New Museum
On Sunday, September 15, 1963, four black girls were slain in an explosion at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The bombing was instigated by four Ku Klux Klansmen. “These children,” Martin Luther King, Jr. proclaimed in a eulogy, “were the victims of one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity.”
Although the perpetrators were identified by investigators, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover closed the case before they could be tried. On the other hand, punishment was summarily and brutally inflicted on demonstrators, who were attacked with tear gas and dogs while peacefully protesting racial injustice.
A press photo from one of the 1963 protests is part of Grief and Grievance, a timely and important exhibition opening at the New Museum in New York tomorrow. Documenting a black man being assaulted by a police dog, the newspaper clipping is hard to look at, and not only because of the subject. Veiled in stocking nylon that obscures most of the details, the picture is the centerpiece of a 1964 mixed media painting by Jack Whitten, an abstract artist who studied at Cooper Union and struggled to reconcile his formalist training with what he witnessed and experienced as a black man from Alabama.
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