MOBILE, Ala. (AP) – When an Atlanta museum makes international headlines with an exhibition of photos from Mobile’s past, it raises an obvious question. The History Museum of Mobile has a forceful answer.
When will the photos that Gordon Parks shot in 1956 for a Life magazine story on segregation come full circle back to Mobile? As soon as the museum’s leadership can make it happen and in as big a way as they can make it happen.
“The plan is, we’re going to do it,” said Scotty Kirkland, the museum’s curator of history, adding that the timetable is “sooner rather than later.”
“We’ve sort of fleshed out the beginnings of that exhibit,” said David Alsobrook, the director of the museum, who explained that his goal is to make the photos a major component in a much larger overall look at the history of race relations in Mobile from World War II to the present.
Some quick background: Parks, now regarded as a master photographer whose talents extended into writing and filmmaking, came to Mobile in 1956. (For more perspective on Parks, a recent New York Times article describes a collection of 1950 images poignantly related to his own early life in Kansas.) His mission in Alabama was to illustrate a story on the daily reality of segregation: Not the clashes that made headlines, but the everyday routine of institutionalized slights and economic disadvantage.
Life published one story in September 1956, focusing on an elderly Mobile couple and some of their grown children, including teachers and a college professor. In December of the same year it published a follow-up on the backlash generated by the first story, describing the way a Choctaw County family featured in it was ostracized and forced to flee its home.
And that was more or less that, until about 2012, when staff at the Gordon Parks foundation rediscovered a cache of color transparencies. The power of the images remained fresh, partly because of Parks’ ability to illustrate the subtler everyday realities of a conflict-filled era, partly because he had worked in color, which was not yet in widespread everyday use. Consequently, the segregation he depicts feels less like a distant, abstract past and more like an experience all too recent for those who lived through it.
In November, Atlanta’s High Museum opened an exhibition titled “Gordon Parks: Segregation Story,” which will run through June. Even before the Atlanta opening, Kirkland said, the History Museum of Mobile had already been in contact with the Gordon Parks Foundation to inquire about a Mobile exhibition. The attention generated by the Atlanta show has only strengthened the desire to bring the images home.
“Those photos gave the nation a snapshot of Mobile in the fall of 1956,” Kirkland said. And they can be the impetus for “a deeper conversation” as they give Mobile a chance to take a look back at itself, he said.
The reality is that even with the plan on the fast track, it will take a while to reach fruition. Kirkland and Alsobrook explained that much of the available display space is simply booked up through late summer. The current centerpiece exhibition is “Ark of India,” described as “an account of late 19th and early 20th century India as seen by Alabama artist Roderick D. MacKenzie.” It runs through early September.
If an exhibition featuring Parks’ photos can open in late 2015, as museum leaders hope, then it can be up and running in 2016, the 60th anniversary of Parks’ visit. Museum leaders also say they will use the lead time to craft exhibits that are more than a mere echo of the Atlanta display.
The original Life magazine article featured about two dozen photos. Most were from the Mobile area and Shady Grove, a community near Silas in Choctaw County, but others were from as far away as Tennessee. The High Museum is showing more than 40. But the Gordon Parks Foundation reportedly has around 70, so it’s possible that some remain unseen by the public. Kirkland said that one of his goals is to make sure that any photos relevant to Mobile are included in a local exhibition.
Alsobrook stressed that he intends for any display of Parks’ work to be part of a larger examination of Mobile’s postwar racial history, and in particular of the commonly held and widely cherished belief that the city’s passage through the civil rights era was more genteel and tranquil than the Southern norm.
Essentially the goal is to walk a line between extremes. Mobile really was different from the beginning, Alsobrook said, more akin to other port cities such as Charleston and New Orleans. In addition to French and Spanish influence on its heritage, its racial makeup wasn’t simply black and white. The population included Creoles of color and others whose lineage was impossible to identify at a glance. Carnival also allowed for some blurring of the social lines.
“Mobile’s enforcement of Jim Crow was always pretty spotty,” Alsobrook said. That fuels the idea that it was a land apart during a troubled era. It’s also true that a spirit of cooperation between leaders such as Joseph Langan and John LeFlore helped prevent the widespread violence that affected cities such as Montgomery and Birmingham. But to infer that Mobile did not have real problems is to gloss over some ugly realities, Alsobrook said.
“We’re trying to avoid getting into the realm of propaganda,” said Alsobrook. “The goal is not to destroy all the existing myths. The goal is to come to a more accurate understanding.”
World War II makes for a good starting point because it is when the modern era really began to take shape. Wartime demand turned Mobile into a boomtown, with tens of thousands drawn to Brookley Field and the city’s shipyards. But the flip side was that the population more than doubled in a short time, with the city becoming “virtually unlivable” in some respects, said Alsobrook, whose own parents arrived in 1942 to work at Brookley.
The growth “put a tremendous strain on Jim Crow’s rather porous system,” said Alsobrook, particularly in realms such as the city’s public transit system, the employment market and housing. (The Ken Burns documentary The War noted that at one point, “To relieve the desperate overcrowding in Mobile, the National Housing Agency provided 14,000 units for white workers – but fewer than 1,000 for blacks. There were 30,000 African Americans in the city now – and just 55 hospital beds that would take them.”)
In 1942, a city bus driver fatally shot Henry Williams, a black army private in uniform who refused to move to the back of his bus. The driver, Grover Chandler, was never prosecuted, Alsobrook said. In 1943, as the federal government pressed for equality for defense industry employees, a riot broke out at the Alabama Dry Dock shipyard.
Tensions continued in the postwar era with “a lot of documented cases of violence, intimidation, police shootings,” said Alsobrook. Despite a veneer of civility, there were struggles. In 1956, the same year Parks visited for Life magazine, black postal workers in Mobile successfully fought to open their own credit union when the one that served white postal workers wouldn’t cater to them.
“Apparently he was terrified the whole time he was down here,” Alsobrook said of Parks.
Alsobrook held out Little Rock, Arkansas, as an example of a city known for bitter racial clashes during the civil rights era. More recently, he said, civic leaders there made an effort to confront that heritage directly, achieving an enviable level of sincere reconciliation.
“I don’t think we’ve reached that point in Mobile,” Alsobrook said.
He’d like to see the Parks photos, and the large exhibition, work as a catalyst to help change that. The long historical view may have its comforts, but there’s a real sense of urgency as well, he said. People who experienced the conditions of 1956 firsthand are reaching the late years of their lives. Meanwhile, Alsobrook said, “There’s a whole young generation that knows nothing about our history.”
“There’s a lot of legend and myth attached to Mobile’s racial history,” he said. “Surely the time has come when we can deal with it. If not, we’ll never deal with it.”
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