not the first) in the history of photography to mobilize resources to create a cumulative picture of a place and time: in Roy Stryker’s words, ‘to portray America’ ” (ibid., 58). 14. Nicholas Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 66, 68. Natanson estimates that the percentage is slightly higher in the RA-FSA component of the file (10.1 percent) than in the OWI component (8.6 percent). 15. U.S. Resettlement Administration, First Annual Report (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1935), 97; cited by Annette Melville, Farm Security Administration, Historical Section: A Guide to Textual Records in the Library of Congress (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1985), 11. 16. Interview with Nicholas Natanson, 26 February 1987; cited by Natanson, Black Image, 259. 17. Letter from Jack Delano to Roy Stryker, May 9, 1940, cited in Photographic Memories (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 32. 18. Roy Stryker, cited by Milton Meltzer, Dorothea Lange: A Photographer’s Life (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1978), 176. Lange had written to Stryker on May 2, 1938, about

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her desire to “do some work on disenfranchisement in the South, as the result of the poll tax. Dynamite on this one!” Stryker did not write back. See Natanson, Black Image, 61. 19. Rosskam initiated the project with Viking, which published it in 1941. “Picture book of negro life” is the phrase used by Viking editor Paul Reynolds in a letter to Richard Wright (January 23, 1941), encouraging him to accept Viking’s offer. JWJ MSS 3, box 103, folder 1533, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University. This collection includes the requisition form and other materials. 20. Richard Wright and Edwin Rosskam, 12 Million Black Voices (1941; New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1988), 64, 99. 21. Martha Jane Nadell, Enter the New Negroes: Images of Race in American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). See also Sara Blair, Harlem Crossroads: Black Writers and the Photograph in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), chapter 2, which attributes the inclusion of this image to Wright’s own photographic prowess. 22. For a powerful reading of this photograph, see Jeff Allred, “From Eye to We: Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices, Documentary, and Pedagogy,” American Literature 78, no. 3 (September 2006), 549–83. 23. On photojournalism’s coming of age in the 1940s, see Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003); and the essays collected in Picturing the Past: Media, History, and Photography, ed. Bonnie Brennen and Hanno Hardt (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). 24. Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 15. 25. Clare Booth Luce, “America in the Golden Age,” cited (with some caveats) by James Guimond in American Photography and the American Dream (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 156. Guimond makes a compelling case for the sensationalism that motivated Life, in contrast to the more tempered approach of Look, to which a number of FSA photographers migrated. In a photo essay titled “Prejudice: Our Postwar Battle” (May 1, 1945), for example, Look openly championed the fight against domestic prejudice and included photographs of anti-Japanese and anti-Semitic signage and graffiti, but, interestingly, none of Jim Crow signs (although these were summarized verbally). 26. On the Double V campaign, see Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Marching Blacks (New York: Dial Press,1945), and the essays collected by Rayford W. Logan in What the Negro Wants (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,1944), especially the contribution by A. Philip Randolph. Although not an émigré, the Swedish sociologist Gunner Myrdal translated his extended visit to the United States into the signal account of the nation’s brewing racial crisis, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper, 1944). 27. Ebony, November 1945, 1. Palfi, whose work is housed at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, documented more Jim Crow signs than any other photographer. Her depictions of Jim Crow form a portion of her broad documentation of racial violence and discrimination during (and after) her three-year tenure of the prestigious Rosenwald fellowship (1946–49). On the lack of support for Palfi’s projects, see Guimond, Amer-

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notes to pages 113–115

ican Photography, 142. A selection of Palfi’s photographs can be seen in James L. Enyeart, Invisible in America: An Exhibition of Photographs by Marion Palfi (Lawrence: University of Kansas Museum of Art, 1973); Reframing America (Tucson, AZ: Center for Creative Photography, 1995); and Stetson Kennedy, Jim Crow Guide: The Way It Was (1959; Boca Raton: Florida Atlantic University Press, 1990). 28. According to Pamela Newkirk, the black press reached its zenith in 1945, when the Chicago Defender achieved a circulation of 257,000, the Pittsburgh Courier 202,000, and the Afro-American (Baltimore) 137,000. Newkirk characterizes the Johnson Publishing Company, founded in 1945 as the publisher of virtually all the picture magazines, as “the most successful black publishing enterprise in the world” (Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media [New York: New York University Press, 2000], xxv). 29. The story originally appeared on the first page of the Chicago Defender on March 17, 1945, with a pledge in the following issue (March 24) to check on the replacement boat’s facilities; the sequel, on March 31, reported “complete victory.” Walter Winchell reports the story in his “Howcum Department” column in the New York Post on March 23. Reprinting Winchell’s column in its March 31 issue, the Defender had the final word: “New York newspapers began—a little late—investigating the latest insult to Miss Liberty.” The black press in general also follows the actions of NAACP, Urban League, Core, Committee for Racial Democracy, and many local advocacy groups in reporting on efforts to desegregate facilities across the nation. 30. Rivera is quoted in Exposures of a Movement (directed by Steve Crump, 1996). 31. The story and the photograph, under the heading “Jail . . . for a Photo,” were published in February 1961 by the Southern Patriot, the journal of the Southern Conference Educational Fund, which was committed to chronicling even unexceptional civil rights abuses and which tracked the story of segregated Coke machines for over a decade. The photograph is now one of the five in the NAACP photo archive in the Library of Congress (Lot 13087). On the greater risk involved in photographing “white” (rather than “colored”) facilities, see J. C. Hickman’s story about his experiences as a black photojournalist in Dallas in the 1950s in The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow: Jim Crow Stories, episode 3, Public Broadcasting Service, www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/narrative_hickman.html. 32. Gordon Parks, To Smile in Autumn (New York: Norton, 1979), 108–9. A slightly tamer version of the story appears in Half Past Autumn: A Retrospective (Boston: Little, Brown & Co, 1997), the catalog that accompanied the exhibition organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art. The Life series ran from September 3 to October 1, 1956, and on December 10 the magazine published “A Sequel to Segregation,” on the reprisals suffered by the Causey family. Parks’s photographs were used in the third and fourth installments, September 17 and 24. 33. Telephone conversation with Alex Rivera, March 5, 1998. 34. Commentary by Clarence Page on the photography exhibit “Reflections in Black,” NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, November 29, 2000, www.pbs.org/newshour/essays/novem ber00/page_11-29.html. 35. Examples of such works, following the precedent established by the collaboration between Richard Wright and Edwin Rosskam, include Langston Hughes and Milton Meltzer, A Pictorial History of the Negro in America (New York: Crown, 1963), in which the signs are illustrated by photographs by John Vachon and Esther Bubley; The Movement: Documen-

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tary of a Struggle for Equality (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964), with text by Lorraine Hansberry and (with the exception of a few photographs of New York City by Roy De Carava) 123 photographs by white photographers, primarily Danny Lyon, who provides the photos of the segregation signs; Leonard Freed, Black in White America (New York: Grossman, n.d.), with Freed’s own photographs, including extensive coverage of the signage; and L. Mpho Mabunda, ed., The African American Almanac (Detroit, MI: Gale, 7th ed. 1997), with coverage of the signs from the FSA-OWI and AP/Wide World Photo archives. Tellingly, the Ebony Pictorial History of Black America, vol. 3 (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, 1971), which draws largely from the Johnson Company’s own archive of black photography, includes no coverage of the signs. Similarly, the thousands of African American photographs collected for Behind the Veil, sponsored by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, include no depictions of Jim Crow signs (and the published volume, as a result, includes some familiar examples from the FSA-OWI archive). 36. Deborah Willis, in Black Photographers Bear Witness: 100 Years of Social Protest, ed. Deborah Willis and Howard Dodson (Williamstown, MA: Williams College Museum of Art, 1989), 9 (which contains no photographs of Jim Crow signs). See also Deborah Willis, Black Photographers, 1840–1940, An Illustrated Bio-bibliography, and Deborah Willis, ed., Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography (New York: Norton, 1994). Other important accounts of the traditions and priorities of black photography include Angela Y. Davis, “Underexposed: Photography and Afro-American History,” in Davis, Women, Culture and Politics (New York: Vintage, 1990), 219–32; bell hooks, “In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life,” Art on My Mind: Visual Politics (New York: New Press, 1995), 54–64; Valencia Hollins Coar, A Century of Black Photographers: 1840–1960 (Providence: Rhode Island School of Design, 1983); Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, Viewfinders: Black Women Photographers (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1986); and the special issue of Ten.8 titled “Evidence: New Light of AfroAmerican Images,” no. 24. None of these collections includes a photograph of a Jim Crow sign. 37. Robin D. G. Kelley, foreword to Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present, ed. Deborah Willis (New York: Norton, 2000), ix–x. 38. See Barbie Zelizer, Remembering To Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 1–15; Vicki Goldberg, The Power of Photography: How Photographs Changed Our Lives (New York: Abbeville Press, 1991), 135–61. 39. Michael Griffin, “The Great War Photographs: Constructing Myths of History and Photojournalism,” in Picturing the Past: Media, History, and Photography, ed. Bonnie Brennen and Hanno Hardt (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 146–47. For analogous stories designed to refashion memory in the nineteenth-century novel, see Nicholas Dames, Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810–1870 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 40. Barbie Zelizer, “From the Image of Record to the Image of Memory: Holocaust Photography Then and Now,” in Brennen and Hardt, Picturing the Past, 98–121. 41. Umberto Eco, “A Photograph,” in Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1986); cited by Michael Griffin in “Great War Photographs,” 129. 42. Russell Miller, Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History (New York: Grove, 1997), 19. 43. When Henri Cartier-Bresson published his seminal text The Decisive Moment in 1952,

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according to Russell Miller, it cemented his “reputation as the world’s finest photo-journalist” (Miller, Magnum, 102). 44. According to Charles Flowers in his introductory comments to Elliott Erwitt, Snaps (London: Phaidon, 2001), for which this photograph is the opening image. Flowers also notes that when staff members at his hometown African American museum viewed the photograph, “they also wanted to hang it high so that today’s children and teens could see it” (15). 45. The decision is consistent, however, with the institute’s commitment to the ideology of racial reconciliation that prevailed during its completion in the 1990s. See Glenn Eskew, “The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and the New Ideology of Tolerance,” and Jennifer Fuller, “Debating the Present through the Past: Representations of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1990s,” in Romano and Raiford, Civil Rights Movement, 28–66, 167–96. 46. Rob Kroes, Photographic Memories: Private Pictures, Public Images, and American History (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2007), 13. See also Goldberg, Power of Photography, 135–61.

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4 . R E ST RO OM D O OR S A N D DR I N K I NG F OU N TA I N S

1. The extent to which black emasculation is a white male fantasy is emphasized by bell hooks in “Reconstructing Black Masculinity,” Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 87–114. 2. Jacques Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud,” Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 152, 151. For a critique of psychoanalytic attempts to suppress the “space between” the signs of gender represented by Lacan’s two doors, see Virginia L. Blum, “Ladies and Gentlemen: Train Rides and Other Oedipal Stories,” in Places through the Body, ed. Heidi J. Nast and Steve Pile (London: Routledge, 1998), 263–80. 3. The usage of ségrégation in French to refer to racial segregation was first noted in 1950, according to both the Dictionnaire Hachette and Le grand Robert de la langue française. Hachette lists, as the word’s second meaning, “ségrégation raciale.” As an example of this usage, the Robert cites the term’s explicit reference to Jim Crow in Simone de Beauvoir’s L’Amérique au jour le jour, published in 1954. Having entered French culture shortly before Lacan’s 1957 lecture, the racial overtones of the expression lois de ségrégation were almost certainly intended by Lacan and audible to his listeners. 4. For a reading of the ways that race is implicated along with materiality, excrement, and excess as the outside (or outhouse) of Lacan’s diagram, see Maia Boswell, “ ‘Ladies,’ ‘Gentlemen,’ and ‘Colored’: ‘The Agency of (Lacan’s Black) Letter’ in the Outhouse,” Cultural Critique 41 (Winter 1999): 103–38. Boswell and I agree about the construction of an excremental racial outside, but, reading Lacan through the lens of Toni Morrison, Boswell gives him credit for incorporating this exterior as exterior, whereas I see him favoring the symmetry of racial and sexual difference. 5. For a description and selective reproduction of the Greyhound bus assignment, see Esther Bubley, “Cross-Country Bus Trip,” in Documenting America, 1935–1943, ed. Carl Fleischhauer and Beverly W. Brannan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 312–29.

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6. Cleveland Sellers, The River of No Return: The Autobiography of a Black Militant and the Life and Death of SNCC (New York: William Morrow, 1973), 16. 7. According to Bertram Wilbur Doyle, The Etiquette of Race Relations in the South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1937), the response to this distinction among African Americans in the South was to drop the term woman entirely and replace it with lady. This trend was reversed in the different cultural climate of the 1980s, when “womanism” became the African American alternative to feminism. On the difference between “white ladies” and “colored women,” see also Toni Morrison, “What the Black Woman Thinks about Women’s Liberation,” New York Times Magazine, August 22, 1971. 8. See, for example, Diane Nash, “Interview with Juan Williams,” in Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954–1965, ed. Juan Williams (New York: Penguin, 1988), 130; Brenda Scott Wilkinson, The Civil Rights Movement: An Illustrated History (New York: Crescent Books, 1997), 115; Langston Hughes and Milton Meltzer, A Pictorial History of the Negro in America (New York: Crown, 1956), 318; and Gerda Lerner, Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 167. 9. Chuck McDew, interview with author, June 24, 1997. 10. This is the way Miss Jane remembers the Bayonne courthouse in the early 1960s in Ernest J. Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (New York: Bantam Books, 1971), 228–29. The denial of gender privileges to African American women has been a subject of substantial historical and theoretical inquiry, including bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981); Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: Norton, 1985); Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); and Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987), 65–81. 11. Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 253. 12. On African American women’s pathbreaking role in bringing suits against their exclusion from the “ladies’ car,” see Barbara Young Welke, Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution 1865–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 249–375; and Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 18–20. 13. Frederick Douglass, “The Civil Rights Case,” speech at Lincoln Hall, Washington, DC, 22 October 1883, quoted by Charles A. Lofgren, The Plessy Case: A Legal-Historical Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 147; editorial, New Orleans Times Democrat, 9 July 1890, quoted in Otto H. Olsen, ed., The Thin Disguise: Turning Point in Negro History (New York: Humanities Press, 1967), 53. See also George Washington Cable, “The Freedman’s Case in Equity” (1884), in The Negro Question: A Selection of Writings on Civil Rights in the South, ed. Arlin Turner (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1958), 74–75; and Mary Church Terrell, A Colored Woman in a White World (1940; Salem, NH: Ayer Press, 1986), 298–99. 14. The wording of the exemption in Plessy v. Ferguson is quoted in Lofgren, Plessy Case, 191. Two-thirds of the nine states adopting Jim Crow legislation between 1887 and 1892 provided some kind of nurse’s exemption.

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notes to pages 131–148

15. Quoted in Lofgren, Plessy Case, 119. According to Lofgren, state and federal courts were extensively citing the Miles case by 1890. See also Barbara Welke, 329, 333–34. 16. “Lady among the races” is the expression used in the authoritative Introduction to the Science of Sociology by Robert E. Park, cofounder of the prestigious University of Chicago school of sociology, and Ernest W. Burgess (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1921), 139. 17. Jonathan Swift, “The Lady’s Dressing Room” (1730), in which Strephon is disabused of femininity’s ruse by peeking into his lady’s dressing room. 18. In “Whiteness and Ethnicity,” David Roediger argues that the significant presence of people of African descent in Cuba produced a racialized sense of whiteness among Cubans of European descent (Race Critical Theories: Text and Context, ed. Philomena Essed and David Theo Goldberg [Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002], 330). This racial identity traveled with them and was generally accepted in Miami where, uniquely among immigrants from the Caribbean, Cubans were allowed to use “white” as well as “colored” beaches and other facilities. Additional evidence of the sign’s inclusionary intention is that the courtesy of translation was not typically provided on signs intended to exclude Spanish speakers. 19. See “Loomis and Burke Doing Business Again,” in the liberal newspaper PM, 23 February 1947, with photos by Palfi and text by Stetson Kennedy. 20. For accounts of the event, see the Jackson Daily News, June 7 and 8, 1961; New York Times, June 7–9, 1961. 21. John Vachon, “Tribute to a Man, an Era, an Art,” Harper’s, September 1973, 98. 22. The phrase was first used in the title of the book by Abram Kardiner and Lionel Oversey, The Mark of Oppression: Explorations in the Personality of the American Negro (New York: Meridian Books, 1951), which documents the ways that systemic discrimination destroys African American self-esteem. The title typifies the tendency in the postwar period to figure racial injustice as physical injury. 23. This combination of legal victory with social decline characterized precisely the period between these photographs, marked by increasing black unemployment and domestic disarray. For Daniel Patrick Moynihan, these were critical years in the decline of the black standard of living, with almost 30 percent of African American men unemployed during the prosperous year of 1963. See Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Labor, 1965), 67. 24. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, in Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of “Brown v. Board of Education” and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Vintage, 1975), 782. 25. In The Creatures Time Forgot: Photography and Disability Imagery (New York: Routledge, 1992), David Hevey distinguishes between a medical model “in which the impairment and the disability are both contained within the body” and a social model that “separates[s] out the bodily impairment from the socially created disablement” (16–17). The racialized counterpart can be glimpsed by comparing the perspective of Erwitt’s photograph to that of the African American social psychologist Kenneth B. Clark, whose 1950 report to the Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth is the first item the Supreme Court cites in its controversial footnote 11 of the Brown decision. Not only does Clark insist that segregation harms all children, but he also resists the discourse of crippling. See Kenneth B.

