March 10, 2006
Folks We Have Lost Posted by Audrey Peterson at 03:45 PM EST This Monday I was sitting at my computer, attempting to write an editor’s letter for American Legacy magazine. The theme was a goodbye to some of the notable African-Americans we have lost in 2005 and 2006. The list was discouragingly long, and seems to have started with the death of Shirley Chisholm on New Year’s Day of last year. It went on from there: Ossie Davis last February. Bobby Short and Johnnie Cochran (love him or hate him) in the spring. By the end of the summer we had lost Luther Vandross, August Wilson, and the founder and publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines, John H. Johnson. In the fall it was Judge Constance Baker Motley, the entertainers Shirley Horn and Nipsey Russell; and Rosa Parks, and Vivian Malone Jones, who in 1963 faced down Governor George Wallace when he refused to allow her to enter the University of Alabama to register. She became the first African-American to graduate from there. In November, the artist Ernest Crichlow died at 91. He lived in Brooklyn, just a few subway stops from our offices here on Fifth Avenue, but I found out too late that he had still been alive and missed the opportunity to talk to him about his long career and share it with our readers. December took Richard Pryor. Lou Rawls and Coretta Scott King passed on a few weeks into 2006. And at the end of February the 58-year-old science fiction writer Octavia Butler fell at her home in Seattle, hit her head, and died. As an African-American woman, she was alone in her genre when she published Kindred in 1979, a tale about a black woman who, in order to save her life, travels back to the antebellum South to save the life of a white slaveholder ancestor. Butler is the only science fiction writer to have received a MacArthur fellowship. Men and women like Ossie Davis, Judge Baker, Mrs. Parks, Mrs. King, and Vivian Jones were outright civil rights activists; artists and writers like Crichlow and Butler, on the other hand spoke to us about the social conditions of black people through their work. Public they were, but one has only to see Crichlow’s 1938 lithograph Lovers (part of a printmaking collection at the Library of Congress Web site) to understand the special kind of quiet courage it took to create as he did in those times. “I didn’t like seeing her go through back doors,” Ms. Butler once told Publishers Weekly. “If my mother hadn’t put up with all those humiliations, I wouldn’t have eaten very well or lived very comfortably. So I wanted to write a novel that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that black people have had to live through in order to endure.” The quote, which I clipped from her New York Times obituary, beautifully summed up her motivation. The great Gordon Parks, who died on Monday at the age of 93, possibly while I was churning out my long list of people who had gone before him,was another kind of social activist and artist. But right now I’ll set aside his films—The Learning Tree and Shaft—his poetry, musical compositions, and books (although his final autobiography A Hungry Heart: A Memoir by Atria books is a must-read if you’re interested in Parks), to focus on his photographs. Parks was a prolific recorder of history. But he was pragmatic enough to know, early on, that if he wanted to keep taking photos he’d have to earn a living at it—and so he got his first chance at learning to “shoot fashions,” as he was given to saying, by strolling into a white-owned Minneapolis dress shop in 1938 and asking the husband-and-wife owners, the Murphys, if he could have a job photographing the gowns there. Mr. Murphy gave him short shrift, but Mrs. Murphy gave him a job. That job eventually led him to the Farm Security Administration, where in 1942 he shot American Gothic, Washington, D.C., which he named after Grant Wood’s famous 1930 painting. You have probably seen it. A black cleaning woman stands with a broom in her right hand and a mop propped against the desk next to her. Behind her hangs the American flag. It’s not an homage to the plain-living American, as in Wood’s painting; it’s an indictment of segregation and racism in our capital city, something some of the white Southern members of the FSA, who didn’t want Parks there in the first place, would have used against him. “Stryker said you’ve got the right idea, but you’re going to get us all fired,” Mr. Parks told me in a telephone conversation last October. “He put it at the bottom of the pile, but he told me that I should stay with her. He said you had to write cold and hard about black life in America and not allow whites to address the words with the consolation of a few tears.” Parks took it to heart, but he wrote his words with images. He stuck with Ella Watson and took photos of her in her apartment with her family and attending church. She was a person beyond her ironic emblematic role of African-American as second-class citizen. And Roy Stryker’s words stuck with Parks. He continued throughout his life to capture his fellow blacks in all kinds of situations, from all walks of life. His work for Life magazine—a chronicle of poverty in Brazil, an exposé of gang violence in Harlem, a chronicle of racial segregation in the deep South, a photographic essay on Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam—are moving, stunning, brilliant, memorable, the expert work of a gifted man. But it is his earlier work, the FSA photos from the Library of Congress, that remains my favorite. Many of the images, including those of Ella Watson, are available to look at online. By visiting www.memory.loc.gov and typing “Gordon Parks” into the search box, you can see scores of his works, wonderful images that capture the soul of black America in the first half of the twentieth century.
