Crescent City, California 19 October 2012
Portland, Oregon 23 October 2012
Honolulu, Hawaii 27 January 2013
If photojournalism is of interest to you, this piece at JOHN EDWIN MASON: DOCUMENTARY, MOTORSPORTS, PHOTO HISTORY is a must read.
“It began as a challenge. Righteous anger propelled it forward. It moved many of Life magazine’s readers to acts of generosity. Yet it ended in tragedy. What should have been a triumph became instead a reminder that the law of unintended consequences can exert its force in unimaginably heart-breaking ways. This is the story of “A Harlem Family,” one of the most powerful, and most troubling, photo-essays that Gordon Parks ever produced.”
1972: Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Hattiesburg was a major target of activity during Freedom Summer 1964. ©Robert Gumpert 1972
“And all the sinners, saints
As heads is tails.
Just call me Lucifer,
Cause I’m in need of some restraint.
So if you meet me,
Have some courtesy,
Have some sympathy, and some taste
Use all your well-learned politesse
Or I’ll lay your soul to waste…”
Sympathy for the Devil, © Mick Jagger and Keith Richard
Sometime in April or May of 1972 a friend and I were hitchhiking through Mississippi headed for New Orleans. As preparation for the trip I had watched Easy Rider a number of times but wasn’t really concerned about heading into the “Deep South”. It had been eight years since Freedom Summer and seven years since the Voting Rights Act had been passed — plenty of time for things to change. Youth, it perverts the sense of time.
A White guy, about our age, picked us up on Highway 61 just south of the Tennessee border. He liked to talk and we liked to listen. We learned that eight years is no time at all when it comes to social memory. He gave us a lesson in the fine art law bending, at least as practiced in rural Mississippi. Faced with “new” federal civil rights laws, local politicians solved their “colored problem” by simply deputizing all the White men in town. This canard gave them the power to arrest any Black they pleased for anything they wanted.
It was 1970, the halfway point in Richard Nixon’s first term as President, when the White House’s political strategist Kevin Philips explained the Republican Southern Strategy to the New York Times. Simply the Southern Strategy used fear to push southern White voters into the Republican Party. Two years later Nixon defeated George McGovern by the largest Electoral College vote in history. Since 1972 the South has pretty much been a lock for the Republican Party and it is likely to be again this November 6th.
In June, July, and August 1974 I was again in the South. Eastern Kentucky was coal country. Perhaps some small portion still is. A United Mineworkers Union (UMW) organizer described the region as an internal colony; all its natural resources and money flowed out until there was nothing left. I had come to photograph something nebulous under the title “Black Lung.” Not a well thought out plan. But I stayed for the last three months of the UMW strike at the Brookside mine in Harlan County. That strike spread up the road to another mine and I got to know those folks pretty well, including one of the leaders. He will remain nameless here but was a White guy, and like me in his late 20’s or early 30’s. Evenings we would often sit and talk, mostly about union and the battle at hand. His three year-old would remind him to turn off the porch light before going outside, making it harder for a sniper to shoot him. Sometimes we talked about Vietnam: “We lost” because we didn’t bomb them into the Stone Age. And while we almost never talked about race, he made it plain that he was, in his exact words, a racist.
The Union won at Brookside and a union vote was scheduled for the mine up the road. My friend had to find organizers for each shift and coalface and one he found was Black. When I asked him how he, a racist, was willing to put a Black man in a position of power over Whites he told me a story to illustrate his reasoning: If a Black man killed a White man and it was not over union business, he would testify it was murder. But if that same Black man killed a White man over something union related, he would testify that the Black man was on a date with his daughter. While most people don’t, I have always found this story — one of possible change — optimistic. But times have changed. I doubt my long ago friend would tap that black man today. Race, for many Whites, trumps all.
In 2008 Obama lost the South but won the election. It seemed to highlight another geographical split in the country, not regional but split along the rural/city divide. Cities being more tolerant, less homogenous and open to differences of many sorts were voting Democratic. The Republican Party’s chances in electoral politics, especially for President were on the decline along with racial politics. Or so the idea went.
But racism has not declined; it is more active. Judging from the last four years, the Republican Party has decided the salvation for them is in hitting racial politics hard, taking the Southern Strategy of 1970 national.
Today a presidential race that shouldn’t be close, given the Republican Party’s positions on money, race, religion, gender, civil rights, social issues, the economy, investment, healthcare, education and government, is razor thin. Why? Because the demographics of race trump region and rural/city differences as long as you’re White. The Republican Party has gone national with their fear of “Others,” coded language, and policies of exclusion.
“They’re selling postcards of the hanging
They’re painting the passports brown
The beauty parlor is filled with sailors
The circus is in town.
Here comes the blind commissioner
They’ve got him in a trance.
One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker
The other is in his pants.
And the riot squad they’re restless
They need somewhere to go
As Lady and I look out tonight
From Desolation Row”
Desolation Row © Bob Dylan
Robert Gumpert 2 November 2012