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Clark, “The Desegregation Cases: Criticism of the Social Scientist’s Role,” Prejudice and Your Child, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963). 26. Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” in I Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive, ed. Alice Walker (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1979), 155. This playfulness is more characteristic of Erwitt’s photographic practice than is the pathos of racial disability. 27. Erwitt’s third photograph specifically recalls the 1949 Hollywood version of the Broadway play Home of the Brave, which transforms the play’s Jewish protagonist into a black solider who is literally paralyzed by guilt over the relief he feels when his white (and at times racially abusive) friend is killed in battle. For a reading of how this film works first to evoke black anger at racism and then to dissolve it into the universalized problem of survivor guilt, see Michael Paul Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 228–50. For reading of Hollywood’s rendition of the postwar crisis in masculinity that does not focus on race in particular, see Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York, 1992), chapter 4. 28. Stanley M. Elkins coined the expression damage hypothesis in the third edition of Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 267–70; the quotes are from “The Howard University Address,” given by Lyndon B. Johnson, 4 June 1965, drafted by Richard N. Goodwin and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, reproduced in Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey, The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), 126, 130, 125. For a fuller study of the postwar damage hypothesis, see Rogin, Blackface, White Noise, chapter 7. 29. Martha Rosler, “In, Around, and Afterthoughts (on Documentary Photography),” in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 307. 30. Deborah Willis, “Visualizing Political Struggle: Civil Rights–Era Photography,” in American Visual Cultures, ed. David Holloway and John Beck (London: Continuum, 2005), 173. 31. Lyon describes his relationship with Forman and with SNCC in Danny Lyon, Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992): Forman treated me like he treated most newcomers. He put me to work. “You got a camera? Go inside the courthouse. Down at the back they have a big water cooler for whites and next to it a little bowl for Negroes. Go in there and take a picture of that.” With Forman’s blessing, I had found a place in the civil rights movement that I would occupy for the next two years. James Forman would direct me, protect me, and at times fight for a place for me in the movement. He is directly responsible for my pictures existing at all. (30) For fuller accounts of Danny Lyon’s career as a SNCC photographer, see Leigh Raiford, “ ‘Come Let Us Build a New World Together’: SNCC and Photography of the Civil Rights Movement,” American Quarterly 59, no. 4 (December 2007), 1129–57; and Sara Blair, Harlem Crossroads: Black Writers and the Photograph in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 203–7.

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notes to pages 152–159

32. For a more extensive account of the Standard Oil of New Jersey (SONJ) documentary project, see Steven W. Plattner, Roy Stryker: U.S.A., 1943–1950: The Standard Oil (New Jersey) Photographic Project (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983). Of the 135 photographs in Plattner’s book, which was also the catalog for an exhibit at the International Center of Photography, Bubley’s is the only representation of a segregated facility. Needless to say, the SONJ publication The Lamp, which uses Bubley’s photos to illustrate an essay on tobacco, does not include this one; see “Tobacco: Heat from Oil Cures Tons of This Great North Carolina Crop,” Lamp 29 (January 1947): 20–23. 33. Just how mythological they were is well documented by historical studies. For an account of the racial dynamics that produced the nineteenth-century white working class, see David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Haymarket, 1991). 34. For an analysis of the interplay between the eroticization of the product and the commodification of the female body, see Simone Weil Davis, Living Up to the Ads: Gender Fictions of the 1920s (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 35. For Camel’s ad slogans, see Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 341. In chapter 6 of Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society (New York: Basic Books, 1984), Michael Schudson claims that women began smoking cigarettes in significant numbers in the 1920s and became a target of advertising by the late 1920s. In White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), Jan Nederveen Pieterse discusses the disappearance of plantation culture in advertising. 36. In The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), Mary Ann Doane links the fetishization of the female body in advertising during and (especially) immediately after World War II to the effort to preserve an image of femininity apart from female participation in the workforce (see 28–29). This shift is crystallized in the contrast between this Camels ad and one produced during the war that featured a woman defense worker smoking a cigarette and announcing: “In my new defense job, less nicotine in the smoke is important to me. I stick to Camels.” 37. André Bazin discusses the wartime origins and attributes of the distinctively American pinup girl, but not her fetishistic qualities, in “Entomology of the Pin-Up Girl,” in What Is Cinema?, trans. and ed. Hugh Gray, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 2:158–62. 38. Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York is the title of a 1911 book by Mary White Ovington, who two years earlier cofounded the NAACP. 39. Life, 24 September 1956, 98–112. The first photograph is included in this story; the second is included in the catalogue for Parks’s 1997 retrospective exhibit, Half Past Autumn: A Retrospective (Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1997). 40. Gordon Parks, To Smile in Autumn (New York: Norton, 1979), 107. 41. Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (1892), in The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper, ed. Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 63, emphasis in original. In a recent twist on Parks’s image, the hip-hop group Common not only placed the photograph on the front cover of their 2000 album Like Water for Chocolate but

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also commissioned a poster in which the young girl on the margin of Parks’s image is turned around to take center stage between the “white” and “colored” fountains which she claims (one hand on each) as her parental legacies. 42. For the differences between social eating and drinking, see Mary Douglas, “Deciphering a Meal,” in Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 249–75, where she explains: “Drinks are for strangers, acquaintances, workmen, and family. Meals are for family, close friends, honored guests. The grand operator of the system is the line between intimacy and distance” (256).

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5 . T H E EY E BA L L A N D T H E WA L L

1. From Myrlie Evers’s description of the dating rituals of her Mississippi adolescence in Mrs. Medgar Evers, with William Peters, For Us the Living (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1967), 45. 2. Paula Rabinowitz, They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary (London: Verso, 1994), 6. 3. Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 11, 12. 4. Cited by James Farmer, “Separation v. Integration Debate,” Dialogue Magazine, 1962, in Negro Protest Thought in the Twentieth Century, ed. Francis L. Broderick and August Meier (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1965), 372. 5. “Sitdowns Are Held Inevitable: Ex-College Head Talks at Bennett,” Greensboro Daily News, February 15, 1960; Booker T. Washington, cited by Lerone Bennett Jr., in Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America (New York: Penguin, 1993), 265. 6. See the classic text by Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Praeger, 1966). 7. “Canadian Newsman Says Fear of ‘Unknown’ Upsetting Whites,” Jet, April 7, 1960, 14–15. Elevators, of course, were also frequently segregated, with the “Negroes and Freight” sign common there as well as on trains. 8. For some examples of the enormous body of anthropological and sociological literature on the socializing function of meals, see, in addition to the text by Mary Douglas cited above, Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970) and The Origin of Table Manners, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper and Row, 1978 [1968]); Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994 [1939]); Kathryn Grover, Dining in America: 1850–1900 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987); Margaret Visser, The Rituals of Dinner: The Origins, Evolution, Eccentricities, and Meaning of Table Manners (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991); and David Bell and Gill Valentine, Consuming Geographies: We Are Where We Eat (London: Routledge, 1997). 9. For fuller accounts of these developments, see David M. Schwartz, “Life Was Sweeter, and More Innocent, in Our Soda Days,” Smithsonian 17, no. 4 (July 1986), 114–24; and Philip Langdon, Orange Roofs, Golden Arches: The Architecture of American Chain Restaurants (New York: Knopf, 1986), chapter 1. As Bernice L. Thomas explains in America’s 5 & 10 Cent Stores: The Kress Legacy (Washington, DC: National Buildings Museum, 1997), the lunch counter

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notes to pages 164–174

became a standard feature of the highly standardized five-and-dime store chains by the mid1930s. 10. The argument that American national identity depended on standardization is, of course, a common one. See, for example, Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Random House, 1972); and Philip Fisher, “Democratic Social Space: Whitman, Melville, and the Promise of American Transparency,” Representations 24 (Fall 1988), 60–101. 11. Hopper is cited by Gail Levin in Edward Hopper: A Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 1 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 9. Although Hopper resisted the designation of an American Scene painter, which he found parochial, and retained his allegiance to French art, he gave his vision of urban isolation a distinctively American inflection, transposed from the Parisian café to the New York diner. On the social and aesthetic power of Nighthawks, see Robert Hughes, American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (New York: Knopf, 1997), who asserts that Hopper’s “images have become part of the very grain and texture of American experience” (422). 12. White Castle promotional brochure, cited by David Gerard Hogan, Selling ’Em by the Sack: White Castle and the Creation of American Food (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 45. 13. Whiteness signified purity, and castles strength, to Billy Ingram, the White Castle architect who, in partnership with Walt Anderson, transformed the incipient hamburger business into an economic dynamo. See Hogan, Selling ’Em by the Sack; and Paul Lukas, “White Castle, Still Proud, Takes a Turn as a Film Set,” New York Times, August 4, 2004. 14. For a rich account of these developments, see Alex Zwerdling, Improvised Europeans: American Literary Expatriates and the Siege of London (New York: Basic Books, 1998), chapter 3. 15. Hogan, Selling ’Em by the Sack, 47, 3, 1. For White Castle’s clones and imitations, and the legal battles provoked by some of them, see also Langdon, Orange Roofs, Golden Arches, chapter 2; and John P. Nichols, The Chain Store Tells Its Story (New York: Institute of Distribution, Inc., 1940), in which White Castle constitutes “example Number One” of the phenomenal expansion of chain stores in the postwar period. 16. Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin, The Making of a Southerner (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991 [1947]), 135; a white Southern woman cited by Leon F. Litwack in Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998), 245; Lerone Bennett Jr., “The Life and Times of Jim Crow,” Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America (New York: Penguin, 1962). 17. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 18. Founded in 1925, the chain never fulfilled its national aspirations and disappeared in the 1950s. On the pervasiveness of the open blackface mouth as a vehicle of an imaginary Southern past, see Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), especially chapters 4 and 6. 19. On Jews as the limit case of whiteness, see Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), 53. Karen Brodkin proposes phrases such as “not quite white,” “not bright white,” or “conditionally white” in How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in

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America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998). On the association of Jews with disease, see Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). In a personal conversation, July 17, 1997, Florence Wilson-Davis, the public relations manager for the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, recalled that her father instructed her to look for “No Dogs” signs as a way to know whether she could enter a place that had no explicit racial signs posted. 20. The rate card from Barrett’s Bald Mountain House is at the Adirondack Museum, Blue Mountain Lake, New York. In an interview on National Public Radio’s This American Life (March 2, 2006), Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg described seeing “No Dogs or Jews” signs on bed-and-breakfast establishments during a family trip through Pennsylvania in the 1940s. A similar recollection is given concrete form in Barry Levinson’s 1999 film Liberty Heights, in which a “No Jews, Dogs or Coloreds Allowed” sign is posted on a Baltimore country club. A “No Niggers Jews Dogs” sign from the 1950s (but without a specific provenance) is housed in the Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan. 21. See Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Pantheon, 1990), 121–97; John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (1937; Garden City: Doubleday, 1957), 126–30; Charles S. Johnson, Patterns of Negro Segregation (New York: Harper, 1943), 56–77; and Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944; New York: Harper, 1962), 636– 39. 22. On the living conditions for agricultural workers in Florida in the 30s, see Michael Carlebach and Eugene F. Provenzo Jr., Farm Security Administration Photographs of Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), 11. 23. Ed Gardner’s memories about Birmingham corroborate the sense that eating places were more stringently regulated than other sites: “Everything from top to bottom was segregated. And then the eating places . . . had two doors. They had to have a sign on there, Colored and White, and then the owner had to have a wall inside there seven feet high so the black and white couldn’t see each other.” Cited in Howell Raines, My Soul Is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered (New York: Penguin, 1977), 140. 24. The opinion handed down by Justice Harold Burton condemned the Jim Crow curtain for emphasizing “the artificiality of a difference in treatment which serves only to call attention” to the race of the passengers “holding identical tickets and using the same public dining facility.” Cited by Catherine A. Barnes, Journey from Jim Crow: The Desegregation of Southern Transit (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 76. Apparently echoing the language of the Court, Flannery O’Connor’s story “The Artificial Negro” describes how the Jim Crow curtain reinstantiates white supremacy over wealthier and better-dressed African American passengers by screening out of view all kinds of unsettling differences, those of social superiority no less than those of social inferiority. In Jazz, Toni Morrison trenchantly describes the “green-as-poison curtain separating the colored people eating from the rest of the diners” (New York: Knopf, 1992, 31). 25. Kennedy’s formulation, in the series coauthored with the New Republic contributor Elizabeth Gardner, appears almost identically in the Afro-American, February 4, 1950, 13, and the Daily Compass, November 19, 1949, 20, and in a somewhat altered form in Stetson

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notes to pages 181–184

Kennedy, Jim Crow Guide: The Way It Was (1959; Boca Raton: Florida Atlantic University Press, 1990), 186–87. I have cited the Daily Compass version, which puts “are made physically ill” in scare quotes to indicate the authors’ distance from this claim. 26. Lillian Smith, “The Walls of Segregation Are Crumbling,” New York Times Magazine, July 15, 1951, 9. 27. Palfi herself did go backstage; she writes in her journal of the trip “taking photos (to the amusement and pleasure of the passengers) in the Jim Crow dining car,” but these photographs have mysteriously disappeared. The journal ran from October 26, 1945, in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and ended December 15, 1945, in Athens, Alabama. This entry is from December 13, en route to Athens. The journal, along with all of Palfi’s negatives and papers, is in the Marion Palfi archive at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona. In the accompanying story, Stetson Kennedy corroborates the sense of different behavior on the other side of the divide: “Once seated, however, you are likely to fare exceptionally well, since the waiters are non-white.” “ ‘Last Call’ in the Dining Cars,” Daily Compass, November 10, 1949, 20. 28. Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 378–81. 29. Lincoln Kirstein, “Photographs of America: Walker Evans,” in Walker Evans, American Photographs (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1938), 195. Some other representative titles in which America occurs include Erskine Caldwell, Some American People; Nathan Asch, The Road: In Search of America; Louis Adamic, My America; Harold Stearns, Rediscovering America; Dorothea Lange and Paul S. Taylor, An American Exodus; and Sherwood Anderson, Puzzled America and Home Town: The Face of America (with FSA photographs selected by Edwin Rosskam). 30. James Agee in Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), 11. In American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), Shawn Michelle Smith focuses on an earlier and formative nineteenth-century phase of the camera’s intervention in “narratives of national belonging and exclusion” (5). For an analysis of the “irregular, erratic intersections” between the “ambivalent and conflicted histories” of photography and nation, see W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), chapter 5. 31. Carl Mydans, More Than Meets the Eye, cited by William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 130. Other FSA photographers who followed in Mydans’s path throughout the 1940s include Arthur Rothstein, who became technical director of Photography at Look, where he was joined in 1948 by John Vachon; and Gordon Parks, who joined the staff of Life in 1948, followed in 1949 by Esther Bubley. On Stryker’s negotiations with Look and Life, which he both desired and derided as publication outlets for the FSA file, see Sally Stein, “FSA Color: The Forgotten Document,” in Modern Photography (New York: Photography Publication Corporation, 1989), esp. 94–95. In Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America 1890–1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), Maren Stange offers statistics on the distribution of FSA photographs to commercial magazines. 32. The differences among FSA photographers were substantial and often a source of controversy between Stryker and the more independent members of his staff, especially Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. Nevertheless, some critics have argued that certain codes of or-

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ganization and framing that derived from the photographers’ urban middle-class training and audience were widely shared. See, for example, James Curtis, Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth: FSA Photography Reconsidered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989). 33. “Introduce Americans to America” were the instructions from Rexford Tugwell, the director of the Resettlement Administration, who hired Stryker to head the photographic division, as recorded in an interview with Stryker in the University of Louisville Photographic Archives, cited by Ulrich Keller in The Highway as Habitat: A Roy Stryker Documentation, 1943–1955 (Santa Barbara, CA: University Art Museum, 1986), 25. 34. For the relation of photographic aesthetics of the 30s to the “transparent eyeball” proposed by Ralph Waldo Emerson, see Carolyn Blinder, “ ‘The Transparent Eyeball’: On Emerson and Walker Evans,” Mosaic 37, no. 4 (December 2004), 149–63. 35. Grace Overmyer, Government and the Arts (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1939); quoted by Stott, Documentary Expression, 110. On the centrality of transportation to the development of national identity in the United States, see Philip Fisher, “Democratic Social Space: Whitman, Melville, and the Promise of American Transparency,” Representations 24 (Fall 1988), 64–66. 36. Keller, Highway as Habitat, 13. Keller also analyzes the different demographic consequences of highways and railways. 37. For another series of photographs that Paul Taylor took in 1934 of Lange with her camera on the top of her car, see Karin Becker Ohrn, Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980). According to Paul Taylor in a 1976 interview (cited by Therese Thau Heyman in Celebrating a Collection [Oakland: Oakland Museum of California, 1978], 64), Lange photographed from the top of her car to compensate for her shortness and to eliminate the foreground; but these goals seem to reflect his sense of her priorities rather than hers, for aside from some of the photographs of agricultural conditions she took for their collaborative project An American Exodus, she rarely presents an overview. 38. Lange’s words are recalled by Paul Taylor in a 1975 interview, cited by Milton Meltzer in Dorothea Lange: A Photographer’s Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), 137–38. 39. Rondal Partridge, interview with Nicholas Natanson, 5 August 1990, cited in Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography (Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 1992), 263. 40. Derived in part from commentary on Agee and Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (see, for example, T. V. Reed, “Unimagined Existence and the Fiction of the Real: Postmodernist Realism in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” Representations 24 [Fall 1988], 156– 76), the critique of voyeurism has found a forceful advocate in Paula Rabinowitz, who in They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary associates the female documentarians with the social workers who were recruited in the 1930s to supervise the private lives of the poor. Her primary example, however, is Margaret Bourke-White rather than the more scrupulous and sophisticated women photographers of the FSA. 41. Beaumont Newhall, “The Questioning Photographer: Dorothea Lange,” foreword to Dorothea Lange Looks at the American Country Woman (Fort Worth, TX: Amon Carter Museum, 1967), 8. 42. Natanson, Black Image, 72. He estimates Lange’s percentage as 31.1.

