Racism’s Infrastructure
“Segregation Wall, Gonzales, Texas.” This partition was constructed in the early 20th century to keep people of different races apart, with Caucasians sitting in the front and others behind the wall. When the saloon was remodeled and re-opened in 2014, the wall was retained as a historical reminder. Photo by Richard Frishman.
America’s legacy of institutional racism, slavery, and segregation are the subject of a photography exhibit, “Ghosts of Segregation,” now showing at the LMU Laband Art Gallery. Rich Frishman’s photos of places that were sites of injustice, both infamous and unremarkable, give evidence of America’s “built environment” of racism in forms and structures as varied as segregated movie theaters, bus stations, churches, and even university entrances.
Accompanying the photo exhibit is “Ghosts of Segregation: American Racism, Hidden in Plain Sight,” a collaborative book that includes Frishman’s photos and a series of related essays by B. Brian Foster about the experiences of his family and their life in Mississippi.
Frishman is a photojournalist and Guggenheim Fellowship awardee whose work has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in feature photography. He lives and works in the Seattle area. B. Brian Foster is a writer, storyteller, and sociologist. He is a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and the author of “I Don’t Like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black,” which chronicles Black community life and blues tourism in Clarksdale, Mississippi.
Frishman and Foster sat for a Zoom interview about the exhibit and their book a few days before their Feb. 6 opening reception at the Laband Art Gallery. The exhibit runs until March 29, 2025. They were interviewed by Joseph Wakelee-Lynch, editor of LMU Magazine. This interview was edited for clarity and length.
JWL: Rich, let me start with you. What led you to start taking photographs of the sites that are part of this nation’s history of slavery, racism and segregation, especially since many of them are at first sight very unremarkable scenes?
RF: The fact that they are unremarkable makes them much more important to me, because they are easy to overlook and prone to be forgotten. And once something is forgotten it’s easy to deny it ever occurred. The beneficiaries of that denial are often the perpetrators of that offense, rather than the victims. So, I wanted to record as much evidence of our sordid history of racism as possible. In fact, many of the places that I’ve photographed have disappeared, by political intention and age. For example, Brian had directed me to a church in Oxford, Mississippi, where he formerly taught. It had odd doorways one story up from the ground with no apparent access to those doorways. It turned out that those were entrances to what once had been the slave gallery. The church itself burned totally shortly after I photographed it. But sometimes places are elevated in consciousness, rather than being destroyed. In Macon, Georgia, a transit center had the words “Colored Waiting Room” carved in granite over the entrance. Some people wanted to remove. Macon opted to retain that as a history lesson.
BF: I really appreciated the fact that many sites in the book are unremarkable. They reflect the significance of mundane moments lived and experienced in patterns of inequality. Regarding the examples that you just gave, what is more mundane than trying to get from one place to the next? What is more mundane than a Sunday service? Many sites evoke larger than life, explosive happenings — the subject of books and documentaries. Yet many of the sites also hold mundane histories that from my point of view are equally important. Even the Edmund Pettis Bridge has a mundane quality to it.
JWL: Brian, what drew you to this project, especially since your essays in the book that accompany the photography exhibit is intensely personal?
BF: When I came across the New York Times essay in which Rich talked about his work on “Ghosts” in late 2020, I was in the midst of a family archival project of photos, documents and materials that I had gotten from my grandmother. So, in a different way I, too, was thinking about history and the power of photographs or the potential of a photograph to capture living history. A picture of my grandmother and my great grandmother at a family reunion isn’t just a picture. There is an aliveness to it, and that aliveness lives in me and shapes my perspective and the work that I do. Writing from where I was is central to my essays in the book.
JWL: I was fascinated by your comment in the book, Brian, that by working over and over with the photos of your ancestors, photos that represented the memories for your grandmother — the events portrayed in the photographs — eventually became, in a way, memories of your own.
BF: In every house I’ve lived in, I surround myself with the material culture of my family. I’m looking at the photo of George Washington Carver High School that I mention in the book that features my grandmother. Beside that is a photo of my dad from probably the 1980s, on my wall is my grandmother’s high school diploma. The material culture of my family is everywhere around me. I look at those items as the fingerprints of my family — proof that we were here and did things. The point I’m making is that my immediate family was small, and yet just as I carry their DNA in my body, I also carry those memories in my imagination. Engaging with those materials is way to honor their legacies and their memories. I place a great deal of importance on photos and other items of material culture.
