This Photo Essay is one of the reasons I still subscribe to the NY Times, despite my frequent criticism.
It’s an extraordinary interactive analysis of an iconic portrait of segregated America in 1955 — a devastatingly powerful image both taken as a whole and examing each part, as the Times photo essay does brilliantly.
As a whole it’s a perfect encapsulation of Jim Crow in public transporation, taken just months before Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus.
But the essay also examines the many parts of the photo and finds almost miraculous meaning:
- an ornate “W” — for Walgreens — but also the background to a white woman looking disdainfully at the photographer;
- behind the segregated barrier, “a man gazing with infinite sadness out of slightly unfocused eyes“ (imbued with Christ-like qualities by the essayist);
- the children of privilege right in front of him, caught as their (likely) nanny moves to the back;
- the inanimate section above the people, “like a Greek Temple entablature,” — each section echoing or anticipating art movements of the 20th century.
Looking at it today is almost unbearable. Seeing a stark image of white privilge from 65 years ago as the deadly persistence of that cancer explodes around us is disheartening. But the sea change of the last two weeks, based primarily on revulsion to different, horrifying visual evidence also gives hope, as I wrote yesterday in From Philadelphia, MS in 1980 to Tulsa, OK in 2020. Let this be the bookend of an era:
Let this obscene event in Tulsa be a bookend.
A self-hammered nail in the coffin of using race to oppress African-Americans and immigrants and gull the naive into supporting the party that doesn’t care if they live or die, the party that throws a beer party after trying to rob them of their health care. A bookend to an era of militarized police given license to terrorize; an end to the era of children in cages and indifference to disease.