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notes to pages 188–196

43. On Lange’s working methods, see Rondal Partridge’s account in Meltzer, Dorothea Lange, 167, and Curtis, Mind’s Eye, 47–67. 44. Agee and Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 187. 45. The quotes are from an oral-history interview with Lange conducted by Suzanne B. Riess in 1960 and 1961, “The Making of a Documentary Photographer,” in the Bancroft Library, University of California, phrases from which are cited by Karen Becker Ohrn in Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 18; by Linda A. Morris, “A Woman of Our Generation,” in Dorothea Lange: A Visual Life, ed. Elizabeth Partridge (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 32; and by Elizabeth Partridge as the subtitle and epigraph of that volume. 46. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; New York: Bantam, 1989), 3. 47. Roy E. Stryker and Nancy Wood, In This Proud Land: America 1935–1943 as Seen in the FSA Photographs (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 14. Edward Steichen, “The F.S.A. Photographers,” in U.S. Camera 1939, ed. T. J. Maloney (New York, 1938), 44; cited in Stott, Documentary Expression, 58. 48. Quoted in Ohrn, Dorothea Lange, 24. According to Roy Stryker, Lange “had the most sensitivity and the most rapport with people of the FSA photographers” (Stryker and Wood, In This Proud Land, 13). 49. John Belton, American Cinema/American Culture (New York: McGraw Hill, 1994), 3.

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6 . D OU B L E TA K E

1. Epigraph: Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, 286–98, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). In his follow-up essay, “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in the Cinema” (ibid., 299–318), Baudry elaborates the cave analogy by drawing careful distinctions between Plato and Freud. 2. On the shift from the multisensory experience of the early nickelodeon to the tyranny of the visual in the classical cinema, see (among others), Russell Merritt, “Nickelodeon Theaters, 1905–1914: Building an Audience for the Movies,” in The American Film Industry, ed. Tino Balio (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), 59–79. Although diametrically opposed to the nickelodeons in architecture and decor, the cosmopolitan picture palaces of the 1920s also emphasized the multisensory distractions through which the exhibition site could obstruct absorption to the screen. As theorized by Siegfried Kracauer in “Cult of Distraction: On Berlin’s Picture Palaces” (New German Critique 40 [Winter 1987], 91–96), the picture palace is antithetical to Baudry’s cinema cave. 3. Cleveland Sellers, The River of No Return: The Autobiography of a Black Militant and the Life and Death of SNCC (New York: William Morrow, 1973). 4. For some recent accounts of this shift, see Linda Williams, ed., Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995); Mark Jancovich and Lucy Faire, The Place of the Audience: Cultural Geographies of Film Consumption (London: British Film Institute, 2003); and Richard Maltby, Melvyn Stokes, and Robert C. Allen, eds., Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007).

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5. Derived from Jacques Lacan’s “Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a,” in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 67–119, the relation of look to gaze has been elaborated in relation to cinema and photography by Kaja Silverman in The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996), 125–227; and in relation to family photography by Marianne Hirsch in Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 6. Key accounts of cinema’s inheritance of an ideology of monocular vision from the Renaissance invention of linear perspective include Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981); Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus” and “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema,” in Rosen, Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology; Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), especially chapters 1, 2, and 8; and Kaja Silverman, Threshold of the Visible World, especially chapter 4. 7. Following from Lacan’s famous figure of being “photo-graphed” in “Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a,” 106, an undifferentiated “camera,” sometimes written “camera/gaze,” tends to collapse the camera’s varieties and uses into a metaphoric machinery of vision. In her critical reading of Lacan, Kaja Silverman notes that “the camera has survived for a century and a half as a privileged figuration of the gaze” (Threshold of the Visible World, 150). Although Jonathan Crary persuasively critiques the presumed continuity of the tradition allying the photographic camera with the camera obscura, his insistence on the rupture in models of vision that occurred in the early decades of the nineteenth century tends to elide cinema with photography. See his Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). 8. For some firsthand accounts of that difference in perspective, produced primarily by whites deliberately attempting to view the screen from an unfamiliar location, see Charlene Regester, “From the Buzzard’s Roost: Black Movie-Going in Durham and Other North Carolina Cities during the Early Period of American Cinema,” Film History 17 (2005), 113–24. 9. In her pathbreaking Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), Jacqueline Najuma Stewart also offers a compelling account of the paradoxical coemergence of the universal spectator and the segregated audience. Focusing primarily on the “reconstructive” spectatorial practices enabled by the public sphere of the emerging race theaters in Chicago’s Black Belt, however, she notes the specific locus of the segregated balcony only in passing. Our readings are complementary, especially in our similar uses of Miriam Hansen’s Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). In keeping with Stewart’s call (in “Negroes Laughing at Themselves? Black Spectatorship and the Performance of Urban Modernity,” Critical Inquiry 29 [2003], 677) for scholarship on “black spectatorship in its many historical and geographical contexts (beyond the urban North),” my analysis attempts to fill in another piece of the picture. Robert C. Allen notes that despite the Great Migration, “in 1910 nine out of ten African Americans still lived in the South, and seven out

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of ten lived in the rural South” (“Race, Region, and Rusticity: Relocating U.S. Film History,” in Maltby, Stokes, and Allen, Going to the Movies, 35). 10. For another account of 1910 as a decisive turning point, see Virginia Woolf, “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,” in The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1950) 96. 11. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 23, 82–84. 12. As recalled by Lillian Gish, “Interview,” Reel Life, Winter 1972, cited by Lary May in Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 60. In “Nickelodeon Theaters, 1905–1914: Building an Audience for the Movies,” in Tino Balio, ed., The American Film Industry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), 59–79, Russell Merritt notes the injunctions to urban nickelodeon operators to avoid gaining the reputation of being ethnic theaters. In Babel and Babylon, Miriam Hansen examines in depth the implications of imagining film to be a universal language. 13. On the negotiation of cultural differences at theaters patronized by specific demographic groups, see Stewart, Migrating to the Movies; Mary Carbine, “ ‘The Finest Outside the Loop’: Motion Picture Exhibition in Chicago’s Black Metropolis, 1905–1928,” in Silent Film, ed. Richard Abel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 234–62; Judith Thissen, “Jewish Immigrant Audiences in New York City, 1905–1914,” and Giorgio Bertellini, “Italian Imageries, Historical Feature Films and the Fabrication of Italy’s Spectators in Early 1900s New York,” both in American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era, ed. Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 15, 28, 29–45; Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), chapter 8; Lizabeth Cohen, “Encountering Mass Culture at the Grassroots: The Experience of Chicago Workers in the 1920s,” American Quarterly, 41, no. 1 (March 1989), 6–33; and Randy Gue, “ ‘It Seems That Everything Looks Good Nowadays, as Long as It Is in the Flesh & Brownskin’: The Assertion of Cultural Difference at Atlanta’s 81 Theatre, 1934–1937,” Film History 8 (1996), 209–18. 14. To flesh out this cursory account of the complex question of “primitive” cinema, see Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde” and “ ‘Primitive’ Cinema: A Frame-Up? Or, The Trick’s on Us,” Noel Burch, “A Primitive Mode of Representation?” and Thomas Elsaesser’s “Introduction” to “The Institution Cinema: Industry, Commodity, Audiences,” all in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: British Film Institute, 1990), 56–62, 95–103, 220–27, 153–73; Kristin Thompson, “From Primitive to Classical,” in The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960, ed. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 157–73; and Stewart, Migrating to the Movies, 107– 13. On the transformation of the audience from an active to a passive presence, see Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Knopf, 1977), especially chapter 9. 15. Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, 64; Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 84; emphasis in original in both citations. Metz’s translator, Ben Brewster, introduces his essay “A Scene at the ‘Movies’ ” with a similar emphasis on “the segregation of the audience and the screen” (Elsaesser, Early Cinema, 318). 16. The Delaware law is cited in Max W. Turner and Frank B. Kennedy, “Exclusion, Ejec-

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tion, and Segregation of Theater Patrons,” Iowa Law Review 32, no. 4 (May 1947), 632–33; see also Robert B. McKay, “Segregation and Public Recreation,” Virginia Law Review 40, no. 6 (October 1954), 697–731. Thorough accounts of the legal and social development of segregated theaters are provided by Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), chapter 8; Gregory A. Waller, Main Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, 1896–1939 (New York: Prentice Hall, 1994), chapter 7; and Barbara Stones, America Goes to the Movies: 100 Years of Motion Picture Exhibition (Washington, DC: National Association of Theatre Owners, 1993), chapter 16. The civil rights acts enacted by many Northern state legislatures laid the groundwork for the antidiscrimination suits that started to be filed in the second decade of the twentieth century. On some of the legal struggles that ensued, see Carbine, “ ‘The Finest Outside the Loop,’ ” 242; Alison Griffiths and James Latham, “Film and Ethnic Identity in Harlem, 1896–1915,” in Maltby, Stokes, and Allen, American Movie Audiences, 58; and Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915 (New York: Scribner’s, 1990), 9. 17. Many Southern theaters simply excluded African Americans entirely, while others deployed a temporal rather than spatial division: the “midnight ramble” that designated the latest show, usually from midnight to 2 a.m. and often only on the weekends, for African American audiences, who were nevertheless often required to watch the film (despite an empty orchestra) from the balcony. According to a survey produced by the Motion Picture Herald, 24 January 1942, 33–34 (cited in Gomery, Shared Pleasures, 162), approximately two hundred theaters provided “midnight rambles” in the 1930s. See also “Midnight Ramble: Oscar Micheaux and the Story of Race Movies,” aired in the television series This American Experience (Corporation for Public Broadcasting, 1994) for an account of these midnight screenings. Northern theaters sometimes seated African Americans along the sides or in the back rows of the orchestra rather than upstairs. In “Race, Region, and Rusticity,” Allen emphasizes the scarcity of evidence concerning black theaters and moviegoing, especially in the South. 18. New York Age, November 18, 1909, cited by Anna Everett, Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909–1949 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 24. For other examples of discrimination at Broadway theaters at this time, see Allen Woll, Black Musical Theatre: From Coontown to Dreamgirls (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 51–53. Comparable stories about downtown movie theaters in Chicago are provided by the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (1922; New York: Arno Press, 1968), 317–20. 19. See Alison Griffiths and James Latham, “Film and Ethnic Identity in Harlem, 1896– 1915,” in Maltby, Stokes, and Allen, American Movie Audiences, 58–59. Walton’s articles on seating were part of the larger project of black film criticism that began to be disseminated through the three hundred black newspapers and magazines that were in print by 1910. For a full account of the evolution of black film criticism, see Everett, Returning the Gaze. 20. Defender, 11 July 1910; cited by Carbine, “ ‘The Finest Outside the Loop,’ ” 242. For other stories in the Defender, see Carbine’s article and Stewart, Migrating to the Movies. 21. New York Times, April 20, and 21, 1910; January 24 and February 10, 1912.

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22. Robert Benchley was especially irate over the treatment of Claude McKay and William Gropper, whose orchestra tickets for He Who Gets Slapped were confiscated and exchanged for balcony seats. See Robert Benchley, Benchley at the Theatre: Dramatic Criticism, 1920–1940, ed. Charles Getchell (Ipswich, MA: Ipswich Press, 1985), 14–15. 23. Lester A. Walton, “Stop German Opera; Un-American Film Allowed on Screen,” New York Age, 15 March 1919; cited by Everett, Returning the Gaze, 35. 24. Stewart, Migrating to the Movies, 66–78; Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 5–6, 50. The segregated balcony, in my account, constitutes a specific instance of the anxieties provoked by African American migration to the “North”—here, both a geographic and architectural location. 25. On attempts to restrain the gallery gods, see Robert W. Snyder, The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 30–34. The derivation of the term, and its Americanization as “peanut gallery,” is explained by Michael Quinion in World Wide Words under “peanut gallery” at www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qapea1.htm. Accessed July 12, 2009. 26. For an account of a different viewing situation—white crossover interest in the exhibition of “race movies” in African American theaters—see Jane M. Gaines, “The White in the Race Movie Audience,” in Maltby, Stokes, and Allen, Going to the Movies, 60–75. 27. Even in protesting the distortion of the black film tradition produced by a narrow critical focus on Birth of a Nation, Everett acknowledges the film as “a watershed event in both black and white film histories” (Returning the Gaze, 4; see also chapter 2). Despite her decision in Migrating to the Movies to redirect attention to preclassical and transitional modes, Stewart similarly acknowledges the pivotal role of Griffith’s film. 28. Manthia Diawara, “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance,” Screen 29, no 4 (Autumn 1988), 74. 29. Stewart, Migrating to the Movies, part 1; Hansen, Babel and Babylon, part 2. 30. For a detailed reading of Dixon’s condensation of two volumes of his Reconstruction trilogy (The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, 1865–1900, and The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan) into Griffith’s primary source, the play The Clansman (1905), and of Griffith’s adaptations of this source, see Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), chapter 3. 31. Michael Paul Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 209. My reading of Birth is indebted to Rogin’s laser vision into the thickly associative texture of the film images, although I focus more on the racial than on the sexual undercurrents. 32. This is a salient example of the general tendency James Snead notes for Griffith’s intertitles to slant in a tendentious direction the images they are ostensibly intended simply to explicate. White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side (New York: Routledge, 1994), 45. 33. Theodore Huff ’s shooting script is reproduced by A. R. Fulton in “Editing in The Birth of a Nation,” in Focus on “The Birth of a Nation,” ed. Fred Silva (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall, 1971), 144–53. Tellingly, Fulton chooses the sequence in the Ford Theater to demonstrate the editorial skills that enabled Griffith, in ways previously unimaginable, to “control

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the spectator’s attention absolutely” (145). Although, according to Lary May, it is not known whether Griffith invented the iris, “the way he used it was unique.” See May, Screening Out the Past, 74. 34. Thomas Dixon Jr., The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (Ridgewood, NJ: Gregg Press, 1967), 69. Perhaps to give the camera the vantage point Phil describes, Griffith moves the young Stonemans to the back of a steeply graduated orchestra and places the camera slightly above their heads. 35. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 150–51. Hansen makes the point to contrast this singular instance of female looking in Birth with the proliferation of female gazes in Intolerance, and she reads Elsie as a historical witness who is not implicated in the assassination plot. 36. John G. Nikolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History (New York: Century Co., 1890), vol. 10, chapter 14. 37. Booth was a Shakespearean actor who identified with Brutus but actually played the role of Marc Antony in Julius Caesar. (His brother played Brutus.) Nor is the phrase “Sic semper tyrannis,” which is the state motto of Virginia, actually in Julius Caesar. Nevertheless, Booth saw himself as Brutus, writing in his diary after the assassination: “With every man’s hand against me, I am here in despair. And why? For doing what Brutus was honored for.” See Right or Wrong, God Judge Me: The Writings of John Wilkes Booth, ed. John Rhodehamel and Louise Taper (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 155–59. 38. Thomas Dixon Jr., The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, 1865– 1900 (Ridgewood, NJ: Gregg Press, 1967), 5, 33. 39. The violent language attributed to Stoneman was characteristic of hostile Southern descriptions of his prototype, Thaddeus Stevens, which imply that Stevens was using the black cause to wreak a personal revenge against the white South. By contrast, “The Birth of a Nation: An Editorial” in Crisis defended the sincerity of the “the great abolition statesman” and protested the film’s implication that he “secretly rejoice[d] in Lincoln’s assassination because of his infatuation for his mulatto mistress” (cited in Silva, Focus on “The Birth of a Nation,” 65). Thomas Dixon maintained that it was “an historical fact that Thaddeus Stevens became dictator of the U.S. government immediately after the death of President Lincoln” (cited by Rolfe Cobleigh in “Why I Oppose The Birth of a Nation,” ibid., 81). 40. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 91. 41. Griffith found his inspiration in Dixon’s description of the Klan’s ride to the rescue: “I could just see these Klansmen in a movie with their white robes flying. . . . this ride would be to save a nation.” Quoted in James Hart, ed., The Man Who Invented Hollywood: The Autobiography of D. W. Griffith (Louisville: University of Kentucky Press, 1972), 28–29; cited by Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie, 191. 42. Williams, Playing the Race Card, 120–21. See also Rogin’s claim that “the moving picture camera and the moving Klan, welding white individuals into a mystic union, embody Griffith’s prophetic vision” (Ronald Reagan, the Movie, 222). 43. Dixon, Clansman, 17.

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notes to pages 211–214

44. See D. W. Griffith, “The Future of the Two-Dollar Movie,” in Silva, Focus on “The Birth of a Nation,” 100. Griffith contrasts the concealment of the director’s interpretive power to the interactive quality of live performance. 45. The Darwinian struggle is Griffith’s metaphor in “The Future of the Two-Dollar Movie,” in which he asserts that film “vies with the best offerings of the dramatic stage. . . . The motion picture is no longer an infant art. It is the newest and most powerful form of dramatic expression.” Ibid., 99–101. 46. See, for example, Tom Gunning, “Weaving a Narrative: Style and Economic Background in Griffith’s Biograph Films,” in Elsaesser, Early Cinema, 336–47. Rogin also discusses Griffith’s transformation of stage formalism into the psychological cinematic realism (Ronald Reagan, the Movie, 197–201). 47. Moving Picture World, March 13, 1915, cited in Silva, Focus on “The Birth of a Nation,” 29. 48. “Thomas R. Cripps, “The Reaction of the Negro to the Motion Picture, Birth of a Nation,” in Silva, Focus on “The Birth of a Nation,” 119. 49. William Walker recalling a 1916 screening of the film in an all-black theater, from an on-camera interview in Kevin Brownlow and David Gill’s documentary D. W. Griffith, the Father of Film (1992), cited in Williams, Playing the Race Card, 96, 128. 50. David Nasaw reads the film’s impact on the segregated balcony in the opposite direction, attributing the balcony’s usage in part to the depiction of “the leering rapists, sadists, and brutes so vividly portrayed in The Birth of a Nation. It was imperative that palace managers guard their white patrons against possible insult or injury from black customers”; but placing these apparent rapists, sadists, and brutes above the heads of the white patrons hardly seems like effective protection. See Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 236. 51. Dan Streible, “Race and the Reception of Jack Johnson Fight Films,” in The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema, ed. Daniel Bernardi (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 193. 52. The phrase “Ethiopian Colossus” was coined by Jack London to entice Jeffries back into the ring to wrest the world championship title back for whites; cited by Dan Streible, “Race and the Reception of Jack Johnson Fight Films,” 173. The call concludes (variously edited): “Jeff, it’s up to you. [The White Man must be rescued.]” 53. The first quotation is Streible’s paraphrase of Arthur R. Ashe Jr.; the second is from an article by H. E. K. [Hugh E. Keough] published on the day of the fight in the Chicago Tribune, 10. Both in Streible, “Race and the Reception of Jack Johnson Fight Films,” 181. See also Randy Roberts, Papa Jack: Jack Johnson and the Era of White Hopes (New York: Free Press, 1983). 54. See Anna Everett, Returning the Gaze (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 49; Gregory A. Waller, Main Street Amusements, 155; and Streible, “Race and the Reception of Jack Johnson Fight Films,” 193. 55. On the vertical segregation of the Alhambra, which hoped both to profit from and to manage black excitement about the film, see Streible, “Race and the Reception of Jack Johnson Fight Films,” 188–89. 56. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 311.

