Consider the case of Frank Emi, who was imprisoned at the Heart Mountain Internment Camp in Wyoming. Emi, much like those interned at Topaz, spoke out against the questionnaire. He posted his questionnaire on the camp’s mess-hall doors with a handwritten message that read: “Under the present conditions and circumstances, I am unable to answer these questions.”19 This act of resistance was not isolated. Kiyoshi Okamoto, a California high school teacher and former soil tester in Hawaii, became a leader in Heart Mountain against unjust and racist policies. He gave a speech during a mass meeting and urged Nisei to stand up for their rights as U.S. citizens. He then taught those in attendance about their constitutional rights. Together, Okamoto, Emi, and others helped form the Fair Play Committee (FPC), which declared that internees would not cooperate with the draft unless their citizenship rights were honored first. More than four hundred Nisei attended the meetings; the group had two hundred dues-paying members, and three hundred FPC members refused to be drafted.
Camp administrators responded by going after the leadership. Emi and six other leaders of the FPC at Heart Mountain were arrested and “indicted for conspiracy to violate the Selective Service Act and for counseling others to resist the draft.”20 In court, Emi continued to speak out:
Miné Okubo, (map) Trek, Vol. 1, No. 2 February 1943, Central Utah Relocation Center, Project Reports Division, Historical Section, Special Collections and Archives, Topaz Internment Camp Documents, 1942-1943 (MSS COLL 170) (Utah State University Merrill-Cazier Library, courtesy of Miné Okubo Estate)
We, the members and other leaders of the FPC are not afraid to go to war—we are not afraid to risk our lives for our country. . . . We would gladly sacrifice our lives to protect and uphold the principles and ideals of our country as set forth in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, for on its inviolability depends the freedom, liberty, justice, and protection of all people including Japanese-Americans and all other minority groups.”21
His courageous act of resistance led to him and six other FPC leaders being sentenced to four years at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Kansas. They were housed with the general population, considered criminals for refusing to fight for a government that had placed them in concentration camps without due process. After the war, an appeals court overturned their conviction and President Truman granted a presidential pardon on December 24, 1947, to all draft resisters, including the Nisei.
However, Okubo chastised similar individuals who organized at Tanforan and Topaz. Her text following the loyalty questions at Topaz is instructive. She notes “the ‘disloyal’ were finally weeded out for eventual segregation.”22 She adds in a later illustration, “The program of segregation was now instituted. One of its purposes was to protect loyal Japanese Americans from the continuing threats of pro-Japanese agitators.”23 And she comments on the “loyal” internees who were transferred from another camp to Topaz: “Twelve hundred loyal citizens and aliens were transferred from Tule Lake to Topaz. Their arrival once more brought excitement to our now relatively peaceful city.”24
Miné Okubo, “Evacuees Arrives from Tule Lake,” Citizen 13660 (courtesy of Miné Okubo Estate)
At the same time, she devoted only two pages to the murder of sixty-three-year-old James Wakasa, who was shot in the chest and killed when he walked too close to the barbed-wire fence that defined the perimeter of the camp. Instead, her drawings focuses on the women who made paper wreaths for his funeral—a passive response that documents the chain of events but offers up little critique when it was needed.
