[Note: This is a cross-post from my documentary photography blog.]
Every now and then, the gods send you a moment of serendipity -- something unexpected that shoots a small shiver of delight up your spine -- whether you deserve it or not. I had one of those moments, yesterday, when my friend Chuck Mathewes emailed me a link to a slideshow on the New York Times' website -- "The Case of Loving v. Bigotry". The second photo in the series (that's it directly below) made me smile because what is says about the culture of drag racing.
Let me explain.
Grey Villet: Richard and Mildred Loving watching drag races from the pit area, Sumerduck dragway, Sumerduck, Va., 1965. {Click on the image to see a larger version.]
This photo wasn't intended to be about drag racing. As far as Life magazine and its photographer, Grey Villet, were concerned, it was about an important episode in American history.
Villet made the image in 1965, while he was working on a story about Richard and Mildred Loving, a couple challenging the constitutionality of Virginia's law prohibiting marriage between partners of different races. Here's how the Times' Julie Bosman tells the story:
In 1958, Richard and Mildred Loving were arrested in a nighttime raid in their bedroom by the sheriff of Caroline County, Va. Their crime: being married to each other. The Lovings -- Mildred, who was of African-American and Native American descent, and Richard, a bricklayer with a blond buzz cut -- were ordered by a judge to leave Virginia for 25 years. ...[The Lovings struggled] to return home after living in exile in Washington, where Mildred, gentle in person but persistent on paper, wrote pleading letters to Robert F. Kennedy and the A.C.L.U. Two lawyers took their case to the Supreme Court, which struck down miscegenation laws in more than a dozen states. The Lovings' belief in the simple rightness of their plea never wavered.
It's a tremendous story, no doubt about it. But that's not what gave me a charge when I saw the photo. The thrill comes from knowing that it makes perfect sense that the Lovings could relax at a drag strip. The photo confirms an argument that I've been making about the strange and wonderful racial culture of drag racing. All over the country, and even in the segregated South, drag racing has long been an oasis of racial tolerance.
My long-term documentary project, Democracy of Speed, explores the racial and gender cultures of drag racing. While the project concentrates on Eastside Dragway, in Waynesboro, Virginia, I've spent quite a bit of time at Sumerduck Dragway, the drag strip in the photo above, which is still very much in operation.
Oddly enough, It was a little bit of bigotry -- my own bigotry -- that got me into the project.
When I first went to a drag race, seven or eight years ago, I had a pretty good idea what I was going to find -- great photo ops and a bunch of dumb rednecks. I was right about the photos, but stunningly wrong about the people.
First of all, they're weren't dumb. It takes a fair amount of smarts to be a successful racer.
Second, the racers weren't rednecks, some of them were women, and a many of them were black. That's what drew me to the project -- easy, unselfconscious gender and racial integration in a place where I (and probably most people) least expected it, in a working-class Southern setting.
Over the years, I've made a lot of photos, conducted scores of interviews, and spent many hours pouring over old books, magazines, and newspapers trying to make sense of what I saw on that first day at the track. I've discovered that drag racing is unique among motor sports in the way that, from the very beginning, it has accepted and often welcomed women racers and racers of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. You can read more of what I have to say on the subject, here, and see a gallery of my photos, here.
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Grey Villet's photo of the Lovings at Sumerduck Dragway eventually accompanied "The Crime of Being Married: A Virginia Couple Fights to Overturn an Old Law Against Miscegenation", which appeared in Life's 18 March 1966 edition. You can read it and see more of his photos, here. (At least you can if you're using Internet Explorer. It doesn't seem to be displaying on Firefox, at the moment.)
It's a small irony that Villet, a white man, was born and raised in South Africa, a nation that modeled its laws against racially mixed marriages on America's. Villet himself seems to have been a racial liberal. He left South Africa for New York City, when he was in his twenties. He soon found himself on the staff of Life, for which he sympathetically covered Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the crisis surrounding the integration of the schools, in Little Rock, Arkansas, among other major events. He even shot a story on drag racing, in Moline, Illinois, which was never published.
You can see more of Villet's photography at the Monroe Gallery's website and browse through several thousand of his photos at Getty Images.