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57. Forum, January 1897, in The Works of Theodore Roosevelt: Memorial Edition (New York: Charles Scribner, 1923–26), 14:135. 58. According to James Weldon Johnson, the opening of Shuffle Along on Broadway in 1921 began the process of challenging the segregated balcony. See Woll, Black Musical Theatre, 73. However, movie theaters such as Loews in Harlem continued to segregate audiences into the 1930s.

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7 . U P SI DE D OW N A N D I N SI DE OU T

1. See Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1992), chapter 8; Barbara Stones, America Goes to the Movies: 100 Years of Motion Picture Exhibition (North Hollywood, CA: National Association of Theatre Owners, 1993), chapter 16; and Thomas Doherty, “Race Houses, Jim Crow Roosts, and Lily White Palaces: Desegregating the Motion Picture Theater,” in Richard Maltby, Melvyn Stokes, and Robert C. Allen, Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007), 196–214. As these and other film historians have noted, the conversion to sound was an additional hurdle for cashstrapped black theaters that could not afford the higher cost of the audio equipment and the films. 2. On light as cinematic aura, see Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996), 93–104. On the technical and conceptual production of film posters, see Carl Laemmle, “The Business of Motion Pictures,” in The American Film Industry, ed. Tino Balio (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), 153–68; and Peter Strevens, “Introduction,” and Steve Neale, “Poster-Film-Industry,” in Selling Dreams: British and American Film Posters, 1890–1976 (Cardiff: Welsh Arts Council, 1977), 1–3, 4–8. 3. Quoted by Stones in America Goes to the Movies, 209. 4. Hardin Tolbert describing conditions at the Ada Meade and Ben Ali theaters in Lexington, Kentucky, in the Indianapolis Freeman, April 3, 1915, cited by Gregory A. Waller, Main Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, 1896– 1930 (Washington, DC,: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 177. For similar descriptions, see the citations from Minnie Adams, a drama critic for the Chicago Defender, in Mary Carbine, “ ‘The Finest Outside the Loop’: Motion Picture Exhibition in Chicago’s Black Metropolis, 1905–1928,” in Richard Abel, ed., Silent Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 240–41, and those from Lester A. Walton in Anna Everett, Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909–1949 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 33. Gloria Wade-Gayles, Pushed Back to Strength: A Black Woman’s Journey Home (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 3. 5. Benjamin Mays is recalled by Professor E. A. Jones in Clifford M. Kuhn, E. Joye, and E. Bernard West, Living Atlanta: An Oral History of the City 1914–1948 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 302. On the estimates of the numbers of black- and white-owned theaters for African Americans in the first few decades of the century, see Gregory A. Waller, Main Street Amusements; Gomery, Shared Pleasures, 160, 162; and Dan Streible, “The Harlem Theater: Black Film Exhibition in Austin, Texas, 1920–1973,” in Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara (London: Routledge, 1993), 222. On the importance of black ownership

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to the audience experience in all-black theaters in the South in the 30s, see Randy Gue, “ ‘It Seems That Everything looks Good Nowadays, as Long as It Is in the Flesh & Brownskin’: The Assertion of Cultural Difference at Atlanta’s 81 Theatre, 1934–1937,” Film History 8, no. 2 (1996), 209–18. On the social and psychological advantages of black-owned theaters in Chicago’s Black Belt, see Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). On the range of segregated practices and responses to them, see Thomas Doherty, “Race Houses,” 196–214. 6. Although film historians such as Barbara Stones in America Goes to the Movies, Douglas Gomery in Shared Pleasures, and Gregory A. Waller in Main Street Amusements have chronicled the rise and fall of theaters with segregated balconies, they have tended to heed the injunction against attending (to) them or to the ambivalent viewing experiences they created. For an exception that does consider the effects of the segregated balcony on viewer response, see Matthew Bernstein, “Nostalgia, Ambivalence, Irony: Song of the South and Race Relations in 1946 Atlanta,” Film History 8, no. 2 (1996), 219–34. By contrast, the separate black theaters, especially in Chicago, have proved a rich subject of historical inquiry, from Mary Carbine’s pioneering study “ ‘The Finest Outside the Loop’ ” through Jacqueline Stewart’s Migrating to the Movies. The split between the historical and the literary is, of course, schematic. Writers such as Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright did describe the cultural ambiance of the black movie theaters in Harlem and Chicago, but the fictional and autobiographical narratives of alienation and vulnerability in the white downstairs have greater emotional power. Examples include Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, James Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work, and Malcolm X’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X. 7. On the cultural significance of boxing for African American viewers, see bell hooks, “Doing It for Daddy,” in Constructing Masculinity, ed. Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis, and Simon Watson (New York: Routledge, 1995), and “Feminism Inside: Toward a Body Politic,” Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Art, ed. Thelma Golden (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994), 132–33. See also Eldridge Cleaver, “Lazarus Come Forth,” in Soul on Ice (New York: Dell, 1968); and Gerald Early, The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1994). 8. The texts that put into circulation the terms resistant, negotiated, and oppositional spectatorship are Manthia Diawara’s 1986 “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance” and bell hooks’s 1992 “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” both reprinted in Diawara, Black American Cinema, 211–20, 288–302; Stuart Hall’s 1989 “Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation,” Framework 36 (1989), 68–81; and James Snead, White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side, ed. Colin MacCabe and Cornel West (New York: Routledge, 1994). More recent attempts to historicize black spectatorship include Jacqueline Bobo, Black Women as Cultural Readers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), Carbine, “ ‘The Finest Outside the Loop,’ ” and Stewart, Migrating to the Movies. 9. Jane M. Gaines, “The White in the Race Movie Audience,” in Maltby, Stokes, and Allen, Going to the Movies, 62. 10. Stewart, Migrating to the Movies, 106. 11. Christian Metz, “Photography and Fetish,” in The Critical Image: Essays on Contemporary Photography, ed Carol Squiers (Seattle: Bay Press, 1990), 155–64.

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12. Mary Ann Doane, “Technology’s Body: Cinematic Vision in Modernity,” differences 5 (Summer 1993), 20–21. 13. Gomery, Shared Pleasures, chapter 4. 14. “Kingdom of shadows” is the often-cited phrase from Maxim Gorky’s assessment of an 1896 Lumière program, trans. Leda Swan and reprinted in Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (New York: Collier, 1973), 407–9. Perhaps the most famous protest against the conflation of cinematic shadows and black men is the narrator’s opening assertion in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man that he is not “one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms” but “a man of substance, of flesh and bone” (Ellison, Invisible Man [New York: Vintage, 1995 (1947)], 3). In contrast to cinema, photography has typically embraced the metaphor of the shadow. First selected by William Henry Fox Talbot to announce his discovery of the negative-positive process of photography to the Royal Society of London in 1839, the phrase “the art of fixing a shadow” was also adopted as the title of a major 1989 exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC: “On the Art of Fixing a Shadow: 150 Years of Photography.” The shadow metaphor has pervaded the discourse of photography: see, for example, Shadow and Substance: Essays on the History of Photography in Honor of Heinz K. Henisch, ed. Kathleen Collins (Bloomfield Hills, MI: Amorphous Institute Press, 1990). The shadow registers photography’s association with loss, absence, elegy, and death, which critics such as Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag have theorized. According to Patrick Maynard, “the linkage of shadows to photographs is enduring” (The Engine of Visualization: Thinking through Photography [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997], 36). 15. For some contemporaneous African American critiques of black audience response to the jungle genre in the 1930s, see Everett, Returning the Gaze, 249, 265. For more recent African American critiques of the racial foundations of the Tarzan mythology, see Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900–1942 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 125–77, 275–77; James Snead, White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side (New York: Routledge, 1994), 8, 71; and hooks, “Doing It for Daddy,” 103. 16. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967), 152–53. 17. According to the glosses provided by John Willett to “The Modern Theatre Is the Epic Theatre” in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willett (New York: Hill & Wang, 1966), 42; and Roland Barthes in “Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 175. 18. Rothstein shot this photo during his period of transition from the Farm Security Administration to Look magazine. The allegations made several years earlier that Rothstein had repositioned a steer skull in the Dust Bowl to produce a more dramatic photograph of the drought lend support to the suspicion that he repositioned Eddie Mitchell for dramatic effect as well. For the steer-skull scandal, see Nicholas Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 58–59. 19. Persistence of vision is the persistence of an afterimage on the retina for a fraction of a second; the phi phenomenon is the illusion of motion produced by a succession of static images. For more detailed accounts, see A. R. Fulton, “The Machine,” in Balio, American

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notes to pages 225–231

Film Industry, 19–32, and David A. Cook, A History of Narrative Film (New York: Norton, 1990), 1–8. 20. Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 29, 185. Doane is primarily interested in the heterosexual stakes that convert a pattern of alternating light and darkness into a narrative of continuity, but the racial stakes are more overt and overdetermined. 21. In “Eudora Welty and Photography: An Interview,” Eudora Welty Photographs (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989), Welty consistently emphasizes the centrality of framing (see especially xvi, xiv, xix). This issue has special pertinence to this image because a print published after Welty’s death, in Eudora Welty and Politics: Did the Writer Crusade?, ed. Harriet Pollack and Suzanne Marrs (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), includes just enough more of the sign on the left to call the implication of color picture into question. I take the version published under Welty’s name and in conjunction with her interview to reflect her own choice of framing most closely. 22. Christian Metz, “Photography and Fetish,” in The Critical Image: Essays on Contemporary Photography, ed. Carol Squiers (Seattle: Bay Press, 1990), 161–62. 23. See Roland Barthes, “The Face of Garbo,” in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill & Wang, 1972), 56–57. Laura Mulvey similarly chooses Garbo’s face as a prime example of the fetishistic scopophilia that gives “flatness, the quality of a cut-out or icon rather than verisimilitude to the screen” (“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Rosen, Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, 203). 24. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure,” 205–6. The famous formulation of the fetishistic compromise (“Je sais bien, mais quand même”) is the title of Octave Mannoni’s first chapter in Clefs pour l’imaginaire ou l’autre scène (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1969), 9–33. 25. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Annwyl Williams, Celia Britton, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 75. 26. Alison Smale, “The City of Light, as Seen from a Glittering Perch,” New York Times, August 26, 2007. 27. See Langston Hughes and John C. Alston, “Atlanta: Its Negroes Have Most Culture but Some of Worst Ghettoes in World,” Ebony, January 1948, 17–24. Ironically, when Newsweek reprinted the photograph the following year in an essay titled “The South: Report on Racial Trends” (10 October 1949), it recaptioned the photograph from “ ‘Buzzard’s roost’ where Negro moviegoers must got at big downtown Fox Theater is up five flights of stairs” to “Colored moviegoers ascend to ‘nigger heaven’ ,” so that the upward climb would illustrate racial progress rather than duress. 28. The Fabulous Fox: The Magic and the Memories (Marietta, GA: Publication Concepts, n.d.), n.p. The theater was originally designed as a Yaarab Shrine Temple, which accounts for the Orientalist architectural motifs. For accounts from moviegoers required to climb the exterior stairs, see Janna Jones, The Southern Movie Palace: Rise, Fall, and Resurrection (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 58; and Warren Cochrane’s narrative in Kuhn, Joye, and West, Living Atlanta, 302. 29. Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” in Rosen, Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, 287.

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30. On the multiple intersections between cinema, consumerism, and femininity in the 1930s and ’40s, see Charles Eckert, “The Carole Lombard in Macy’s Window,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 3, no. 1 (Winter 1978), 1–22; Jeanne Allen, “The Film Viewer as Consumer,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 5, no. 4 (Fall 1980), 481–500; Mary Ann Doane, “The Economy of Desire: The Commodity Form in/of the Cinema,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 11, no. 1 (1989), 23–33; and Jane Gaines, “The Queen Christina Tie-Ups: Convergence of Show Window and Screen,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 11 (1989), 35–60. 31. Quoted by Harry E. Ellis, Dr. Pepper: King of Beverages (Dallas, TX: Dr. Pepper Company, 1986), 47. See also Jeffrey L. Rodengen, The Legend of Dr. Pepper/Seven-Up (Fort Lauderdale, FL: Write Stuff, 1995). 32. Laura Mulvey, “Afterthoughts . . . Inspired by Duel in the Sun,” Framework 15–17 (Summer 1981), 14. The link with Dr. Pepper is reinforced by the beverage’s Waco, Texas, origins and the mythology surrounding its founder, who died in a shoot-out. 33. Metz, Imaginary Signifier, 93. 34. For a fuller elaboration of the distinction between the rhetoric of the docile racial shadow in the early twentieth century and the phobic evocation of the emancipated Negro’s threatening shadow in the decades surrounding the Civil War, see my essay “Shadows,” Representations 84 (2004), 166–99. Both the essay and the brief summary in this chapter are indebted to Judith Jackson Fossett’s comprehensive Darkness Illuminated: Slavery and Its Shadows in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 35. On the visual tropes of expressionist cinema, see Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen, trans. Roger Greaves (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); and William Nestrick, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Mt. Vernon, NY: Macmillan films, 1976). Suggesting an expressionist influence on Marion Post Wolcott is warranted by her own biography. She spent the winter of 1932 studying modern dance in Berlin and 1933 studying child psychology at the University of Vienna, where her interest in photography developed. 36. In Annemette Sorensen’s Peter Sekaer fotograifer fra 1930’ ernes USA: New Deal Photography (Copenhagen: Det Köngelige Bibliotek, 1990), the photograph is captioned with a quotation from Sekaer that makes his astonished encounter with Jim Crow signage clear: “In the south there are laws that forbid Negroes from eating in the same cafes, etc. as whites. They are not allowed to sit in the movie theatres except in the balcony. A picture of a Negro balcony entrance in Anniston, Alabama” (49). For commentary on Sekaer’s artistic development and relationship to Evans, see Allison N. Kemmerer’s introduction to Peter Sekaer, American Pictures (Andover, MA: Addison Gallery of American Art, 1999), 7–18. Despite Evans’s attraction to the vernacular of American signage (which he collected as well as photographed extensively), he photographed only one small Jim Crow sign, a “White Entrance” sign from a café in New Orleans, whereas the contact sheets Sekaer produced during this trip include several photographs of segregated drinking fountains. 37. Powerful critiques of this slippage include Donna Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics of Inappropriate/d Others,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 295–337; and Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 157–91. 38. Although the phrase black looks was first introduced by Jacqui Roach and Petal Fe-

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notes to pages 239–247

lix as the title of their essay in The Female Gaze: Women Viewers of Popular Culture, it was popularized by bell hooks in “The Oppositional Gaze,” in Diawara, Black American Cinema, and then as the title of hooks’s book Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992). 39. Within the codes of cinema, the wearing and removal of glasses are defining gestures in the alignment of sexual difference with a difference in viewing position. Because the woman is supposed to be seen rather than to see, glasses on a female character signify not a deficiency but an appropriation of vision, “an active looking” that “in usurping the gaze . . . poses a threat to an entire system of representation” (Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis [New York: Routledge, 1991], 27). In The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (New York: Methuen, 1988), Tania Modleski points out that Hitchcock associates glasses with noncooperative women. The same logic applies to African American men, who are no more constructed as viewing subjects than are white women. For debates about the parallels between black male and white female viewing authority, see Diawara, “Black Spectatorship,” 66–76; Jane Gaines, “White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory,” Screen 29, no. 4 (Autumn 1988), 12–27; and hooks, “Oppositional Gaze,” 288–302. 40. Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 47. Subsequent citations are noted in parentheses in the text. 41. Roger D. Abrahams, Deep Down in the Jungle (Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1970), cited in Gates, Signifying Monkey, 54, on signifying as both gestural and verbal; “It can denote speaking with the hands and eyes.” 42. Gomery, Shared Pleasures, 81. 43. Wade-Gayles, Pushed Back to Strength, 4. Cited by Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994), 35. Subsequent citations from Kelley are noted in parentheses in the text. 44. For example, note the recollection of Dianne Braddock, the older sister of Carole Robertson, one of the four little girls murdered in the bombing of the church in Birmingham. Alabama, in 1963: “We’d have to go upstairs into the balcony. We’d sit and we’d throw popcorn and ice. We would throw ’em down on the white folks. And she always thought that was real funny, you know.” Four Little Girls, dir. Spike Lee (Forty Acres and a Mule Filmworks, 1997). 45. Wade-Gayles, Pushed Back to Strength, 3–4. 46. Baudry, “Ideological Effects,” 294. 47. Metz, Imaginary Signifier, 96. Collapsing eyes and mouths, the image of the hungry fish reveals Metz’s debt to Melanie Klein, whose work he uses to inflect the Lacanian imaginary toward the dynamics of incorporation that, he says, “Lacan’s discourse in fact ‘skirts’ ” (6). 48. Mel Watkins, Dancing with Strangers: A Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 146–47. 49. “Willie Wallace Remembers,” The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow (Educational Broadcasting Corporation, 2002). 50. Carl van Vechten, Nigger Heaven (New York: Knopf, 1926), 149. The alternative to

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the popcorn throw is a narrative of leaving the theater, refusing to go to the movies at all, or losing all memory of the film that is viewed from the balcony. See, for example, accounts by Warren Cochrane, director of the Butler Street YMCA, Atlanta, in Kuhn, Joye, and West, Living Atlanta, 302; John Lewis, with Michael D’Orso, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 48; and Antoinette S. Demond, “On Sitting,” Crisis, November 1955, 525, cited by Doherty, “Race Houses,” 199–200. 51. On the erotic uses of the balcony, see David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 182. In his study of working-class culture in Worcester, Massachusetts, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), Roy Rosenzweig notes that in the teens, the Worcester newspapers labeled the back rows of the movie theaters (in the absence of a balcony) “lovers’ lane” (202). For a study of the drive-in that suggests parallels with the balcony, see Mary Morley Cohen, “Forgotten Audiences in the Passion Pits: Drive-In Theatres and Changing Spectator Practices in Post-war America,” Film History 6 (1994), 470–86. As these passing references suggest, the balcony is more often a subject of knowing laughter than of critical inquiry. 52. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. and trans. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84. “The chronotope is an optic for reading texts as x-rays of the forces at work in the culture system from which they spring” (425–26). 53. Sunshine Tucker, who was the manager of the Fox Theater’s box office when interviewed by Janna Jones, recalls her balcony experience at the Fox in the 1950s and ’60s: “We were sitting in the balcony, and we had the best seats in the house.” Cited by Jones, Southern Movie Palace, 59. 54. On these developments, see Gomery, Shared Pleasures, 63–170; and Doherty, “Race Houses,” 196–214.

