Who We Be : The Colorization of America (9781466854659)

by Chang, Jeff; Herc, D. j. Kool

  The manager told King that he was bound by the laws of the state and the ordinances of the city. King argued that interstate travel had been desegregated, that the law required he be seated in the main room. But the manager still refused to budge. “We can’t serve you out here,” the manager told him placatingly, “but now, everything is the same. Everything is equal back there. You will get the same food. You will be served out of the same dishes and everything else. You will get the same service as everybody out here.”4

  “I know that I shouldn’t get angry,” King replied to the Dobbs House manager. “I know that I shouldn’t become bitter, but when you put me back there something happens to my soul.5

  Then he offered some cutting sarcasm. “Now I don’t see how I can get the same service. Number one, I confront aesthetic inequality,” he said, signifying on the Dobbs House’s antebellum plantation chic. “I can’t see all these beautiful paintings that you have around the walls here. We don’t have them back there.”

  When King retold this part of the story, he raised roars of laughter. (We can only wonder what kind of racist kitsch decorated the Dobbs House walls.) But King was serious about aesthetic inequality. He had been profoundly moved by Mamie and Kenneth Clark’s famous beauty-standard experiments, in which Black children, given a choice, had chosen white dolls to play with over Black ones. Even if Brown v. Board of Education had moved Blacks closer to formal equality, they were still far from realizing true equality in a society that remained culturally segregated.

  “You see, equality is not only a matter of mathematics and geometry, but it’s a matter of psychology,” King told his audiences. “It’s not only a quantitative something, but it is a qualitative something. And it is possible to have a quantitative equality and qualitative inequality.”6

  The impact of segregation, he was arguing, goes far beyond the reach of the law. The segregated is utterly dehumanized, reduced to the status of an object, “a thing to be used, not a person to be respected.”7 But the act of segregation distorts the vision of everyone living under its regime. It “scars the soul of both the segregated and the segregator,” King said. “It gives the segregated a false sense of inferiority and it gives the segregator a false sense of superiority.”

  King had been forcibly separated from his white traveling companion and their entire conversation had been disrupted. He was left alone with the shames and rage borne of invisiblity. Separation prevented trust, reconciliation, and redemption. It denied the possibility of mutuality and the creation of a beloved community.

  Through this experience, King would tell his audiences, he came to understand the deeper wisdom of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. “Segregation has always been evil,” King would say, “and only the misguided reactionary clothed in the thin garments of irrational emotionalism will seek to defend it. Segregation is both rationally inexplicable and morally unjustifiable.”8

  King would not eat that afternoon at the Dobbs House. Not long afterward, he would again be refused service at the same restaurant under similar circumstances. By the start of the 1960s, Black civil rights leaders and attorneys were filing discrimination lawsuits against the chain that would finally prove successful. In the new decade, the Dobbs House chain would replace its zip-a-dee-doo-dah with “South Seas” exotica—tikis and rattan, leis and palms.

  By then the civil rights movement had taken a turn toward fuller political enfranchisement. But past the strictures of de jure segregation, there still lay the actual facts of segregation, and that question was as much a question of culture as of politics, as much a question of cultural representation as of political representation.

  IN THE WHITE GALLERY

  Nineteen sixty-three was the year of the Birmingham campaign, the year the Civil Rights Act was introduced, and the year of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It was the year that George Wallace declared, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” It was the year that James Baldwin responded, “Color is not a human or a personal reality, it is a political reality.”

  In 1963, Faith Ringgold knew of only one Black artist, Jacob Lawrence, who showed at a gallery on East 57th Street, then the center of the art world. Yet Ringgold had made up her mind that she wanted to be regarded as a serious artist. So she and her second husband, Burdette “Birdie” Ringgold, packed up her still lifes and landscapes—her subjects then, she said, were “trees and flowers”—and went downtown to East 57th Street to see the gallerist Ruth White, who specialized in French-style works.

  Ringgold had a way of dealing with life’s obstacles. Her mother, Willi Posey, a fashion designer, had taught the asthmatic child to draw and paint, and reminded her that her grandfather, the son of slaves, had been a teacher. Once, Faith had asked her mother where all the young men coming out of the subway station at the end of her block in Harlem were going every day. She was told they were headed to the City College of New York, and the little girl made up her mind that someday she was going there, too.

  When Ringgold enrolled there in the 1950s, she was told that the School of Liberal Arts’s art department allowed only men to matriculate. Making art was not women’s work. Teaching was. So she registered in the School of Education to major in art and minor in teaching. That was how she dealt with problems.

  As the 1960s began, Faith Ringgold was an art teacher; a single mother of two daughters, Michele and Barbara Wallace; and now that the males-only rule had been rescinded, one of the first African American women to receive a master’s degree in art from City College. In 1961, while in Paris with her mother and daughters on a failed search to find expatriate artists of the Harlem Renaissance, she decided making art was her life’s work.

  “I realized if that was true, I was going to have to give it all I had,” she said. “Being a woman and being Black too was going to be a problem so I had better be highly focused. I had better be ready.”

