Published on December 21, 2020
Originally written by Richard Frishman for the New York Times‘ series World Through a Lens.
The six faded letters are all that remain, and few people notice them. I would never have seen them if a friend hadn’t pointed them out to me while we walked through New Orleans’s French Quarter. I certainly wouldn’t have realized their significance.
On Chartres Street, above a beautifully arched doorway, is a curious and enigmatic inscription: “CHANGE.” Now part of the facade of the Omni Royal Orleans Hotel, the letters mark the onetime site of the St. Louis Hotel & Exchange, where, under the building’s famed rotunda, enslaved people were once sold.
All human landscapes are embedded with cultural meaning. And since we rarely consider our constructions as evidence of our priorities, beliefs and behaviors, the testimonies our landscapes offer are more honest than many of the things we intentionally present.
Our built environment, in other words, is a kind of societal autobiography, writ large.
Several years ago, I began to photographically document vestiges of racism, oppression and segregation in America’s built and natural environments — lingering traces that were hidden in plain sight behind a veil of banality.
Some of the sites I found were unmarked, overlooked and largely forgotten: bricked-over “Colored” entrances to movie theaters, or walls built inside restaurants to separate nonwhite customers. Other photographs capture the Black institutions that arose in response to racial segregation: a Negro league stadium in Michigan, a hotel for Black travelers in Mississippi. And a handful of the photographs depict the sites where Black people were attacked, killed or abducted — some marked and widely known, some not.
In 2018, I was perusing the website for the Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project [a collaboration between the UW Simpson Center for the Humanities, the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies, and the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest, and led by history professor James Gregory] which led me to a theater company site that mentioned the Moore Theatre’s segregated entrance. Another site, historylink.org, helped confirm the nature of the door and identify its precise location. Google Street View allowed me to get a sense of its relatively current state.
The very existence of the door shocked me. I had walked past it countless times over the 40 years I’ve lived in Seattle, never giving it a thought. It wasn’t until the summer of 2020 that the tragic nature of this obscure door resonated with the sobering reminder on the marquee.
Continue reading at the New York Times.
Originally written by Richard Frishman for the New York Times.