Damarius Johnson
If you could talk more about why this is a particularly significant event or story.
Alex Lichtenstein
Yeah, so when I had this Picturing Black History assignment, you know, we get to choose some photographs. And I’d always been fascinated by the history of the rural south, particularly in the 1920s and the 1930s. One because it’s a visually well documented and arresting history because the Farm Security Administration photographers fanned out across the country but many of them focused in the 1930s on on taking photographs of the South. I mean, these are many of the photographs we know well in Mississippi and Arkansas. Then Sean is the photographer I write about Dorothea Lange, and wasn’t just in California, but spent time in Mississippi. Arthur Rothstein, the dustbowl photograph, so you just name any Farm Security Administration photographer, and one of the sort of places on their itinerary was almost always the rural south now, that was with the aim usually of documenting southern desperation and poverty. That is the deep, deep poverty in which most southern rural people black and white, both but black, especially lived during the 1930s with a political purpose, which was to propagandize in favor of the various government programs that were designed to help those people. And that’s an incredible I mean, anyone who knows the history of photography knows that that was, you know, one of the most stunning visual records in the 20th century that we have in US history. And moreover, in terms of African American History, also a stunning visual record, which you can find, for instance, in the great book, more urban, but also rural, by Richard Wright and Edwin Roskamp, which was published from the FSA photographs, 12 million black lives I think published in 1940. So there’s this important documentary history. All that said, I wrote this essay about Ben Sean’s Arkansas photographs, because they do something a little different. And that’s why they caught my eye in that they don’t really document and he has pictures that do so document, the destitution of the black poor in the rural south, that was easy to find, you know, you didn’t have to look far if you’re traveling through these counties. But what struck me about the photographs that I write about that you see in the essay, is they do something a little different. And that Sean’s, I seem to be caught by something different, which was this resilient, vibrant, dignified, and self determined black life that persisted in the deepest, Jim Crow, south in rural Arkansas, a place where, you know, as I say, in the essay, no question that on a daily basis, African Americans were subjected to white power and white supremacy. And yet Ben Shawn caught this moment in which that, if not absent, was not visually apparent, and something else was going on in these photographs. And that’s what I liked about this image. Because in some ways, it was so different than many of the other FSA photographs, we see of black life in the rural south for the 30s.
Damarius Johnson
Alright so I was wondering if you could talk more about that photographic archive, if having these images by Ben Shawn, does it shift the way that we understand the time period in terms of the lived experience of folks? Or do you mean that it’s significant because of the way that the photographer strategy captured?
Alex Lichtenstein
This really wasn’t just the case writing about a different element to FSA photography, although it was that but as Damarius is asking me, How does this shift the way we might understand life in the rural south in this period, especially for black people, and again, that’s the other thing that I found interesting about it, was that it demonstrated an aspect of black life in the rural south that, you know, we forget all too easily. This is a tension in doing African American history. Of course, we spend a lot of time trying to write about and demonstrate the conditions to which people were subjected Necessarily so especially in this day and age, when you know, we live in a moment in which Oh, wasn’t so bad, or, you know, racism really was an aberration and not central to the American experience. So we’re at great pains to document the fact that well, no, racism was central to the experience, particularly African American experience. But at the same time, we want to make sure that we demonstrate that people still lived lives that they weren’t always oppressed every moment and that they found the possibility for dignity and self determination, not just through revolt, but through daily life and pride in their family, in their community in their or property if they were landowners and the aspiration to own land, and so forth. So to me, yeah, I mean, this isn’t just evidence of a particular approach to photography that Sean took at the moment that was a little different than his peers. He was also a painter. I’ll talk about that in a minute. But it also as Damarius asked definitely makes us rethink or understand black life in the sharecropping south, in another way. And as I say, in the conclusion of the essay, there were all sorts of good reasons to leave the south economic, political, and so forth. But something was left behind also something that may have been valuable to people.
Damarius Johnson
Yes, well, since you mentioned, could you please tell us more about the painting?
