Across the Lines:
Elizabeth Abel studies racial perspectives in photography of the Jim Crow era

The distraction came along when Elizabeth Abel, UC Berkeley professor of English, was researching a book about women's writing across racial lines. As she read about the history of segregation in the American south, she came upon a photograph by Dorothea Lange. The picture showed a black couple sitting at a lunch counter in 1938. The placement of a board, dividing service between whites and blacks, cut them off at eye level.

Segregated waiting room, 1940

"I looked at it and said, 'That's really odd,'" Abel recalls. "It wasn't my sense of the usual conventions for showing segregation. I just wanted to know more, both how segregation operated as a system of signage and where documentarians put themselves when they wanted to capture the system."

Initially, Abel thought the answers would come easily, in the pages of an already written book about photographic representation of the Jim Crow era. But as she looked, she discovered that no such book existed. Neither the signs nor their visual documentation had been conceptualized as an American archive. Before long, her own emphasis shifted, and she began writing the missing book herself.

The Jim Crow laws, named after a black character from minstrel shows, were introduced at the end of the nineteenth century to prevent racial interaction. The laws, which varied from state to state, required separate schools, separate drinking fountains, separate lunch counters, and even separate ticket windows at the circus. They remained in place until the 1960's, enforced through ubiquitous signs.

These signs were the starting point for Abel's project. Perusing historical societies, university libraries and private collections in the American south, Abel collected a series of Jim Crow-era signs, such as a stark one from 1942 declaring, "No Dogs, No Negroes, No Mexicans." "A very amazing sequence there," Abel says wryly. "There's much that can be said about the semiotics."

Entering the colored section of a Mississippi movie house, 1939

According to Abel, most of the signs available today are not originals but replicas, produced largely for African Americans who want to preserve history. "But there's also a significant clientele of white racists who want to hang these in their rec rooms, on their bathroom doors, over their pools," Abel says. "So this sign reproduction is a very ambiguous enterprise because it's fueling two diametrically opposed sets of interests."

After researching the signs themselves, Abel began to amass Jim Crow-era photographs. She was surprised to find only a small number of photos, between 100 and 200, that documented the signage. The largest single body of these was taken by the Farm Security Administration, one of Franklin Roosevelt's projects during the 1930's. The FSA photographers were mostly northerners, sent to the south to record rural poverty. But many of the photographers, including Lange and Walker Evans, found themselves sidetracked by the unfamiliar phenomenon of segregation.

One photograph in Abel's collection shows a black man walking up the back steps of a movie theater. A sign reads, "Colored Admission, 10 cents." His long shadow falls behind him, across the poster of a white, smiling movie actor in a cowboy hat. "I like this one because it suggests that African Americans could cast their own shadows back across the icons of white masculinity," Abel says.

"Colored" sign posted on a tree, 1938

Another photograph shows a small black boy standing behind an outdoor drinking fountain. A sign reading "Colored" is posted beside him on a tree. "The sign is obviously meant to refer to the fountain, but there's a funny kind of displacement," says Abel. "It creates an ambiguity by opening a space between the label and its reference point. What exactly is 'colored' here: the tree, the fountain, or the child?"

For Abel, one of the most intriguing photographs is an advertisement for Dairy Cream. It shows a smiling blond boy standing in front of a building, holding an enormous vanilla ice cream cone. On a wall behind him, off to the side, is a small drinking fountain marked "Colored." "The question this raises for me is, does the photographer intentionally include that 'colored' sign or not?" Abel muses. "It's interesting to speculate on the different meanings it would have: as an intentional contrast that aggrandizes the whiteness and privilege, or as an inadvertent inclusion. Was the sign so normalized that it became invisible, that it cropped up in places where the photographer literally didn't see it?"

Abel hopes to formulate her research into a class at UC Berkeley. In the meantime, she has worked with the Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program (URAP), involving students in her project. "I like to get an art historian, an anthropologist, an ethnic studies major, several students from different departments," says Abel. "We meet together, and each one is given a research assignment. I also typically take out one of the photographs so we can have a discussion, seeing how one's disciplinary base structures what one thinks. The approaches are quite different."

Abel's work with students has also impacted her research directly. After looking at a photograph of a civil rights-era sit-in, a student managed to track down one unidentified white woman who was sitting among black student protesters. This made it possible to contact the woman for an interview. "I think that was quite thrilling for the students, to do living research and interact with real people," Abel says.

For her own part, Abel feels that her four years on this project will continue to influence her perception even after her book is finished next year. "The way I look at literature has definitely changed," Abel says. "I find myself noticing who is standing where, who is looking at whom from what vantage point. I am very cued into space now, much more than I used to be."