  So there Faith Ringgold was in Ruth White’s gallery in 1963. White looked at Ringgold’s paintings—derivative of Picasso, the Impressionists, and the rest—and asked her, “Do you know where you are?”

  Ringgold said, “Yes. I am on East 57th Street.”

  White said, “You cannot do this.”

  Faith and Birdie walked out of the gallery with the words ringing in their heads. You cannot do this. “What do you think she meant?” Birdie asked.

  For years afterward Faith would speak of this encounter in present tense, as if it was still happening. “I’m on the line here,” she would say. “I got to turn into a blues singer. I got to take that bad experience and turn it into something good.”

  “I think what she meant is, Here we are in the sixties, the beginning of the most challenging period of American history, and your future is on the line and you’re painting still life and landscapes like you’re a European person?

  “That’s what she means. You don’t just become an artist to paint a pretty picture. It’s a powerful way of documenting a time, a period, and a people.”

  “And so I said, ‘Well, thank you, Ruth White. I really appreciate it.’”

  THE SPIRAL

  As the March on Washington neared, many of New York’s leading Black visual artists—including Norman Lewis, Hale Woodruff, Emma Amos, Richard Mayhew, and Charles Alston—began gathering at Romare Bearden’s studio to discuss the issues of the day: the American civil rights uprisings and the African anticolonial struggles, Negritude and nonviolence, African art and abstraction, what it meant to be a Negro and a Negro artist in that time.

  With the exception of Amos, the entire group was middle-aged and male. Most had come of age with the Harlem Renaissance or the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration. All were highly accomplished and profoundly overlooked. Norman Lewis had been a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism, was represented by the powerful Willard Gallery, and was recognized by Willem de Kooning and Ad Reinhardt as one of their most influential peers. But, the critic Elsa Honig Fine wrote, “
At openings, the wealthy art patrons were more likely to ask him for a drink than to discuss his aesthetic theories.”9

  The group named itself Spiral, evoking, in Woodruff’s words, “the Archimedean one; because from a starting point, it moves outward embracing all directions, yet constantly forward.”10 It was an image of perfect, natural form: the embodiment of beauty, diversity, organicity, inevitability. Perhaps Spiral’s name also reflected a kind of reclamation.

  Ellison, a friend of Bearden, had his hero in Invisible Man warn, “Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang.” By the early 1960s, Ellison was writing, “American history is caught again in the excruciating process of executing a spiral—that is, returning at a later point in time to an earlier point in historical space,” with the South as “the point of maximum tortuousity.”11 But by choosing this image, the artists seemed to suggest that if the forces arrayed against the freedom struggle wanted to plunge history downward and backward, Black art could help reverse that course. They envisioned a circular movement progressing upward to encompass the whole.

  The group would never mold a manifesto. They were unable to adopt the kind of lockstep discipline demanded of their political counterparts in the civil rights movement. They had aesthetic and strategic disagreements, not to mention the usual cat-scratch of egos. But they understood that expression was the key for achieving self-determination, and that itself was worth the strife of collectivity.

  At best they shared a desire to confront, as Ellison would write later of Romare Bearden’s stunning post-Spiral collages, “a distorted perception of social reality,” “a stubborn blindness to the creative possibilities of cultural diversity,” and “the prevalence of negative myths, racial stereotypes, and dangerous illusions about art, humanity, and society.” Ellison continued, “[T]he true artist destroys the accepted world by way of revealing the unseen.” In the same way, Bearden and the Spiral artists would reveal themselves and their people not just through their unmasking of racial injustice but through their demonstration of artistic mastery. They would “bring a new visual order into the world.”12

  In 1965, Spiral opened a gallery at 147 Christopher Street where they mounted an exhibition of works executed in only black and white. The centerpiece was Lewis’s Processional, a sweep of bold strokes of white suggesting marchers moving across the dark scrim of history, an advance of joy, hope, and progress. It would do nothing else of consequence. In 1966, the year SNCC declared itself the vanguard of Black Power, signaling a new era in which secular militancy would replace King’s spirit-driven nonviolence, the gallery quietly closed.

  PICTURING THE STRUGGLE

  Spiral’s significance was not lost on Ringgold. She had made it a point to attend every Black artist’s show opening to introduce herself to all of her elders. “They would sort of thin out,” she chuckled at the memory. “Like, ‘Oh, here she comes. See ya later, man.’”

  Once, when Ringgold asked Romare Bearden if she could come to a Spiral meeting, he politely brushed her off. “One day your art will find its own friends,” he told her. Ringgold was disappointed. But, she said, “I needed them desperately. I was going to make sure that I had a connection with these people because I’d been deprived of any connection with Black artists.”

  Ringgold knew that they had been defined by their delicate dances on the razor edge of the color line. “They were struggle-bound. They were angry,” she said. “They were afraid to be thought of as angry.” She wanted to explore that emotional chroma, what had defined it, how it might be transformed. In the American People paintings she set out to paint that generation’s painful racial drama in flat, depthless colors. Between Friends depicted a white matriarch staring mutely past an eager-to-please young Black woman, the personal made political.

