Damarius Johnson
With Mother’s March, it’s a, kind of, picture of women and children marching in Ohio, and if you could just talk about how you found the story, the picture, and then why it matters.

Jessica Viñas-Nelson
To find this image of marching mothers and children, I just simply started going through Getty’s wonderful archives. I think I went through over 20,000 images, and just looking for what image struck me and what image I wanted to find out more about and see what was going on. And so, when I found this image, I immediately was drawn into it. Specifically, the dating of it, and the location of it, because it so beautifully showed and illustrated a point that historians have long been trying to make sure is coming off clearly, is that Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954 was significant, obviously so, but it didn’t integrate a single school. And it’s also in our popular narrative. It was a ruling for southern schools. And so this image, which takes place in Ohio in 1956, runs completely counter to that popular narrative that Brown solved school integration. Brown was the beginning, not the end. I’m not even sure it’s appropriate to say Brown was the beginning, because the fight to just get to Brown, you know, was so much longer and more involved. But this image crystallized a lot of things that’s important to tell about the history of school desegregation, where it was a fight, and it was a fight carried out on the backs of parents and children who had to make Brown, the Brown decision, a lived reality, right? The court could rule something, but it was up to individual Black children and parents to make it a lived reality. And so, this image of two years after Brown supposedly solved everything, and in a place we don’t traditionally think of as being a place with school segregation, but, like, much of the North was very much a place of school segregation. It was very captivating for crystallizing those, and really framing and showing and illustrating those two aspects of what the fight for school integration really and genuinely looked like.

Damarius Johnson
One thing that’s very interesting about this picture and this essay, is also the prominence of women and children and their involvement and activism. And I want to know if maybe that was an important, or an important theme that the image also illustrates, or if you’d like to talk about that more?

Jessica Viñas-Nelson
A third aspect that this image really captures quite beautifully, is another tenet that historians are trying to get across about the reality of what school desegregation efforts looked like. And that’s the prominence of women and children in the movement. They were at the forefront of it. Black mothers made sure that their children got educations. And not only did they march them to the school, but they marched them home afterwards, and then spent the day teaching them, or found ways in their community to make sure that they got an education still, even if they had to go to work afterwards. And so, the prominence of women and children in the movement is a given to those who are familiar with this history, but it’s not as well known in the popular understanding of what this looked like. Maybe what captured the essence of it so much was the rain puddle that you can see in the image. Imagine doing this every day, even when you know, you’re not going to let us in today, you know, the fruitlessness of what it felt like many days, because, you know, Ohio weather…

Damarius Johnson
Yes.

Jessica Viñas-Nelson
That happened a lot of the times, and so getting dressed up, marching to a schoolhouse you’re going to be turned away from, only to go home, I’m sure, take off those formal clothes so you don’t ruin them, and then, you know, settling in to learn for the day, I think is a very captivating idea of what they knew they were trying to do and trying to get across.