In 1987 I was on staff with the Rural Advancement Fund, a non-profit, farm advocacy organization with a field office in Pittsboro, North Carolina. In addition to working with small, family farmers throughout the two Carolinas, RAF also ran a Justice Project in rural Robeson County in the southeast corner of the state.
Robeson County’s population is one-third white, one-third African-American, and one-third Lumbee Indian and racial strife has long been an issue. The County is noted for the Battle Hayes Pond, which took place in 1958, when hundreds of Lumbee confronted the Ku Klux Klan and ran them out of the county as they were attempting to stir animosity among the races. Despite the positive outcome of that situation, the County has been plagued by unsolved murders and extra-judicial killings throughout its history. The photographs here are from a Justice Rally in the county seat of Lumberton, demonstrating against the killing of Jimmy Earl Cummings, a native-American man, by the county Sheriff’s Department.
For obvious reasons these images have been on my mind for the last few weeks. I look at them and see faces, and signs, and situations that could easily be transposed to today’s world. And I think, I made these pictures thirty-three years ago, and yet, here we are, fighting the same battles, with the same adversaries, demanding the same basic rights, freedoms, and respect. And certainly, this fight has been going on a lot longer than that. And the battle doesn’t seem to be ending anytime soon.
Often, the most simple observation is the most prescient. And I keep coming back to Rodney King, who asked with an almost childlike wonder, “Can we all get along?”
Happy 4th of July.
Lumberton, NC, 1987.
Lumberton, NC 1987
Lumberton, NC 1987