James Baldwin, dressed in a suit, tie and sheepskin coat, stood in front of a New Orleans ice cream parlor, looking straight ahead with a furrowed brow. To the side, a white employee peeked through blinds as though fearful, and behind him, a door is topped with the sign Colored Entrance.
Baldwin, the most famous black writer in the world in the 1960s, abided this insult with dignity on a trip south in 1963 when photographer Steve Schapiro took the photo, which is a highlight of the exhibit “Time is Now: Photography and Social Change in James Baldwin’s America” at Carpenter Center for the Arts at Harvard University in Cambridge.
“He goes back to where he was treated poorly as a young man and was shocked by what he encountered,” said Makeda Best, Harvard Art Museums curator of photography. “When you look at these images, you understand that historical moment and the everyday experiences of people. Maybe you’re not African-American or it wasn’t directly your experience, but people can see how these experiences shaped our interactions with each other and life in America.”
In 31 black and white photos from 1932 to 1989 selected largely from the archive of the Harvard Art Museums, Best illustrates Baldwin’s meaning when he wrote about the gap between America’s realities and ideals. The images, presented chronologically, expose aspects of segregation in the Jim Crow south and the power of the Civil Rights movement, as well as the humanity of African-Americans overlooked by much of white society.
“The people in these photos are going about their lives and are not going to be defined by all these humiliations,” Best said. “People presented themselves with dignity, despite their situation.”
In different mediums, Baldwin and photographers Robert Frank, Ben Shahn, Bruce Davidson, Danny Lyon, Dawoud Bey and others bore witness to the urgent need to address racism and expand the opportunities America promised. In a Life magazine article about him, Baldwin spoke unflinchingly: “There’s a bill due that has to be paid."
Similarly, the photos in the exhibit do that as well.
There are no people in the 1962 Danny Lyon photo “Segregated drinking fountains in the county courthouse, Albany Georgia,” but the Colored and White fountains are so close together that drinkers would have nearly touched, an irony given the intent to keep them apart. What is unmistakable is that the different fountain designs were intended to demean African-Americans.
“Someone had to stoop to a little bowl and turn the handle by hand,” Best said. “The one for the whites was big, automatic and refrigerated.”
In a Marion Post Wolcott photo, “Cashiers Paying Off Cotton Pickers, Marcella Plantation Mileston Mississippi,” 1939, a cotton picker reached through a narrow slot to receive his pay, his face and body hidden behind a darkened window, as though he's not worthy to be seen.
"The cashiers can’t see the picker, and the pickers can’t see them,” Best said. “It reinforces the humiliation.”
In another Danny Lyon photo, “The Line,” dozens of white-uniformed black inmates of Angola Prison in Louisiana worked in a barbed wire field beneath the eye of three overseers on horseback. It’s 1967, but looks like it could be the 1850.
“Slavery was over, but we still were enacting vestiges of it,” Best said.
After the disturbing images of the Jim Crow South, the exhibit turns more hopeful. There’s a Bruce Davidson image of Harlem, home of Baldwin and many prominent African-American musicians, artists and writers, and Peter Campbell images of churches, places crucial to the growth of the Civil Rights Movement. There are 1968 photos of marchers gathered at Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington and marchers in Chicago in protesting the Vietnam War, holding signs that said “Unite or Perish” and “America is the Battleground, not Vietnam.”
Outside white society, African-Americans went about their lives in ways typical of any American – going on a picnic, playing music, enjoying a well-kept automobile. In an untitled photo by Bruce Davidson, a pregnant woman held the hand of her small daughter and a picnic basket and walked next to her husband, who held the hands of two more daughters and carried a blanket. In Joanne Leonard’s untitled photo, an elderly man played an electric guitar in front of a house, while a young girl peered around a stairway to listen. And showing the universality of grief, a poignant photo by Richard Balzer captured a young boy in a suit burying his head beneath the comforting arm of a woman who consoled him during the funeral for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
In the aftermath of despair and devastated hope, African-American photographer and Emmy-winning cinematographer John Simmons shot “Window Writing,” a 1969 image of a girl in a diner drawing a design with her finger on a steamy window, and Leonard Freed shot "Motorcycle passing buildings with Black Panther slogan.”
“Despite what’s happening, you can dream of being in another space,” Best said.
To contemporary eyes, the photos seem bizarre of white men in blackface posing with well-dressed women at a formal party and of a black man in black face at a public hawking of medicines, but these occurrences were common in the 1950s, Best said. Much has changed, of course, since blackface and Jim Crow segregation ended, yet the elderly woman holding a sign in the 1965 Steve Schapiro photo “Stop Police Killings, Selma” could be a protester at a Black Lives Matter rally today.
As though summing up the exhibit, the final photo “Two Boys on Carrolburg,” taken in Brooklyn in 1989 by McArthur “genius" grant winner Dawoud Bey, shows an older youth looking behind, while a younger one looks forward.
“The younger boy is more self-assured, he’s seen change,” Best said. “But what else needs to be achieved?”
Reach Jody Feinberg at email@example.com. Follow her on Twitter@JodyF_Ledger.