History is Now

Pictures Lie

This weekend, Thelma Mothershed Wair, one of the nine Black students who we remember from the Little Rock Nine passed away. For those who are unfamiliar, which I doubt you are if you read this, but the Little Rock Nine were the group of students who integrated Central High School in Little Rock Arkansas in 1957. Because racism is so ridiculous, the night before the KIDS were supposed to go to school, the governor, Orval Faubus, ordered the National Guard to block them from going to school. Yes, you read that right. The grown governor sent grown soldiers to JOIN the mobs of also grown people to block some kids from going to school.

It took 16 days of this before the courts forced them to be able to go to school— escorted by other soldiers from the 101st Airborne (where most of my family served out of Ft.Campbell, KY) to escort them in. But people—it took a whole Presidential Executive Order. An Executive Order for some kids to go to school. Amerikkka.

For context, remember that whole Emancipation Proclamation thing? To free slaves in civil war—well umm that was an Executive Order. So think about that when thinking about what was needed to allow some kids to go to class.

The picture says it all. As these Black kids did nothing wrong except having the audacity to seek an education, racist white people attack and yell at them. I guess not much has changed— the racism and attacks have moved largely online and the segregation is done via legacy racism and schemes like vouchers—but I digress.

This also made me think of something else. That picture, the other pictures from that time made it seem like, and this may sound crass at first, that these people were already gone? Not in the sense that they should be, but the imagery and the way media works, they trick us into thinking these things were so long ago. Look at that picture. Besides the fact that she looks cool af, while the OG Karens look on, the pictures look like a long gone era.

That is something else I have wanted to take a second and say—about that though.

Looking at images from the civil rights era, a lot of them are what, black and white. No pun intended, these pictures get a distinct vintage look to them. But what if I told you, that is by design. A lot of the pictures we see, they HAD COLOR photos, but that doesn’t fit into the narrative that this racism stuff was so long ago.

And before someone comes at me, I know this has been looked into and some outlets have concluded that is not entirely the case, there also are outlets that confirm it. I also know newspapers didn’t like to do color photos until later with 12% using color in the 70s.

That being said, here are some examples:

Aside from the fits, again nice, those pictures could be last month. I mean— the signs are asking to stop police brutality, voting rights, housing access. These literally could have been today. But the black and white images we see create a safe distance from the past. A mental head pat that says—we aren’t so bad now, that was forever ago and we moved on.

But it isn’t that long ago. Many people are still alive today who were blasted by hoses and attacked by dogs.

I personally have been chased by the KKK in a pickup truck with shotguns. The history they like to act like was forever ago is RIGHT NOW.

There are living survivors of the Tulsa race massacre. And not only did they survive the racist attacks on Black Wall Street— they are surviving an assault on their memories with repeated denials of the government to do something for their unjust and racist harm.

But as of today, they are still losing and it was not that long ago.

Think about this weird fact— the last spouse of a civil war soldier died in 2020. Now think about that again, and tell me how far away all this stuff was.

So yeah, as I think about the point we are in the country with a the possibility of a Black woman as president, I also think about the fact that we pretend our darkest days are behind us and hide behind grainy black and white pictures.

In this moment, we are witnessing a large backslide to where we were before the civil rights era. We can pretend all we want with those pictures to act like we are so far removed but want to know a little secret, that history is now.

Don’t believe me? Go back to the pictures in this post— one of them was a recent white supremacist Trump rally, but in color it was harder to tell the difference.