JWL: Brian, when you talk about the “aliveness” of your family’s material culture, you make me think that what’s done in the past doesn’t dissipate into the clouds as long as we don’t forget. What’s done in the past has an invisible, yet tangible force that shapes lives ever after, even if unseen.
BF: The world that we inhabit and what happened here before us — to me, if you don’t have an awareness of that, then your awareness is incomplete.
JWL: Rich, in the book about “Ghosts of Segregation,” you refer to our “built environment,” a term often used by engineers. As I look through the photos of buildings — the segregated bus stations and movie theaters for example — it seems to me that you’ve documented not just racism as an opinion or belief. Your photographs document the infrastructure of racism. People built things to make the system of racism work. Segregation is a system, and it has an infrastructure. Do you think of your photos in that way?
RF: I hadn’t thought of it in such stark terms, but you’re right. I’ve been thinking of Hannah Arendt’s observation that evil hides in banality. The banality of evil is a reality and it’s more problematic now than at any time in my lifetime. We’re starting to see backsliding in terms of our racial attitudes. The infrastructure of racism does exist.
BF: So, what is racism, other than a set of conditions, experiences, challenges, and expressions of violence that a certain population experienced? We’re talking about lynchings of Black Americans in the South in the late 19th century and 20th century, we’re talking about housing segregation and how it happened in every American city. So, first of all, something happened. Of course, attitudes matter. But racism is a way to talk about a set of things that happened to a people across time and place. Racism hasn’t happened in outer space, it happened in the world we live in, which means there are places associated with it. Racism by definition has a materiality to it.
JWL: I want to ask a question about one photo in particular: the dugout shelter near Nicodemus, Kansas. It’s not much more than a small cave dug into a low hillside and not easily seen. What did you think when you first came across it?
RF: It was haunting when I came across it. The shelter is a hundred yards off the road among the rocks at the edge of a farmer’s field. I had been trying to document sunset towns [white towns where Black people for their safety needed to leave by sundown]. The town that I was staying in, about 25 mi. east of Nicodemus, is still considered a sunset town. This dwelling, or rather this cave, was made of necessity by people who lived in Nicodemus and traveled back and forth and had no place to be safe other than this hole in a bunch of rocks. I associate those places with the people who were there, and I associate those places with their energy. I felt I could sense their presence — those people who have passed before me and resided briefly in that spot. The same is true of the crossroads where Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney were murdered. It was alive with an energy that I could not explain other than to describe it as a place of ghosts. I’m biased toward a scientific approach to life, but somehow I sense that the spirits of those people still inhabit these places.
JWL: Brian, many of the photos in the book that accompanies the “Ghosts of Segregation” exhibit memorialize barbarity and acts of horror committed against your ancestors and your people: the barn where Emmet Till was killed; the hanging tree in Goliad, Texas; the sites where Treyvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Michael Brown were shot or strangled. It’s important to remember these killings, of course, but was there a personal a toll on you as you delved into these images in order to write your essays that appear in the book?
BF: What I wanted to do with the essays was wear my hat as a sociologist and a scholar and offer up some of the language that we use to refer to the experiences represented by the photos: post-memory, Black place-making, melancholic hope. Language that scholars have developed to add some texture to the experiences of the world we live in.
Images from “Ghosts of Segregation: American Racism, Hidden in Plain Sight,” by Richard Frishman and B. Brian Foster, Celadon Books, 2024. Photos by Richard Frishman.
Yet, as you say, I’m a black boy from Mississippi. I don’t have to go far into my lineage to find some sharecroppers. There also is some enslavement in my lineage. That’s part of who I am. A lot of the words you read in my essays were written by someone who was emotional in the writing. I wasn’t under the impression that things were peaceful and happy for my ancestors a hundred years ago. So, I wouldn’t say it took a toll, but it definitely was an emotional journey. I embraced it. That what it’s like to live for me as Black man, with the interests, history, and lineage that I have. The book wasn’t an easy and fun project to work on. Sometimes the work is serious, and I’m OK when it’s time to be serious.
JWL: Rich, your photos document the history of slavery and segregation across the country. But you grew up a white kid in the suburbs of Chicago. What was it in your upbringing that gave you the eyes to see what you saw?
