Arts & Culture

A Photographer’s View of the South

“Everybody says in the South, you can stand on the soil and feel things,” says the photographer William Abranowicz, “because America’s memory is in the soil.” Before he began photographing historic Southern places for his new book, This Far and No Further, Abranowicz studied archival images from the famed photographer Walker Evans, and then was stirred by the similarities between many of those midcentury pictures and what he saw through his own lens. Here, as a preview of the book, which catalogs sites that were important during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, Abranowicz shares a selection of images he captured throughout the South.

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Main Street, Clarksdale, Mississippi, 2018

Photo: William Abranowicz

Clayborn Temple, Memphis, Tennessee, 2018

While listening to young musicians practicing with the Stax Music Academy at the Clayborn Temple in Memphis, Abranowicz shot this image and then began chatting with a woman in the audience. “Her grandson was in the band, and she told me that when she was twelve years old, she had been in this same temple during the sanitation workers’ strike,” Abranowicz says of the 1968 event when protesters carried signs that read, I AM A MAN. “She remembered Martin Luther King Jr. coming up to her and asking if she was all right. There was a joy in talking to her, and there was a joy in listening to these kids.” 

Photo: William Abranowicz

Felix Benjamin Duncan Gaines Mural, Old Depot Museum, Selma, Alabama, 2017

“In 1937, Felix Benjamin Duncan Gaines, a Black American painter, completed his monumental mural in the community center in Selma, Alabama,” Abranowicz writes. “The center had been established with funds from the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal agency that enlisted millions of job seekers to complete public works projects. In 1992, the murals were moved to Selma’s Old Depot Museum.”

Photo: William Abranowicz

Johns Island, South Carolina, 2018

“Esau Jenkins was born in 1910 on Johns Island, South Carolina, where he lived until his death in 1972,” Abranowicz writes. “In the 1940s, Jenkins and his wife Janie purchased a number of school buses to transport students and workers to Charleston for education and employment. During those bus rides, the couple would teach adult passengers how to pass literacy exams so they could register to vote. Wanting to educate more Black South Carolinians in the basics of civic participation, Jenkins founded the Progressive Club in 1948.”

Photo: William Abranowicz

Ruins of the Progressive Club, Johns Island, South Carolina, 2018

“The Progressive Club was, among other things, a pioneering citizenship school for Black American students,” Abranowicz writes. “In time, it came to include a community grocery, a gas station, day-care services, and classrooms, as well as providing a barter system in times of privation. The center’s education programs resulted in thousands of black citizens registering to vote.”

Photo: William Abranowicz

Farm on the Delta, Belzoni, Mississippi, 2018

Photo: William Abranowicz

Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, 2017

“The Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, was led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from 1954 to 1960,” Abranowicz writes. “During his tenure as the church’s pastor, King helped organize the Montgomery Bus Boycott.”

Photo: William Abranowicz

Main Street, Plaquemine, Louisiana, 2019

Photo: William Abranowicz

The Bradley Sisters, Greensboro, North Carolina, 2019

“Sit-ins to integrate eating establishments had been occurring on a small scale for several years when, in 1960, four black freshmen from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (NC A&T) walked from their campus in Greensboro, North Carolina, to the still segregated Woolworth’s five-and-dime store in the town center and sat down at the counter,” Abranowicz writes. “A continuing graduation tradition at NC A&T includes being photographed beneath the monument to these four students at the entrance to the campus.”

 

Photo: William Abranowicz

Selma, Alabama, 2017

Photo: William Abranowicz