Birmingham on My Mind
September 15, 1963 - Fifty Years Later
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James Baldwin
New Orleans, 1963 |
One night, many years ago, a book appeared in my suburban Jamaica, NY home. My parents had attended a lecture that James Baldwin had given at our church, Calvary Baptist Church, and had returned with the book in hand. While the church never struck me as a particularly activist one, our minister, Rev. Walter S. Pinn, had let it be known on more than one occasion that he had marched besides Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. There was a small black and white photograph hanging in the church vestibule that proudly and permanently testified to that fact. Most likely my folks purchased the book after Baldwin's talk as part of SNCC's fundraising efforts. As was his wont, my dad didn't talk much about that evening when they came home--I only remember him saying he did not entirely agree with Baldwin, whom he said struck him as being too strident and "arrogant"--but he did make it a point to leave the book sitting out where I could "find" it. Entitled
The Movement: Documentary of A Struggle for Equality, it was a collection of photographs depicting the Civil Rights Movement at a moment when the movement was indeed still a vivid and very present reality. Containing photographs by a number of photographers, including Danny Lyons, Charles Moore, and others, its text had been authored by the African American playwright and writer Lorraine Hansberry. The book was published by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SNCC), and contained Hansberry's short but evocative texts alongside the photographs. The photographs themselves ranged from scenes of demonstrations, sit-ins, along with photographs of everyday black life in America at that moment..which is to say that some of the pictures were quite gruesome.
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16th Street Baptist Church on the
morning of the bombing |
Along with photographs of menacing white racists taunting civil rights marchers there were other pictures that more starkly visualized the often horrific results of the ongoing attempts of America's black citizens to lift themselves out of a state of enforced apartheid, as well as the violence that befell them and their non-black sympathizers who dared to resist. The pictures came at me in a rush. While I had indeed begun to experience the sting of racism as a black student bussed into previously white schools as part of the first wave of Northern school integration, I had never experienced anything like the raw, naked racist violence that these pictures described. Fire hoses, dog, and tear gas set loose on black citizens, those same citizens publicly stalked and beaten with baseball bats, and set upon by white mobs for daring to sit at a lunch counter or ride a Greyhound bus. Pictures made at lynchings, in which the white participants posed as if at a family picnic while a black body swung from a tree, or smoldered in the embers after being burnt to death.
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Sarah Collins in the hospital
after the bombing
Photograph by Frank Dandridge |
By the time
The Movement had appeared in print, blacks in the south had been living through an orgy of violence directed against them for two centuries. Blacks in Birmingham, AL had their homes so frequently dynamited by racists who resented their presence and home ownership, that the city had become known as Bombingham. On September 15, 1963 this dynamiting of black lives reached a crescendo with the bombing of Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church. The week before, Alabama governor George Wallace had stated that in order to stop integration Alabama needed, "a few first-class funerals." Four young girls were killed that Sunday morning. A bomb having been placed there earlier by Robert "Bomber Bob" Chambliss, Bobby Frank Cherry, Herman Frank Cash, and Thomas Blanton--Ku Klux Klan members all--exploded at 10:22 AM, taking the lives of Addie Mae Collins (14), Denise McNair (11), Carole Robertson (14), and Cynthia Wesley (14) who were attending Sunday school and preparing for church service. The bomb exploded with such force that one of the girls was immediately beheaded. Twelve year old Sarah Collins
[now Sarah Collins Rudolph], sister of Addie Mae, was blinded when flying glass pierced her eyes. She later lost one eye. It was a picture of a young Sarah Collins, lying in a hospital bed, her eyes covered with huge patches of cotton gauze, that was among the images in
The Movement that grabbed my attention and permanently seared itself into my brain.
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Odessa Woolfolk
Courtesy The Birmingham News |
I was eleven years old when I saw that image of the immobilized little black girl laid out, helplessly scarred and traumatized, and that image has stayed with me all of these years. I realize now that I was at the time the same age as the youngest girl killed in that attack, Denise McNair. Deciding some seven years ago that I wanted to somehow work with this experience, to use it somehow, to confront it by putting myself in Birmingham, I contacted the curator at the Birmingham Museum of Art to see if I might shape a project, working with them on what would become a residency project that would honor the memory of those killed that day while also engaging the contemporary Birmingham community. During that initial visit I was able to attend a service at 16th Street Baptist Church and to have lunch with Odessa Woolfolk, the President and a founding board member of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, which had opened in 1992. I had lunch with Ms. Woolfolk, who began to give me a deeper sense of the history as well as the various ways in which that history was still playing out in the Birmingham community. When I told her that I would be visiting the 16th Street Baptist Church that Sunday morning, she asked me with a knowing look, "Let me know what happens." I am pretty sure she knew what would happen, but she likely thought it best that I have the experience myself.
