“The echoing horror of slavery cuts both ways” Imani Perry
On June 22, 2017, I flew from New York to Atlanta, grabbed a rental car and headed to a budget motel at the intersection of Highways 85 and 231 in Montgomery, Alabama. The next day, I headed twenty miles north on the 231, and 150 years back in time to a moment before America’s Civil War.
I was headed to the annual convention of the League of the South, a hate group that believes that slavery wasn’t so bad and the South should still try and secede. My goal was to document the women who lead and participate in hateful or racist groups on the far right, in an in-depth, long-term project.
Women provide the far right with a dangerous, and seldom examined, veneer of femininity, domesticity, and normalcy that helps accomplish their toxic agenda.
In Wetumpka, the one-road town where the convention was held, there were Klansmen, tattooed greasers, and burly men in fatigues. There were also well-dressed southern ladies, and men in button-downs and khakis. The mood was angry as speakers like David Duke and Hunter Wallace and others riled up the crowd.
I was forcefully ejected and escorted out by armed heavily armed men before 3 pm. Shaking, I drove to the nearest motel parking lot and hyperventilated until I puked.
On Sept 20, 1028, I retraced my steps from Brooklyn to Atlanta to Montgomery, to the same intersection of Highways 231 and 85, to a budget motel directly across from where I’d stayed a year earlier. This time, I took Highway 85, the Martin Luther King Expressway, ten miles east and toward a radically different vision of America’s future.
This time, I was covering Tabitha Isner for the New York Times Magazine. She was a long-shot progressive Democratic candidate for Congress, facing a ten-year Republican incumbent.
We spent the weekend on the campaign trail, in black churches and community centers. Everywhere we went, people were welcoming and excited to see a candidate who stood for change and wanted to represent them. We were given heaping plates of BBQ and macaroni and cheese. We were embraced, encouraged and acknowledged.
On Sunday morning of my weekend with Isner, I sat next to her in a pew at historic black church in a city rich with history and the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement, and lowered my head. I struggled to hold back the tears. Going to Montgomery the second time had been an opportunity for synchronicity – I saw the same exact geography through an entirely different perspective.
And I immediately knew what I wanted to do next.
With the support of an Aftermath Project grant, I will to retrace my steps and continue the project I began, but look to the other side. Just as war is only half the story, hate and the toxic voices of white supremacy are only half the story.
I’ve visited homes of white supremacists nationalists, conservative extremists, the alt right, militias, racists, haters, xenophobes, Klansmen and Nazis. The night before the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, I drove through the dark woods to a remote cottage without cellphone service and was “tested” by a group of hardcore neo-Nazis by being given a piece of pizza with bacon. I’ve been threatened and harassed. I I’ve seen the aftermath of America’s unhealed civil war wounds in women who are actively working against justice, equality and inclusion.
Now, I want to meet the women who are fighting back.
My goal as a documentary photographer is to understand the women who are at the forefront of the battle for my nation’s soul, so I must continue to add layers of understanding and imaging to the work I’ve already done.
Men may hold the highest officers and the most power, but from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Amanda the “Den Mother,” of the League of the South, it is women who do the work of change. They raise the next generation. They pave whichever path we as a nation may decide to take.
Over the course of the next year, I will meet the neighbors of the Klansmen and Nazis, groups like Be the Bridge, which brings black and white women together to have hard conversations. I will seek out baptism, PTA meetings, local rallies, food banks, demonstrations, and sites of healing and change.
I will photograph portraits, landscapes and objects, with accompanying writings based on extended interviews and deep encounters. Ultimately, I will organize this new work into diptychs with my old work, pairing opposite sides of this fissure together based on geography and ideology.
Both through my encounters with women and the resulting work, I hope to create conversations that grapple directly with our nation’s unhealed wounds.
We must face our past and examine our present. We must look people in the eye, and engage with those with whom we disagree. The only way out is through, and the only way to reconcile our nation is to understand both the forces that are tearing it apart and the people trying to put it back together.
NOTE: The images here include work from Gordon’s grant-year-in-process and also from her project about women of the far right (which her Aftermath Project grant builds on).
