Separate, But Equal: the Mississippi Photographs of Henry Clay Anderson - Book Review

Black Issues Book Review, Jan-Feb, 2003 by Evette Porter

with essays by Shawn Wilson, Clifton L Taulbert and Mary Panzer Public Affairs, October 2002, $35.00, ISBN 1-586-48092-8

If you're old enough to remember the Deep South during segragation, then the photographs in Separate, But Equal will seem eerily familiar. They offer a glimpse of southern life for blacks that was mostly defined by the absence of whites. It was a world where civil rights marchers shared the same stage with cheerleaders, the high school prom, Little League, the women's auxiliary and traveling vaudeville shows. For me, having long ago lived in Mississippi during segregation, it was like coming home.

Among the more than 90 black-and-white images taken by Henry Clay (H.C.) Anderson of life in the Mississippi Delta from the late 1940s to the mid-'60s, there is a sense of black social life that seamlessly crosses class lines. Anderson, who opened up shop in 1948, photographed everyday life in the segregated world of Greenville, Mississippi. His stock-in-trade, however, was high school yearbook photos, portraits of college campus queens and locals in their Sunday best. In many ways, Separate, But Equal rebuts the conventional images of blacks in the rural South, by its very pedestrian observations.

"Most images of black Americans in the Delta were formed through the lenses of photojournalists. Northern photographers had come south in the middle of the century to document the plight of blacks, the survivors of slavery, reconstruction, Jim Crow, legal segregation and the Civil Rights fights," writes Clifton L. Taulbert, a native of Mississippi and contributor to the book. "They captured our tears. They recorded our terror. They took pictures of our dilapidated tenement homes. They caught our mothers without their hair freshly pressed and without their makeup applied.... They were more interested in the cruelty of Jim Crow."

At a time when that history of cruelty under segregation is endlessly recycled, it is refreshing to see the images in Separate, But Equal, knowing that it represents a truer version of black life in the Deep South for those of us who lived it.