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8 . R E M A K I NG R AC IA L SIG N S

1. This was actually far from the first sit-in, just the first to galvanize mass action. CORE had organized sit-ins in restaurants and movie theaters in Chicago, Detroit, and Denver in 1942; and the NAACP had sponsored some in Washington, DC, in the 1940s and in Wichita, Kansas, and Oklahoma City in 1958. Nevertheless, the Greensboro sit-in has been institutionalized as the originary moment of the movement, and the recitation of the events of that day has become a kind of national narrative, the lunch counter a national object, and the day—February 1, 1960—a date of near-national commemoration. On the prehistory of the Greensboro sit-in, see the prelude to Howell Raines, My Soul Is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered (New York: Penguin, 1977), 27–34; and We Shall Overcome: The Civil Rights Movement in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, ed. David J. Garrow (Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing, 1989), 3: 873–79. 2. Baldwin is cited by Steve Kasher in The Civil Rights Movement: A Photographic History, 1954–68 (New York: Abbeville Press, 1996), 78. See also Martin Luther King Jr.’s claim in “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” that “the nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter” (The Eyes on the Prize: Civil Rights

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notes to pages 252–254

Reader, ed. Clayborne Carson et al. [New York: Viking, 1991], 155). For Malcolm X, the cup of coffee is meager recompense: “We who are Muslims . . . don’t think that an integrated cup of coffee is sufficient payment for 310 years of slave labor” (“Malcolm X v. James Farmer: Separation v. Integration,” Negro Protest Thought in the Twentieth Century, ed. Francis L. Broderick and August Meier [Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965], 367). 3. Julian Bond on the Atlanta sit-ins he helped to organize is cited in Raines, My Soul Is Rested, 87. A selection of the students’ signs may be found in Michael Walzer’s “A Cup of Coffee and a Seat,” Dissent 7, no. 2 (Spring 1960), 115. 4. Sasha Torres, Black, White, and in Color: Television and Black Civil Rights (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 15. See also Howard Zinn, SNCC: The New Abolitionists (Boston: Beacon, 1964), 7–8; Mary King, Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement (New York: William Morrow, 1987), 215; and Pat Watters, Down to Now: Reflections on the Southern Civil Rights Movement (New York: Pantheon, 1971), 70. For a cautionary note on the mass media’s distortions, see Edward P. Morgan, “The Good, the Bad, and the Forgotten: Media Culture and Public Memory of the Civil Rights Movement,” in The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory, ed. Renee Romano and Leigh Raiford (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 137–66. 5. “Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow” (Susan Sontag, On Photography [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977], 17–18). For a different account of photography’s distinctive contribution to the representation of the civil rights movement, see Leigh Raiford, “ ‘Come Let Us Build a New World Together’: SNCC and Photography of the Civil Rights Movement,” American Quarterly 59, no. 4 (December 2007), 1129–57. 6. Kasher, Civil Rights Movement, 10. See also Charles Moore, Powerful Days: The Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991); and Danny Lyon, Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). 7. L. F. Palmer, “Sit-ins Reveal New Face of Young Negro America,” Chicago Defender, March 26, 1960. The codes governing behavior during the sit-ins (such as “Sit straight; always face the counter; do not strike back nor curse if abused; remember the teachings of Jesus Christ, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King”) were formulated as the “Ten Commandments” of the “Nashville school” of nonviolence by the Vanderbilt University divinity student James Lawson and distributed by John Lewis. See John Lewis, with Michael D’Orso, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 80–106. 8. Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–1934, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 510. 9. On women’s roles in the movement and their obfuscation, see Vicki L. Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Woods, eds., Black Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941–1965 (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing, 1990); Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: William Morrow, 1984); Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Knopf, 1979);

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Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long? African-American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), chapter 9; and Kathryn L. Nasstrom, “Down to Now: Memory, Narrative, and Women’s Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement in Atlanta, Georgia,” in Romano and Raiford, Civil Rights Movement, 253–89. 10. On the pressure toward creating a homogenizing consensus memory of the civil rights movement, see the essays collected in Romano and Raiford, Civil Rights Movement. For an analysis of a film that resists that resists that pressure, see Valerie Smith, “Meditation on Memory: Clark Johnson’s Boycott,” American Literary History 17, no 3 (2005), 530–41. 11. Anne M. Wagner, “Warhol Paints History, or Race in America,” Representations 55 (Summer 1996), 114. Wagner argues that the canonization of certain photographs has produced a tragically recursive image of race as “the physical confrontation of men” (111). 12. “The first great media event” is the widely supported description by David Halberstam, from The Fifties (New York: Villard Books, 1993), 436, cited by Shaila Dewan in “How Photos Became Icon of Civil Rights Movement,” New York Times, August 28, 2005, 10. The first photograph, taken by Lester Davis, was published by The American Negro: A Magazine of Protest; the Jet photographs, taken by David Jackson, were reprinted shortly afterward by the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, the New York Amsterdam News, and Crisis. For a comprehensive analysis of the “logics of visibility” through which Till’s murder gained national meaning, see Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), chapter 5. 13. The caption to the photograph in Jet read: “Mutilated face of victim was left unretouched by mortician at the mother’s request. She said she wanted ‘all the world’ to witness the atrocity.” Cited along with other responses to the Till photograph by Elizabeth Alexander, “ ‘Can You Be Black and Look at This’? Reading the Rodney King Video(s),” in Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, ed. Thelma Golden (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 102. 14. Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. and intro Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 38. Taylor’s essay and the discussion it provoked, which appear together in this volume, provide a valuable overview of the debates about difference and universality that captivated the academy in the 1980s and ’90s. For the philosophical foundations of a theory of recognition, see Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans. Joel Anderson (Cambridge: Polity, 1992). On the limits of recognition as a framework for social justice, see Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialis” ’ Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997), and her exchange with Axel Honneth in Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition: A Political-Philosophical Exchange, trans. Joel Golb, James Ingram, and Christiane Wilke (London: Verso, 2003). 15. Quoted by Ada Louise Huxtable in “The Death of the Five-and-Ten,” in Architecture Anyone? (New York: Random House, 1986), 315. On the rapid growth of Woolworth from its origin in 1879 to 2,430 stores in 1960, when net sales crossed the billion-dollar mark, see Godfrey M. Lebhar, Chain Stores in America: 1859–1962 (New York: Chair Store Publishing Co., 1963), 41.

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16. Bernice L. Thomas, America’s 5 & 10 Cent Stores: The Kress Legacy (Washington, DC: National Building Museum 1997), 10. 17. On the Klan’s exterior skin of whiteness, see Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 39–41. White women held 93 percent of the waitress jobs when the sit-ins began. For an account of the service industries’ segregation of women of color into “back room” positions, see Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 18, no. 1 (Autumn 1992), 1–43. 18. The full text of Governor Wallace’s inaugural speech, delivered on January 14, 1963, can be found at www.archives.state.al.us/govs_list/inauguralspeech.html, accessed July 16, 2009. 19. Cited by Walzer in “A Cup of Coffee and a Seat,” 112. The scene recalls the famous opening of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: “I am an invisible man . . . simply because people refuse to see me . . . because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes” ([New York: Vintage, 1947], 3). 20. Jacques Lacan, “Of the Gaze As Objet Petit a,” in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 84, 106. For an illuminating gloss on some of the essay’s key terms, see Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996), chapter 4. 21. Note by contrast the caption to the NAACP photograph: “Black Youths in Katz Department Store occupied every seat at the lunch counter to protest segregation.” See photograph and caption in Clara Luper, Behold the Walls (Oklahoma City, OK: Jim Wire, 1979), 38. 22. “Reflections in Black and White,” produced by NBC’s Nashville affiliate WSMV-TV in 1985, Museum of Television and Radio, New York. Sasha Torres discusses the rhetoric of the close-up in her analysis of an earlier NBC documentary, “Sit-In” (December 20, 1960), in Black, White, and in Color, 36–47 23. This dilemma helps to explain why certain anomalous images have become popular icons, such as Gerald Holly’s photograph in The Nashville Tennessean, March 17, 1960, of the successful sit-in at the Nashville Greyhound bus terminal, which was subject to the Interstate Commerce Commission’s 1955 ruling that public facilities in interstate transportation terminals had to be integrated. Holly bucked management opposition to cross the counter to meet the students in a reciprocal gaze that yokes being served with being seen. 24. “Describes Differences between the ‘Old Negro’ and ‘New Negro,’ ” Pittsburgh Courier, April 9, 1960. 25. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black,” Representations 24 (Fall 1988), 143. 26. These are the first student words to appear in the local newspaper coverage of the sitins, “Negroes Fail To Obtain Service,” Greensboro Daily News (February 3, 1960). Diane Nash draws the distinction between passive resistance and active insistence in “Inside the Sit-ins and Freedom Rides: Testimony of a Southern Student,” in We Shall Overcome, 3:974. The upwardly mobile students’ repudiation of the African American kitchen worker also reveals the class dynamics within the resident black community. 27. Moses is quoted by Ben H. Bagdikian, “Negro Youth’s New March on Dixie,” Satur-

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day Evening Post, September 8, 1962, 15; cited in Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 17. Shortly afterwards, Moses left New York to become a leader of SNCC. Moses is answering the question famously formulated by W. E. B. Du Bois: how to be “an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals” (The Souls of Black Folk [New York: Bantam, 1989], 3). 28. African American reporters and editors were not formed by or bound to the spiritual discourse of the civil rights leaders. For a recent exposé of Southern newspapers’ suppression of news about the civil rights movement, see James Dao, “Forty Years Later, Civil Rights Makes Page One,” New York Times, July 13, 2004. 29. “The Revolt of Negro Youth,” Ebony, May 1960, 36–37. 30. Chicago Defender, March 26, 1960. 31. “Negroes in South in Store Sitdown,” New York Times, February 2, 1960. 32. “Negroes Extend Sitdown Protest” (New York Times, February 10, 1960) describes the “well-groomed” students as “sitting impassively” and departing in “orderly fashion” when the stores closed. Claude Sitton’s story, “Negro Sitdowns Stir Fear of Wider Unrest in South” (New York Times, February 14), quotes the Rock Hill Evening Herald’s description of “orderly, polite, well-dressed, and quiet” demonstrators. 33. Interview clip selected by the producers of the Public Broadcasting Service documentary series Eyes on the Prize as an explanatory frame for the rearguard action that ensues. 34. “North Carolina’s Harry Golden Sees Negroes’ New Tactics Winning Struggle,” Life, March 1960, 24. 35. The sit-in took place on February 20, 1960; the editorial by James Jackson Kilpatrick originally appeared in the Richmond News Leader, 14–15. This memorable passage was also cited in Jet, March 24, 1960, 14, and by Claude Sitton in “The Mood of the South—and the State of the Nation,” New York Times, March 6, 1960. On Kilpatrick’s complex political selfpositioning, see Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (New York: Knopf, 2007), 109–19. 36. Life, February 22, 1960, cover and p. 17. Grounded in generations of the tobacco industry, the cigarette is, of course, an overdetermined figure of white male power in the South. I thank Leigh Raiford for pointing this out. 37. Although the formal qualities of this UPI photograph have made it a textbook classic, it lacked the drama to capture a place in the daily press. It did, however, run in the African American weeklies, appearing in both the Chicago Defender and the Baltimore AfroAmerican on February 20. 38. As Life magazine explained in its full-page spread of the scenes of confrontation, the two-day clash that swelled to nearly three thousand participants (the New York Times estimated the number at a more modest five hundred) was the “dismaying but uneasily awaited break in a display of nonviolent protest against southern segregation” (Life, February 29, 1960, 32). The February 17 story in the New York Times uses similar language to describe “the worst outbreak of violence in the South’s two weeks of demonstrations at lunch counters.” Scenes of the melee in Portsmouth constituted the first coverage of the sit-ins in the New York Times Magazine on March 6. 39. “Two Stores Are Closed,” Greensboro Daily News and Record, February 7, 1960.

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notes to pages 272–277

40. Harry Golden, quoted in “North Carolina’s Harry Golden,” 24. The number of counters changes, but the claim remains the same. 41. “Down Freedom’s Main Line,” in Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954– 65, ed. Juan Williams (New York: Penguin, 1988), 138–39. 42. The editorial in the Raleigh News and Observer is cited in an editorial in the Greensboro Daily News, February 13, 1960, and by Claude Sitton in “Negro Sitdowns Stir Fear of Wider Unrest in South,” New York Times, February 15, 1960. 43. On the power of consumption as a democratizing agent, see Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Pantheon, 1998). 44. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 17. See also the reading of “The Chapter on Money” in Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, in Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). 45. Sec. 201, Title II, “Injunctive Relief against Discrimination in Places of Public Accommodation,” of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Document Number: PL 88–352; July 2, 1964. The wording of the Civil Rights Act echoes the most famous sentences in Justice Harlan’s lone dissent to the Plessy decision that gave legal sanction to Jim Crow: “Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.” 46. Life, February 29, 1960, 32. 47. New York Times Magazine, March 6, 1960, 15. The peaceful sit-ins at Nashville similarly exploded into violence on February 25. 48. New York Times Magazine, May 28, 1960, 12. The caption for this photograph cites some of the “Ten Commandments” formulated by James Lawson, who had studied with Gandhi in India. As these commandments are the verbal form of Gandhi’s legacy, the “Negro girl” is Gandhi’s heir in the visual field. 49. For the story of the photograph, one of many civil rights photographs the local newspaper refused to publish at the time, see Dao, “Forty Years Later.” The photographer Calvert McCann was a sit-in participant whose last-minute decision to take a camera with him produced the event’s only documentation. That he knew Nietta Dunn, a friend of his sister’s, may have enabled the intimate image of her detachment. (Telephone conversation with Calvert McCann, October 1, 2008.) 50. For a succinct account of his conception of the face, see Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1885), 85–92. The female face in these photographs transposes Levinas’s philosophy of the infinite, in which the face is an uncontextualized manifestation of the Other whose humanity demands acknowledgment, into the social framework of a politics of recognition. 51. The alternative spatial metaphor of the “fusion of horizons” that indicates that one culture, or cultural group, has adjusted to accommodate the perspectives of another culture is proposed by Hans-Georg Gadamer in Wahrheit und Methode (Tubingen: Mohr, 1975) and discussed by Charles Taylor in “The Politics of Recognition” in Guttman, Multiculturalism,

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67–73. Susan Wolf ’s contribution to the same volume explores the importance of that fusion for the educational domain (75–85). 52. See, for example, Diane Nash’s comments about the waitress in her interview with Juan Williams in Eyes on the Prize, 132, and Anne Moody’s comments in Coming of Age in Mississippi (New York: Dell, 1976), 264. 53. Ebony, May 1960, 42. 54. Diane Nash’s speech is cited by Taylor Branch in Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954–63 (New York: Touchstone, 1988), 279; John Lewis describes her role as spokesperson in John Lewis, with Michael D’Orso, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 110. Nash put her principles into practice by repeatedly choosing jail rather than bail. 55. Diane Nash, cited in Gidding, When and Where I Enter, 279. 56. Lewis, Walking with the Wind, 108. 57. Ebony, June 1960, 35, 40. 58. Some of the most shocking photographs by Charles Moore, originally published as a photo essay, “They Fight a Fire That Won’t Go Out,” in Life (May 17, 1963), have been reprinted in Powerful Days: The Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991), and Kasher, Civil Rights Movement. Kasher includes a photograph of a sit-in by SNCC organizers, taking a break from a conference, at a Toddle House in Atlanta in December 1963, but the climactic nature of the Jackson sit-in, reinforced by the mass demonstrations and arrests it precipitated, made it a culminating visual statement. 59. Moody, Coming of Age, 275. 60. See John R. Salter Jr., Jackson, Mississippi: An American Chronicle of Struggle and Schism (Hicksville, NY: Exposition Press, 1979), 132–53; Branch, Parting the Waters, 813– 16; and Moody, Coming of Age, chapter 22. 61. I am grateful to Joan Trumpaeur Mulholland for explaining her trajectory to me in a telephone interview on April 21, 2001. After determining to leave a segregated Duke University, Trumpauer decided that the burden of integration shouldn’t rest exclusively on African Americans and applied to Tougaloo, where she roomed with the activist Joyce Ladner and became one of only two white students to graduate from the historically black college. Although Trumpauer and Lois Chaffee (another white member of the sit-in group) were originally assigned the role of “spotters” who phoned in the names of those arrested during the sit-in, they joined their African American peers at the counter in the hope that additional bodies would absorb the force of the blows. After the sit-in, Trumpauer became involved in organizing the 1963 march on Washington and subsequently in voter registration and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. For another account of Southern white women’s involvement in the movement, see Constance Curry et al., Deep in our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000). 62. Salter, Jackson, Mississippi, 134–35. 63. As if she intuited that conjunction, Evers’s daughter Rena was particularly excited by the stains she saw on Salter’s back after the sit-in, exclaiming wildly: “I thought it was blood, but it was only catsup!” (Mrs. Medgar Evers, with William Peters, For Us, the Living [Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967], 257). The pool of blood has become the identifying

