Dawoud Bey
Fred Stewart II and Tyler Collins, 2012
2 inkjet prints mounted to dibond, 101.6 x 162.56 cm (40 x 64 in.)
Courtesy of the artist
THE BIRMINGHAM PROJECT
DAWOUD BEY
September 15, 1963. On this day in Birmingham, Alabama, the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church killed four young African American girls: Addie Mae Collins, age fourteen; Denise McNair, age eleven; Carole Robertson, age fourteen; and Cynthia Wesley, age fourteen. Several hours later, two young African American boys, Johnny Robinson, age sixteen; and Virgil Ware, age thirteen, were shot and killed in related violent incidents.
Dawoud Bey
Fred Stewart II and Tyler Collins, 2012
2 inkjet prints mounted to dibond, 101.6 x 162.56 cm (40 x 64 in.)
Courtesy of the artist
Dawoud Bey
Mary Parker and Caela Cowan, 2012
2 inkjet prints mounted to dibond, 101.6 x 162.56 cm (40 x 64 in.)
Courtesy of the artist
When I was eleven years old, I saw for the first time the published photograph of a wounded Sarah Collins. Sarah was also in the church, but unlike her older sister, Addie Mae, she survived. I trace the beginning of this work to seeing that picture in a 1964 book called The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality. The photograph showed Sarah, a vulnerable Black girl, badly wounded, her eyes covered in heavy bandages, lying in a hospital bed soon after the explosion. Everything changed for me at that moment, and it has taken all of these intervening years to craft a response to the ground-shifting personal drama of seeing that picture. I didn’t know it would take fifty years (including seven years of repeated trips to Birmingham) in order to come to terms with what that response might be and how I might give tangible and expressive shape to it, but that is indeed how long the project has been unfolding.
The Birmingham Project considers the past through the present. This is my memorial to those six young lives lost more than fifty years ago, and a tribute to the community of people who were in Birmingham at that traumatic moment and to those born there since that fateful day. Finally, this project bears witness to the resilience of members of Birmingham’s current African American community, who are both the subject of and the subjects in these photographs.
The portraits were made in Birmingham over five months in two locations: the original sanctuary of Bethel Baptist Church and the Birmingham Museum of Art. During the civil rights era Bethel Baptist Church was the heart of the Movement. Pastored by the activist minister Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, Bethel was the site of the formation of the Alabama Christian Freedom Movement for Human Rights, which later became the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, one of the primary organizations of the civil rights movement. My second location, the Birmingham Museum of Art, founded in 1951, was for many years a segregated public institution, allowing Black visitors only one day a week, on Negro Day. I wanted to use both the communal space of the Black church and the public galleries of a formerly segregationist museum as the social and historical context in which to make these photographs.
BEY