Visual Testimony
Okubo was rewarded for her decision not to agitate those who controlled her freedom. She, along with all the other internees who answered “yes” to the key questions on the loyalty tests were slowly transitioned out of the camps. Okubo herself was given the opportunity to leave Topaz in 1943, but she decided to stay until January 1944 to finish her sketches of camp life before moving to NYC for an illustration job. Fortune magazine had seen her illustrations in Trek and offered her the chance to illustrate their special issue on Japan. The publication wanted Okubo to shine a light on the internment experience, and the WRA was not only aware of her new opportunity but also approved of it. Each internee who left the camp had to provide the WRA with references (be it their new landlords, employers, or education programs), and all references were carefully screened. Greg Robinson argues that this process indicates that the WRA promoted Okubo’s work and viewed it as beneficial, for it aligned with their new objectives to reintegrate Japanese Americans back into society.25 Many Japanese Americans were dissuaded from returning to their homes on the West Coast, and were sent to the East Coast instead. Again, Okubo is remarkably subdued with regard to this gross injustice. In her introduction for the 1983 reprinting of Citizen 13660, she writes, “For the Nisei, evacuation had opened the doors of the world. After the war, they no longer had to return to the Little Tokyos of their parents. The evacuation and the war had proved their loyalty to the United States.”26
Miné Okubo, “Women Creating Paper Floral Wreaths for Funeral,” Citizen 13660 (courtesy of Miné Okubo Estate)
Okubo’s quote epitomizes the ironies and contradictions that surround her work. She both criticizes and compliments federal internment policy. Moreover, she both exposes and obscures this history. Her perspective on how the camps personally affected her is equally mixed. She states that it was positive from a creative standpoint. “I am not bitter. Evacuation had been a great experience for me because I love people and my interest is people. It gave me the chance to study human beings from cradle to grave, when they were all reduced to one status.”27 Yet, she also writes that the internment camps were a “tragic episode” and that “some form of reparation and an apology are due to all those who were evacuated and interned.”28
This stance is admirable, but her critique came late. Okubo’s drawings and writing were not outspoken against WRA policy in the 1940s. That said, it was dangerous to be outspoken, considering that Okubo was a prisoner and she had no way of knowing when or if she would be released. Thus understanding her text first and foremost as a prison memoir is important—that by simply detailing her experiences she shined a negative light on the policy of the federal government. Additionally, her text became more influential as the decades passed, for it introduced the chilling history of the internment camps to a new generation of readers, ones who knew little to nothing about the camps’ existence.
And despite the shortcomings of Okubo’s text that demonstrated little solidarity with other internees whose politics differed from hers, she nevertheless told her story and did so in a manner that was accessible and allowed readers to empathize with her situation. In doing so, she opened up a host of questions, including how one defines resistance. Certainly Okubo was not engaged in the “resistance” in the camps if we define resistance through an activist perspective of organizing and directly challenging power. But her book did expose the history of internment camps to a large audience. Her images and text acted as a call for never again—a stance that she echoed in a 1983 interview: “I am a creative, aware person . . . an observer and reporter. I am recording what happens, so others can see and so this may not happen to others.”29 Throughout her adult life, Okubo continued to tell the story of the internment camps through interviews, illustrations, and testimonies. In 1981, she testified before the United States Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Citizens at the New York City hearing. Okubo stressed the need for the public to be informed about the history of the camps and, to close her testimony, she presented the Commission with visual evidence—a copy of her book, Citizen 13660.
18
Come Let Us Build a New World Together
IN MID-JULY 1962, DANNY LYON had just finished his junior year at the University of Chicago, studying photography and history, when he decided to hitchhike south 390 miles from Chicago to Cairo, Illinois. A friend in Chicago had been arrested in Cairo while demonstrating against segregation, an
d Lyon wanted to see the emerging civil rights movement for himself. He brought with him a Nikon F camera, film, and the name of a contact person.
In Cairo, Lyon’s contact brought him to a community-organizing meeting, where he heard Charles Koen, a sixteen-year-old high school student and leader in the Cairo Nonviolent Freedom Committee, address a small crowd. He also heard John Lewis speak. Lewis was a student leader of the Nashville lunch-counter sit-in movement and the Freedom Rides and had joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in June, a month prior, as a field secretary. Following the speeches, Lewis and Koen led the group to the city’s only public swimming pool—one that was still segregated, despite a state mandate demanding otherwise. Lyon recalls:
There was no press . . . no film cameras, no police, and no reporters. I had my camera, and I ran along as this brave little group marched through the sunlit and mostly empty streets of a very small American town. With the exception of a few young black men, everyone else who was watching seemed to hate and deride the demonstrators, many of whom were children.1
When the group arrived at the pool, they stopped outside the building and prayed. Afterward, the group went into the middle of the street and sang. The peaceful demonstration was ruptured when a white man drove his pickup truck at the crowd. Everyone stepped aside, except for a thirteen-year-old African American girl, who stood her ground, refused to move, and was knocked down by the truck.
