Reflections of the Deep South in rural NJ

Fascinating review in yesterday's New York Times:

In the photograph the church appears almost like an animal shot with a tranquilizer dart. The structure sags, as if on sun-soaked haunches, unable to move from the asphalt veldt. Were it not for the presence of a white van in the foreground, the image might have been captured by a Farm Security Administration photographer roaming the Deep South in the 1930's.

Appearances deceive. The photograph of Mount Moriah Primitive Baptist Church was taken just last year. And although Elsmere, the town in which the church stands, once bore the biscuits-and-gravy name of Eighty Acres, it is in New Jersey and lies not much farther south than Philadelphia. Yet one almost expects to see cotton growing nearby.

The languid image is part of a revealing online exhibition, "Small Towns, Black Lives," created by the New Jersey photographer Wendel A. White. Over the past 13 years Mr. White has been toting his camera through the state's southern reaches, documenting the existence of a handful of small all-black communities that still survive there. In his back road travels, he has also unearthed the rich African-American history of several towns that are now largely populated by whites.

Mr. White's online photographs depict little-known aspects of the nation's past: communities formed by blacks in the 19th and early 20th centuries as havens from racism. Many of these enclaves, where African-Americans could raise families and build careers, were in New Jersey. For Mr. White there has been some urgency to document these insular towns before they change even further or disappear completely. "Even if they don't physically go away, the nature of the communities is disappearing," Mr. White said. "What we're seeing is the last bit of the 19th century."

Posted by David on January 21, 2003 10:09 PM