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notes to pages 288–294

trope of Evers’s assassination, singled out for comment in every account. See, for example, Moody, Coming of Age, 276; Evers, For Us, the Living, 302; and Branch, Parting the Waters, 825. 64. Interview with John Lewis, May 1961, reproduced in WKNO program “The Fight for Civil Rights” (Memphis, 1992). UCLA Film and Television Archive. 65. From Anthony Lewis’s extensive citation of Kennedy’s address in Portrait of a Decade: The Second American Revolution (New York: Random House, 1953), 192–95. 66. Martin Luther King Jr., in a telegram to President Kennedy, cited by Taylor Branch in Parting the Waters, 824. In For Us, the Living, Myrlie Evers cites the speeches by Medgar Evers and President Kennedy and claims she felt the president “was talking directly about our Capitol Street boycott, our voter registration drives” (268, 300–301). 67. Branch, Parting the Waters, 827. Branch continues: “This was a mythical event of race. . . . White people who had never heard of Medgar Evers spoke his name over and over, as though the words themselves had the ring of legend.” 68. Moody, Coming of Age, 266. Special venom was often reserved for white participants in the civil rights movement. Trumpaeur herself acknowledged in the interview that as a “nigger lover” she was believed to be at greater risk than the rest of her cohort; for that reason she was kept out of certain operations and provided by her roommate with scarves to conceal her hair. See also the comment of the civil rights photographer Charles Moore: “To him I was worse than ‘a nigger,’ I was a white nigger.” Cited in Kasher, Civil Rights Movement, 62. 69. On the dangers of sentimentalizing the interracial female bond, an impulse that surfaced in response to the resurgence of racial fractures in the 1990s, see Jennifer Fuller, “Debating the Present through the Past: Representations of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1990s,” in Romano and Raiford, Civil Rights Movement, 167–96. The larger dangers of overvaluing recognition as a social strategy and goal are spelled out in Nancy Fraser’s response to Alex Honneth in Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition. 70. “Terribly Dangerous,” Newsweek, June 10, 1963, 28. Newsweek’s account is especially ironic because the “Negro coed” herself reports that Trumpaeur, the “white nigger,” was the first to be attacked (Moody, Coming of Age, 266). Interviewed by Thomas B. Morgan for the article, Salter similarly dismisses the incident: “It wasn’t just a blonde throwing catsup. . . . Two of our girls were dragged from their stools and along the floor to the door” (Thomas B. Morgan, “Five Days in Mississippi,” Look, July 16, 1963, 89). 71. Morgan, “Five Days in Mississippi,” 86. A F T E RWOR D

1. Ian Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996), xviii. The two cases, decided in a single opinion, were Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education, No. 05–915, and Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, No. 05–908. A similar logic prevailed in the Ricci v. De Stefano decision (2009). 2. On the use of political posters to shape communities and memories, specifically the posters that made use of Danny Lyon’s photographs, see Leigh Raiford, “ ‘Come Let Us Build

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a New World Together’: SNCC and Photography of the Civil Rights Movement,” American Quarterly 59, no. 4 (December 2007), 1129–57. 3. Linda Lou, “Students Block Off Sather Gate in Anti-209 Protest,” Daily Californian, November 7, 1997. 4. Bob Batz Jr., “Homewood Man Creating Museum of the African’s Experience in America,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, February 20, 2005, www.post-gazette.com/pg/05051/ 459097.stm.

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Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. abjection, 142, 150, 151, 156–57, 170, 175, 212, 291 Adelman, Skippy, 113 Adorno, Theodor, 310n6 advertising, commercial, 155–57, 191–92, 222, 231–32, 328nn35–36 affirmative action policy, in California, 294–96, 295, 296 African Americans: businesses owned by, 44, 45, 46, 54–56, 57, 58, 59, 61, 72, 200, 201, 217, 218, 219, 220, 239; cinematic representation of, 125, 208–9; as cinematic spectators, 195–204, 212, 217–20; community spaces claimed by, 44–47, 74; and labor relations, 102; and library use, 74, 316– 17n27; and military service, 112, 148, 182; “Negro” as term claimed by, 72, 73–74; northward migration of, 204, 335n9; periodicals for, 112–13, 160, 201, 322nn28–29; and response to film theater segregation, 195, 196, 200–3, 218–19, 241–48, 342n6, 346n44; and response to Jim Crow signs (see Jim Crow signs, African Americans’ response to); and social class, 41, 53, 84, 130, 152–54, 264–65, 350n26; and unemployment, 90, 326n23; violence against, 106, 107, 110, 111, 114, 140, 255, 274–75, 283– 84, 286–88. See also men, African American; women, African American

Afro-American (periodical), 76, 112, 182, 270, 317n28, 322n28, 331n25, 351n37 Agassiz, Louis, 21 Ah Yup legal case, 68 Alabama, segregation in, 38, 39, 112, 114, 180, 222, 224, 229, 258, 331n23; protests against, 256, 283, 284, 285, 292 Albany (GA), 148, 149, 150, 294 Allen, James, 106, 302n2, 312n22, 319n10 Allen, Robert C., 335n9 anthropology, racial difference assessed in, 11, 13–14, 20–21 Apartheid Museum (Johannesburg), 1–2 APEX (African American Panoramic Experience) Museum, 52 Appadurai, Arjun, 33, 34 Appiah, Anthony, 10 Arkansas: health spa for whites in, 69; sit-in at Little Rock Woolworth’s, 268, 268–69 Asian Americans, xix, 19, 68, 307n49 Atget, Eugène, 100–1 Atlanta (GA), 52, 73, 107–8, 136, 136, 138, 230, 230, 319n5 Atlanta Compromise, 163 Atlanta History Museum, 105 Augusta (GA), 45, 46 automobile, documentary photography facilitated by, 185–86, 187, 333n37

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balconies, segregated seating in theater, 19, 28– 29, 195, 196, 201–4, 214, 337n17; African Americans’ response to, 195, 196, 200–3, 218–19, 241–48, 342n6, 346n44; cartoon of, 214–16, 215; photography of, 28–29, 197–99, 198; racial hierarchy inverted in, 202, 222 Baldwin, James, 22, 23, 251, 342n6 Barber, Marchel’le Renise, 54–56, 57, 58, 59, 313n32 Barnett, Ross, 260 Barthes, Roland, 26, 63–66, 88–89, 343n14 Baudrillard, Jean, 50 Baudry, Jean-Louis, 195–96, 212, 222, 231, 244, 334n1 Bazin, André, 156 beaches, 46–47, 311n13, 326n18 Bell, Dorothy, 284–85, 285 Belzoni (MS), 219, 231, 232, 233 Benchley, Robert, 202, 338n22 Benjamin, Walter, xx, 21, 26, 62, 63, 65, 89, 100– 1, 253 Bennett, Lerone, Jr., 160–61, 282 Bennett College, 163 Berger, John, 103, 104 Berkeley (CA), 294–96, 296 Biko, Emory, 297–300 Biko, Stephen, 300 biological determination of race, 10–15 Birmingham (AL), 69, 70, 119, 180, 222, 224, 229, 231, 283, 284, 285, 291, 331n23, 346n44 Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, 82, 118–19, 312n25, 324n45, 327n31 Birth of a Nation (film), 28, 203–13, 246, 291, 338n27, 338–39n33, 339nn34,35,39,41, 340n50 “black,” as term in Jim Crow sign, 70–71, 71 blackface, 7, 214, 265 black memorabilia, 34, 48–52, 53–54, 127, 310n4, 312n22, 313n29 Blackwell, Fred, 283, 286 Blair, Ezell, 262 Boas, Franz, 13–14 Bogen-Garrett, Petie, 319n6 Bond, Julian, 50–51 Booth, John Wilkes, 207–8, 339n37 Boswell, Maia, 324n4 Bourke-White, Margaret, 190, 333n40 boxing match, film of, 213, 215–16 Braddock, Diane, 346n44 Breyé, Brian, 52 Broadway revues, all-black, 216, 341n58

Brown, Bill, 310n4 Brown v. Board of Education, 111, 117, 146–47, 326n25 Bubley, Esther, 108–9, 111, 127, 150, 152–56, 153, 162, 328n32, 332n31 Bush, George W., xx, 293 bus lines. See transportation systems Cairo (Egypt), 188 California: Jim Crow signs in, 19; political struggle for affirmative action in, 294–96, 295, 296 Calloway, Cab, 97–98, 99 captions: for photographs of Jim Crow signs, 72, 182, 316n23, 344n27, 345n36; for photographs of lunch-counter sit-ins, 270–71, 350n21 Carson, Jeanette, 49 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 117, 323–24n43 cartoons, 43–44, 45, 213–16, 215 Casmier-Paz, Lynn, 53, 60 Certeau, Michel de, 29, 35, 48 Chaffee, Lois, 353n61 chain restaurants, 161, 164, 165, 167, 170 Chattanooga (TN), 275 Chesnutt, Charles W., 41, 316n20 Chicago: black-owned theaters in, 200, 201, 335n9, 342n6; segregated theater seating in, 19, 201 Chicago Defender (newspaper), 43–44, 45, 112, 113, 201, 264, 316n22, 322nn28–29, 351n37 children, African American, depicted in photographs, 96, 97, 144–45, 145, 147 Christianity, 66, 76–77 cigarettes: advertisements for, 155–57, 328nn35– 36; at lunch-counter sit-ins, 266–67, 270, 287 cinematic apparatus, 195–99, 244, 334n1 cinematic spectatorship, 28, 195–204, 217–20, 222 cinematic techniques, in Griffith’s work, 204, 207, 208, 209, 211, 338–39n33 civil rights legislation, 201, 273, 288, 337n16, 352n45 civil rights movement, 35, 47, 115, 117, 119, 140, 142, 253, 255. See also sit-ins at lunch counters Civil War, U.S., 205, 246, 291 Clark, Kenneth B., 326n25 class. See social class Cockrell, Dale, 303n10 cold war, 104, 111

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index collectors’ items, Jim Crow signs as, 48–51, 312n22 Color (periodical), 94, 113 color blindness, xviii, xx, 29, 256, 273, 288, 291, 293–94, 295, 300, 352n45 “colored,” as term in Jim Crow signs, 68, 71–72, 74, 316n21 Columbians (white supremacist group), 107, 112, 136–37, 138, 152 commercial establishments: black memorabilia sold in, 34, 48–52, 53–54, 310n4, 312n22, 313n29; black-owned, 44, 45, 46, 54–56, 57, 58, 59, 61, 72; tacit desegregation of, 177. See also film theaters; lunch counters; restaurants commercial photography, 66, 72–73 commercial signage: Jim Crow signs as part of, 44–47; Jim Crow signs compared to, 36– 37, 41 commodification: and advertising, 155–57; and Certeau’s theory of consumption, 35, 48; and chain restaurants, 164; and money exchange, 272; and post-segregation marketing of Jim Crow signs, 26, 35–36, 52–56, 58–59, 60–61, 312n22 concentration camps, photographs of, 116 Congdon-Martin, Douglas, 51 consumerism, homogenizing effects of, 16, 272 consumption, film theaters as sites of, 221, 222, 231–34, 244 Cooper, Anna Julia, 123, 159 Cosby, Bill and Camille, 52 Cosmopolitan (periodical), 83 Crary, Jonathan, 335n7 Crisis (periodical), 72, 113, 292, 339n39 Cuba, 134, 326n18 cultural biography, 34, 310n3 cultural memory, 5, 24, 29, 104, 116, 294 Cushman, Sean Dennis, 316n23 Dada, 65, 80 The Daily Compass (periodical), 112, 182, 331– 32n25 Dallas (TX), 59 Dallas Express (newspaper), 112 Davidson, Bruce, 117 Davis, Griffith J., 230–31, 243 Davis, Sammy, Jr., 52, 281 Davis-Wilson, Florence, 312n25, 331n19 Delaney, David, 15, 307n43 Delano, Jack, 67, 81, 81–85, 84, 90, 94, 108, 109

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Delaware, legislation on theater admission in, 200–1 Denmark (SC), 196, 242 Depression, Great, 6, 27, 118, 161, 178, 179, 184, 217, 221 deracialization of “white people,” 68, 69 desegregation, 111, 115, 140, 177, 322n29. See also civil rights movement; sit-ins at lunch counters Detroit (MI), 111, 292 Dewey, Thomas, 43 Diawara, Manthia, 204, 338n28 disability, as metaphor for segregation, 147–48, 326n25 Dixon, Thomas, Jr., 205, 235, 339nn39,41 Doane, Mary Ann, 225, 328n36, 344n20 documentary photography: facilitated by automobile travel, 185–86, 333n37; governmentsponsored, 89–90, 108–11, 115, 127, 142, 162, 178, 184–86, 188, 219, 237, 320nn12– 13, 332–33nn31–32, 343n18; and national identity, 183–84; visual rhetoric of, 89–90, 92, 150; and voyeurism, 162, 183, 333n40 “dogs,” as term in Jim Crow signs, 171–76, 331nn19–20 Dos Passos, John, 20 Douglass, Frederick, 131 Dred Scott v. Sanford, 11 drinking fountains, Jim Crow signs on: and black femininity, 157–59; and black masculinity, 142–44, 146–48; complication of race and gender in, 27, 142–44, 152–57; and construction of whiteness, 136–37, 152; and labor relations, 152–54; photography of, 38, 73, 89, 105, 117–18, 118–19, 124, 136, 136, 142–59, 143, 145, 147, 149, 151, 152, 153, 158, 345n36; and public sphere, 38; and racial infantilization, 150 Du Bois, W. E. B., 10, 11, 16, 18, 72, 189, 202, 263, 351n27 Dunn, Nietta, 276, 275–76, 352n49 Durham (NC), 41, 81, 81–85, 84 Dyer, Richard, 69, 86 Early, Gerald, 53 Ebony (periodical), 112, 113, 118, 133–34, 160, 230, 264, 278–80, 281–82 Eco, Umberto, 117 economic relations: and film-related advertising, 231, 232; and Great Depression, 6, 27, 118, 161, 178, 179, 184, 217, 221; and racially mixed

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economic relations (continued) clientele in general stores, 16; and racially mixed clientele in restaurants, 27, 161, 177– 80; and segregated theaters’ admission policies, 217, 221, 248. See also labor relations Ehrman, Jesse, 295 Eiffel Tower, 228–29 elevators: interracial contact in, 164; Jim Crow signs in, 73 Ellison, Ralph, 342n6, 343n14, 350n19 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 189 Enwezor, Okwui, xx Erwitt, Elliott, 117, 146–48, 147, 150, 157, 158, 326n25, 327nn26–27 eugenics, 216 Evans, Walker, 26, 73, 108, 183–84, 237, 332– 33n32, 345n36 Everett, Anna, 338n27 Evers, Medgar, 283–84, 285–86, 288, 353– 54n63, 354n67 Evers, Myrlie, 288 face, significance of, at segregated lunch counters, 189–90, 255, 262–64, 275–77, 284–85 Fanon, Frantz, 222 Farm Security Administration (FSA), 67, 81, 89– 90, 108–11, 115, 142, 162, 178, 184–86, 188, 190, 219, 320nn12–13, 332–33nn31–32, 343n18; merged with Office of War Information (OWI), 89, 108, 109, 115, 320nn12–13 fascism, 112, 136. See also Nazi Germany Faubus, Orval, 260 femininity, black: registered in photographs of Jim Crow signs, 140, 142, 157–59; and rhetoric of Jim Crow signs, 129–30, 325n7 femininity, white: cinematic representation of, 204, 227–28; fetishization of, 155–57, 328n36; registered in photographs of Jim Crow signs, 82, 83, 134–37 feminism, 228, 325n7 Ferris State University, 35 fetish: cinema as, 226–27; of female body, 155– 57, 226–27, 328n36, 344n23 Figlio, Karl, 15 films: and advertising, 231–32; and cinematic apparatus, 195–99, 244, 334n1; and cinematic spectatorship, 28, 195–204, 217–20, 222; and cinematic techniques in Griffith’s work, 204, 207, 208, 209, 211, 339–39n33; cowboy, 221, 222, 234, 246; jungle thriller, 219, 222, 237–39, 240; and racial ideology

in Griffith’s work, 203–13; romantic comedy, 221, 222, 227–29; segregation depicted in, 125–26; segregation signs co-opted in, 296, 297; “women’s,” 231 film theaters: black-owned, 45, 72, 200, 201, 217, 218, 219, 220, 341n1; Jim Crow signs at, 72, 196, 224, 226, 233, 236, 237, 237–39, 316n23; midnight screenings in, 337n17; segregated entrances to, 196, 220, 229–31, 230, 233, 236–39, 237, 242, 243; segregated seating in, 195, 196, 197–99, 198, 200–4, 214–16, 217– 23, 337n17; as sites of consumption, 221, 222, 231–34, 244. See also photography, of segregated film theaters Flaherty, A. J., 2, 7, 8 Flash (periodical), 113 Fleming, Jeanne, 280–81 Florida: interracial restaurant service in, 178–79, 179; Jim Crow signs in, 44, 46, 47, 134, 172– 73, 175, 175–77, 177; lunch-counter sit-ins in, 277, 278 food: racial symbolism of, 82; served in film theaters, 221; social aspects of, 163–64. See also restaurants Forman, James (Jim), 150, 327n31 Foucault, Michel, 17, 35, 305nn23,40 France: Jim Crow photographs published in, 112; linguistic signification of “segregation” in, 126, 200, 324n3 Freed, Leonard, 117, 280 Freedom Riders, 123, 140 Freud, Sigmund, 79, 196, 334n1 Friedlander, Lee, 8, 78 Fulton, A. R., 338n33 Fusco, Coco, 20 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 352n51 Gaines, Jane, 219 Gandhi, Mohandas K., 275, 348n7, 352n48 Garbo, Greta, 225–26, 227–29, 344n23 Gardner, Elizabeth, 331n25 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., xvii, 10, 54, 239–40, 304n15 gaze: and black looks, 238, 345–46n38; Lacan on, 258; at segregated lunch counters, 161, 189–90, 255, 258–59, 350n23; of white male photographer, 148, 150 gender difference: complicated by racial difference in Jim Crow signs, 27, 125–32; complicated by racial difference in photographs of Jim Crow signs, 81, 123–24, 127–28, 132–40,

