Southern Crossings 14
The dominant feature in Birmingham’s Kelly Ingram Park is a sculpture of a young black man under attack by a white policeman and a police dog. The sculpture, “Footsoldier Tribute,” by artist James Drake, is located north of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, where a Ku Klux Klan bomb killed four African-American girls on September 15, 1963, as they were preparing for Sunday worship. The sculpture captures the terror of that event and of the following civil rights demonstrations, when peaceful marchers were assaulted with water cannons and canines by Bull Conner’s police force. I made this image with stark contradictions in view. Beneath the statue, seated on a bench, was an elderly black woman reading the Sunday paper. A Confederate flag flew from a nearby lamp post: the sign beneath explaining its presence in terms of free speech. Towering above were the gleaming skyscrapers of the city.
The showpiece of downtown Atlanta is a twenty acre public park built on the site of abandoned buildings and empty lots. The park was constructed to herald the rise of Atlanta in the esteem of the world as the city prepared to host the 1996 Summer Olympics. The commemorative landscape now provides a place for residents and visitors of diverse backgrounds to interact and relax. It is symbol of a city poised to move ahead, to leave behind a conflicted past and to occupy a prominent place in America, and to help define the future of the South. Many people speculate that, in the force of its own forward movement, Atlanta might serve to redefine what it means to be Southern and to catalyze a new “urban South.”
