Ordinary Lives

In a photographic exhibit of African-American towns in southern New Jersey, Wendel White documents his subjects’ efforts to build communities despite the barriers.

By: Amy Brummer

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Wendel


White’s panoramic view of Morris Beach.

 

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Dr.


Merrie Hill of chesilhurst studied at the New England Conservatory of Music. 


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Robert


Tucker of Elsmere, with undergraduate and graduate degrees in chemistry,
was a teacher, guidance councelor and superintendant of schools in Lawnside. 


 

   Route 9 in southern New Jersey is a boulevard of Americana and
"down the shore" nostalgia. Awash with scrubby pines and sandy soil, it makes
its way up the coast, providing access to the seaside towns of the state’s outdoor
playground.
   Just off the beaten path of this main thoroughfare is one of
the area’s great treasures: The Noyes Museum in Oceanville is the region’s only
art museum, and its mission to exhibit and preserve the work of New Jersey artists
reflects the creativity and diversity of its denizens.
   To commemorate its 20th anniversary, the museum mounted an exhibit
that captured the spirit of its mission, dedicating all four of the galleries
to photographer Wendel White’s Small Towns, Black Lives: African-American Towns
in Southern New Jersey. The exhibit comes to the Johnson & Johnson Gallery
in New Brunswick May 23.
   Since 1989, Mr. White, a professor of photography at Richard
Stockton College in Pomona, has been capturing images from several historically
black towns in southern New Jersey. When he took the position at the college in
1986, a friend mentioned he might have an interest in these towns. On her advice,
he visited the town of Whitesboro, where he began to see connections to personal
history.
   "A lot of the cultural things were familiar to me from my own
background," says Mr. White, who was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in April.
"My family originally came from a rural area of North Carolina, although I grew
up in the city, as did my mother. But my mother went to the farm in the summer
as a kid."
   Having grown up in Philadelphia, Newark and Montclair, and teaching
at the Cooper Union School of Art, School of Visual Arts and the International
Center of Photography in Manhattan, Mr. White had very little knowledge of the
landscape and culture of southern New Jersey until he moved there.
   "I was really surprised at how rural it was," he says, "how
open the spaces were, how much natural, sort of untouched areas existed, how much
farming there was, and how many small communities there were, not suburban but
really small rural communities.
   "At the time I didn’t know the scope of the black towns in southern
New Jersey, and the history of the black towns. One of the things I like to point
out is that this was a learning process for me, as well."
   His journey took him to towns such as Gouldtown and Springtown,
founded decades before the Civil War. He notes that the proximity of the southern
New Jersey region to Philadelphia and its Quaker heritage made it possible for
these towns to exist, and that the Dutch in New York had a much more conservative
view of slavery.
   "Really the understanding of the uniqueness of these towns didn’t
come until much later in the project," Mr. White says. "Even after I knew the
terrain and after I understood the communities, it took me a while. It was after
I looked at other locations and I talked to people I gradually came to understand
the context of southern New Jersey. I began to understand that there probably
aren’t many places where this number of African-American communities in a rural
setting in a Northern state could exist."
   Because of this social climate, this phenomenon continued after
the Civil War with towns like Whitesboro becoming havens for African-Americans
seeking to etch out a life. But even as blacks achieved greater success and financial
autonomy, the towns stand as a reminder that white society still had its boundaries.
   "The most specific one that I think of is Morris Beach," he
says. "It was 1939 and this woman (Jennie Morris), who is a successful funeral
director in Philadelphia, wants to buy a summer home in Ocean City and she can’t.
So she decided to start her own summer community. She finds the property and buys
the property, and there is a house on the property, which is her house, and she
subdivides it because she understands that while she had this difficulty, others
have this difficulty.
   "By that time there were other communities only for African-Americans
on the East Coast because there were individuals that were starting to become
affluent. I think that is a situation where we really see that direct response
to the segregation and the Jim Crow. In other communities I think it was always
assumed, and it was true that there wasn’t a choice, but in this case she started
out trying to make a purchase in a community and was blocked from doing so, and
so she started her own."
   In looking at these communities and understanding how they came
about, Mr. White recognizes that they reflect the layers of history in southern
New Jersey as experienced through the black community. It continued up until the
1960s with the community of Adat Beyt Mosheh. A synagogue based in Philadelphia
during the 1950s, its members became disillusioned with the urban experience and
wanted to find a better place to live, settling near Elwood.
   In chronicling these people and places, Mr. White makes it clear
he is not a historian. As an artist, he is drawn to things that interest him as
opposed to using the historical method that scholarly investigation would warrant.
As much as these pictures are a reflection of the black towns in southern New
Jersey, they are also about Mr. White’s personal curiosities, derived from his
own life experience. But in this context, he also tries to go deeper than the
image itself by including text that gives the photograph a wider scope.
   "I’m just fascinated with the appearance of things," he says.
"That is why in my work, in this particular project, it gradually led to the use
of text in the artwork itself. The photograph and the way I approach photography
is very descriptive. So I wanted to use the photograph to show the people and
places and the buildings and the details of the world I encountered. But I wanted
to use text to do something that the photograph doesn’t do, which is to convey
a specific narrative, in particular, to talk about things that were not present
at the time that I was making the photograph, so that is the encounter with history."
   A photograph of Bethune Avenue in Morris Beach shows a T-intersection,
crossed electrical wires and a chicken picking at the grass in the foreground.
It is a stark and fairly unremarkable place, but the text that accompanies it
fleshes out its importance. It is the single access road to the Morris Beach community.
He goes on to explain how it is losing its African-American population, as original
owners have begun selling their properties to year-round residents. His portrait
of Paul Reynolds from Whitesboro shows the man at home, on his couch. The image
is both distant and intimate, with the subject set back in the room yet directly
engaged with his eyes. The text explains that he is the president of the Male-Tones
Gospel Singers and that his wife passed away on the day of their 51st anniversary.