Lyon’s signature photograph of the day featured this thirteen-year-old girl kneeling down in prayer with Lewis to her left and Koen to her right. A year later, SNCC printed ten thousand copies of the image as a poster with text that read COME LET US BUILD A NEW WORLD TOGETHER. Posters sold for $1 and helped raise much-needed funds.2
SNCC poster, Come Let Us Build a New World Together, 1962, photograph by Danny Lyon (copyright Danny Lyon/Magnum Photos; image reproduction: Joseph A. Labadie Collection, University of Michigan)
SNCC chose Lyon’s image for good reason. It documented themselves (student activists) and their chosen tactics for the movement (nonviolent direct action.) The text of the poster was an invitation and recruitment pitch, pulling activists into the movement. For Lyon, the photograph signified day one of a two-year journey that would send him across the far expanses of the South, working as a white artist within a black-led movement to end segregation and racial discrimination.
SNCC was the most radical of the Southern civil rights organizations, one that began as a student group and evolved into a cadre of full-time organizers.3 SNCC focused on direct-action campaigns and embedded itself in rural communities of the Deep South and for months, if not years, engaged in long-term campaigns that sought to develop and support local leaders.4 This work was exceedingly dangerous, for it existed outside the gaze and the protection of the mass media that typically added a certain level of safety from violence as perpetrators sought to keep their most heinous acts out of sight. Thus, SNCC, by necessity and by its own ingenuity, had to create media to provide protection and document its work on the ground. Mary King, SNCC communications secretary, stated, “It is no accident that SNCC workers have learned that if our story is to be told, we will have to write it and photograph it and disseminate it ourselves.”5
When SNCC was first launched in 1960, three administrative departments were established at the Atlanta office: coordination, communications, and finance. SNCC director of communications Julian Bond and his staff worked around the clock, sending out press releases to media contacts across the country. They also edited the monthly SNCC newsletter The Student Voice, produced promotional materials, printed posters, and created other forms of ephemera. All of this work was dependent on field reports.
In 1962, Bond issued a twelve-point internal memo to SNCC workers in the field:
It is absolutely necessary that the Atlanta office know at all times what is happening in your direct area. When action starts, the Atlanta office must be informed regularly by telephone or air mail special delivery letter so that we can issue the proper information for the press. (Atlanta has the two largest dailies in the South; we have contacts with the New York Times, Newsweek, UPI, and AP, the two wire services; we have a press list of 350 newspapers, both national and international).6
Bond added:
Please delegate one or two people to take photographs of the action. If you have facilities to develop films immediately where you are, have the pictures developed and send the shots to us. If there are no facilities, send the roll(s) of film to us in manila envelopes air mail special delivery addressed personally to James Forman or Julian Bond, along with descriptions of what the photographs are about.7
The Atlanta office did the rest, disseminating the images to the nation and the world.
Danny Lyon’s introductory experience in Cairo had propelled him to head farther south in August—to the SNCC office in Atlanta. The only problem was that when he arrived, the office was empty. The entire staff was in Albany, Georgia, another 150 miles south. When he finally located SNCC workers in Albany, he met James Forman, executive secretary of SNCC, for the first time. Lyon recalls:
Forman treated me like he treated most newcomers. He put me to work. “You got a camera? Go inside the courthouse. Down at the back they have a big water cooler for whites and next to it a little bowl for Negroes. Go in there and take a picture of that.”8
Back in Atlanta a darkroom was set up in the closet of the SNCC office, and Lyon was given a credit card for air travel, allowing him to rush to hot spots across the South at a moment’s notice.
