John Edwin Mason: Documentary, Motorsports, Photo History

Grey Villet, Interracial Love, and Drag Racing, 1965

Update:  30 January 2012.  I've just seen a small but superb exhibition of Grey Villet's photos at the International Center of Photography, in New York.  It includes the photo directly below and about 20 others that he made while working on the story about interracial love for Life magazine.  I learned a few fascinating new things about Villet and the family he photographed and have added some comments and two photos to the end of this post.

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

Update:  30 January 2012.  At the International Center of Photography's exhibition of the photos that Grey Villet made while working on the Loving's story, I learned that drag racing was even more important to Richard Loving that I originally thought.  The drag strip wasn't just a refuge, a place where the Lovings could temporarily escape the pressures of being an interracial couple.  Richard was, in fact, a successful drag racer.  During the season that Grey Villet captured on film, he won over 38 trophies and over $5,000 in prize money, a significant sum in 1965.  Loving co-owned his race car with two African-American friends, Raymond Green and Percy Fortune, reinforcing my sense that drag racing was an unexpected, but very real, zone of interracial tolerance.

Here's another photo of the Lovings at Sumerduck Dragway.

 

Grey Villet:  Richard and Mildred Loving sitting in open door of car celebrating Richard's winning race, Sumerduck Dragway, Sumerduck, Virginia, April 1965.

Another aspect of the story that became clear to me when I saw the photos at the exhibition is the contradictory role that social class played in the Loving's story.  Both Richard and Mildred had grown up and remained working class.  So had and were their friends.  On the other hand, the local judge who sentenced them to prison, Leon M. Bazile, was a very wealthy man.  Here's Villet's scathing take on the issue.

 

Grey Villet:  [Leon M. Bazile in his living room.]

Finally, it's worth noting that the prints on display at the exhibition are vintage prints from Villet's estate.  He seems to have made them himself.  At the very least, they were made under his supervision.  As you can see here, they're sepia-toned.  It's an interesting choice.  Perhaps Villet knew that he was working on a story of historical significance and chose sepia as a way to give the photos a timeless quality.  My friend John Benette, the curator and writer, thinks that he used the sepia toning as a way of taking the photos out of ordinary time and space and of signaling a sense of romance.  In doing this, he would have defused, to an extent, the anxieties that most Americans felt at the time about interracial marriage.

Margaret Bourke-White, FDR, & the Casual Rituals of Race

In 1938, Margaret Bourke-White went to Warm Springs, Georgia, to shoot the president.  She was on an assignment from Life magazine to cover the Thanksgiving banquet that Franklin Delano Roosevelt [FDR] hosted each year for patients at the Warm Springs Foundation, a treatment center that he had founded for people stricken with polio.  (It's now the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute.)

 

Margaret Bourke-White:  Patients draw lots to sit at the President’s table at Thanksgiving dinner.  Seat of honor at President’s left was won by Robert Rosenbaum, 11.  Life, 5 December 1938.  [Photos copyright Time, Inc.  Click on any image to see a much larger version.]

Life's editors undoubtedly hoped that Bourke-White, one of the magazine's star photographers, would produce a feel-good story for the holiday season.  That’s precisely what she delivered.  The photographs in “At Warm Springs President Roosevelt Carves Up a Turkey Instead of a Map” [Life, 5 December 1938] showed a modern medical facility full of patients who demonstrated humor and resiliency in the face of a devastating disease.

But there was more to the photos than this.  Inadvertently, Bourke-White produced photographs that documented the casual rituals of racial subordination in stark, matter-of-fact detail.

 

Margaret Bourke-White:  The living room of the Little White House is pine-walled, decorated with ship models and pictures.  By the fireplace stand the President’s little round desk.  Below, at the other end of the room, Maid Lizzie and Cook Daisy at table.  Life, 5 December 1938.  [Note that neither woman is granted the courtesy of being identified by last name.]

Bourke-White certainly didn't intend her photos to be indictments of the racial hierarchies of the Jim Crow South, and Life’s editors and readers, who were overwhelmingly white and middle class, almost certainly wouldn't have seen them that way.  In 1938, few whites would have noticed anything remarkable about photos that depicted African-Americans as servants and whites as those being served.  For most Americans, the racial ideology of the day -- one that assumed black inferiority and white superiority -- was invisible.  But, as the photos demonstrate, it was hidden in plain sight.

 

Margaret Bourke White:  Warm Springs grows festive when the President come to visit.  There are parties every day.  Above are guests at a post-Thanksgiving dinner party in the home of Will Moore (right), well-to-do patient from New York.  Seat on couch is Cissie Lord, the Foundation belle, who was stricken four years ago, made her Manhattan debut in wheelchair.  Life, 5 December 1938. 

Routine inter-racial interactions, such as those that Bourke-White captured, both reflected and reinforced the notion that there was a natural hierarchy of race.  Even whites who didn't ordinarily interact with blacks could take their cue from mass media, such as Life, which was well on its way to becoming one of the most popular magazines in American history.  As the historian Wendy Kozol has shown, with its massive readership, Life played an important role in shaping white Americans ideas about blacks.  In Life and other forms of mass media -- newspapers, movies, radio -- representations of African-Americans typically showed them as servants, entertainers, athletes, and lay-abouts.  Given this media environment, the blacks in Bourke-White's photos would have seemed no more extraordinary than the blue skies or male presidents.

