This photo is both bitter and sweet. I appreciate the wry humor of the owner who is having a little fun -- signifyin' -- at the expense of someone who was once the most famous colored man in the world. (I'd bet my next paycheck that the owner was black.) But there's sadness here, too. The photo is document of a time when people like my parents -- both of whom were entering adulthood when the photo was made -- were denied the rights of citizenship, simply because of the color of their skin.
I stumbled across the photo, which appeared in the 27 June 1938 issue of Life magazine, while doing research on the photographer, Margaret Bourke-White. She and I see the image differently. Bourke-White was incensed.
Margaret Bourke-White: A Negro Rest Station at Elkridge, MD. [Caption as published in Life, 27 June 1938. Click on either image to see a larger version.]
Here's the original caption that she wrote for the photo (it was never published):
FOR COLORED sign atop round Coca-Cola sign tacked to a wooden Star of David in front of BOOKER TEA WASHINGTON store effecting a cruel display of racist condescension in the land of segregation. Location: Elkridge, MD, US. Date taken: 1938.
This is something of a mystery to me.
On the one hand (and whether or not Bourke-White read the signs correctly), the anger that she expressed in her caption is consistent with what I've learned about her over the last few months. From the time that she was in her early thirties, she was a left-leaning liberal, who sympathies were with the poor and the oppressed. A year before she made the photo, she and novelist Erskine Caldwell had published You Have Seen Their Faces, a fierce condemnation of the plight of sharecroppers in the South that payed close attention to the effects of racism. And in 1950, a lengthy Bourke-White photo essay about South Africa appeared in Life that was one of the first and most sophisticated exposes of apartheid to appear in the mainstream press. (The South African essay is something that I'm writing about at the moment.)
On the other hand, Bourke-White was sometimes seemed oblivious to the casual rituals of racial subordination, as these photos, also from 1938 demonstrate.
Life, 27 June 1938, pp. 4 and 5.
Not surprisingly, Life's agenda was very different from its photographer's. Bourke-White made the Booker Tea Washington photo while on an assignment to document the ugliness of American highways. (It appeared in the magazine cropped, but legible. See above.) Here's how Life reporter Paul Peters put it:
The U.S. auto highway system is the finest in the world, but its roadside is the most unsightly. No other country has permitted its scenic beauty to be marred by such endless mileage of hot-dog stands, signs, shacks, dumps and shoddy gas stations.
The pictures on these pages are a few of hundreds taken by Margaret Bourke-White on the 241-mile stretch between New York and Washington. This is U.S. Highway 1, for three centuries America's greatest artery of travel and trade.
...the "nation that lives on wheels" ...has the dubious honor of having created... the Supreme Honky-Tonk of All Time.
* * *
Bourke-White's life and work are something of a conundrum. That's how it should be. I'm going to have fun, over the coming weeks, trying to sort things out.
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