Kurt Andersen: I started the show talking about how the merger of entertainment and presidential politics makes the Oval Office like theatre in the round with the performances beamed into every home and every pocket, but I want to spend the rest of the show on how we respond to all the political performance. In this scenario, we're not just in the audience eating Milk Duns, we've got our own role to play, the role of citizens.
During this presidential election cycle, more than any since 1968, race was both text and subtext with Trump awkwardly dealing with his glowing support from all kinds of white supremacists, including the Ku Klux Klan. Trump also warned darkly of nonexistent voter fraud in those neighborhoods, and of dangerous refugees, and walls at the border to keep out the rapist. Unlike the 1960s, we live now in an era where racial violence isn't just alleged but routinely documented by citizens on YouTube and Facebook.
Ieshia Evans: The video, the horrific video that I saw of the shooting, the murder of Alton Sterling.
Kurt Andersen: Another Black man, this time in Louisiana, shot while he was pinned to the ground by two police officers.
Ieshia Evans: It was beyond sickening. It was beyond disgusting. I flew to Baton Rouge.
Kurt Andersen: This is Ieshia Evans.
Ieshia: I am a nurse.
Kurt Andersen: She traveled to Louisiana from her home in Pennsylvania to join friends who'd organized a protest.
Ieshia Evans: They were in awe, like, "You came all the way down here for us?" It's like, "Yes. You are me. I am you. We're in this together."
Kurt Andersen: On the morning of July 9th, thousands of people were protesting across the city of Baton Rouge. Ieshia's group assembled outside the police headquarters. It was approaching noon, the sun beating down, and hundreds of people were marching in the street chanting and holding signs.
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Ieshia Evans: There was a lot of anger, a lot of sadness.
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Kurt Andersen: When police started moving toward the protesters, things escalated.
Ieshia Evans: The crowd was being pushed off to the side, they're being pushed off on my left side. They were all being told to go into the grass, and that if they were in the grass, they would be able to peacefully protest. Even in the grass, the police officers were marching forward with their shields. Banging on their shields and pushing my people further back. There was one guy with a video camera. He was just like, "They're telling us the protests in the grass. They're pushing us off into the grass. They want us off the street."
I looked at him and I said, "What's the point?" I just felt like that defeats the purpose of a protest. I'm not being pushed off to the side. We are not being pushed off to the side. We're tired. We are overtired. I walked further into the street.
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Kurt Andersen: She stood there, staring down two officers dressed head-to-toe in heavy-duty riot gear. The photographer, Jonathan Bachman, a freelancer for Reuters, caught that moment of their confrontation. She stands in the center of the frame, feet firmly on the pavement, her head is held high. Her expression, in spite of what's going, on is calm, serene, even. Her sundress billows in the breeze. The photo went viral for its odd elegance, this moment of peace. Is she about to be arrested or maybe this is some parlay between the two sides? The two officers, looking like characters in some Brechtian performance, are doing what exactly?
Mark Speltz: They're coming from the left, full riot gear. Every limb and section in their bodies covered; protective padding, shields. They're ready to go, arrest ties, a firearm on their belt, and they're reaching out.
Kurt Andersen: Mark Speltz is an historian who's written extensively on photography from the Civil Rights Movement, and he's fascinated by this photo.
Mark Speltz: There's a space between them. She's got her arms crossed, just standing stable, erect. There's nothing behind Miss Evans, but there's a whole line of the soldier-- I always say soldiers, the lines of the officers in armor behind them. There's so much information to read and wonder about.
Kurt Andersen: The photo is so unlike other images we were seeing last summer and the year before. Protesters and law enforcement in confused standoffs and in frenzies of movement. People lying in the street. The videos of crowds running. Tear gas. People pleading with police, and Black men, shot and dying. Which is what made this image so surprising, how different it was. The police officers and the protester are close but not touching. This strange pause, this moment in between.
Mark Speltz: I think that there's this gulf and this divide. The two sides really couldn't be more clearly represented. With the militarized response, an authoritative and overwhelming, sometimes occupying force that you feel in some of the photographs. I'm thinking back to Ferguson. It wasn't a new realization for African Americans. The juxtaposition of heavily armored and armed versus unarmed is very powerful. This just makes it visible. The vulnerability of Blacks versus police was very visible in this photograph.
Kurt Andersen: You have studied many, many photographs from past Civil Rights Moments in America. Did this photograph remind you of images you'd seen before?
