Spring 1999
Volume 25, Number 3

Viewing segregated bathrooms and fountains through the eyes of white photographers reveals neither the consequences of, nor the attitudes behind, the brutal system designed, after the failure of Reconstruction, to circumscribe every aspect of black experience. The photographs that call our attention to the Jim Crow signs, lifting them out of their habitual invisibility as natural features of the social field, were taken primarily by northern liberals shocked by the blatant inscription of race across the southern landscape. In contrast to photographs by southerners who took segregation for granted and whose photographs typically incorporate Jim Crow signs (if at all) in the background of the events, groups, or places whose documentation was the primary goal, northern photographers composed their images deliberately to foreground and to comment on these signs: compare, for example, the prominent location of the segregated outhouse in Bubley's photograph with its adventitious appearance in a 1930s photograph of the Alabama state docks (fig. 4).10 From the myriads of signs defacing "public" facilities, northern photographers chose to document those--surprisingly few and in surprisingly consistent configurations--that gave material form to their own racial ideologies. And whereas the Jim Crow signs most often appear in photographs by southerners in either unpopulated or in crowded spaces, northern photographers tend to single out individuals from groups to stand beneath the signs of race in ideologically pointed ways. Unavoidably gendered, these bodies make manifest the photographer's inflection of a racial symbolic. By doubling Bubley's project, looking critically not only at the Jim Crow signs themselves, but also at the gaze that she and other northern photographers directed at them, I hope to illuminate the strategies adopted by viewers who attempted to dissociate themselves from a perspective in which they were inevitably implicated. I mean perspective quite literally here: where in racialized space does the photographer place the camera, and how does gender inflect that position? To make point of view more richly legible, I recruit Jim Crow photographs from their marginal status in archives devised for other purposes and read them not as local and transparent illustrations of social practices but as diverse manipulations of a common visual rhetoric. I examine how this rhetoric evolves with changing racial ideologies by tracking images that span the middle decades of this century, from the late 1930s, when Jim Crow representation emerged in force as an artifact of the documentary movement fostered by New Deal government agencies, through the postwar period's relentless production of a discourse of racial damage that culminated, and terminated, in the mid-1960s, when it yielded to a more aggressive civil rights agenda that finally succeeded in dismantling Jim Crow.11 This trajectory, however, gains its full meaning only within a broader narrative that returns to the origins of Jim Crow legislation.

6. In the book from which this essay is drawn, I analyze a range of segregated sites at which sexual difference was not a chief concern. I focus here on sites at which race is framed through gender. Because I am concerned with the representation of Jim Crow signs, I do not engage the controversies over Jim Crow's chronology and demography. For the original, now much contested, account of segregation's scope and evolution, see C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955; New York, 1974); Woodward summarizes some of the debates about Jim Crow's geography in "Strange Career Critics: Long May They Persevere," Journal of American History 75 (Dec. 1988): 857Ð68. See also Kennedy, Jim Crow Guide; John W. Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (Cambridge, 1982); Williamson, The Crucible of Race; and Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York, 1998).

7. Alex Rivera, telephone conversation with author, 5 Mar. 1998; the photograph is included in the documentary film, Exposures of a Movement (dir. Steve Crump, Steve Crump Productions, 1996, videocassette). The film also presents an astonishing photograph by Cecil J. Williams of the following signs in front of a gas station in Sandy Run, South Carolina, 1959: No Nigger or Negro Allowed Inside Building; No Negro or Ape Allowed in Building; Negroes Not Wanted in the North or South. Send Them Back to Africa Where God Almighty Put Them to Begin With. That Is Their Home. If the sheer level of verbal abuse compelled Williams, a stringer correspondent for Jet, the Afro-American, and Crisis, and the official photographer for the South Carolina NAACP, to risk documenting these signs, the risks are also indicated by the presence of the Closed Today signs that made it possible for Williams to take the photograph (which is also included in Williams, Freedom and Justice, p. 27). According to Williams, his "life would have been in jeopardy" if he had taken the photograph openly (Williams, telephone conversation with author, 25 Mar. 1998). These signs also suggest the extent to which the white/colored binary that I am calling the racial symbolic both masked and set some limit to the furor of the racist imagination. Excess was not the only trigger to African American documentation of Jim Crow signs; Rivera, Williams, and other black photographers occasionally photographed standard White and Colored signs, usually at night or in deserted settings. See, for example, Williams's photograph of a "colored waiting room" sign in Freedom and Justice, p. 26; Ernest C. Withers's photographs of a No White People Allowed in Zoo Today sign and a Colored Waiting Room sign in Let Us March On! Selected Civil Rights Photographs of Ernest C. Withers 1955Ð1968, ed. Ronald W. Bailey and Michele Furst (Boston, 1992); Milt Hinton's photographs of Motel for Colored, For Colored Only, and Colored Entrance signs in Milt Hinton and David G. Berger, Bass Line: The Stories and Photographs of Milt Hinton (Philadelphia, 1988), pp. 87, 125, and 134; and Leonard D. West's photograph of a Colored Entrance sign in Homespun Images: An Anthology of Black Memphis Writers and Artists, ed. Miriam DeCosta-Willis and Fannie Mitchell Delk (Memphis, 1989), p. 32. The scarcity of black images of Jim Crow signs must be understood in relation to the full and heroic black documentation of the protest movement.

