Tag: Civil Rights

Journalism still has the power to shape the world we live in and, perhaps more importantly, shape our understanding of this place. We must hope—or perhaps demand—that Atlanta’s media can lead us to a sort of narrative renaissance.

Gordon Parks: The South in Color isn’t the first time Anna Walker Skillman has exhibited the work of the iconic photographer at her gallery, Jackson Fine Art. When more than seventy color transparencies from the seminal trip at the base of his epochal 1956 Life magazine photo essay “The Restraints: Open and Hidden” were found at the bottom of an old storage bin in 2011, the Gordon Parks Foundation contacted Skillman and fellow gallery owner friend Arnika Dawkins for the first exhibition of them in 2012. Then in 2015, Skillman dovetailed the celebrated Gordon Parks: Segregation Story exhibition at the High Museum. Over a decade later, Skillman remains intimately involved with Parks’s epic work.

He isn’t famous, though arguably he should be. “J.T. was a personal assistant to Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy,” says Andrew Young, “and he was a friend of mine.” Johnson was a leader of the Ground Crew, a sort of special forces unit within Dr. Martin Luther King’s organization the SCLC—the Southern Christian Leadership Council—and he ran operations in the streets of nearly every city where the movement played out.

During a reflective conversation this week in the Trumpet Awards Foundation’s 10th floor conference room overlooking the downtown skyline, Clayton discussed key moments from her trailblazing life in Atlanta, from her unexpected friendship with Calvin Craig, the grand dragon of Georgia’s Ku Klux Klan at the height of the civil rights movement, to her groundbreaking WAGA-TV The Xernona Clayton Show and the powerful final gift she was able to give to her boss Dr. King in 1968 in the hours after his assassination.

Today, everybody in the South is living better than they’ve ever lived before, and we are much further along than we realize. The problems that still exist are hard to evaluate—in part because many people who identify as Christians seem to have gotten confused as to which side they’re on. Right now, we have a nation that seems to be completely divided.

In the early ’70s, my mom saw that private schools in New York City were giving Black students the opportunity to attend their prestigious institutions on scholarship. The Civil Rights Act made this possible, but the schools that carried out the goal of the Act were the true heroes.

For the majority of my upbringing, I never considered myself to be any form of activist, or thought I had those qualities of leadership. But once I began my career as a journalist, I started to see how the work of social justice activists is so much more than leading protests and speaking to crowds, the actions we commonly think of as activism.

The neighborhood I live in is called English Avenue. The northern end is a mile and a half from West Midtown, the southern end two and a half miles from the State Capitol and City Hall. Mercedes-Benz Stadium is in our backyard. Yet despite this proximity to Atlanta’s centers of privilege and power, the neighborhood has for too long been a background player in the story of this city.

One of the ways you can recognize that you have reached elder status is when you discover you can vividly recall events that took place 50 or 60 years ago. These are events that are now seen as having “historic importance,” even though in retrospect they may have seemed less so at the moment you were living through them in real time. That would certainly have been the case for me as a young person heading to Howard University from my home in Detroit.

Growing up, I felt the impact of both race and gender. I felt constrained at home because I was a girl and overprotected, and outside my community, I was constrained because schools, hospitals, buses, hotels, restaurants, churches, and even the YMCAs were all segregated.