In 2002 the American photographer Gillian Laub was sent on assignment by Spin magazine to Mount Vernon, Georgia, to document the lives of teenagers in the American South. Nestled among fields of Vidalia onions, it symbolizes the archetype of pastoral, small-town American life. Laub met and photographed many of the residents of Montgomery County, encountering a warm and polite community that was proud of its history and protective of its neighbors.
Yet this idyllic town had long been hostage to a dark past, manifesting the racial tensions that scar much of America. More than half a century after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 legally prohibited segregation, adolescent rites of passage in this rural countryside, including high school homecomings and proms, were still racially segregated.
Laub photographed the people of Montgomery County for more than a decade, returning to the town even in the face of growing—and eventually violent—resistance on the part of some community members. In 2009, a few months after President Barack Obama’s first inauguration, Laub’s photographs of segregated proms were published in The New York Times Magazine, bringing national attention to the town. The power of the photographic image served as a catalyst and, the following year, the proms were finally integrated. For a moment, progress seemed inevitable.
For a moment, progress seemed inevitable
Then, in early 2011, tragedy struck the town. Justin Patterson, an unarmed 22-year-old African-American man, was shot and killed by a 62-year-old white man, Norman Neesmith. Laub, who had photographed and befriended Patterson’s friends and family during her many trips to Montgomery County, was disturbed by the entrenched racism and discrimination dividing the community. She recognized that a larger story needed to be told.
Her project, which began as an exploration of segregated high school rituals, evolved into an urgent mandate to confront national realities. Relying on her incisive and empathic eye as a photographer, she explored the history of Montgomery County, recording the stories and lives of its youth.
What emerged over the next decade—during which time the country witnessed the rise of citizen journalism and a conflagration of racially motivated violence, re-elected its first African-American president, and experienced the formation of the Black Lives Matter movement—was a complex story about adolescence, race, the legacy of slavery and the deep roots of segregation in the American South.
America has not dealt with the dark stain of slavery
“America has not sufficiently dealt with the dark stain of oppression and slavery that marks our history,” Laub says, “and it is one of the reasons that segregated proms and racially charged killings have continued in the 21st century.” While truth and reconciliation commissions have been established throughout the world to grapple with painful histories and to address ethnic and racial atrocities, Laub points out that it was only this year that a substantial memorial was opened to reckon with the lynching of thousands of black Americans, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.
Nonetheless, she found among the students of Montgomery County “an American spirit of challenging inequality”, she says. “They made sacrifices in speaking out and acting courageously. There was a desire to agitate for a better life, for personal freedom. This inextinguishable light is what gave me hope.”
Then and Now: the People Behind the Pictures
Image Gallery
Southern Rites is a specific story about young people in the 21st century from the American South, but it poses a universal question about human experience: can a new generation liberate itself from a harrowing and traumatic past to create a different future? In the exhibition “Southern Rites” (which is also the title of a HBO documentary with Laub), the artist deploys her skills as a penetrating storyteller and visual activist to examine the realities of racism, raising questions that are both agonizing and essential to understanding our American consciousness. Through her images, and the voices of her subjects, we encounter that which we do not want to witness, but what is vital for us to see.
A generation of African-American young adults has come of age during Barack Obama’s historic presidency, yet the scars of slavery and the legacy of segregation and race-based violence continue to limit the opportunities and hopes of many African-American youth in the American South and throughout this country. As one of Montgomery County’s young, African-American residents wryly observed in response to Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency, which has brought deeply entrenched racist ideologies to the surface: “Now the rest of the country is finally seeing what we’ve been dealing with forever.”
Now the rest of the country is finally seeing what we’ve been dealing with forever
As American political scientist Naomi Murakawa observed, “If the problem of the 20th century was, in W.E.B. Du Bois’s famous words, ‘the problem of the color line’, then the problem of the 21st century is the problem of colorblindness, the refusal to acknowledge the causes and consequences of enduring racial stratification.”
In contemplating profound moral questions through a specific narrative lens, Laub’s Southern Rites asks us to explore the complexity and pain of inequalities that are still with us today, while demonstrating the power of photography to affect social change. In the image gallery, you can read quotes from the photograph’s subjects which reflect the passing of time with all that it brings: hope, despair, death and new life. Scroll down or click the image gallery above for more.
The images in this article will appear in the traveling exhibition, “Southern Rites“, curated by Maya Benton, which the International Center of Photography will tour nationally beginning in fall 2018.