8. Rivera makes these comments in Exposures of a Movement.

9. Parks records these threats in To Smile in Autumn (New York, 1979), p. 109; hereafter abbreviated S. See Robert Wallace and Gordon Parks, "The Restraints: Open and Hidden," pt. 4 of "Background of Segregation," Life, 24 Sept. 1956, pp. 98Ð112. Here and in his more recent account in Half Past Autumn: A Retrospective (exhibition catalogue, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 10 Sept. 1997Ð11 Jan. 1998), Parks presents a hair-raising story of white violence and betrayal. Although he managed (barely) to escape from Alabama unhurt, hostile white inhabitants of Choctaw County worked their revenge by running out of town and confiscating the property of the African American family with whom he had stayed.

10. The primary exception to this geographic rule is the substantial body of photographs produced by Kennedy, an outspoken southern critic of Jim Crow; tellingly, Kennedy did not photograph the segregated bathroom doors and drinking fountains that conferred the illusion of symmetry and permanence on the racial division. By foregrounding Jim Crow signs and isolating them from the more complex and varied range of economic and social interactions the signs succeeded only partially in regulating, northern photographers may have oversimplified and exaggerated their influence. In Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890Ð1940 (New York, 1998), Grace Hale argues persuasively that the profit motive forced southern whites to engage with their prospective black clientele on terms of near equality. Hale bases her claims in part on FSA photographs of racially mixed southern scenes that show little evidence of segregation. Photographing the signs themselves, however, especially the signs on rest rooms and fountains that were typically removed from scenes of commercial transaction, gave northerners the opportunity to express their reaction to the explicit (if at times ineffective) racial markers they encountered.

11. The earliest representation of a Jim Crow sign I have found is dated 1908 and shows the horse-drawn truck of the Imperial Laundry of Birmingham, Alabama, with For White People Only painted on the side (Birmingham Public Library, Department of Archives and Manuscripts). Although there are quite a few examples of southern representations from the 1910s and 1920s, a new concentration of images was produced by the influx of northern photographers sponsored by the FSA in the late 1930s. For an extremely thorough and helpful overview of the status and construction of race in the FSA files, see Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal. Natanson estimates that approximately 10 percent of the FSA collection, and 8.6 percent of the OWI Domestic Branch files "included discernible black figures or their dwellings," coverage "of historic proportions" compared to that of other government agencies (pp. 66, 68). Of this coverage, an almost negligible number included Jim Crow signs. Only thirty of the 88,000 photographs in the FSA-OWI classified file in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress are catalogued under the heading of "Discrimination Signs in the U.S. Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information Collections." Nevertheless, these thirty images constitute the largest single collection of photographs of Jim Crow signs. According to Petie Bogen-Garrett, curator of pictures at the Library of Virginia, many photographs disappeared after the legal dismantling of Jim Crow, when the record of this era was a source of regret to southerners who either mourned the passage of this era or felt retrospectively that they had been in error. Photographic evidence of Jim Crow effectively disappears along with the signs by the late 1960s, although there is occasional documentation of the relics that remained on buildings no longer in use. The latest photograph I found depicts the Colored Service entry of a building in New Orleans in 1980 (by A. J. Flaherty, in the Louisiana Division of the New Orleans Public Library).

Elizabeth Abel is associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley; the author of Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (1989); editor of Writing and Sexual Difference (1982); coeditor of Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (1997); and author of the book in progress (from which this essay is drawn), Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow. Her most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry is "Black Writing, White Reading: Race and the Politics of Feminist Interpretation" (Spring 1993).