October 25, 2005
Rosa Parks Posted by Audrey Peterson at 01:00 PM EST A few days ago my mother had a brief conversation with a woman at the Post Exchange at Fort Dix, in New Jersey. It was one of those bits of passing small talk you have with strangers while standing in line to check out. The woman had the misconception that Rosa Parks was no longer living. My mother, who is as informed about American history as about that of her own native Germany, quickly told her that Rosa Parks was indeed alive, and was downright huffy that any American citizen wouldn’t know that. Mom told me this story yesterday evening, her voice filled with the same bewildered dismay that must have been present when she schooled the stranger in the PX. She does not watch very much television, so she could not have known that Rosa Parks had just died, or was dying perhaps even as we spoke. For my own part, I always try to avoid the news after 5 p.m. I figure that if there’s anything more intense and catastrophic than what’s already happening, somebody will make it their business to tell me. So I didn’t find out until this morning. It was like a soft punch to the heart, hearing the news. As most Americans know, Rosa Parks was arrested on December 1, 1955, for not giving up a her seat to a white man on a crowded, segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. She had to submit to being fingerprinted and having mug shots taken. You may have seen them. There’s no smugness to them, unlike some I’ve seen lately. She is dignified and calm in appearance. She was being arrested for doing the right thing. I think I would have been too afraid to try anything like what Mrs. Parks did back then; I believe I am too much of a coward to do anything like that even today, and even for the right reasons. Rosa Parks was 42 years old, one year younger than I am, no impulsive young woman. She was a seamstress and housewife, but she was not some meek little lady who just decided one day that she had had enough. She had known the score for a long time. Her husband, Raymond Parks, a barber, had been active in the National Committee to Defend the Scottsboro Boys, eight black youths unjustly convicted of raping two white women. She had been turned away twice when she tried to register to vote, finally succeeding in 1945. She was an adviser to the NAACP youth council, and the secretary to her local NAACP. She attended a school-integration workshop at the Highlander Folk School (now the Highlander Research and Education Center) in Monteagle, Tennessee. The school was known for training civil rights activists. She even had had a tussle with the same bus driver, James Blake, in 1943, 12 years before the incident that would spark a full-on war for civil rights. Blake had gone apoplectic because Mrs. Parks had refused to pay her fare at the front door and then get off of to enter through the back, as was the custom in Montgomery at the time. She was no more or less afflicted by that vicious brand of openly practiced race prejudice than other blacks and minorities were in the South (and for that matter, in some other parts of the United States too). She almost didn’t get on the bus when she saw Blake was driving it. But this time she had had enough. And in many ways she was prepared for the fight that would come. And it came. The NAACP had been looking for a case like hers to test in court. Members first thought that 15-year-old Claudette Colvin, who had been arrested on the same charge eight months earlier, would be a good subject, but the girl got pregnant, and her mother and the NAACP decided she couldn’t get on the stand (with good reason, because she would likely have been pilloried by the prosecution). Another woman, Mary Louise Smith, was arrested, but it was decided she couldn’t withstand media scrutiny. Mrs. Parks knew about both women, because as secretary of the Montgomery NAACP she had attended the meetings where these decisions were made. A white lawyer named Clifford Durr, who along with his wife Virginia is among the bravest people in civil rights history for reasons I may blog about someday, bailed Mrs. Parks out. Her case went to trial. She was convicted of disorderly conduct and violating a local ordinance. A young minister named Martin Luther King, Jr., then led a boycott of the Montgomery buses that crippled the city. Less than a year later, in November 1956, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation on transportation in any city was unconstitutional. According to the historian and author Douglas Brinkley, who wrote a crisp and concise biography of Rosa Parks, James Blake, the bus driver, remained unrepentant. Brinkley interviewed him for the book, and Blake used all kinds of foul language when Mrs. Parks’s name was mentioned. He died of a heart attack in 2002, at the age of 89. His story presents an argument for why we should continue to prosecute people who got away with violating the civil rights of others way back when, no matter how old and weak they are. They’re not too weak to keep spewing their bile and hatred. My one consolation is that Mrs. Parks outlived him. Mrs. Parks moved in 1957 to Detroit, where she stayed active in the civil rights movement, and served on the staff of U.S. Representative John Conyers (D., Mich.) from 1965 until 1988. In 1987 she founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development, an organization that provides scholarships and guidance for young blacks. Her death was a punch to the heart for me, because she had the kind of integrity and unimpeachable character, the kind of courage and backbone, you almost never see in public figures today. As long as she was alive I could point to her as someone who had the right stuff. But at 92 she lived as long as she could. Rather than mourning her, though, perhaps in her honor I will straighten my back and try to gain just a little of her courage myself.