With Forman’s blessing, I had found a place in the civil rights movement that I would occupy for the next two years. James Forman would direct me, protect me, and at times fight for a place for me in the movement. He is directly responsible for my pictures existing at all.9
Forman understood the power that photographic images had on the public’s visual consciousness. He was one of a handful of civil-rights activists/leaders who carried a camera with him, a short list that included Malcolm X, Robert Zellner (SNCC), Wyatt Tee Walker (SCLC), and Andrew Young (SCLC).10 In late March 1963, one of his photographs appeared in the New York Times, exposing how local sheriffs had used police dogs to attack black demonstrators who were attempting to register to vote in Greenwood, Mississippi. Forman was arrested, but SNCC field secretary Charles McLaurin managed to wrestle his camera away from the police officer during the tussle. “Knowing that those photographs—later to be seen around the world—would get into the right hands,” reflects Forman, “was one of the biggest help to my morale in jail.”11
Lyon documented similar types of events in other locations, including Albany—actions with the camera in mind. When tense moments were not available, SNCC created them. “Albany was quiet when I was there, so two people went out and got arrested on my behalf. The picture of Eddie Brown, a former gang leader, being carried away by police with a look of beautiful serenity on his face was reproduced in college papers and SNCC fund-raising flyers.”12
Danny Lyon, Eddie Brown Calmly Being Carried off by the Albany Police, 1963 (from Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, copyright Danny Lyon/Magnum Photos)
Much of Lyon’s best work took place off the beaten path. In August 1963, Lyon traveled to southwest Georgia to investigate a report that thirty-two teenage African American girls had been locked up for weeks in the county stockade outside of Leesburg. The girls had been arrested for demonstrating in Americus in July and August and were being held without charges in abysmal conditions—a single room without beds, no working sanitation facilities, and one meal allotted per day. Lyon writes, “For all practical purposes the girls, many as young as thirteen . . . had been forgotten by the world, including SNCC’s Atlanta office, which had its hands full.”13
On route to Leesburg, Lyon met up with an activist from Americus, and the two devised a plan. Lyon would hide inside the car as they approached the jailhouse. His companion would go inside and distract the lone jailer while Lyon
snuck out of the car and walked behind the building to take pictures through the bars.
The plan worked. Lyon went undetected, and in a matter of days his photographs were delivered to a U.S. congressman, who promptly entered them in the Congressional Record. The uproar that followed resulted in the girls being released in early September. Lyon wrote:
Danny Lyon, Leesburg, Georgia Stockade, 1963 (from Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, copyright Danny Lyon/Magnum Photos)
Until that moment I don’t think I had really been accepted into SNCC. After all, SNCC people were activists. Most of them went to jail routinely. They did things. It was one of their finest qualities. All I did was make pictures. But in Americus, my pictures had actually accomplished something. They had gotten people out jail.14
Lyon was being too self-critical. His photographs and those of other SNCC photographers played a prominent role in the success of the organization. Besides, SNCC photographers were not simply documentarians, they were artists and fieldworkers, entrenched in the daily work of community organizing and movement-building. Photographers had become the eyes of the civil-rights movement.
Mississippi
“When you made a move on Mississippi, one of the things you had to do was come to grips with your own mortality . . . This is not going to be big demonstrations with lots of television cameras with people around watching . . . when we went on those highways in the middle of the night . . . you had to think that you would never live to see your home again.”
—Charles McDew, SNCC15
In the summer of 1960, SNCC organizer Bob Moses toured Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana to seek out and cultivate local leaders. In Cleveland, Mississippi, he met Amzie Moore, head of the Cleveland NAACP. Moore persuaded him that the greatest asset that SNCC could provide them was to help organize a voter registration campaign. Moses agreed, and by August 1961, SNCC opened its first voter registration school in McComb, right in the heart of Klan country.16 By fall 1962, Moses was in charge of six offices and twenty field secretaries.17 He described his philosophy as such:
A People's Art History of the United States: 250 Years of Activist Art and Artists Working in Social Justice Page 23