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ChaNice


Matthews of Whitesboro sist while her sister Latoya braids her hair. 


 

   "I try my best not to make photographs that are overly theatrical
or overly emphatic in some way or empathetic to the subject," he says. "It is
not that I want to create a distance as a way of separating myself, it is that
I want to create, hopefully, a kind of impartial view that allows the strength
of the subject to come through without being idealized. And ultimately, that then
makes the presence of the people in the place more powerful, if they haven’t been
exaggerated in some way."
   Mr. White plays both insider and outsider in his project. As
a black photographer whose family heritage stemmed from a rural experience, he
felt he could pick up on nuances that give the work subtle richness. As a nationally
exhibited photographer who serves as secretary to the New Jersey Council for the
Humanities, he is able to convey the larger, collective impact of individual lives.
   "The result," he says, "in terms of the impression that people
have, is how powerful it is for people in these communities over the decades to
have built ordinary lives. The thing that becomes unique, the thing that becomes
dramatic in a sense is the ability to construct an ordinary life, to have normal
civic engagement with the people around you — to build a life in an environment
where there is a disincentive to do so, in an environment where there are lots
of obstacles that would have normally, or under many circumstances, prevented
people from succeeding. That is where the powerful idea resides, in the ability
to construct that life."
   As a result of seeing his work as a whole in exhibition form,
he finds that it brings to mind even larger themes than he had realized.
   "I became very much aware that this is the last physical presence
of the 19th century in American culture," he says. "Not so much that they are
connected to the 19th century, but the 19th-century ideal of community and the
nuclear towns, life before the invention of the car and how people might live
and work and do live all their life in one place and have that connection.
   "I live in a community where I know two or three of my neighbors.
In these communities, they know everybody pretty much, and that is a very 19th-century
idea, and I think that we won’t have that anymore. These communities are symbols
of the 19th century, not that they are old fashioned or backward. It’s just that
they represent that more nuclear idea of what a community is, and that is their
strength."
Small Towns, Black Lives: African-American Towns in Southern New Jersey will
be on exhibit at the Johnson & Johnson Gallery, 1 Johnson & Johnson Plaza,
New Brunswick, May 23-July 18. For information, call (732) 524-2529.