Alex Lichtenstein
Well, I don’t know Sean’s work as a painter all that much. But he was a painter, first and foremost, not a photographer. The reason I bring that up is well, two reasons. One, he has a very interesting painting that he did on his way to this community in Arkansas to take these photographs, where he stopped in a town called Marked Tree, which is in the Arkansas Delta. And that was the heart of the Southern tenant farmers union, the interracial protest movement in 1935. That was standing up for the rights of sharecroppers, both against their white landlords and against the government that was handing out government checks to the landowners when they should have been defending the sharecroppers. So Sean, as far as I can tell, witnessed one of these protests and did an amazing painting of it, which you can find. And so I was interested, and yet when he gets to Little Rock, and takes this set of photographs of this particular family, you know, it’s not paying attention to protests, he’s paying attention to something quotidian, daily life on a Sunday, and yet I thought there was a connection, right? That is the protest that explodes in the Delta is connected in some ways to the dignity and self determination that he found just a week later when he gets to Little Rock. And secondly, I think Sean is really important, because there may be others. But I would say he’s one of the few people of that generation that is socially committed, and indeed, politically radical photographers and artists from the 1930s, who was a living bridge to the civil rights movement in the 1960s. So even while in 1935, we can find this painting these photographs, but also this painting by Sean of the Southern tenant farmers union. Then in 1964, he does this drawing really powerful, I think, of Shorner, Goodman, and Cheney, the three civil rights workers who were assassinated, essentially by the Klan in Meridian, Mississippi, in 1964. So Sean is aware of and, you know, creating visual records of both of those moments. And so to me, that makes him a particularly interesting figure in American arts.
Damarius Johnson
Yes, thank you in one theme that you mentioned that I wanted to pick up on was this idea of everyday protest. And in particular, in the essays you focused on dress, and I wondered if you could talk about how a dress signals resistance and how you were able to discern that in images?
Alex Lichtenstein
That’s an interesting question. I don’t know if I can answer that one Damarius, right. So in the essay, I do emphasize the way people and the children especially are clothed, how they’re dressed in particular, again, the typical image that we get of the Southern black sharecropper in the 1930s is dressed in rags, right. And yet, Sean captures these people on a Sunday. And again, I don’t think this was an unusual moment. And there’s a whole series of these photographs, dressed in their Sunday best, right? And these are very poor people, but it’s clear that they value their their church going. I mean, that’s, that’s part of the ritual, and that religion was a key element of their world. And that then carried with that was, again, dignity, self respect, and respectability. I mean, I know, there’s plenty of good critiques of what’s called respectability politics. But you know, in this time in place, the ability to demonstrate that, you know, you could close your family as the patriarch of the family, the willingness, again, the other images that we don’t have, that I didn’t put in the essay, but that are a part of this series are of black women standing outside the church on that same Sunday, very well dressed very well dressed. So I again, was struck by that, and that this being well dressed for the sharecroppers family represented, well, I would say two things. One, if they were expending money on clothes, this is you know, what they are spending money on there is not a lot of extra cash in these families. So that seems significant. Or two, and here’s where at least I didn’t have the eye to detect this but some of the clothing may be homemade, right so that they buy cloth. And then this is something that the daughters and the wife of the family do is make these clothes, which again, are designed for a time and a place, and a ritual, which is the Sunday, the fact that it’s a Sunday is very important. So that’s sort of sartorial politics, if you want to call it that, you know, it’s very important in all sorts of ways. I mean, one certainly sees it in South Africa as well, in terms of both the dress of respectability, but sometimes alternated with what in the South African context would be called traditional dress, so that Nelson Mandela, when he shows up for the treason trials, sort of his first trial in the 1950s, he very deliberately dressed in traditional African dress to send a signal, right, whereas the people around him were dressed in suits and ties. So you know, that was not an accident. So yeah, the sartorial politics of black protests are really an important part of the history for sure.
Damarius Johnson
Yes, thank you. This is one of the rare contributions to this point, to implement this theme. And I think it’s very important that as you see folks in pictures, looking at images, to think about their dresses, also signaling ideas of of their intent and aspirations.
Alex Lichtenstein
I mean, the other thing that I I noticed and wrote about in this photograph, and again, I could be wrong and speculative, but the thing that struck me wasn’t just the way people were dressed. But the fact that one of the young women, clearly the sharecroppers daughter, one of his daughters, is holding a pencil in the background. And so in the essay, as you’ll see, I make a lot of that pencil. And I argue that, you know, the sharecropper, the male head of household, usually not always, but usually brought his family’s labor to the bargain, as it were, large family, they’re all doing the work. But they’re usually was one member of the family, usually a woman, the wife, or the eldest daughter, who had enough education to, you know, help calculate things to write down what their debt might be to the plantation store, how many goods they had asked for, right? That was power, now, again, to exert that power was a risk. But if you got to the end of the year, and the plantation owner said, Well, you know, your family took 12 pounds of bacon this year. So if they wrote it down, they might be able to say, well, you know, maybe I mean, you’d have to be cautious. But the ability to write and keep figures was power. And that was usually power in these families that belong to women, I think. And so, although I don’t think this was a deliberate effort to show that on Sean’s part, because it’s just sort of incidental in the background. I thought it was an interesting detail worth noting.
Damarius Johnson
Absolutely, absolutely. Thank you so much for that context.