Mark Speltz: It did, but I think that there's a different type of civil rights picture here. What comes to my mind are peaceful, calm, reserved, well-dressed women protesting. There's a particular one, taken in 1963 by Bob Adelman. There's this impeccably dressed woman, she's wearing jewelry, glasses. Her purse is clutched in her hands. She's all alone at the center frame.
There's a police officer or two behind her. She's at a construction site. She's slowing the construction of this project because they weren't hiring Black workers. She's kneeling on her protest sign, in that dress, on a dirt road. There's massive dump trucks behind her. She's doing an act of civil disobedience. There are scores of photos like these, but we don't typically see them.
Kurt Andersen: Why? Just because they're not as violent and angry?
Mark Speltz: The media at the time, in the North and the South, tended to focus on the most violent, eye-grabbing situations. This type of violence also sold newspapers.
Kurt Andersen: Speltz says that the serenity and the dignity of this photo from Baton Rouge is what made it so extraordinary, and so popular. By my reckoning, the photograph of the year. Ieshia Evans really does seem the very embodiment of steely calm.
Ieshia Evans: The most common misconception is that I am a peaceful person. [laughs] I am what I need to be when I need to be. There was no need for me to be rambunctious at that present moment but had there been a need for me to protect any of my people, including myself, that would have been something that I would be willing to do.
Kurt Andersen: It's that warrior quality and the intensity of the event that she says is missing from this photograph.
Ieshia Evans: It's safe. It is the color book version of the truth. It is what they want to see. They want to see a presumably innocent Black girl in a dress, looking so peaceful, and non-militant, and non-threatening. It's candy for the people. Not that I'm against the photo at all. There's a lot of positive feedback that I got from people on how they felt about the photo and the way it influenced them.
As far as the seriousness, which is the issue that's going on here, I feel like that, out of all of the photos that have been taken, that is not the strongest photo to depict what is really going on and how we, as Black people living in America, we as Africans living in America, how we feel about what's being done to our people. Why is it still the 1960s? Why are we still having the Civil Rights Movement? Why do I have to stand here?
Kurt Andersen: Right after that picture was taken, she was arrested by those officers, loaded into a van with other protesters, and taken to jail, where she spent several hours. She was charged with obstruction of a highway, but that charge was quickly dropped.
Ieshia Evans: This is supposed to be America. This is supposed to be the land of the free, so-called. This is supposed to be a democracy.
Tracy K. Smith: I think we're nervous, as a nation, about all that we really need to own up to.
Kurt Andersen: This is the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Tracy K. Smith.
Tracy K. Smith: It's instantly, I guess, one of those iconic images. What makes it feel heartening, apart from what is literally being represented, is the fact that we still have the capacity for these kinds of gestures that, in my mind, link us back to a moment, in American democracy, where so much seemed possible for the first time.
Kurt Andersen: At Studio 360, we commissioned Tracy to write a poem about the photograph.
Tracy K. Smith: The sense of love as a clarifying force is something that seems to sit at the middle of this photo for me. I just wanted to see where I could go with that idea. Using the word love in a climate that is characterized by so much that is almost directly the opposite of that, felt like a really exciting opportunity.
UNREST IN BATON ROUGE
after the photo by Jonathan Bachman
Our bodies run with ink dark blood.
Blood pools in the pavement’s seams.
Is it strange to say love is a language
Few practice, but all, or near all speak?
Even the men in black armor, the ones
Jangling handcuffs and keys, what else
Are they so buffered against, if not love’s blade
Sizing up the heart’s familiar meat?
We watch and grieve. We sleep, stir, eat.
Love: the heart sliced open, gutted, clean.
Love: naked almost in the everlasting street,
Skirt lifted by a different kind of breeze.
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Ieshia Evans: That was absolutely beautiful.
Kurt Andersen: Ieshia Evans.
Ieshia Evans: What resonated with me was the skirt being lifted by a different type of breeze. In my head, it takes me to every bad breakup I've ever had and feeling used, especially if you've ever been cheated on, if you've ever been lied to. That is how I feel about our present condition living in America, being an African American. I've been with America for how many? For hundreds of years. You've been lying to me, and you've been cheating on me, and you've been disrespecting me, and lifting my skirt. You know what I mean? Embarrassing me.
I want it to be clear that it's not just about me, just because I happen to be in, I guess if you want to say the right place at the right time. It's more than just the girl in the sundress protesting in this peaceful protest. It's bigger than that.
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Kurt Andersen: Ieshia Evans is a nurse. She lives in Pennsylvania. We also heard from Mark Speltz. His new book of civil rights photography is called North of Dixie. My great thanks to Tracy K. Smith for her magnificent poem. You can read it and see that photograph by Jonathan Bachman at studio360.org.
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