Ghosts of Segregation seeks to spark an honest conversation about the legacy of racial injustice in America today. All human landscape has cultural meaning. Because we rarely consider our constructions as evidence of our priorities, beliefs and desires, the testimony our landscape tells is perhaps more honest than anything we might intentionally present. Our built environment is society's autobiography writ large.
Ghosts of Segregation photographically explores the vestiges of America's racism evident in the built environment, hidden in plain sight: Schools for "colored" children, theatre entrances and restrooms for "colored people," lynching sites, juke joints, jails, hotels and bus stations. Past is prologue.
We often take our daily environments for granted, but within even the most mundane edifice may lurk an important bit of history. That stairway apparently to nowhere once went somewhere. The curious palimpsest of bricks covers something. What purpose did they serve?
Segregation is as much current events as it is history. These ghosts haunt us because they are very much alive.
To learn more about the history behind these pictures, view or download the 55-page Ghosts of Segregation PDF
Rich Frishman