Bathroom doors and drinking fountains: Jim Crow's racial symbolic

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 25, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 435-480

  Abel, Elizabeth ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 62449145314     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/448930     Document Type: Article

References (39)

1. See Once Upon a Time... When We Were Colored (dir. Tim Reid, Republic, 1996, videocassette). Through scenes such as this, the film sharpens the critique of racialization that is at most implied in Taulbert's pastoral recollection of life in the Jim Crow south, although in other ways Reid intensifies the memoir's romantic evocation of a black communitarian past destroyed by integration. For a critique of this and other recent examples of black nostalgia for a bygone era, see Adoíf Reed, Jr., "Dangerous Dreams: Black Boomers Wax Nostalgic for the Days of Jim Crow," The Village Voice, 16 Apr. 1996, pp. 24-29. I am grateful to Endesha Ida Mae Holland for bringing Tim Reid's film to my attention, to Barrie Thorne for introducing me to Endesha, and to Catherine Hollis for showing me Reed's review
2. Jacques Lacan, "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud," Écrìts: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977), pp. 152, 151
3. In the absence of clear photographic evidence, we can turn to literature for indications of local variation in the degree to which gender categories unsettled the priority of race in the construction of Jim Crow space. That sexual difference was acknowledged in the Jim Crow policies of Kentucky and Tennessee (where Bubley's photograph was taken), in contrast to those of the Deep South, is suggested by Toni Morrison's Sula (1973; New York, 1975, p. 20), in which Helene's and Nel's train ride in 1920 from Ohio to New Orleans is marked by the shift in the presence of "colored women's" rooms at rest stops in these states to the absence of all "colored" toilets in Alabama, where the two women learn, with another African American woman passenger, to use the fields by the train tracks. Louisiana apparently resembled Alabama. In Ernest J. Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman ([New York, 1971], pp. 228-29)
4. Miss Jane remembers about the courthouse in Bayonne in the early 1960s: up to a year ago they didn't have a fountain there for colored at all. They didn't have a bathroom inside, either. White, yes; but nothing for colored. Colored had to go outside, rain or shine and go down in the basement. Half the time the bathroom was so filthy you couldn't get inside the door. The water on the floor come almost to the top of your shoes. You could smell the toilets soon as you started downstairs. Very seldom a lady would go down there because it was so filthy. Although the plural "toilets" in the singular "bathroom" may suggest some minimal concession to sexual difference, it offered African American women no protection from the degrading consequences of their racial location. Nevertheless, individuals at least occasionally reinstated the distinction of gender: Miss Jane also recalls that Madame Orsini (a "dago") would allow black women, but not black men, to use the bathroom in her grocery (p. 229). That some Jim Crow boundaries may have been more permeable for women than for men is also suggested by Mary Fair Burks, organizer of the Women's Political Council that laid the groundwork for the Montgomery Bus Boycott, who remembers going "into rest rooms with signs FOR WHITE LADIES ONLY" in situations in which "there were neither other facilities for Negroes nor nearby bushes" (Mary Fair Burks, "Trailblazers: Women in the Montgomery Bus Boycott," in Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941-65, ed. Vicki L. Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Woods [Brooklyn, N.Y., 1990], p. 76). Black men were accorded no such flexibility: Sammy Younge, Jr., the first black student to die in the civil rights movement, was murdered in 1966 by a white Standard Oil station attendant in Tuskegee for refusing to use the outdoor Jim Crow bathroom; Isaac Woodward, a World War II veteran, had his eyes gouged out for using a white men's room in a Carolina bus station that provided no facilities for African Americans. See James Forman, Sammy Younge, Jr.: The First Black College Student to Die in the Black Liberation Movement (New York, 1968), and Stetson Kennedy, Jim Crow Guide: The Way It Was (Boca Raton, Fla., 1990), p. 71. The fact that, according to Joel Williamson in The Crucible cf Race: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York, 1984), bathroom segregation originated in the workplace, especially in factories in 1913-15,suggests that its initial purpose, at least, was to separate men rather than women. The prevailing Jim Crow policy seems to have been to disregard gender: Cecil Williams recalls doors marked "WHITE WOMEN" and "WHITE MEN" but only occasional doors marked "COLORED," "meaning it was used by black men, women, and children" in Clarendon County, South Carolina, in the 1940s and 1950s (Cecil J. Williams, Freedom and Justice: Four Decades of the Civil Rights Struggle as Seen by a Black Photographer of the Deep South [Macon, S.C., 1995], p. 3)
5. 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): 857-68
6. 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)
7. Williamson, The Crucible of Race; and Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York, 1998)