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142–44, 152–57; and Lacanian symbolic, 126, 127; registered in photography of lunchcounter sit-ins, 29, 254, 256 gender relations: and interracial relations, 46– 47, 47, 129; modernization of, 82 geography, racial significance of, 15–20 Georgia, Jim Crow signs in: drinking fountains, 107, 136, 148, 149, 150, 319n5; elevators, 73; film theaters, 45, 46; government buildings, 107–8, 136, 136, 148, 149, 150, 294, 319n5; restrooms, 138; waiting rooms, 90–91, 91 Germany. See Nazi Germany Gilroy, Paul, 10, 26, 62 Ginsburg, Ruth Bader, 331n20 Gish, Lillian, 206 Goldberg, Whoopi, 50, 52 Golden, Harry, 265, 351n34 Goldsby, Jacqueline, 106, 319n9 Gomery, Douglas, 342n6 Good Housekeeping (periodical), 84–85 Gotanda, Neil, 11 graphic design of Jim Crow signs, 39, 41–44, 311n12 Greensboro (NC), 163, 251, 255, 256, 258, 261, 262–67, 263, 267, 272, 347n1 Greenville (MS), 92, 94–96, 95 Greenville (TX), 70–71, 71 Griffith, D. W., 28, 137, 199, 203–13, 214, 246, 291, 338n27, 338–39n33, 339nn34,41, 340nnn44–45 Guimond, James, 321n25 Hale, Grace Elizabeth, 16, 306n37 Halifax (NC), 144–46, 145 Hall, Stuart, 10, 304n14 Hannibal (MO), 197, 198 Hansen, Miriam, 199, 200, 204, 210, 214, 336n12 Harlem: black-owned businesses in, 44, 61, 201, 342n6; riots in, 44; theaters in, 201, 214, 341n58, 342n6; Van Vechten’s description of, 203, 246 Harlem Renaissance, 262 Henderson v. United States, 181 Henkin, David M., 41, 80, 310n7 heterotopias, 17 Hevey, David, 326n25 Hinton, Milt, 97–98, 99, 114 history, representation of: in photographs of Jim Crow signs, 82–84; and scarcity of photographs of Jim Crow signs, 104

383

Hitchcock, Alfred, 346n39 Hitler, Adolf, 84, 85, 136 Hoffman, H. F., 214–16 Holly, Gerald, 350n23 Home of the Brave (film), 327n27 hooks, bell, 238, 346n38 Hopper, Edward, 164, 166, 330n11 Horkheimer, Max, 310n6 Houston (TX), 268 Hughes, Langston, 306n31, 342n6 Hurston, Zora Neale, 148 Hurt, Sallie, 312n22 Husfloen, Kyle, 51 ice cream parlors, Jim Crow signs at, 22, 23, 81, 81–83, 150, 151, 151–52 iconic images: and Hopper’s painting Nighthawks, 164–65, 166; photographs of Jim Crow signs as, 27, 92, 104, 117–20, 118–19, 146, 147, 149, 150; photographs of lunchcounter sit-ins as, 256, 349n11, 350n23 iconicity: paired with logos, 26, 62–63, 314n2; and Peirce’s semiotics, 26, 63; and photographic representation, 63, 64, 65 immigration: racial binary of Jim Crow signs complicated by, xix, 170, 171, 174–77; restaurant standardization in context of, 161, 167 indexicality: and Peirce’s theory of semiotics, 26, 63; of photographic representation, 63, 64, 65, 66, 89, 101 Intolerance (film), 204 Iran, discriminatory signage in, 309n67 ironic signification: in documentary photography, 90; in photographs of Jim Crow signs, 80, 83, 85–86, 87 Jackson, Blyden, 16 Jackson, John L., 29 Jackson (MS), 140, 141, 142, 256, 262, 283, 285– 87, 286, 288–89, 353n58 Jacksonville (FL), 46, 172–73, 175 Jenkins, Gwendolyn, 140, 141, 142, 157 Jet (periodical), 76, 259, 280–81, 317n28, 349n13 Jett, Ira, 152, 152 Jews, discrimination against, 174, 331n20 “Jim Crow,” as popular song and dance, 1, 6–7, 303nn9–10 Jim Crow Guide (Stetson Kennedy), 112, 181, 331–32n25

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Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, 35, 312n23, 331n20 Jim Crow signs: commercial signage compared to, 36–37, 41; commercial signage using, 44– 47; co-opted in all-white Hollywood film, 296–97; estimated number of, 302n2; graphic design of, 39, 41–44, 311n12; materials used in, 5, 46, 48; as museum artifacts, 1, 35, 52, 59, 60–61, 126–27, 128, 129, 299, 331n20; parodies of, 59–60; photography of (see photography, of Jim Crow signs); in postsegregation artwork, 297–300, 298; postsegregation marketing of, 26, 35–36, 52–56, 58–59, 60–61, 312n22; and public sphere, 25, 36–39, 41–43, 44–45, 292; racial construction complicated by, 5–6, 7, 16, 36; redeployed in progressive politics, 29, 294– 96, 295, 296; removal of, 47–48, 105, 113, 115, 124, 256, 292, 293, 319n5; reproductions of, 35, 52–56, 58–59, 299, 312n25, 313n29; rhetoric of, 67–73, 74, 76–77, 81, 127–30, 169–71, 316n21; spread of, 4–5. See also specific sites of Jim Crow signs Jim Crow signs, African Americans’ response to: in artwork, 297–300, 298; in cartoons, 43–44, 45; in childhood, 33–34, 41, 125; as collectors’ items, 48–51, 312n23; as consumer items, 35, 52–56, 58; in defense of community spaces, 44–47; in fiction, 41; in films, 125; in iconography, 46–47, 47; in photography, 26, 66, 67, 73, 76–77, 77, 78, 96–102, 113–16, 172, 317n28, 322n31. See also civil rights movement; sit-ins at lunch counters Johnson, James Weldon, 341n58 Johnson, Lyndon B., 148 Johnson, Magic, 52 Johnson-Jeffries Fight (film), 213, 215–16 Jolson, Al, 235 Jordan, Juanita, 52 jungle thriller, as film genre, 219, 222, 237–39, 240 Käsebier, Gertrude, 162 Kasher, Stephen, 253, 348n6 Kazin, Alfred, 193 Keating, Bern, 92, 94–96, 318n48 Kelley, Robin D. G., 116, 241–42, 346n43 Kennedy, John F., 248, 288 Kennedy, Stetson, 48, 107, 112, 136, 181, 182, 331–32n25, 332n27

Kilpatrick, James Jackson, 265–66, 278 King, Martin Luther, Jr., xviii, 61, 102, 280, 283, 288, 347n2, 348n7 Kittrell (NC), 86, 87, 90 Klein, Melanie, 346n47 Kluge, Alexander, 210 Kracauer, Siegfried, 334n1 Kristeva, Julia, 170 Ku Klux Klan, 125, 204, 205, 210, 211, 258, 299 Ku Klux Klan Museum, 59, 313n37 labor relations, 102, 152–54 Lacan, Jacques, 126, 127, 130, 144, 200, 258, 324nn3–4, 335n7, 346n47 Laclau, Ernesto, xix The Lamp (periodical), 328n32 Lamprey, J. H., 21 Lancaster (OH), 169, 169 Lange, Dorothea, 72, 90, 108, 109, 118, 162, 185–86, 187, 188–92, 219, 238, 320–21n18, 332–33n32, 333nn37–38 laundry companies, under segregation, 69, 70 Laurens (SC), 59 Lawson, James, 280, 348n7, 352n48 Lee, Russell, 108, 142–44, 143, 174 Lee, Spike, 52, 310n4, 312n26 Lefèbvre, Henri, 15, 17, 306n34 Leland (MS), 219 Levinas, Emmanuel, 277, 352n50 Levinson, Barry, 331n20 Lewis, John, 251, 280, 348n7 liberalism, 89–90, 92, 104, 142, 256 Liberty Heights (film), 331n20 libraries, municipal, 73–74, 75, 316–17n27 Library of Congress, 108, 320nn12–13, 322n31 Life (periodical), 22, 73, 96, 111, 113, 114, 157– 58, 184, 202, 265, 266–67, 274, 318n46, 321n5, 322n32, 332n31, 351n38 Lincoln, Abraham, 28, 204–10 Lindenberger, Jan, 51, 127 logos: and construction of race, 26, 62, 63, 66– 67, 314n2; paired with iconicity, 26, 62, 63, 66–67, 314n2 London, Jack, 340n52 Lonestar Restaurant Association, 170–71, 171, 174 Look (periodical), 113, 184, 289, 290, 321n25, 332n31, 343n18 López, Ian Haney, 293, 303n12, 354n1 Lott, Eric, 304n15 Lubitsch, Ernst, 227

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Luce, Henry, 184 Lumberton (NC), 152, 153 lunch counters: racial segregation at, 161, 188– 92, 189, 257; standardization of, 164, 165. See also sit-ins at lunch counters Lydon, John, 171 lynching: and black memorabilia collections, 52; and photography, 106, 107, 110, 111, 319nn9–10; protests against, 115 Lyon, Danny, 117, 148, 149, 150, 154, 294, 327n31 Magnum photo agency, 117 Malcolm X, 342n6, 348n2 Manchester (GA), 90–91, 91, 142 Mannoni, Octave, 344n24 Martha’s Crib, 54–56, 57, 58, 313n32 Marxism, 17–18, 227, 228 Maryland, Jim Crow signs in, 134, 174 masculinity, black: and discourse of injury, 148; emasculation of, 102, 146, 148, 150, 154, 156; Jim Crow laws’ feminization of, 124, 131, 142; registered in photography of Jim Crow signs, 90–91, 94–96, 102, 137, 142–44, 146–48, 152–54; registered in photography of segregated film theaters, 235, 236; and social class, 152–54 masculinity, white, 94, 96, 131, 150, 215, 216, 222, 265 Mason, Skip, 312n22 Mays, Benjamin, 218 McCain, John, xviii McCann, Calvert, 352n49 memento mori, photographs as, 88, 343n14 memory museum, 103, 104–5, 116. See also cultural memory Memphis (TN), 99–102, 100, 101, 109, 172, 173, 218, 235, 242, 243, 257 men, African American: depicted in photographs, 101, 102, 188–92, 189, 234, 235, 262– 66, 263, 267–68, 268, 269, 269–71, 271; and discourse of injury, 148; Jim Crow restroom signs for, 124, 127, 128; at lunch-counter sitins, 255, 262, 263, 267–68, 268, 269, 269–71; and military service, 112, 148, 182; represented in film, 327n27; and unemployment, 90, 326n23; working-class, 101, 102, 152–54, 238. See also masculinity, black men, African American, depicted in photographs of Jim Crow signs: at drinking fountains, 119, 142–44, 143, 146–48, 147,

385

152–54, 153; at film theaters, 223–25, 224, 226, 229, 232–34, 233, 235–39, 237; at ice cream parlors, 22, 23; in railroad dining car, 182; at restrooms, 137, 138; in waiting rooms, 83–84, 84, 90–91, 91, 94–96, 95, 99 men, white: depicted in photographs of Jim Crow signs, 86–88, 87, 152, 152–55, 153; Jim Crow photographs predominantly produced by, 124; at lunch-counter sit-ins, as counterdemonstrators, 261, 265–67, 267, 286, 286; at lunch-counter sit-ins, as participants, 286, 286–87; as photographers of Jim Crow signs, 67, 81–85, 89–92, 94– 96, 108, 109, 117, 124, 132; photographic viewpoint of, 148, 150; working-class, 154, 265, 266, 267. See also masculinity, white Merrill, Phillip, 312n22 Merritt, Russell, 336n12 Metz, Christian, 200, 217, 218, 220, 222, 223, 225, 244, 346n47 Mexico, immigrants from, 19, 170–71, 174, 176 Miami (FL), 134–35, 326n18 middle class: black, 53, 130, 264–65; white, 48, 96, 154, 162, 190 middle class, and cinematic spectatorship, 200, 203 midnight screenings, in film theaters, 337n17 Miles, Vera E., 130, 131 miscegenation, 160, 168, 205 Mississippi: black muncipality in, 18, 307n46; black-owned theater in, 219, 220; Jim Crow signs in, 94–95, 95, 140, 141, 142, 233, 236; segregated theaters in, 219, 222, 232, 233, 246 Mississippi, segregated lunch counters in, 188– 92, 189; protests against, 256, 280, 283, 285– 87, 286, 288–89, 353n58 Missouri, segregated film theater in, 197, 198 Mitchell, Eddie, 223, 224, 229, 234, 343n18 Mitchell, W. J. T., 64, 314n2, 332n30 modernity, social, 82, 156 Modleski, Tania, 346n39 money exchange, at lunch-counter sit-ins, 271– 73, 271, 276 Montgomery (AL), 38, 39 Moody, Anne, 286–87, 289, 290 Moore, Charles, 353n58, 354n68 Morehouse College, 218 Morgan, Thomas B., 290 Morrison, Toni, 202, 324n4, 331n24, 342n6 Moses, Robert, 263, 351n27

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Mound Bayou (MS), 18, 307n46 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 148, 326n23 mulattoes, 205–6, 339n39 multiculturalism, 256, 349n14 Mulvey, Laura, 344n23 Murray, Pauli, 41 Museum in Black (Los Angeles), 52 Museum of African American Life and Culture (Dallas), 59 Museum of Modern Art (NYC), 73, 184 Museum of the African’s Experience in America, 299 museums, 1, 35, 52, 59, 60–61, 73, 105, 127, 129, 184, 295, 299 Mydans, Carl, 108, 184, 332n31 Myrdal, Gunnar, 321n26 Nadell, Martha Jane, 110 Nasaw, David, 340n50 Nash, Diane, 272, 279–80, 350n26, 353n54 Nashville (TN), 96, 127, 259, 268, 272, 350n23 Natanson, Nicholas, 108, 109, 188, 320nn14,16 Natchez (MS), 246 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 22, 59, 76, 113, 212, 251, 259, 283, 286, 292, 322n31, 347n1 national identity: articulated with racial identity, 252, 256, 263, 282, 292; mediated by documentary photography, 183–84; mediated by food consumption, 164 National Museum of American History (Washington, D.C.), 1, 295 Native Americans, xix, 301n2 Nazi Germany, 68, 84, 91, 107, 116, 136, 318n46 “Negro”: as term claimed by African Americans, 72, 73–74; as term in Jim Crow signs, 72–74, 76–77 Negt, Oskar, 210 New Deal, 81, 89–90, 108, 142, 221 New Jersey, Jim Crow signs in, 113 Newkirk, Pamela, 322n28 New Orleans (LA), 2, 3, 4, 7, 280, 281, 345n36 Newsweek (periodical), 289–90, 344n28 New York: Jim Crow signs in, 19, 110, 113; segregated theater seating in, 202, 214, 216 New York Age (newspaper), 201 New Yorker (periodical), 165 New York Post (newspaper), 113 New York Times, xvii, 202, 264–65, 274–75, 287, 351n38 New York Times Magazine, 181

nickelodeons, 201, 334n2, 336n12 Nikolay, John G., 207 Ninotchka (film), 223, 225, 227–29, 243 Nixon, H. C., 110 Norman, Brian J., 310n4 North Carolina, Jim Crow signs in, 41, 42, 42– 43, 138–40, 139; drinking fountains, 117–18, 118–19, 144–46, 145, 152, 153; restrooms, 81, 81–83; waiting rooms, 83–88, 84, 87 North Carolina, protest against segregation in, 163, 251, 255, 256, 261, 262–67, 263, 267, 269, 269–70, 272, 347n1 Oakland (CA), 59 Obama, Barack, xvii, xviii, xx Obama, Michelle, xviii O’Connor, Flannery, 331n24 Office of War Information (OWI), 89, 108, 109, 115, 127, 320nn12–13 Oklahoma: Jim Crow signs in, 142–44, 143; lunch-counter sit-ins in, 251, 254, 259, 260, 275 Omi, Michael, 5 Orientalism, 230 Orkin, Ad, 217, 218 Our World (periodical), 113 Page, Clarence, 50, 58, 59 Palfi, Marian, 107, 112, 135–37, 139, 150, 152, 152, 162, 182–83, 243, 257, 321–22n27, 332n27 Palmer, L. F., 264 Paris (France), 100, 222 Parks, Gordon, 73, 96, 97, 108, 112, 114, 157–59, 158, 316n24, 322n32, 328–29n41, 332n31 parks, Jim Crow signs in, 39, 40, 106–7, 107 Parks, Rosa, 61 Patterson, Frederick D., 163 Patterson, Orlando, 91 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 26, 63, 65 Penland, Betty, 136, 136–37, 152 Pennsylvania: Jim Crow signs in, 174; rail car segregation in, 131 persistence of vision, in film viewing, 225, 343n19 perspective, linear, 197 photography: by African Americans, 115–16; Barthes on, 26, 63–66, 88–89, 343n14; Benjamin on, 26, 65, 78–79, 89, 100–1, 253; compared to psychoanalysis, 79, 197; and construction of race, 20–21, 62, 63, 64;