October 10, 2005
O.J., Again Posted by Audrey Peterson at 01:00 PM EST As if we didn’t get enough of the moronic circus that was the O. J. Simpson trial the first time around, now we’ve been forced to observe its tenth anniversary. But does it really deserve notice? After the verdict came down, on October 3, 1995, I remember my dad, who grew up black in Alabama during the 1920s and 1930s and who witnessed more than his share of racism up close and personal, saying, “Now they know how we feel.” This was in reference to the absurd trials, held mostly in the first half of the twentieth century, that saw Klansmen and the like walk off scot-free from murder indictments, the blood still fresh on their hands. One in particular springs to mind, since it occurred 40 years nearly to the month before the O.J. trial. In August of 1955, Emmett Till, a 15-year old black boy from Chicago, whistled at a white woman named Carolyn Bryant in a grocery store in Money, Mississippi. He was lynched by the woman’s husband, Roy Bryant, and an associate, J. W. Milam, and then thrown into the Tallahatchie River. That September an all-white jury found the two men innocent, even though eyewitnesses and evidence said otherwise. Afterward, Bryant and Milam lit cigarettes and posed for pictures with their wives outside the courthouse. When I look at the images of both events, O.J.’s smiling face after his acquittal doesn’t look much different to me from Bryant’s and Milam’s did after they were found innocent (maybe O.J. looked a little more relieved and a little less smug, but not by much). His announcement that he would spare nothing in finding the real killer was ugly in its lack of sincerity and conviction, but not nearly as criminal as Bryant and Milam, after their acquittal, bragging about how they had killed Till in the January 24, 1956, issue of Look magazine. My mother, a white woman who was born in Nazi Germany two weeks before Hitler invaded Poland (she will kill me if I don’t add that she has been a proud citizen of the United States for more than 40 years), knew more than a little about what racism can do. Having married, against her German father’s wishes, a black American 14 years her senior, then coming, in 1962, to America, where it was still illegal to marry outside of your race in 17 states, she also understood why my father jumped up out of his chair and shouted when the O.J. verdict was read. The O.J. trial was the same kind of terrible farce as the trial of Bryant and Milam. Even as my dad shouted, I think he knew the acquittal was a Pyrrhic victory. Blacks weren’t gaining anything by letting a murderer go free. I resent that 10 years later we’re still hearing only about the African-Americans who thought the trial and verdict was fair (one exception is a Frontline episode that aired last Tuesday, an excellent in-depth look at the trial and verdict). There were a lot of us out there—including me—who believed O.J. to be guilty as sin. But as one woman, Linda Burnham, the head of the Black Women’s Resource Center in Oakland, said in an October 3 article in the British newspaper The Guardian, “I didn't believe in his innocence. But, like most black people I knew, I wasn’t interested in talking to white people about it unless they had sorted themselves out around the issues.” I couldn’t have put it better. Still, for a hot second my father and I, and I suspect many other African-Americans, felt that white people were finally experiencing the same type of helpless frustration blacks have felt toward our justice system since the time our ancestors were brought here on slave ships. In May 2004 the Justice Department decided to reopen the Emmett Till case based on evidence, much of which was dug up by an amateur filmmaker from Louisiana named Keith Beauchamp, that there were others, still alive (Milam and Bryant both died of cancer, in 1981 and 1994, respectively), who may have taken part in the crime. That group includes Carolyn Bryant, now Carolyn Donham, 71 years old and living in Greenville, Mississippi. Some may ask what good come out of sending any elderly person to prison so long after the fact. For me, it is not so much the actual sentence, as the record that comes with it, the one that says, at last, justice was done.
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