8. 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
9. 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 1955-1968, ed. Ronald W. Bailey and Michele Furst (Boston, 1992)
10. 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
11. 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
12. 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. 98-112. Here and in his more recent account in Half Past Autumn: A Retrospective (exhibition catalogue, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 10 Sept. 1997-11 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
13. 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, 1890-1940 (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
14. I am inferring this percentage (by my count ten cases out of twelve) from Charles A. Lofgren's analysis of legal antecedents to Plessy in chapter six of The Plessy Case: A Legal-Historical Interpretation (New York, 1987), pp. 116-47; hereafter abbreviated PC. Although he discusses in passing some of the gender implications of this material, Lofgren is more concerned with the development of the separate but equal argument. Further evidence of women's position as the primary victim of the separate car laws is provided by the 1891 letter from Louis A. Martinet to Plessys leading counsel, Albion W. Tourgée, suggesting that Tourgée's original plan was to use a "nearly white" lady as a test case for these laws (Louis A. Martinet, letter to Albion W. Tourgée, 5 Oct. 1891, in The Thin Disguise: Turning Point in Negro History, ed. Otto H. Olsen [New York, 1967], p. 56)
15. Sometimes the class division of railway cars was explicitly gendered, sometimes only implicitly. What was consistent was that white women rode in the nonsmoking firstclass cars, where they were secluded from the unattached men required to ride in second class. According to Edward L. Ayers, mixing across race between men in the second-class cars was not perceived as a problem. See Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (New York, 1992), esp. pp. 137-52
16. Although Charles W. Chesnutt's narrative of the forced separation of Dr. Miller from Dr. Burns on a train in Virginia suggests otherwise, his account of Captain McBane's insistence on smoking his cigar in the "colored" car reveals that theoretical prohibitions against whites in Jim Crow cars were readily violated by aggressive individuals. See Charles W. Chesnutt, "A Journey Southward," The Marrow of Tradition, ed. Robert M. Farnsworth (1901; Ann Arbor, Mich., 1969), pp. 48-62
17. Frederick Douglass, "The Civil Rights Case," speech at Lincoln Hall, Washington, D.C., 22 Oct. 1883, The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, ed. Philip S. Foner, 5 vols. (New York, 1950-75), 4:396-97, quoted in PC, p. 147; editorial, New Orleans Times Democrat, 9 July 1890, in The Thin Disguise, p. 53
18. See also George Washington Cable's account of a "neatly and tastefully dressed" African American mother and child forced into the "most melancholy and revolting company" of convicts in "filthy rags, with vile odors and the clanking of shackles and chains" who rode with them for two hundred miles in a Jim Crow car that "stank insufferably" (George W. Cable, "The Freedman's Case in Equity" [1884], The Negro Qhiestion: A Selection of Writings on Civil Rights in the South, ed. Arlin Turner [Garden City, NJ., 1958], pp. 74-75). For a compelling first-person account of the sexual terror experienced by African American women forced to ride in Jim Crow cars, see Mary Church Terrell, A Colored Woman in a White World (1940
19. Salem, N.H., 1992). Terrell summarizes these experiences by declaring: "No pen can describe and no tongue portray the indignities, insults and assaults to which colored women and girls have been subjected in Jim Crow cars" (pp. 298-99). The gulf between Terrell's pain and the equanimity with which Chesnutt's Dr. Miller faces his Jim Crow car experience suggests how deeply gendered were the costs of the segregated cars
20. This photograph of the Birmingham City Hall was one of a series on municipal buildings taken by the Birmingham View Company in 1951. The TVA photographs are reproduced in a special issue of Pencil Points devoted to the TVA ("Tennessee Valley Authority Architecture," Pencil Points 20 [Nov. 1939], p. 704). The photographs in the essay were obtained primarily from Charles Krutch, photographer and chief of the Graphic Arts Service of the TVA, although a few were taken privately by TVA employees. The lack of commentary on discrimination in a building produced by a federal agency is especially striking. I am grateful to Tim Culvahouse for this reference
21. The extent to which black emasculation is a white male fantasy is emphasized by bell hooks [Gloria Watkins], "Reconstructing Black Masculinity," Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston, 1992), pp. 87-114. Robin D. G. Kelley's insistence on the necessarily clandestine nature of black resistance is a powerful reminder not to take the appearance of compliance, to say nothing of white investments in that appearance, as representing black realities; see Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York, 1994)
