We are pleased to introduce NCN readers to Jessica Ingram‘s “A Civil Rights Memorial,” a photographic exploration of the ways in which important moments in the struggle for civil rights in the American south are remembered—or perhaps more to the point, the ways in which such events risk being forgotten as they fade into the landscape of time or are otherwise awkwardly remembered as part of the local context in which they occurred. The above photograph is the contemporary, unmarked site of of the store in Money, Mississippi where in 1955 Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy from Chicago, was accused of whistling at a white woman, an event that led to him being beaten, shot, and dumped in the Tallahatchie River. To see the exhibit click here.
We first encountered Ingram’s work at the Visura Magazine Spotlight—a site designed to support emerging artists and students. It is a web resource that we strongly encourage NCN readers to visit.
Ingram’s images of eerily abandoned sites of civil rights history remind me of Texas’ erasure of African American contributions from its schoolbooks. As our history vanishes–physically and in texts–our youth have no knowledge of our progress to sustain their lives and empower themselves against the crushing hegemony of current American culture. Thus, they participate in their own oppression because they have no weapons of historical power to challenge it.
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