Samob Mockbee (1944-2001) and the Rural Studio

Phi Kappa Phi Forum, Summer 2003 by Lindsey, Bruce

PRE:TEXT

Daniel Kemmis, former mayor of Missoula, Montana, in his book Community and the Politics of Place, describes a beautiful analogy put forward by Hannah Arendt in her book The Human Condition.

To live together in the world means that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time.

The public realm, as the common world, gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other, so to speak. What makes mass society so difficult to bear is not the number of people involved, or at least not primarily, but the fact that the world between them has lost its power to gather them together, to relate and to separate them. The weirdness of this situation resembles a spiritualistic seance where a number of people gathered around a table might suddenly, through some magic trick, see the table vanish from their midst, so that two persons sitting opposite each other were no longer separated but also would be entirely unrelated by anything tangible.

The table, the landscape for Kemmis and the people of Montana, architecture for Samuel "Sambo" Mockbee, his students, and the residents of Hale County, Alabama, is being rebuilt, reestablishing some of those things that have the capacity to gather us together.

ROLL CALL

Hale County, Alabama: 100 miles west of Auburn, 100 miles south of Birmingham, 40 miles north of Selma, is in the center of the state. Home to the Black Warrior River, and the photographs of Walker Evans in James Agcc's 1939 book Ld Us Now Praise Famous Men. Agcc writes:

. . . the question, who are you who will read these words and study these photographs, and through what cause, by what chance, and for what purpose, and by what right do you qualify to, and what will you do about it?

Sambo Mockbee, a fifth-generation Mississippian, along with O.K. Ruth, both professors in Auburn University's School of Architecture, answered the call in 1991; they knew what to do. They planted a seed, the "redneck Taliesin" Rural Studio, in the Black Belt of Hale County, Alabama, that has brought forth a tree, the branches of which have literally reached around the world.

Sambo Mockbee was a husband, a father, a teacher, and a citizen architect. he knew that buildings, like the Montana landscape and Arendt's table, had the capacity to connect people to people, and people to places, so that they know where they are. Knowing where you are is important. It is easy to forget the other people and the shape of the land that make up where you are. Sambo knew that architecture is a way for non-pilots to elevate themselves so that they can see where they are, and hence know a little better who they are.

DEPTH

The waters of the Black Warrior River run deep with the history of a part of the United States that W. E. Du Bois proclaimed would be haunted by the fact that Reconstruction was prematurely stopped, states Andrea Oppenheimer Dean, in her book entitled Rural Studio: Samuel Mockbee and an Architecture of Decency. As a young man growing up in Mississippi, Samuel knew African Americans only as maids, caddies, and manual laborers. Later, when working on his first charity house, he described the invisible presence of their houses as a "taboo landscape" for a white man. "And here we are in the twenty-first century . . . still ignoring the problem and Southern blacks are still invisible," stated Mockbee.

One day in 1.966, as a young draftee at Fort Benning, Georgia, Sambo fell asleep at the rifle range. "When I woke up, I was in the middle of all these black trainees who were also from Mississippi, and I was fine, in a nest of equals." Going back to sleep he said, the "race thing had ceased to exist for me." It was not long later that he literally stumbled across the grave of James Chancy in Mississippi. Chaney, a martyred Southern civil-rights worker, risked and lost his life to accept responsibility for who and where he was. Sambo asked himself a question inspired by the teachings of the Renaissance architect Leon Batiste Alberti: "Do I choose fortune or virtue? Do I have the courage to make my gift [as a citizen architect] count for something?"

Thirty years later, two months after Sambo's death from leukemia, Lerone Smiley, Rural Studio crew hand, a.k.a. "Big Selma," six-feet, four-inches tall from Selma, Alabama, resident of the State of Alabama Correctional Institution, offered the following eulogy:

I only knew Sambo for a little over a year, yet he taught me things that will carry me the rest of my life, and he would always teach me by example.

So many times when I meet people and they see me in my state whites, they automatically draw their own conclusion. Not so with Sambo. he allowed me to present to him who I really was. he taught me to think "outside the box." But most importantly, he taught me to pay attention to myself. he saw something in me that I still don't see, but I know that if he saw it, it must be there. I just have to find it .... Now, isn't that something for me, a black man from Alabama, to say about a white man from Mississippi? What's more than that, is that I love him. Now that's what Sambo would call, "outside the box."