From The Vault Of Art Shay: Black History
By Art Shay in News on Feb 22, 2012 7:00PM
I have always loved this 1952 picture of a South side Chicago house and some of its occupants proudly displaying their giant American flag.
A phony clinic promises cures for guileless patients who can pay $3 a visit.
In a Chicago doorway sundered by illicit police machine gun fire a survivor of a famous unprovoked murder counts his blessings.
In a Chicago factory some master black welders energetically produce a tight-seamed tank car for the GATX company. (November 1966)
The graffiti of hate in an alley on Chicago\'s South side.
My first encounter with black political energy occurred in Kenya in 1956, where a thousand angry Kikuyu women set out one morning to assassinate a band of blood thirsty Mau Mau who had invaded their tribal area. They would not, for some reason, let me photograph the heads they had cut off.
Dr. Martin Luther King, in a Memphis funeral home, lies in state awaiting his memorial service. As my accompanying journalist and friend Garry Wills wrote, it was eerie knowing the funeral make-up people were working to cosmeticize the gunshot wound as the radio blared out the Dr. King\'s \"mountain\" speech.
My friend, comedian Aaron Freeman, kisses his artist wife in the Jewish tradition of \"good Sabbath.\"
On Michigan Avenue, Oprah Winfrey interrupts a shoe-shopping trip to enjoy a Victor Skrebneski portrait of herself in a fashion magazine.
Comedian Dick Gregory, seen her being tear gassed in the 1960s, was a subject of a \<em\>Time\<\/em\> magazine feature by Miriam Rumwell. Rumwell covered Gregory in a sympathetic moment and later became friends with Gregory. One night she and I covered his act at a club on Chicago\'s South Side when he started with a joke that played to the audience\'s racial biases. Rumwell became livid. \"You haven\'t learned a anything!\" She said. \"You played right into what they think.\" Gregory hung his head in shame. \"You\'re right,\" he said. She single-handedly bent him backwards and, from that moment on, Gregory used his comedy as a savage attack, not a soothing mechanism.
This chance meeting of a tired old white lady and an energetic young black man with his life ahead of him, is surrealistic enough to make any point the viewer sees in it.
(Legendary Chicago-based photographer Art Shay has taken photos of kings, queens, celebrities and the common man in a 60-year career. In this week's look at his archives, Art shares photos he's taken over the years of the Black experience in America.)
I see, when I scan my million or so pictures, that—for better and for worse—I have contributed to Black History.
(From my fan mail I gather that it is a mistake to put my better pictures "out there" for anyone to add to his or her own collection mostly without accreditation or thank you, and usually in violation of my copyright. One fan in Spain has composed a corny opera involving two of my main subjects—not black—and sells disks of my work, proudly signing my name to it. I suppose he imagines me dead or too poor to seek legal revenge. He's wrong. Having spent a career chasing the Mafia, I know two good hitmen in Spain who owe me a favor.)
But while considering my options I show you some Black History snaps that didn't start out as history.
If you can't wait until this time every Wednesday to get your Art Shay fix, please check out the photographer's blog, which is updated regularly. Art Shay's book, Chicago’s Nelson Algren, is also available at Amazon.
