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Racism in the United States: Anger – Photos from Virginia, 1960

The pictures are disturbing. A young woman is sitting in front of a book, a guy is pushing between her and the young man at her side. He blows the smoke from his cigarette directly into her face. The woman behind her pulls her hair. In another scene, she ashes her on the shoulder with the cigarette. Finally, the guy holds his smoldering cigarette as close to her cheek as if he wanted to burn her face. The girl and the young man stubbornly look down; both sit there petrified.

Picture by picture, the photo series has a shocking effect, picture by picture harassment and torture. Why do people treat each other like this?

The photographer Eve Arnold (1912-2012) once wrote that there were motifs that were made for documentaries – hard news photos of war, poverty, disasters and racism. But as a photographer you have to do a lot more to go beyond the obvious.

In this case, the obvious leads the viewer astray. Humiliation among blacks is not the issue here. Arnold did not take any news photos, so her pictures from the United States in 1960 cannot do without an explanation.

Eve Arnold researched behind the scenes of the civil rights movement.

From sit-in to piss-in

Blacks have fought for their equality and against everyday racism in the USA for many decades, and they continue to do so today. Racial segregation shaped her life in the southern states until well into the 1950s and 1960s. When Rosa Parks refused to reserve her seat on the bus for a white man in 1955, she became one of the mothers of a strong civil rights movement.

With parks by his side, Martin Luther King organized bus boycotts in Alabama. Peaceful protests and passive resistance modeled on Mahatma Gandhi followed; A few years later, however, the Black Panthers, militant activists from Malcolm X to the “Nation of Islam” and their call for “Separation or Death”, also formed.

At the end of the 1950s, schools in particular became the scene of the fight against discrimination. The job took Eve Arnold, a member of the renowned Magnum photo agency, to Virginia in 1960, where the situation was just coming to a head. Six years had passed since the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional in a landmark decision. It had been three years since the army had to move up to Little Rock, Arkansas, after black teenagers enrolled in a white-only school.

It was the time of sit-ins. Particularly popular since four black students marched into the Woolworth department store in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February 1960 and sat at the lunch counter to order coffee – since they were not served, they stayed seated until late at night. The campaign found many imitators.

Soon there were so-called pray-ins and kneel-ins in churches, read-ins in libraries and walk-ins in theaters and amusement parks. Eve Arnold had even heard of a piss-in: the landlord had turned off electricity and water for a couple, the only black tenants of a house that was otherwise white. They used candles and buckets.

Stage goal: endure humiliations stoically

Those who took part in such actions had to expect verbal and physical attacks. The Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) therefore set up training centers to teach resistance techniques. Eve Arnold was assigned to accompany a training group in Petersburg, Virginia.

That’s how she met Priscilla Washington. The 20-year-old studied biology at Virginia State College and appears younger in the photos. Training in a church should teach her how to sit at a lunchtime counter where only whites have eaten so far.

In theory, Priscilla got, among other things, explained: “Make sure that your hair is properly combed and your shoelaces are tied, because if you stand there and raise a hand to straighten your hair or bend down to tie your shoes, and if you accidentally hit a white man, the police come. “

Through practical exercises, the student should learn what could happen to her if she was sitting at the counter. In addition, other course participants took on the role of whites. They insulted Priscilla as “Biggity Nigger” (“brazen, snooty negro”) and “Black Bastard”, tore at her hair, blew her smoke in the face. For two hours she endured stoically, trying to concentrate on the Bible in front of her.

The next day, Priscilla had to pass a test of courage: with a sign “Do not buy from Woolworth”, she should walk up and down the street in front of the police. She passed the test. The photographer later revealed how she overcame her fear by reciting poems and chemical formulas.

“Indoctrinated from birth”

The protest actions were successful. In July 1960 the department store chain broke apart, other shops and restaurants followed. “The images of non-violent demonstrators influenced public opinion in favor of the movement,” said historian Sascha Cohen in 2015 in the “Time” magazine. These strategies would have paved the way for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which banned discrimination under President Lyndon B. Johnson; a milestone for legal equality for black people. And they are also the forerunners of the “Black Lives Matter” movement against police violence, said Cohen.

Sixty years after Eve Arnold’s pictures, her grandson Michael Arnold posted one of the pictures on Facebookwith the hashtag “George Floyd”. He said he had been thinking a lot about his grandmother lately. He was deeply impressed by her work on the civil rights movement and the injustices with which she introduced him in his youth.

Arnold did a lot of introspection in the days after Floyd’s death, Arnold says. “I used to think of the KKK or white racists in ‘white rule’. Now I realize for the first time that it is the system that has been indoctrinated to us from birth.” Then as now, the protests would have brought institutionalized racism to the homes of millions of people in the United States.

Then as now, it was about more than just the obvious.

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