Jim Crow in Jerusalem
Segregation in Palestine and Jim Crow America
“New Haven itself is a crime scene, the site of historic and continuing racism, segregation, and social inequality.” So wrote a scholar of the city at the turn of the twenty-first century. This observation links America’s segregated past to its nominally desegregated present: anyone who travels from the New Haven train station to Yale University confronts the fractious legacy of racial segregation. While segregation in the United States predates 1896, the racial divide approved by the “separate but equal” ruling of the US Supreme Court (Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896) strengthened Jim Crow laws across the American South, and indirectly reinforced de facto segregation in the northern states. The racial divide was famously emblematized in a groundbreaking documentary photograph series, Robert Frank’s The Americans (1959). The original photographs are currently held in New Haven, in the hallowed walls of Yale University.
Four years after Rosa Parks famously refused to cede her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white passenger, Frank captured the starkly physical engineering of public space that segregation had set in place on a New Orleans trolley. The camera angle is evenly split between black and white, and iron bars divide each passenger from their neighbours. The riders stare at the cameraman, their countenances…
