Imagery Illuminates History

Through Zoom meetings, seminars, and other platforms, we use visual images to promote an understanding of history and culture— by introducing additional resources, encouraging a critical eye, and honoring stories of African American dignity and perseverance. Our presentations of images are grouped as Diaspora and Slavery, Black Memorabilia, African American cultural artifacts, and Perseverance stories.

PRIMARY SOURCE PHOTO

There is uncertainty as to when I initially caught a flash of this photo—perhaps during a documentary, just as many of us have seen photographs of civil rights activists in Selma and Birmingham throughout the years. However, when discussing the book, “The Williamston Freedom Movement: A North Carolina Town’s Struggle for Civil Rights, 1957-1970,” by Amanda Hilliard Smith, Cousin Tessie said, “That’s Jackie Bond on the cover with Mrs. Ella Mae.” I was stunned that another vaguely familiar image, featuring the same young lady, was actually linked to the history of a small town in eastern NC.

Smith’s book portrays Civil Rights efforts in the NC town where I grew up. Within the book are familiar family names and places; yet I knew absolutely nothing about their personal “stories” of demanding dignity and equal rights.

The picture above captures the emotion resonating deep within teenager Jacqueline Bond and civil rights activist, Gordon Frinks, as they sing at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Jacqueline asked her father, a local business owner, Styron Bond, to sponsor buses so protesters in Williamston could attend. Documented history reveals “over 2, 000 "freedom buses" and thirty "freedom trains" converged in Washington, bringing more than a quarter million marchers, over 60, 000 of them white.” (Leonard Freed, 1968)

This intriguing photo (above) has appeared in documentaries and was featured as the headline banner by the National Museum of African American History and Culture when a documentary on the ‘63 march was announced. In March 2021, I located another picture of her within the digital collections of the Library of Congress. However, though depicted at the March on Washington, she is an “unidentified woman”. [African American man and woman, half-length portrait, facing right, singers at a moment during a song, at the March on Washington, August 28, 1963] (loc.gov).

 It was the discovery of the stories within Smith’s (2014) book and reading additional research by David Carter (1999) that provided the push I needed to examine the intriguing pictorial history stories within art and artifacts.

Dignity Justified is seeking grants to research and to provide an analysis of the significant contributions of African American women throughout the south, particularly the southeastern rural areas of North Carolina. The research is important because it would  provide networks of cultural heritage learning opportunities for families, schools, historic societies, and community agencies. Further, it would provide an opportunity to examine how collections could be used to impact literature and social studies content.

Dignity Justified would enjoy learning about your ideas or research to inspire others to engage in inclusive projects that link local history to America’s overall celebration of individual accomplishment. 

HISTORICAL DOLL

Wilma, a porcelain character doll, created in 1981, is based on a painting by Norman Rockwell, “The Problem We All Live With,” which shows a little six-year-old girl, Ruby Bridges— who was the first African American child to desegregate William Frantz Elementary in Louisiana on November 14, 1960. The painting featured on the cover of “Look” magazine (January 14, 1964), shows Ruby being escorted by four National guards. They are depicted passing a wall with the “N” word, the letters “KKK” and a thrown, smashed tomato.

The vicious crowds that awaited Ruby’s arrival are not depicted in the painting; however, broadcast of this school integration event brought to the forefront, visual images of the hateful spirit and faces of the mobs. Many were shouting racial slurs and obscenities—so hateful that news coverage masked their words.

In trying to understand systemic racism, a 1971 interview of Rockwell surely provides insight: “…Rockwell explained the unwritten rule laid down by his editor at the Post for twenty years: “George Horace Lorimer, who was a very liberal man, told me never to show colored people except as servants.”

President Obama invited Ruby Bridges to see Rockwell’s painting when it toured at the White House. Dignity Justified, uses the “character Wilma doll”, to present a window into stories of systematic racism (segregation and reinforcing visual servitude), perseverance, and achievement.

Newspaper ARTIFACT

Above is a photo based woodcut engraving, published in Harper’s Weekly (1864), with the following caption: "EMANCIPATED SLAVES, WHITE AND COLORED." It depicts former slave children, with several displaying predominately European features. The adult male (left), Wilson Chinn, was sold to a sugar planter in New Orleans, who branded slaves with his initials. Thus, Wilson’s forehead is branded “V. B. M.”

According to the article, these slaves were liberated in New Orleans by the union army and were brought to New York by their teacher, Phillip Bacon, who established the first school for emancipated slaves in New Orleans.

This photo was reproduced and sold, with profits used to support schools in Louisiana. Apparently, labeling the bi-racial children as ‘White slaves’ was an effort to obtain attention and compassion from northerner benefactors and those who previously neglected the need to educate African Americans.

Obviously, the goal included depicting the visual of “blackness” alongside the relatable visual “whiteness” of slaves. The children (classified as mulattoes) revealed features that could easily appear strikingly similiar to those of a friend, a neighbor, a sister, a cousin, or perhaps of even a daughter.

During this era, auctions frequently emphasized complexions, referring to some slaves as “perfectly white” and “white slaves,” which clearly illuminated the issues of sexual assault on plantations.

The sexual exploitation of slaves is documented in literature, especially by former enslaved African American women. Harriet Jacobs who was born a slave in Edenton, NC in 1813, wrote the first autobiography by a formerly enslaved African American. In noting the plantation abuse in her book, Incidents in the LIfe of a Slave Girl, she wrote: My master was, to my knowledge, the father of eleven slaves…Southern women often marry a man knowing that he is the father of many little slaves…They regard such children as property, as marketable as the pigs on the plantation…passing them into the slave-trader’s hands as soon as possible, and thus getting them out of their sight.