Road Through Midnight - (Documentary Arts and Culture, Published in Association with) by Jessica Ingram (Hardcover)

About the Book

"In this book, Jessica Ingram presents photographs of landscapes that, to unaware passersby, look like nearly any other place in the Deep South: a fenced-in backyard, a dirt road covered with overgrowth, a field grooved with muddy tire prints. However, these seemingly ordinary places hold pivotal, often tragic, stories of the civil rights movement, though rarely is there a plaque with dates or names or any manmade indication of their importance. Most of these "un-memorialized" places are where bodies of African Americans-activists, paper mill workers, sharecroppers, and children-were found, victims of racial violence. These images are interspersed with oral histories from victims' families, journalists, and investigators, as well as newspaper microfiche, FBI files, and other archival ephemera. The narrative intensity grows in power, complexity, and depth as the book goes on and the history unfolds"--

Book Synopsis

At first glance, Jessica Ingram's landscape photographs could have been made nearly anywhere in the American South: a fenced-in backyard, a dirt road lined by overgrowth, a field grooved with muddy tire prints. These seemingly ordinary places, however, were the sites of pivotal events during the civil rights era, though often there is not a plaque with dates and names to mark their importance. Many of these places are where the bodies of activists, mill workers, store owners, sharecroppers, children and teenagers were murdered or found, victims of racist violence. Images of these places are interspersed with oral histories from victims' families and investigative journalists, as well as pages from newspapers and FBI files and other ephemera.

With Road Through Midnight, the result of nearly a decade of research and fieldwork, Ingram unlocks powerful and complex histories to reframe these commonplace landscapes as sites of both remembrance and resistance and transforms the way we regard both what has happened and what's happening now--as the fight for civil rights goes on and memorialization has become the literal subject of contested cultural and societal ground.

Review Quotes

"Road Through Midnight is not an easy read, nor is it meant to be, but it is a powerful means for learning part of our shared history. Jessica Ingram spent more than a decade creating what she describes as 'an interpretive and suggestive work rather than a scholarly one, ' but one that--through her photographs, detailed research, and many personal interviews--will help readers connect the past to the present and with what still remains to be done."--Georgia Library Quarterly

"[A] marvelous, evocative meditation on the power of remembering. . . . Every reader who opens this book will take something different from it."--The North Carolina Historical Review

"A haunting monograph that presents narratives of struggle, injustice, and unspeakable brutality in almost austere fashion. . . . In showing us how everyday landscapes are forever scarred by violent histories, Ingram is telling us that the wounds of slavery, segregation, and white supremacist ideology survive in ways we refuse to see, in our cities, prisons, schools, and neighborhoods."--Chapter 16

"Ingram's expertise shows with the thoughtful blending of image and text throughout the book. . . . [T]his title would be ideal for public, academic, or special libraries that collect works about the South, the Civil Rights era and movement."--North Carolina Libraries

"One of the most powerful books of documentary content I know of. . . . It might be the book's greatest strength that it reminds us that terrible things can happen in ordinary places, in seemingly ordinary times, and that they could yet again."--Study the South