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The Birmingham Project

The Birmingham Project

Last updated on: January 20, 2015 at 1:01 am by Peggy Rosenthal

The Birmingham Project 2015-01-16T15:46:52-07:00 Peggy Rosenthal

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I was looking into the eyes of a black girl around thirteen years old. She looked back, her eyes pensive and a bit sullen. Then I shifted my gaze to the black woman seated as if next to her, about fifty years her senior. The woman’s eyes were those of a survivor, the eyes of someone who has lived through and somehow managed to transcend unimaginable pain.

What this woman from Birmingham, Alabama had survived was the racial violence that overtook her city in the early 1960s. The federal government had ordered Alabama’s public schools to de-segregate; Governor George Wallace was determined to resist.

Though I was a student safely snuggled up in my northeast college, I remember being chilled by Wallace’s hate-filled racist rhetoric, remember hearing how the Ku Klux Klan had vowed to bomb those “nigger troublemakers” to kingdom come.

Negro activists were indeed stirring up “trouble” in Birmingham. Martin Luther King came to town to join the nonviolent campaign against racial segregation. The campaigners would meet at black churches, often the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Negro homes and churches were regularly bombed by white supremacists, though national news wasn’t much covering these bombings.

Not until this one: On the morning of September 15, 1963, during Sunday school classes, a bomb ripped through the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four girls, ages eleven to fourteen. The news shocked the nation awake to the horrors that Negro Americans in the South had been experiencing for years.

The federal government responded with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Nearly fifty years later, renowned photographer Dawoud Bey responded with The Birmingham Project, an extraordinary exhibit of paired life-size photo-portraits. Commissioned by the Birmingham Museum of Art, the exhibit opened there on the fiftieth anniversary of the church bombing. It’s on exhibit now in my city’s (Rochester, New York) photography museum, and I went as my way of commemorating Martin Luther King Day this year.

And so it was that I found myself gazing into the eyes of that young black girl and the woman who could have been her grandmother. And then into the eyes of another paired couple: one young, one old; and then another pair and another, in diptychs along the walls.

To bring these people to us, Bey went to Birmingham and photographed seventy-five black residents: about half of them the age of the children killed in the church bombing, the others the age those children would now be if they’d survived.

Only after all the photographing was complete did Bey begin pairing the portraits, looking for relationships of similarity or complementarity. Through these diptychs of real people alive today, Bey hoped to redeem from abstractness the loss of those four girls—and of two young boys murdered by whites in the ongoing violence of that terrible day.

As I stood before each pair, I felt them communicating to each other across the decades—and to me across the American racial divide. Yet the communications are open-ended. They say: here we are, in this dignity that the photographer has granted us. And they ask: Do you grant me this dignity? How will your life affect mine, and mine yours?

One very small way that their lives—at least, the lives of their fellow black southerners—affected mine was in moving me, a few years ago, to make a sort of civil rights pilgrimage through the South.

Birmingham was of course a central stop. Across the street from the restored Sixteenth Street Baptist Church now sits the Birmingham Civil Rights Museum. Showing complete respect for its subjects throughout, the museum includes key documents, photos of major incidents, and even a mock-up of Martin Luther King’s cell from which he wrote his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”

I had mixed feelings about the museum’s respectful tribute to the civil rights movement. Partly I was grateful that this movement is finally an accepted and tourist-worthy part of Alabama history. But partly I was skeptical about the tourist-worthiness: First this state destroys the lives of its black citizens; then it turns this abominable history into a tourist attraction? (Well, all human motives are mixed, so I can’t let myself get too self-righteous here.)

I don’t know why, then, I was unequivocally moved by the public park across the street from the Museum and Church. But I was. Maybe because this very spot saw the violent police repressions of the nonviolent civil rights marches of the 1960s.

The park has been turned into a sculpture garden that depicts those events: life-size sculptures of police fire-hosing demonstrators; a black boy and girl holding hands, saying “I ain’t afraid”; a young black man being jabbed by a policeman, whose huge dog leaps forward, jaws open for attack.

In contrast to the violence intentionally evoked at the park, Dawoud Bey’s photographs convey a deep stillness. He’d told each photographic subject: “Just make yourself comfortable; be your natural self.” Each resulting portrait conveys a striking individuality, silently proclaiming: Here I am, this is my own particular life; I’m living it before your eyes.

It’s the profound individuality of each face, each person, that I’m gazing into. What greater dignity can we grant to another than by recognizing his or her uniqueness? Uniqueness yes, yet also, especially among the elders, a solidarity in suffering.

Bey draws us as viewers into the spiritual space of this solidarity. And into another dimension of what dignity might mean: a calm refusal to relinquish the human in oneself and others despite the brutalities of decades, even centuries—along with resolute hopefulness in a better future for the vulnerable young.

The young faces, for all their inexperience, are poignant too, but in a different way. They look into a future that has already been shaped for them by a violent history over which they had no control, but whose direction from now on lies—perhaps— within them to change.

Peggy Rosenthal is director of Poetry Retreats and writes widely on poetry as a spiritual resource. Her books include Praying through Poetry: Hope for Violent Times (Franciscan Media), and The Poets’ Jesus (Oxford). See Amazon for full list. She also teaches an online course, “Poetry as a Spiritual Practice,” throughImage’s Glen Online program*.*

solidarity in suffering

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