22. Rosa Parks recalls that "the public water fountains in Montgomery had signs that said 'White' and 'Colored.' Like millions of black children, before me and after me, I wondered if 'White' water tasted different from 'Colored' water. I wanted to know if 'White' water was white and if 'Colored' water came in different colors" (Rosa Parks and Jim Haskins, Rosa Parks: My Story [New York, 1992], p. 46). The same question is recalled by one of the women interviewed in In the Land of Jim Crow: Growing Up Segregated (1991). In Jim Forman's biography of Sammy Younge, Jr., Sammy's childhood friend Laly Washington recalls a recurrent childhood scene in which she and Sammy, at around age ten, posed this question less innocently in order to embarrass their mothers during shopping trips to Montgomery by clambering loudly, "'What is colored water, Mama? What do they mean, colored water? I want some colored water'" (Forman, Sammy Younge, Jr., p. 55)
23. John Vachon, "Tribute to a Man, an Era, an Art," Harper's Magazine 247 (Sept. 1973): 98. Although there is a certain fuzziness in Vachon's recollection of this photograph-he places the scene in Georgia rather than North Carolina, and recalls the sign as saying "Colored Water"-the fact that he remembers it at all despite (he tells us) not having looked at it for thirty years is testimony to the way this scene was etched in his memory. His precise reference to the boy as a "ten-year-old" suggests that there was some verbal exchange between them. Vachon's interest in the destabilizing potential of children's ambiguous relation to racial boundaries is also suggested by another of his photographs, which shows a young white girl standing next to, and dwarfed by, a huge For Whites Only sign on a beach; although the sign dominates the child visually, she cannot be its stable representative, for it seems likely that she doesn't recognize its claims and that her play will transgress the line it draws in the sand. Taken in October 1951, the photograph is part of the collection of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library
24. This combination of legal victory with social decline characterized precisely the period between these photographs, marked by increasing black unemployment and domestic disarray. For Moynihan, these are critical years in the decline of the black standard of living, with almost 30 percent of black men unemployed during the prosperous year of 1963. See Moynihan, The Negro Family, p. 67
25. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, in Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of "Brown v. Board of Education" and Black America's Struggle for Equality (New York, 1975), p. 782
26. See Zora Neale Hurston, "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," / Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . And Then Again When 1 Am Looking Mean and Impressive, ed. Alice Walker (Old Westbury, N.Y., 1979), p. 155. I am indebted to Claire Kahane for this insight
27. Erwitt's third photograph specifically recalls the 1949 Hollywood version of the Broadway play Home of the Brave, which transforms the play's Jewish protagonist into a black soldier who is literally paralyzed by guilt over the relief he feels when his white (and at times racially abusive) friend is killed in battle. For a brilliant reading of how this film works first to evoke black anger at racism in the "land of the free" and then to dissolve it into the universalized problem of survivor guilt, see Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley, 1996), pp. 228-50. For a reading of Hollywood's rendition of the postwar crisis in masculinity that does not focus on race in particular, see chap. 4 of Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York, 1992)
28. Stanley M. Elkins coined the phrase "the damage hypothesis" in the third edition of Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago, 1976), pp. 267-70; the quotes are from "The Howard University Address," given by Lyndon B. Johnson, 4 June 1965, drafted by Richard N. Goodwin and Moynihan, in The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy, pp. 126, 130, 125. Although the language of damage was sometimes invoked by black intellectuals such as E. Franklin Frazier and Howard University President Mordecai Johnson, who at a 1936 dedication of a new building requested President Roosevelt to allow the students to see he was crippled in order to provide an inspiration for their struggle to transcend their own form of crippling, the exceptionally graphic and insistent version of this discourse that crested in the 1960s was produced almost exclusively by white men, and applied almost exclusively to black men. Doris Kearns Goodwin discusses Howard's invitation to Roosevelt in No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (New York, 1994), pp. 532-33. For a fuller study of the postwar damage hypothesis, see Rogin, Blackface, White Nohe, chap. 7
29. Martha Rosier, "In, Around, and Afterthoughts (on Documentary Photography)," in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), p. 307. This is, of course, the standard critique of mainstream documentary practice, as exemplified by the FSA, in which natural disaster, rather than social oppression, is shown to be the cause of human misery. Lyon, by contrast, quite consistendy chose to document the source, rather than the consequences, of oppression, evoking anger rather than compassion. In a photograph taken the same year as the Albany courthouse fountains, for example, Lyon zeroes in on a gleaming "white" marble drinking fountain in Birmingham, Alabama