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From top left (clockwise)
Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, Denise McNair,
and Addie Mae Collins |
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| 16th Street Baptist Church |
My initial visit to 16th Street Baptist Church that Sunday morning began to give me a sense of the complexity of the situation I was actually entering into. I had approached Birmingham full of the known history. But history as it is lived is usually messier and certainly more nuanced than the mythic history afforded by historical hindsight. Mythos and reality may be, in some ways, related but they are generally never quite the same. This first occurred to me when, entering the church to attend the service, I noticed unsettlingly that they church was filled to only perhaps a quarter of its capacity...at best. I had expected a full and rousing congregation, but was met instead by an almost empty building that was in a sad and obvious state of disrepair. Greeting the minister and several of the deacons after service, I introduced myself and briefly described the work I hoped to do. As soon as I mentioned September 15, 1963 the minister stopped me in mid-sentence. His words echo in memory still. "Stop right there," he admonished me. "Here at 16th Street we're not about all of that business; we're about the business of Jesus Christ. If you're interested in that, we'd love to help you." Stunned though I was, I did my best to keep a straight and polite face. Who was I, after all, to tell them what their "business" should or should not be. Of course "all of that business" was basically
all that I knew of 16th Street. Recalling her knowing look, I realized then that this response would not have surprised Odessa Woolfolk at all. I realized then that I had much to learn indeed about the place where I hoped to make my work. I left Birmingham after that first visit more perplexed than when I came.
[Note: 16th Street Baptist Church was designated a National Historic Landmark by the Department of the Interior in 2006, after my initial visit, and has since undergone a $3 million restoration of the building, reversing years of neglect, including water damage, and damage to the facade masonry.]
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Taylor Branch
Parting The Waters |
Some time after that initial visit to Birmingham, I began working on a brief residency project in Baltimore with the Walters Museum. An invitation to dinner from one of the senior museum staff took a wonderful and surprising turn one evening when I found out that the friends who would be joining us, Christy and Taylor, were none other than Christina Macy and her husband the renowned writer and chronicler of the civil rights movement Taylor Branch, whose epic chronicle of the civil rights era had garnered him a Pulitzer Prize. Taylor (who was born in Atlanta, GA) and I had much to talk about, as I knew he had spent considerable time in Alabama, and Birmingham in particular over many years, researching what is now a trilogy of important books. When I told him I had ventured to 16th Street Baptist Church one morning, he raised his eyebrows and asked me knowingly just what had happened. He was not at all surprised, and indeed had I given his book another read before venturing to Birmingham, I might have been better prepared, as he writes at length about the complicated relationship of 16th Street to the history of the Movement. Though the church was the site of many of the mass meetings that Dr. King, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and other movement leaders called to organize their various marches and actions, the congregation of 16th Street Baptist Church was notably absent from those meetings. Those attending the mass meeting came largely from Bethel Baptist Church, 6th Avenue Baptist Church, and the smaller black churches throughout Birmingham.
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Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Birmingham, AL 1963 |
When King visited 16th Street Baptist Church on one occasion in 1963 to ask for volunteers to join in a planned demonstration, not a single adult stood to volunteer, much to King's frustration. Instead the young people began to stand. The adults, many of whom worked for whites, simply could not afford the risk of such action. Doing so would likely have resulted in their being fired, their homes foreclosed on or bombed, or worse. Thus many of the black adults took a publicly disengaged and accommodationist stance. So it was the youth of Birmingham who eventually brought the city to its knees. 16th Street Baptist was the staging ground and meeting point for what became known as The Children's March, with even teachers turning their backs as students staged mass class walkouts in order to feign ignorance--and thus avoid complicity--for what was taking place. The bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church took place four months after these successful demonstrations in an attempt to stop the progress that was then being made. Four months after the adults of 16th Street Baptist Church had specifically not participated in public social protest, their church was dynamited and four of their girls were killed.