  By 1967—when, in an increasingly desperate urban America, it seemed that every stretch of hot weather and bad policing brought the threat of riots—Ringgold’s canvases and ambitions had grown. On the wall-size The Flag Is Bleeding, she superimposed the American flag—“the only truly subversive and revolutionary abstraction one can paint,” she had said—over a white woman linking arms with a Black man and a white man.13 The stars partly hid the first, besieged man. He covered a stab wound with one hand and wielded a threatening knife with the other. The stripes were spattered with his blood.

  In Die, the last painting in the series, a shocking race riot scene—its slashing, splaying bodies echoing Jacob Lawrence’s Migration series No. 52—offered neither Blacks or whites respite from the violence. Nineteen sixty-seven marked the fiftieth anniversary of the East St. Louis riots Lawrence had painted, the year of the Newark and Detroit riots, and the year that Republican presidential hopeful Richard Nixon began voicing the desire of the “silent majority” for a return to law and order. Were hope and reconciliation even imaginable anymore? She called her style “Super Realism.”

  Color had long been an issue for Ringgold. At City College, she had caused snickering among her fellow students with her paintings of dark-skinned models. In the classical chiaroscuro method, lighter colors were supposed to convey light and foreground, darker to show shadow and depth. But in order to spotlight her dark-skinned subjects, Ringgold reversed the process. Her paintings looked inside out to her peers, who sneered at her work behind her back. But she knew from her experimentation that darker colors tended to reveal other dark colors better.

  In her Black Light series, she painted six faces arranged from darkest skin to lightest and called it The American Spectrum, a sharp retort to the chiaroscuro tradition. The capstone of the series featured another flag. Hidden within its stars were the letters “DIE.” The stripes reconfigured themselves into the word “NIGGER.” She called this one Flag for the Moon: Die Nigger, and it preceded Gil Scott-Heron’s recording “Whitey on the Moon” by just a few months.

  These works finally secured her the serious attention from critics, peers, and elders that she had sought. Yet the paintings did not sell. “We want to see something that’s restful and nice to the eyes,” one man told her. “I don’t want your painting screaming at me from the wall.” But for Ringgold the history of art, the history of generations, indeed the history of America, was the history of lines drawn by color.

  THE RISE OF THE SOUTHERN STRATEGY

  In 1964, Democrats had controlled the South since Reconstruction. But in the debate over segregation, many Republicans saw an opportunity to challenge blue rule. The party’s presidential nominee, Senator Barry Goldwater, had supported previous civil rights bills, a position in line with the Northern moderate leadership of the party. But by the summer, Goldwater had taken up the states’ rights cause and voted against the landmark Civil Rights Act.

  By adopting this position—that segregation should be determined not by the feds but by the states—they appealed to a broad front opposed to civil rights—from fringe-right extremists who believed the civil rights movement was a pro-Communist, anti-Christian conspiracy to working-class whites bitter that they had been forgotten by Northern cultural elites. This “Southern strategy” might lose them the West and parts of the North. But they might keep New England and the Rockies and parts of the Midwest, and lock up a “solid South” with the states of the former Confederacy, a coalition that might dominate for years to come.

  At the same time, Alabama’s segregationist governor George Wallace stormed into the Democratic primaries to run a three-state protest campaign. Only a month after declaring his candidacy, Wallace won 34 percent of the Democratic vote in the historically progressive northern state of Wisconsin. In Indiana, he grabbed 30 percent of the vote, and in Maryland, 43 percent. President Lyndon Johnson instinctively understood Wallace’s appeal. He told his aides, “George Wallace makes these working folks think whatever is happening to them is all the Negro’s fault.”14

  Johnson would be triumphant that summer. He secured the Democratic nomination, and on July 2 he signed the Civil Rights Act. Yet on the ev
ening of his greatest legislative victory, he brooded. He told his aide Bill Moyers, “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.”15

  The evidence would not be clear for another four years. On November 3, Johnson won 44 states and the District of Columbia, amassing a stunning 486 electoral votes, the most lopsided victory in the history of presidential elections. But for the next forty years, Johnson’s premonition held stubbornly true.

  By the time the 1968 election rolled around, Wallace’s second presidential run—this time as an independent—once again forced the parties to align themselves in relation to the white backlash. Vice president and future Democratic presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey went to Georgia to take pictures with Lester Maddox, the new governor whose main qualification for office, historian Rick Perlstein wrote, “was having chased Negroes from his Atlanta fried-chicken emporium after passage of the Civil Rights Act with a pistol and a pickax handle.”16

  Richard Nixon had long aligned himself with the Republicans’ Northern moderate leadership on the question of states’ rights and the Southern strategy. His support for the 1957 Civil Rights Act had earned him the praise of Jackie Robinson and Martin Luther King Jr. But now that he was the Republican nominee, Nixon decided to reevaluate his stance. A twenty-seven-year-old expert in white ethnic voting patterns named Kevin Phillips played a central role in his rethinking.

  Phillips’s analysis was counterintuitive. Goldwater had secured just five states outside of his home state of Arizona, but they were Southern states that had been intractably Democratic for years: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. In the memo that landed him a job with Nixon’s campaign, ambitiously titled, “Middle America and the Emerging Republican Majority,” Phillips argued that Goldwater’s vanquishing augured Republican renewal.