30. Lyon, the only white photographer in this study who was actively involved in the civil rights movement, describes his relationship with Forman, and with SNCC, in Danny Lyon, Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992): Forman treated me like he treated most newcomers. He put me to work. "You got a camera? Go inside the courthouse. Down at the back they have a big water cooler for whites and next to it a little bowl for Negroes. Go in there and take a picture of that." With Forman's blessing, I had found a place in the civil rights movement that I would occupy for the next two years. James Forman would direct me, protect me, and at times fight for a place for me in the movement. He is directly responsible for my pictures existing at all. [P. 30] I am very grateful to Catherine Hollis for showing me the affirmative action poster
31. See "Loomis and Burke Doing Business Again," in the liberal newspaper PM, 23 Feb. 1947, p. 5, with photos by Palfi and text by Stetson Kennedy. These are among the many photographs of racial violence and discrimination that Palfi took during (and after) her three-year tenure of the prestigious Rosenwald fellowship (1946-49). Palfi's photographs and papers are at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. I am very grateful to Miruna Stanica and to the center's archivist, Amy Rule, for their assistance in locating these photographs. A selection of Palfi's photographs may be seen in Marion Palfi, Invisible in America: An Exhibition of Photographs by Marion Palfi (exhibition catalogue, University of Kansas Museum of Art, Lawrence, Kans., 1973) and in the 1990 edition of Kennedy's Jim Crow Guide
32. For a full account of the Standard Oil of New Jersey (SONJ) documentary project and its political intentions and effects, see Steven W. Plattner, Roy Stryker: U.S.A., 1943-1950: The Standard Oil (New Jersey) Photographic Project (Austin, Tx., 1983). In Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America, 1890-1950 (Cambridge, 1989)
33. Just how mythological they were is well documented by historical studies. For an account of the racial dynamics that produced the nineteenth-century white working class, see David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, 1991). In The Black Worker: The Negro and the Labor Movement (1931; New York, 1968), Sterling D. Spero and Abram L. Harris claim that as black migration after World War I intensified labor competition between blacks and whites, the black worker "was no less antagonistic to the white worker than the latter was to him" (p. 385)
34. For an analysis of the interplay between the eroticization of the product and the commodification of the female body, see Simone Davis, "Shrinking from Scrutiny, Seeking the Light: Advertising the Self in American Commodity Culture, 1920-32" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1996). Davis's comments, in the dissertation and in person, have been instrumental in the development of my reading
35. The "slower-burning costlier tobaccos" are advertised in this image. Other quotes are from ads discussed by Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley, 1985), p. 341; the "never jangle the nerves" quote is from a 1934 Camel ad whose text begins, "Watch out for the signs of jangled nerves" and concludes that Camels "never jangle the nerves." Camel ads were distinctive in their emphasis on soothing nerves; whereas brands such as Murad, Chesterfield, Fatima, and Lucky Strike emphasized taste, pleasure, and smoothness, Camel ads emphasized their cigarettes' therapeutic value. I am grateful to Don McQuade for collecting the cigarette advertisements and to Simone Davis for sharing them with me
36. Emily Apter, Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-of-lhe-Cenlury France (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991)
37. André Bazin discusses the wartime origins and attributes of the distinctively American pinup girl, but not her fet¡shistic qualities, in "Entomology of the Pin-Up Girl," What Is Cinema? trans, and ed. Hugh Gray, 2 vols. (Berkeley, 1971), 2:158-62
38. The half decade prior to this southern trip Parks spent primarily on assignments in Paris and New York doing fashion photography. Half Past Autumn offers compelling examples of this genre and of Parks's descriptions of the pleasure that he took in it. In "Black Photography: Contexts for Evolution," Deborah J. Johnson suggests that Parks's photographs often exhibit a mutual pleasure in his subjects' appearance: "His subjects are usually aware of the artist's presence, and there is a certain charm of the early studio photographer's 'Sunday best' about these works" (Deborah J. Johnson, "Black Photography: Contexts for Evolution," in A Century of Black Photographers: 1840-1960, ed. Valencia Hollins Coar [Providence, R.I., 1983], p. 19). At least one of the other images for the Life series, a photograph of a Fisk University professor standing with his family under a Colored Waiting Room sign in a Nashville, Tennessee, bus station, was carefully staged
39. Evidence of the risks incurred by black photographers is provided by the experience of Preston E. Stewart, Jr., dean of men at Lane College, who was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct for photographing a Jim Crow Coke machine in Jackson, Tennessee. The story is covered by The Southern Patriot 19 (Feb. 1961). Another unidentified black photographer who attempted to cover the integration of Little Rock's Central High School was jumped and beaten by white onlookers. See U.S. News and World Report, 4 Oct. 1957, p. 43