Photo: Declan Haun (American, 1937−1994) Picketing the Courthouse, Monroe, North Carolina, August 26, 1961 Gelatin silver print (photograph) Museum purchase, in memory of Alice R. and Sol B. Frank, and with funds provided by Patricia L. Raymond, M.D.
“Have you ever been hurt and the place tries to heal a bit, and you just pull the scar off of it over and over again,” Rosa Parks asked decades ago, reminding us that the fight for Civil Rights cuts through the flesh, down to the bone, and into the very marrow of the United States of America.
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Rosa Parks’s words are all too prescient this week, all too knowing of the agonies faced by citizens at the hands of the state, as the extrajudicial executions continue day after day after day. The horror of the killings is further compounded by their intimacy. Consider the murder of Philando Castile, livestreamed by his girlfriend Diamond Lavish Reynolds; in maintaining her composure and her calm in the face of a panicked officer of the law who killed without warning or provocation, Reynolds not only saved the life of her daughter and herself, but she risked everything to broadcast evidence of the crime to the world.
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Reynolds’s actions remind us that although black women are rarely given the credit they deserve by the media, the history books, or core curriculum—they have always been at the heart of the movement for truth and justice. In tribute, the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA, presents Women and the Civil Rights Movement, on view now through October 30, 2016.
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