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index control of signification compromised in, 78–80; critique of cinematic apparatus by, 196–97, 218, 222, 247; and documentary conventions, 89–90, 92; Friedlander on, 78; as instrument of comparative anatomy, 20– 21; and memento mori, 88, 343n14; and national identity, 183–84; Peirce on, 26, 63; rhetoric of, 65–66; semiotics of, 26, 63–67, 92, 101–2; Sontag on, 88, 104, 253, 343n14, 348n5; and temporality, 88–89; Trachtenberg on, 78; and voyeurism, 162, 183, 333n40; Wexler on, 92, 162 photography, of Jim Crow signs: by African Americans, 26, 66, 67, 73, 76–77, 77, 78, 89, 96–102, 113–16, 157–59, 172, 322n31, 328– 29n41; in archives, 24, 81, 90, 104, 105, 108, 111, 319–20nn12–14, 321n27, 322n31; in books, 109–10, 111, 112, 321n19; control of signification compromised in, 80; destruction of, 105, 319n6; and documentary conventions, 89–90, 92; exhibitions of, 67, 98– 102, 116; exteriorized viewpoint in, 159; government-sponsored, 67, 89–90, 108–11, 115, 127, 142, 162, 320nn12–13; historical change represented in, 82–84; as iconic images, 27, 92, 104, 117–20, 118–19, 146, 147, 149, 150; ironic juxtaposition in, 80, 83, 85–86, 87; limited circulation of, 103–5; limited production of, 108–11; and lynching photographs, 106, 107; number of archived photographs, 105, 319–20n12; in periodicals, 73, 96, 111–14, 157–59, 321n25; and photo agencies, 114, 117; as photojournalism, 25, 29, 73, 107, 111–14, 162; and racial typology, 21–22; as rebus, 144; and removal of signs, 292, 293; rhetoric of captions for, 72, 182, 316n23, 344n27, 345n36; scarcity of, 26–27, 103–5, 114, 115, 323n35; and struggle for affirmative action, 294–96, 295, 296; white liberals’ production of, 67, 81–85, 89–92, 94–96, 107, 108–12, 115, 124, 142, 146; white male viewpoint in, 148, 150; white men’s predominance in producing, 124; by white women, 107–9, 111, 112, 124, 127, 135–37, 139, 150, 152–56, 162, 182, 225– 26, 243, 321–22n27. See also specific sites of Jim Crow signs photography, of lunch-counter sit-ins: arrests of protestors depicted in, 278–83, 279; camera location in, 259, 261, 268–69; captions for, 270–71, 350n21; compared to television cov-

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erage, 252–53; iconic images in, 256, 349n11, 350n23; money exchange depicted in, 271– 73; racial difference rearticulated in, 256; visual narrative of, 253–54, 256; white waitresses depicted in, 259, 260, 261, 269, 269– 70, 277, 277–78, 284, 285; writing and reading activities depicted in, 267–70, 268, 269 photography, of segregated film theaters, 27–29; by African Americans, 229–31, 230; and cinematic spectatorship, 197–99, 198, 217– 20; critique of cinematic production registered in, 28, 221, 222, 223–25, 231; discourse of consumption registered in, 221, 222, 231– 34; exterior stairs depicted in, 220, 229–31, 230, 232–34, 233, 236–39, 237, 344n27; government-sponsored, 219, 237; Jim Crow signs depicted in, 224, 224–26, 226, 233, 236, 237, 237–39; and popcorn-throwing, 29, 195, 223, 241–47, 346n44; shadows as signifiers in, 28, 208, 221, 223–25, 234, 235, 236; by white women, 219, 225–26, 232, 234, 238, 243 photojournalism, 25, 29, 73, 107, 111–14, 162, 184, 321n25; and coverage of lunch-counter sit-ins, 29, 252–53, 263–67, 270, 272, 274– 75, 278–83, 286, 289–90 picture palaces, 230, 334n2 Pilgrim, David, 35, 310n6, 312n23 Pittsburgh Courier (newspaper), 112, 114, 322n28 Plato, 195, 196, 334n1 Pleasantville (film), 296–97, 300 Plessy, Homer, 11 Plessy v. Ferguson, 11, 38, 110, 130, 146, 352n45 PM (periodical), 107, 112 Portsmouth (VA), 255, 271, 271, 273–77, 274, 289 Prado, Guillermo, 294, 295 private sphere: and documentary photography by women, 162; Jim Crow signs as expression of, 36, 39, 42–43 psychoanalysis: and cinematic apparatus, 196, 197, 244, 334n1, 335n7; Lacanian, 126, 127, 130, 144, 200, 324nn3–4, 335n7, 346n47; photography compared to, 79, 197; and visual rhetoric, 151–52, 154, 155–56 public sphere: Jim Crow signs in, 25, 36–39, 41– 43, 44–45, 292; oppositional, 210; and race theaters, 219, 335n9; racial difference elided by neutrality of, 256 Puerto Rico, immigants from, 176

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index

Rabinowitz, Paula, 162, 333n40 race, construction of: in academic discourse, 8, 10–11; complicated by Jim Crow signs, 5– 6, 7, 36; and logos/icon pairing, 26, 62–63, 314n2; and rhetoric of photography, 66, 67, 94; and semiotics of photography, 62, 63, 64, 66–67; and Signifying Monkey, 240; and social space, 6, 7, 15–20, 183 racial difference: and anthropological science, 11, 13–14, 20–21; biological determination of, 10–15; complicated by gender difference in Jim Crow signs, 125–32; complicated by gender difference in photographs of Jim Crow signs, 81, 123–24, 127–28, 132–40, 142–44, 152–57; elided in discourse of abstract equality, 256, 273, 277, 293; elided in discourse of color blindness, xviii, xx, 29, 256, 273, 288, 291, 293–94, 295, 300, 352n45; environmental determination of, 12, 19; geographic model of, 15–16, 19; linguistic determination of, 8, 14; and logos/icon pairing, 63; lunch-counter sit-ins’ rearticulation of, 252, 256; and photography as instrument of comparative anatomy, 20–21; and transposition of cultural codes, 94 Raiford, Leigh, 104 railroads, 11, 37, 131, 164, 181, 182–83 Raleigh (NC), 138–40, 139, 269, 269–70, 272 Ray, Man, 134 Reconstruction, 4, 201, 204, 208, 291 Redneck Shop of the Ku Klux Klan Museum, 59, 313n37 “Reflections in Black” exhibit (Washington, D.C.), 67, 98, 101–2, 115–16 Regional Council of Negro Leadership, 123 Reid, Tim, 125–26, 130, 144 reproductions of Jim Crow signs, 35, 52–56, 58– 59, 299, 312n25, 313n29 restaurants: and economic pressure to serve racially mixed clientele, 27, 161, 177–80; Jim Crow signs at, 169, 169–71, 171, 174–77, 176, 177, 331n23; photography of segregated, 27, 162–63, 182–83, 188–92, 189; physical barriers used in segregation of, 161, 180–83, 188–92, 189; race relations in, 160–61, 177– 83, 188–92; racially coded names of, 44, 167; sit-ins for desegregation of, 162–63; standardization of, 161, 164, 165, 167 restrooms, Jim Crow signs on: African American women’s response to, 124, 130, 140, 142; complication of race and gender categories

in, 27, 81, 123–24, 126–40, 142–44; and Lacanian symbolic, 126, 127, 324n4; as museum artifacts, 126–27, 128, 129; photography of, 81, 81–83, 123–24, 129, 132–40, 133, 135, 138, 139, 141, 142–44, 143; and Reid’s film adaptation of Taulbert’s memoir, 125–26 rhetoric: of Jim Crow signs, 67–73, 74, 76–77, 81, 127–30, 169–71; of photograph captions, 72, 73, 316n23; and Signifying Monkey, 240 Richmond (VA), 265, 278, 279, 291 riots: in Chattanooga, 275; in Detroit, 111; in Harlem, 44 Rivera, Alex, 114, 115 Roach, Jacqui, 345–46n38 Roberts, Bruce, 267 Roberts, John, 293 Robertson, Carole, 346n44 Rochester (NY), 19 Rogin, Michael, 205, 210, 303n9, 338n31 romantic comedy, as film genre, 221, 222, 227–29 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 43 Roosevelt, Theodore, 213, 215, 216 Rosenthal, Joe, 118 Rosler, Martha, 150 Rosskam, Edwin, 110, 321n19 Rothstein, Arthur, 108, 222, 223–25, 224, 230, 231, 232, 234, 332n31, 343n18 Salter, John, 286, 287, 288 San Antonio (TX), 174, 176 Sanders, Walt, 91–92, 93, 95, 112, 119, 318n46 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 112 Saussurean linguistics, 10, 240 Saxton, Alexander, 6 Schapiro, Steve, 22 Scott, James C., 242 segregation signs. See Jim Crow signs Sekaer, Peter, 219, 222, 237, 345n36 Sekula, Allan, 22 Sellers, Cleveland, 128, 195, 196, 223 Selma (AL), 38, 39 semiotics: Peirce’s theory of, 26, 63, 65; of photography, 26, 63–67, 92, 101–2 separate-but-equal formula, 11, 146–47, 150 Sepia (periodical), 113 sexual difference. See gender difference shadows, as signifiers, 28, 208, 221, 223–25, 234, 235, 236, 343n14 Shahn, Ben, 108 Signifying Monkey, 239–41, 242

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index Silverman, Kaja, 335n7 sit-ins at lunch counters, 162–63, 251, 347n1; arrest and incarceration of protestors at, 278–85, 279; code of behavior for protestors at, 275, 284, 348n7, 351n32, 352n48; crossracial female solidarity at, 255, 277–78; female protestors’ role in, 254, 255, 273–85, 274, 276, 277, 279, 285, 286, 287, 289–90, 353n61; and Gandhian nonviolence, 275, 348n7, 352n48; media coverage of, 252–53, 263–67, 270, 272, 274–75, 278–83, 286, 289– 90, 351nn32,38; money exchange at, 271– 73, 271, 276; racial and national identity rearticulated in, 252, 256, 263, 273, 282; significance of face and gaze at, 255, 258– 59, 262–64, 275–77, 284–85, 350n23; and social class, 264–67; violence at, 255, 274– 75, 283–84, 286–90, 351n38; white waitresses at, 29, 254, 257–61, 260, 269, 269–70, 277, 277–78, 284, 285, 350n17; white youths as counterdemonstrators at, 261, 265–67, 267, 286, 286; writing and reading activities at, 267–70, 268, 269. See also photography, of lunch-counter sit-ins slavery, 4, 56, 58, 74, 204, 312n26 Smith, Lillian, 33, 34, 181 Smith, Owen, 164–65 Smith, Shawn Michelle, 24, 332n30 Smith, W. Eugene, 111 Snead, James, 338n32 social body, 2, 16, 163–64, 167, 174, 180, 233, 244, 255 social class: and cinematic spectatorship, 200, 203, 221; and lunch-counter sit-ins, 264– 65, 266, 267, 350n26 social class, of African Americans, 53, 130, 350n26; elided by Jim Crow signs, 41; registered in photographs of Jim Crow signs, 84, 152–54; registered in photographs of lunchcounter sit-ins, 264–65. See also middle class; working class social death, entailed by segregation, 91, 101 social space, racially defined, 6, 7, 15–20, 183, 306–7n43 Soja, Edward J., 29 Sontag, Susan, 88, 103, 104, 253, 343n14, 348n5 Sotomayor, Sonia, xvii South Carolina, Jim Crow signs in: film theater, 196; gas station, 76–77, 77; roadside advertisement, 133, 133 Southern Conference Educational Fund, 322n31

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Southern Patriot (periodical), 322n31 Southwestern Christian Advocate (newspaper), 112 Soviet Union, 111, 227 spatiality. See social space spectatorship. See cinematic spectatorship Spillers, Hortense J., xix, 301n2, 325n10 St. Petersburg (FL), 277, 278 standardization: of film audience, 199–200; of restaurants, 161, 164, 165, 167 Standard Oil of New Jersey, documentary photos sponsored by, 111, 152, 320n12, 328n32 Stange, Maren, 332n31 Steichen, Edward, 190, 320n13 Stevens, Thaddeus, 205, 339n39 Stewart, Jacqueline Najuma, 200, 202, 204, 220, 335n9, 338n27 Stewart, Preston E., Jr., 114 Stone, I. F., 107 Stones, Barbara, 342n6 Streible, Dan, 213 structuralism, linguistic, 10–11 Stryker, Roy Emerson, 108, 109, 152, 184–85, 186, 188, 190, 320nn12–13, 332–33nn31–33 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 117, 150, 269, 327n31, 351n27, 353n58 Sturken, Marita, 313n29 Supreme Court, U.S., 11, 73, 146, 181, 201, 293, 294, 326n25, 331n24, 352n45 surrealism, 65 Survey Graphic (periodical), 112 Swift, Jonathan, 132 swimming pools, Jim Crow signs at, 38, 39 symbol: and cinematic representation, 126, 127; and Lacanian symbolic, 126, 127; in Peirce’s semiotics, 63, 65; and photographic representation, 63, 65–66, 101, 144; and racial symbolic, 144 Talbot, William Henry Fox, 343n14 Talbott, Hudson, 165, 166 Tapia, Ruby C., 88 Taulbert, Clifton I., 125 Taylor, Charles, 349n14 Taylor, Mary, 61 Taylor, Paul, 185, 188, 333n37 temporality, photographic registration of, 88–89 Tennessee: Jim Crow signs in, 105, 127, 172, 173; lunch-counter sit-ins in, 259, 268, 272, 275, 350n23; segregated film theaters in, 218, 234, 235, 242

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Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), 105 Texas: Jim Crow signs in, 70–71, 71, 146–48, 147, 170–71, 171, 174, 176; lunch-counter sit-ins in, 268 theaters. See film theaters Thompson, Allen, 285 Thornton, Albert, Sr., 73, 316n24 Thornton, E. J., 96 Till, Emmett, 99, 255, 349n13 Torres, Sasha, 253 Tougaloo College, 283, 286, 287, 290, 353n61 Trachtenberg, Alan, 78, 320n13 trains. See railroads transportation systems, segregated, 5, 11, 36, 37, 44, 128, 130–31, 180, 181, 182–83, 304n20, 331n24, 350n23. See also waiting rooms Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 104 Trumpaeur, Joan, 287, 289, 290, 353n61, 354n68 Tugwell, Rexford, 333n33 Tyson, Cicely, 52

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uncanny, 310n4 unemployment, black, 90, 229, 326n23 University of California at Berkeley, 294–96, 295, 296 Ut, Nick, 118 Vachon, John, 90, 94, 96, 97, 101, 102, 108, 142, 144–46, 147, 332n31 Valentine Richmond History Center, 127, 129 Vanderbilt, Paul, 320n13 Van Vechten, Carl, 203, 246–47 vaudeville, 199, 203 Virginia: Jim Crow sign ins, 8, 9; protests against segregation in, 255, 265–66, 271, 271, 273– 76, 274, 278, 279, 291 visual barriers, in segregated restaurants, 161, 180–83, 188–92, 189 visual rhetoric, in photography, 65–66 voyeurism, photographic, 162, 183, 333n40 Wade-Gayles, Gloria, 218, 241, 242–43, 244 Wagner, Anne M., 349n11 waiting rooms, Jim Crow signs at: in black municipalities, 18; as collectors’ items, 50, 56, 58; photography of, 83–85, 84, 87, 87, 89, 90–92, 91, 93, 94–102, 95, 97, 99, 100, 109; removal of, 48; rhetoric of, 67–68, 316n21 Walker, William, 212–13, 340n49 Wallace, George C., 258, 260 Wallace, Maurice O., 21

Wallace, Robert, 73 Wallace, Willie, 246 Waller, Gregory A., 342n6 Walton, Lester A., 201, 202 Washington, Booker T., 72, 163 Watkins, Mel, 245 Wells, Ida B., 130 Welty, Eudora, xviii–xix, 224, 225–26, 344n21 West, Ben, 272 Western, as film genre, 221, 222, 234, 246 Wexler, Laura, 62, 63, 92, 162 Weyeneth, Robert R., 16 White, Walter, 113 White Castle restaurant chain, 165, 167, 256, 330n13 whiteness, construction of: and deracialization, 68, 69; and logos, 63, 66–67; and photography of Jim Crow signs, 8, 9, 67, 82, 85– 89, 96, 106–7, 107, 136, 136–37, 151, 152, 152; and restaurant architecture, 165, 167, 330n13; and rhetoric of Jim Crow signs, 68– 70. See also men, white; women, white white supremacy, 5, 28, 43, 50, 59, 106, 136, 152, 216, 266–67, 283, 331n24 Wiegman, Robyn, 15 Williams, Cecil J., 76–77, 77, 78, 96, 114, 123, 317n28 Williams, George Washington, 72 Williams, Linda, 210 Willis, Deborah, 98, 102, 115, 150 Wilson, Woodrow, 209 Winant, Howard, 5 Winchell, Walter, 322n29 Winfrey, Oprah, 52 Withers, Ernest C., 99–102, 100, 101, 114, 172 Wolcott, Marion Post, 72, 108, 162, 178, 219, 232, 234, 316n23 women, African American: depicted in photographs, 91–92, 93, 140, 141, 142, 157–59, 158, 188–92, 189; depicted in photographs of lunch-counter sit-ins, 254, 255, 273–85, 274, 276, 277, 279, 285; and feminism, 325n7; gender privileges denied to, 130–31; incarceration of, 278–82; lunch-counter sit-ins by, 254, 273–85, 274, 276, 277, 279, 285; and response to Jim Crow signs, 124, 130–31, 134, 140, 142, 159. See also femininity, black women, white: depicted in advertising, 155–57, 191–92; depicted in photographs of Jim Crow signs, 81, 81–83, 82, 83, 86–88, 87, 134–37, 135, 136; fetishized representation

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index

232, 234, 238, 332n27; and social modernity, 82. See also femininity, white Woodward, C. Vann, 6 Woolworth’s department stores, 163, 256–57, 285 working class, 152–54, 162, 200, 203, 265, 266, 267 Works Progress Administration, 73 World War II, 82, 112, 116, 118, 148, 156, 328n36 Wright, Jeremiah, xviii Wright, Richard, 110, 111, 321n19, 342n6 Zealy, Joseph T., 21 Zelizer, Barbie, 103, 105, 116 zoos, Jim Crow signs at, 171–74, 173, 175

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of, 155–57, 226–27, 344n23; incarceration of, 280, 281; Jim Crow restroom signs for, 81, 81, 127–29, 128, 132–39, 135, 138, 139, 141; at lunch-counter sit-ins, as counterdemonstrators, 261, 290; at lunch-counter sit-ins, as participants, 255, 286, 287, 289–90, 353n61; at lunch-counter sit-ins, as waitresses, 29, 254, 257–61, 269, 269–70, 277, 277–78, 284, 285, 350n17; as photographers, 162, 185– 86, 333n40; as photographers of Jim Crow signs, 107–9, 111, 112, 124, 127, 135–37, 139, 150, 152–56, 225–26, 243, 321–22n27; as photographers of segregated social spaces (without signs), 27, 182–83, 188–92, 219,

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Text 10/12.5 Minion Pro Display Minion Pro Indexer Andrew Joron Compositor Integrated Composition Systems Printer and Binder Thomson-Shore

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