Surprisingly enough, when seen in the context of her time, Bourke-White stands out as a racial liberal.  You Have Seen Their Faces, the book about Southern poverty that she co-authored with the writer Erskine Caldwell, in 1937, makes it clear that she understood the structural elements of black oppression in the South -- job discrimination, disenfranchisement, the inequities of the justice system -- and that she could depict them visually.  There's a also no question that she could portray African-Americans with dignity when she wanted to.  (After World War Two, Life itself generally supported the civil rights movement, and it blazed a trail when it hired the photographer Gordon Parks, the first African-American to join the staff of a major magazine.)

 

Margaret Bourke-White:  Unpublished, uncaptioned photo from the Warm Springs series, 1938.  [It was and still is common for magazine photographers to make many more photos while on the assignment than could possibly be published.  The unpublished photos remain in Life's archive.]

The photos that Bourke-White made in Warm Springs, however, showed little awareness of the ways in which the small rituals of race buttressed the structural elements of racial subordination.  Her camera captured things that she herself didn't see.  Nothing in her photos questioned the dominant racial ideology of the day.

At the same time, nothing about them suggests that she was interested in exploring how felt to be at the bottom of the racial totem pole.  Her blacks seem content and, in one case, delighted, in their subordination; her whites seem to take it all for granted. (Ironically, Bourke-White built her career by defying prevailing gender ideologies.  One of the most famous photographers of her era, she had succeeded brilliantly in a male-dominated field.)

 

Margaret Bourke-White:  Unpublished, uncaptioned photo from the Warm Springs series, 1938.

Throughout this post, I've been careful to say that, like the photographer herself, "most" Americans wouldn't have been sensitive to the routines of racial subordination that were embedded in these photos.  African-Americans, on the other hand, would certainly have noticed the presence of other blacks in the photos, and they would have responded in a variety of ways.

By 1938, African-American had a long and distinguished history of challenging the American way of race.  At issue in some protests -- such as those that surrounded the release of the film Birth of a Nation, in 1915 -- was the representation of blacks in popular media.  It's likely that Bourke-White's photos provoked a certain amount of resentment  -- aimed not at her, but at the racist social structure -- along with sighs of resignation, because structures can sometimes seem permanent.

 

Margaret Bourke-White:  Unpublished, uncaptioned photo from the Warm Springs series, 1938.  [This photo was made in a Pullman car, probably on the train that brought Roosevelt to Warm Springs (see photos below).]

On the other hand, there's no doubt that some black viewers took pride in knowing that members of their race were serving the nation's elite, including the President and First Lady.  Perverse as it may seem, a sense of pride can be attached to the servant's role, if those being served carry enough prestige.  The cooks, maids, waiters, and musicians in Bourke-White's published photos occupied this cultural territory.  So did the Pullman Porters in her unpublished photos.  In fact, they were prime examples.

 

Margaret Bourke-White:  Unpublished, uncaptioned photo from the Warm Springs series, 1938.  [This photo was made in Roosevelt's private Pullman car during his trip to Warm Springs.]

During the early to mid-twentieth century, Pullman Porters occupied a special place within the African-American community.  Although working conditions on the luxurious Pullman sleeping cars was grueling -- most men worked 100 hours a week -- and involved waiting hand and foot on passengers who could afford the high fares, the job paid better than most occupations that were open to blacks.  Porters took pride in their professionalism and were respected members of the community.  It's easy to imagine that, if Life had published these photos of Harry Lucas at work in FDR's private car, many African-Americans would have viewed them with pleasure.

On the other hand, the job was degrading.  Porters worked for tips and were always at the beck and call of the (solely white) passengers, who insisted on calling them all "George," a reference to George Pullman, who founded the company.  The conditions that they faced led them to form the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, in 1925, the first black union to receive formal recognition from the American Federation of Labor.

 

Margaret Bourke-White:  Unpublished but captioned photo from the Warm Springs series.  Portrait of Pullman porter Harry Lucas working in Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt's private car on his trip to Warm Springs.  Warm Springs, Georgia, November 1938.

So the question of how blacks responded to the rituals of race and how they would have read the Bourke-White's photos which capture them has a number of different answers.  But Bourke-White wasn't interested in unpacking its mysteries.  She wasn't that kind of photographer.

Connecting with her subjects and seeing the world through their eyes was never something she cared much about.  She was more interested in imposing her understanding of the world on her subjects and her readers, as she comes close to admitting in her autobiography, Portrait of Myself.  She sought, she wrote, the “typical,” not the particular:  “I am always looking for some typical person or face that will tie the picture essay together in a human way.”

Is it possible that I'm underestimating Bourke-White?  Sure.  If I am, perhaps the photo above provides a clue.  It's the only photo in the series in which the African-American subject is identified by both first and last names.  Did Bourke-White sense the dignity with which Pullman Porters carried themselves?  Did she know about their honored place within the black community?  It's certainly possible.

Still, it seems to me that if we want insight how African-Americans reacted to the casual rituals of race, we'll have to look elsewhere.

* * *

I'll let the great African-American poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar have the last word:

We Wear the Mask

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,-
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
       We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
       We wear the mask!

--Paul Lawrence Dunbar, 1872-1906