The ‘catalytic role of image-making today’

LOUISVILLE — Dr. Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, whose most recent book is “The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America,” delivered a talk rich with insights Thursday during the Westminster Town Hall Forum, a ministry of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis. Listen to her talk followed by a question-and-answer session led by former Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak here.

Lewis, the founder of Vision and Justice, is a critically acclaimed art and cultural historian and best-selling author. Her previous book is “The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery.” She’s the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

Image

Lewis began with the story of a student from nearly a century back who wanted to know why textbooks “presented the world only one way.” Why were there no African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos and Indigenous people included in these books? His teacher told him African Americans “had done nothing to merit inclusion,” Lewis noted. He asked the teacher again and was expelled for “his so-called impertinence in refusing to accept that answer.” He never returned, and the boy — Lewis’ grandfather — went on to become a musician and artist who “created images of individuals and groups he knew he should have been able to find in those textbooks. That man’s life story animated my own.”

“We all have people who have made us possible, who have made us ask questions about whether we’re doing enough in this generation, whether we are meeting our moment,” she said. “I think of my grandfather [Shadrach Emmanuel Lee, whose initials she shares] often.”

He was asking “the fundamental question: What determines who counts and who belongs in American society?” she said. “He knew that culture mattered as much as law and norms alone for the work of justice in the U.S.” Lewis defined culture broadly — paintings, performances monuments, which “create the narratives that we live with and can’t live without.”

One day she heard from the late Congressman from Georgia, Rep. John Lewis, the civil rights icon who wanted her to speak to his colleagues “about the work of culture and the unfinished civil rights movement today,” she said. The 1965 march he led at age 25 from Selma to Mongomery “is critical for all of us being here today. Why? Because during that 50-mile protest, the path of America changed.”

At that time, African Americans made up more than half of Dallas County, Alabama, where Selma is the county seat. Yet, she said, “violently enforced voter suppression” meant only 2% of Black Americans there could exercise their legal right to vote. Lewis’ colleague, Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., discovered that Lewis’ great-great grandfather registered to vote in Alabama in 1867, but “due to the backlash of Jim Crow rule, no one else in Lewis’ family could do so for nearly 100 years,” until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. John Lewis “didn’t want to speak only of the importance of law with his colleagues,” Sarah Lewis said. “He wanted them to understand the catalytic role of image-making today.”

She displayed images to accompany her talk. To accompany the famous John Trumball painting depicting the signers of the Declaration of Independence, Lewis mentioned the video by Ancestry that includes the signers’ descendants, many of them people of color. “What does it mean,” she asked, “to be able to see that transit from the 18th century to the current day visually in front of you? You have to ask yourself, what is the journey between these two moments?”

Today’s definition of citizenship is far broader than it was at the founding of the nation, “but still contested,” she said. “This is a society that forces humility on its citizens.” We once “believed it to be true that African Americans were three-fifths human beings, but we know this was not just. We have needed to accommodate this humility, and the work of culture is often what gets us to see past our blind spots.”

Lewis learned from the jazz musician Winton Marsalis the story of a young boy named Charles Black, Jr. who went to a school dance in Houston in 1931 and was transfixed by the trumpet player there, Louis Armstrong, whose “extraordinary genius and lyricism was captivating. Black knew at that moment that segregation must be wrong,” she said, and “felt a new path unfurl before him that let him walk toward justice.” That boy grew up to serve as one of the lawyers to argue Brown v. Board of Education before the U.S. Supreme Court alongside Thurgood Marshall, and taught law at Yale and Columbia. Every year he held an Armstrong listening night “to honor the man whose creative passion inaugurated this perspective-altering shift.”

Image

“How many movements began when something with extraordinary aesthetic force transformed our vision of the possible, of the just — more times than we can possibly know,” Lewis said.

She also landed on the most photographed man in America during the 19th century, Frederick Douglass, who frequently delivered a version of a speech that examined how photographs — which had been around only since 1839 — had the power to transform the imagination.

“Why would he speak about the power of images? This was a man whose oratory skill could hold a crowd,” Lewis said. Douglass realized that photographs “democratized portraiture and let people see themselves as they would like to be seen for the first time,” she said. “It offered agency to African Americans in particular.”

For those “who don’t buy the argument that culture matters for justice, why would lawyer Bryan Stevenson … who has argued many times in front of the Supreme Court, spend years with his Equal Justice Initiative, creating a memorial, a monument, to honor 4,000 lives unjustly taken by lynching? A national monument not in D.C. but in Montgomery, Alabama,” Lewis noted. “He did so because he understood that narratives need to be dislodged and have to be done so by getting proximate to these histories, having it presented in front of you.”

What are the stakes, she wondered, for “our own sense of the possible?” She asked those in attendance to picture in their minds Pete Souza’s memorable photo of former President Obama bending over in the Oval Office so that 5-year-old Jacob Philadelphia could feel the texture of the president’s hair and verify it was similar to his own hair.

“In that act is a profound understanding,” Lewis said. Obama “knew that young boy had dreams and in that moment sensed they might not be possible, and he needed to touch the evidence.” We have to ask: “What narratives, what messages was [Jacob] receiving at that young age that let him sense the precarity of his dreams?”

“Ask yourself,” Lewis suggested, “what images, what messages within culture let you know your dreams are possible, and which ones made you question which ones they were?”

“I know here in Minneapolis [where George Floyd was murdered in 2020 by a police officer] I am amongst folks who understand culture is not a respite from life, a kind of luxury, but in fact is the indispensable means through which we create the very narratives that cohere the more just society in which we will be all be honored to live.”

Asked during the question-and-answer session about her students, Lewis said she’s learning they “have a lot of belief in the power of the image.” Her students understand “they need to be able to persuade and advocate through the narratives of imagery and culture.” She’s also grown to understand the need to live into what she calls “generation time.” “The news of the day can feel urgent, but as you get older, the idea of generation time comes in,” she said.

On Election Day in 2024, Lewis walked just outside the Harvard campus where W.E.B. DuBois used to live, and by buildings on campus named after President John F. Kennedy.

“I realized that in order to contribute as leaders and community members of all kinds,” she said, “we have to keep our eye trained on the gaze the era requires of us — not just the moment.”