You know where your place is?
You know your place.
You will be put in your place.
I was raised for a period down south as a young child in Wilson, North Carolina, and one of the cruelest things I ever heard was this, "you know your place boy" said by a white man to a black man.
This was the early 70's in the American South. “Colored” and “White” were still above the water fountains and if you were black, you picked up your food from the take out in the back.
50 years later, little has changed in the American South. They have taken down the signage, predatory lending hides behind Title Loan Companies and the tolerance of black lives abuse has set in. Housing is still for the most part on, "that side of town" or "on the other side of the tracks". The reality, low income housing sits behind industrial areas or in the shadow of meat processing plants, etc.
"There are good people on both sides.” Said, then president, Donald J. Trump on August 15th 2017, after a Unite The Right really, in a show of white nationalism turned deadly in Charlottesville, VA. The Proud Boys, Klu Klux Klan members and Neo-Nazis had assembled to protest the removal of a Confederate stature of General Robert E. Lee. James Fields Jr., a self-proclaimed new-Nazi plowed his car into the crowd of anti-protesters.Killing one person, her name was Heather Heyer and injuring dozens of others. “The presidents’s words only serve to offer cover for this heinous act.” said Sen.Ron Wyden of Oregon.
Civil Rights are still beaten down and the police, who often, still today, get away with murdering black people. The state of Georgia still lays clam to the larges Confederate Monument in the United States.
It was fifty four years ago on August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr., in his “I Have a Dream Speech” at the Lincoln Memorial, declared, “I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
The photographs in this series just scratch to service of the complacency and injustice of over one hundred years of oppression towards black people in America.