Clifton Meador

Clifton Meador. Photo courtesy of the artist.

What inspired your choice of subject (civil rights) in Long Slow March?

I grew up in Alabama in the 1960s—my family are all from Alabama, so the struggle for civil rights was something I lived through as an ignorant child. As a white child in an intensely segregated city, I had very little personal knowledge of the Black experience in Alabama, except through what I saw in public, or overheard.

I saw segregated movie theaters, separate waiting rooms in bus stations, segregated public bathrooms. I saw parts of the city that were all black, and parts of the city that were all white. I saw restaurants with signs reading “we reserved the right to refuse service to anyone” which just meant that they refused to serve anyone with brown skin.

I saw crowds of people marching with signs, and felt the fear of the white adults around me. My maternal grandparents were active racists, and the memory of that hangs sickeningly over me.

In what ways does your personal narrative appear in the book?

It’s hard to say. Everything about that book is drawn from who I am.

What’s the significance of the use of multiple typefaces and irregular formatting?

The first part of the book is a preamble, a setting of the stage for the march. I put together a range of pro-slavery texts, slave narratives, and interviews with the klan. There is a traditional typographic form for texts that contain complex, multi-threaded narratives and commentary that is often used for polyglot bibles or Talmudic literature, a form that uses multiple columns and differing typefaces.

What is the significance of the book’s structure? Why are the images and text in separate sections?

The book fell into four sections in my mind, a kind of argument:

1. Preamble—what led to the need to have the Selma march?
2. The march itself, recorded mile by mile, with the title pages of slave narratives hovering in the air over it, and the later feeble attempt to refute the march in newspapers at the time.
3. The arrival—a section of documentary photos of the march arriving in Montgomery, and a sequence of Klan warning pictograms hovering over the marchers, as the police and angry white people tried to suppress the march.
4. A montage of history and feelings, red and angry that suggested the flames of a fire that should consume the past.

Who is your intended audience? How would you like your audience to interact with your work?

I ask students what they know about the Selma march and I am amazing if anyone has heard of it. My audience is the future—to keep the memory of the event, the poetic nature of the march, and importance alive for future generations.

Did you walk or drive when taking these photographs of the march?

Part walking, part driving. It is about 50 miles from Selma to Montgomery.

How does being a white Southerner influence the content of your work?

Well, the content of this piece is entirely about my memories and experiences, even though I don’t include my personal narratives in it. I did a few projects in the former Soviet Union that was largely the recognition of a people undergoing huge social change in the 1990s that felt very similar to the change the deep south went through in the late 1960s and 70s. A sense that the world was turning upside down somehow. Memory Lapse is about a people wrestling with social horror—the Gulag system as manifest in one site, the prison camp at Solovetsky island, and the shifting meaning of that site. That work in particular is framed by my own understanding of the struggle for civil rights.