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| Virgil Ware 13 years old |
On subsequent visits to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute I learned that on that same September day two boys, 13 year old Virgil Ware and 16 year old Johnny Robinson has also been killed in acts of racist violence. Virgil Ware was killed while riding on the handlebar of his brother James' bike, shot by two white teenagers coming from a white citizen's rally. The Ware brothers were unaware of the church bombing that had taken place that morning, and crossed paths with two white teenagers coming from a white citizen's rally. Johnny Robinson was shot and killed by a police officer who claimed he had been throwing rocks at passing cars in the disturbances that began to happen in the aftermath of the bombing that day. I decided immediately that these two young African American boys would also be the memorialized focus of my project. I would make portraits of African American girls, ages 11 and 14, and photographs of African American boys ages 13 and 16. Additionally, as a way of suggesting the lives that were cut short and never allowed to unfold, I would make portraits of adult men and women who were the ages that these young people would have been had they been allowed to live out their lives. Thus the portraits would both document black Birmingham's present while memorializing those lost in its past. These photographs would form the centerpiece of my project.
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Filming in Birmingham, AL
Photograph by Truman Grayson |
I also wanted to continue the work I had begun in video with my earlier Four Stories (2003) that examined the lives of four diverse Detriot teenagers, and decided to create a two channel video piece that would be an evocative meditation on that September morning. I wanted the piece to unfold in extreme slow motion, and invoke the journey that each of the four girls took the church on that "bright blue fall morning" as I seen it described in my readings about that day. Wanting the production values to be as high as I could make them, I began interviewing video and film makers in Birmingham, and decided to work with Six Foot Five, a crew of young filmmakers and editors. After several weeks of pre-production location scouting, most of the principle photography for the video is done, with one more day of filming and audio recording to be scheduled before going to post production editing. The video takes place in four different social spaces, a barbershop, a beauty salon, a classroom, and a lunch counter. Each of these locations have a particular, and in some cases very loaded, place in the social history of the city, with the barber shop and beauty parlor being more intimate and closed social spaces and the classroom and the lunch counter being scenes of highly public social interaction and potential racial conflict and segregation. The other channel of the video describes the languorous and peaceful ride to the church as the car (and the girls) move slowly towards the horrific moment that we know is coming.
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Photographing in the Birmingham Museum of Art
Photograph by Truman Grayson |
I've also began photographing, making portraits of the first group of subjects, women, girls, and boys of the appropriate ages. I've yet to photograph any men unfortunately, and will need to redouble outreach efforts to locate them and gain their participation. The project has been one of relationship building as much as it has been about making the actual photographs and video work. It's been a process of relationship building for me of course, since while one side of my family is from the south--West Point, Mississippi--I am distinctly an outsider to the Birmingham, AL community. It has provided as well an opportunity for the Birmingham Museum of Art to deepen and extend its relationship with its African American community through a project that is very much about that community and its collective history. As such, the project continues my interest in institutional culture and re-shaping the relationships that museums have and can have with their respective communities.
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Photographing in original Bethel Baptist Church Sanctuary
Photograph by Truman Grayson |
I have begun the photographic work by turning one of the museum galleries into my temporary studio, using the museum--as I have in the past--as a space for making work as well a space for later exhibiting that work. It also provides yet another way for the people I am photographing to consider just what a museum is and to claim a more active place within that institutional space. It has been heart rending when photographing the people who come to my museum studio to think about them in relationship to the six people whose lives inform this work. To think of someone striking such a young life down with impunity is a renewed horror each time a young person sits in front of my camera. To see the older women, having lived rich full lives, reminds me constantly of the tragically abbreviated lives of those six young people.
I'm going back to Birmingham to continue work for another two weeks in December, and to continue working on the video
9.15.63. I'll be photographing in Bethel Baptist Church as well
. The exhibition will open September 2013, the 50th anniversary of the bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church. I'll be posting periodically--in this blog and on Facebook--and invite you to come south to Birmingham next year to the completed work. The Birmingham Museum of Art will commence a series of performances and programming as the 50th year begins. Participating artists will include Theaster Gates, Jefferson Pinder, and others. I'm hoping to curate a small selection of related films as well. Watch for it.
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