Small Towns Black Lives
Wendel A. White

I began making photographs for this project in 1989 after a casual remark from Deborah Willis-Kennedy in which she told me about a community called Whitesboro that she visited as a child. In the summer of 1989 I drove to Whitesboro, walked around and made a few photographs. My first conversation was with Rev. George Thompson of the First Baptist Church. Our discussion led to contacts throughout Whitesboro and I began making portraits inside homes and businesses. Many of the longtime residents are descendants of families that moved to Whitesboro to escape the race riots, unemployment, and oppression of late nineteenth century North Carolina.

The project started without a thesis, simply a willingness to invest time and energy on pictures and the fellowship of time spent in black communities. Throughout the summer of 1989 as I photographed various community and church events, it was clear that the stories and oral histories I encountered were essential to the social landscape. In the past thirteen years I have struggled to adequately define a form for the images and the narrative, however I find myself compelled to continue in spite of my awkwardness. The process established in Whitesboro has remained with me for more than a decade. I often make contact through churches or individuals and I am drawn to the informal and ordinary views of small town life.

The photographs the Port Republic cemetery began as the result of another casual comment from Joseph Stephenson. The graves are (all but one) marked as veterans of the U.S. Colored Troops, located on a road without any other sign of a black settlement. These pictures led to the first specific use of genealogical research techniques, the use of text in combination with the photographs and the use of other archival materials as subjects of my photography. The Port Republic site rejuvenated my enthusiasm (through the research) for the remarkable history of black communities. Re-constructing the story of this black settlement whose only physical representation are 5 headstones changed my work to include remnants of rural black settlements. The result has become a project that includes portraits, landscape, architecture, artifacts, archival documents, and narrative text that uses historical material, but is not offered as a history.

My mother’s family narrative is closely tied to the purchase of a farm in rural North Carolina by my great-grandfather after the Civil War. Before my mother died we spoke several times about whether she would like to be buried on the farm and she was unable to decide between rural traditions of the family and urban/suburban reality of her life. I chose to bury her near her brothers, parents and grandparents on the farm in North Carolina, because some of her best stories were childhood memories of summers on the farm.

The photographs in Small Towns Black Lives are made in communities that have no direct connection to my personal history but they are representations of a connection and context. The project is a record of my interest in historically African American communities in the southern counties of New Jersey; it includes annotated photographs and historical documents, panoramic images, and a multimedia web presentation (http://blacktowns.org.) This work is not presented as a historical resource—but as an artist’s journal of travel and discovery.