Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow (review)

Elizabeth Abel, who teaches in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley, has written a deeply engaging and important interdisciplinary historical study of the signs announcing and enforcing Jim Crow in United States history. She further details how activists and artists, especially photographers, represented and in many cases resisted segregation by exposing and subverting the signs of that system. Abel brings to bear the methodologies of social history, post-structuralism, feminist theory, and, above all and brilliantly, psychoanalysis to read what turns out to be a rather small set of extant photographic images of the ubiquitous public signage once used for enforcing separation of the races.

Describing representations of such signs as "provocatively, intermittently ... available for scrutiny," Abel charts how their status as "too offensive" made northern documentarians photograph them relatively rarely, while for the Southern photographers the signs were perhaps "too routine." She also explores tellingly the institutional constraints keeping the Farm Security Administration's photography initiatives from focusing too insistently and fully on segregationist signs. The book's eighty-five strikingly well-reproduced plates thus represent a fair share of the extant images that the author has unearthed.

What the images lack in numbers, they make up for in variety and often in complexity. Many are stark and assaultive pictures of signs meant to discipline and dehumanize. A huge "NO" occupies the left side of one such image, with the prohibited list arranged vertically on the right: "DOGS NEGROES MEXICANS"—in a sign now especially sought in reproduction by collectors. Another photograph shows a sign barring African American entry to a gas station with "NO NIGGER OR NEGRO ALLOWED INSIDE BUILDING." Such signs of Jim Crow take us typically into an ordered world cruelly structured around the hierarchy "White over Black." Often their lettering is itself done in those colors and they might be seen as simply and straightforwardly coercive.

Without minimizing their tragic force, Abel shows how the signs open onto a world of complications, contradictions and possibilities for resistance. Organizing materials by site, she demonstrates, in ways too intricate to be adequately recounted in a brief review, that the politics of the body, of space, of sexuality, and of gender took very different forms in segregating toilets, factories, restaurants, swimming pools, and movie theatres, for example, and that the brutalities of Jim Crow always worked in concert with other axes of social division. The signs of bathroom segregation at times effaced gender among African Americans by offering the options WHITE LADIES, WHITE MEN, and COLORED. Restaurants provoked especially sharp anxieties about what, from meals to citizenship, was shared if food was to be taken together. While Jim Crow is often and not wrongly seen as a state project, Abel's examples also underline that the signs under scrutiny often emerged from private claims, fears, and, especially during the Depression, desires to gain some African American business while preserving inequality and catering to "white trade."

In his wonderful 1931 poem "Strong Men," Sterling Brown invoked the image of a confident Black laughter meeting the many "prohibitions," including the sign "Reserved for whites only," that Jim Crow culture so often "shouted" across the color line. Abel prepares us to understand the importance of playfulness in the face of affront and exclusion, as so well-embodied in a photograph of James Baldwin outside an ice cream shop in New Orleans in 1963, determined to enjoy beauty and sweetness in the face of United States-style apartheid.

Indeed a central contention of Abel's book is that the proliferation of Jim Crow signs bespoke weakness, signaling the constant and growing tendency of grosser forms of segregation to threaten to give way before modern spatial arrangements, economic pressure, and African American genius. While her work is weightily informed by Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan on other scores, where resistance is concerned it is Michel de Certeau who most structures her approach to the...