RF: That’s a complicated question to answer. I was born in 1951, and I grew up during the advent of the modern civil rights movement. I was very influenced by photographs of Vietnam and the civil rights struggle. One of my first memories is coming upon my mom crying while reading about [the murder of] Emmet Till in one of Chicago’s morning newspapers. Emmet was also from Chicago. My parents’ compassion and emphasis on the importance of empathy throughout their lives was important. I could look at these places and experiences that were so far from my experience but recognize that these were human experiences. They didn’t happen in a different world, they happened in my world. I feel that I have a responsibility to stand up when I see something wrong happening to other people and try to be an advocate for them.
I’m not a religious person at all. I’m a very humanistic person. My relatives were all Jews, often persecuted in their native countries. I know my grandparents and great-grandparents fled violence. I think that affected both of my parents who experienced less anti-Semitism that their parents did, but they still experienced it. My experience of being othered is much more limited than somebody who is Black or Asian or Hispanic or who looks overtly different than the ruling power structure of this country. I can easily remember when we were denied service in a restaurant or hotel, both of which happened at different times in my childhood. But on occasion all of my family experienced antagonism and othering. That made it a lot more possible to empathize.
JWL: Brian, based on your essays in the book “Ghosts of Segregation,” I want to ask what’s your “writer’s genealogy,” your writer’s ancestors who have helped make you who you are?
BF: I appreciate that question. I don’t think anybody has ever asked me that. I do have to start with my grandmother. Rich, she is as far from you as possible on the other end of the religiosity spectrum. She was a fixture at our local church. Because I was a grandmother’s boy, that meant I was a fixture, too. She was very serious about the work of the church. There is an extensive tradition of oratory in the Black Baptist church. At her house she had a bookshelf with two sets of encyclopedias. Scattered among the encyclopedias were books about public speaking, perhaps a dozen books, a lot of which I have. So, I grew up participating in that tradition. I’ve always had a relationship with language, in particular flowery, colorful, and animated language, and language that’s meant to communicate a set of ideas to a public.
Also, when I was at the University of Mississippi my mentor was Zandria Robinson. She is now a professor of Black Studies at Georgetown University. She is a masterful writer and is respected and known across the country. She is working on a memoir, and when it comes out the world will know it’s out. She more than anyone has influenced my voice, and all the angles of my work trace back to her. I’m a big fan and student of Zora Neale Hurston, who wrote with a playfulness and a beauty. Her writing also is unrelenting, bluntly honest, and vulnerable. The focus of her writing is the everyday lives, the mundanity, of Black southerners. I’ll mention Kiese Laymon because of the bravery that it takes to be as honest as he is, not just about his life but with his perspective on the world that is very critical of power and power structures. The aesthetics of his writing resonates with me. And Richard Wright is someone I should mention.
JWL: What are your thoughts about this work in the time we now live in, when there appears to be a resurgence of groups promoting white supremacy and when DEI efforts are under attack, even from the Oval Office of the White House?
RF: Our efforts are even more important. Unfortunately, what we’re seeing now is people accepting that rollback as normal. And it’s not. Accepting hatred and violence is not normal, but it’s being more and more accepted. That’s part of the banality of evil that we need to stand in opposition to. Much of what I see as a rolling back is something that has never been resolved. It isn’t that racism and white supremacy is returning; it’s never left.
JWL: And you, Brian?
BF: This moment underlines the importance of documenting the bits and pieces of our history. A big part of this moment is to quiet, marginalize, erase certain stories in our country. Something that has risen to the top of my list in terms of how I live my life is responsibility. What are you responsible for? What are you responsible to? To me, privilege equals responsibility — the more of the former that you have, the more of the latter you have. One thing that I am working to do is call us to be responsible for something. I feel a deep and abiding responsibility to the work that I do, which I’ll do when it’s difficult, when I don’t want to do it, and even if there may be consequences. Last, ain’t nothing comin’ back that hasn’t already been here. This moment doesn’t represent anything that hasn’t already been here. The form is different, but the thing that we call racism — this system of policies, practices, and attitudes — it don’t live in the hills. There is a materiality to it. This isn’t the first time that people wanted to erase certain history or deny civil rights legislation. But in difficult times, be responsible to work that will address what’s happening, that will protect or help vulnerable populations. It’s so easy to panic or be afraid or talk on social media. Be responsible to a set of behaviors that will probably push you out of your comfort zone, that will be difficult to do consistently, and that you may face consequences for doing. Being responsible is probably the thing that I’m thinking about the most at this moment.