Exhibition

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The exhibition, "And The Struggle Continues: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference's Fight For Social Change," which was curated by Carol Anderson, Michael Ra-Shon Hall and Sarah Quigley, is on display now through December 1 in the Schatten Gallery which is located on Level 3 of the Robert W. Woodruff Library. Below is the curator's statement included in the exhibition.

AND THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES highlights the efforts of one of the most important human rights organizations to challenge the oppressive political and economic systems of the 20th century.

Based on the extensive Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) records housed in Emory University's Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, the exhibition reveals how SCLC exposed and transformed a status quo that allowed millions to suffer from poverty, environmental degradation, health care disasters, hunger, homelessness, disfranchisement, and a brutal criminal justice system. It waged these battles on a political terrain that had been fundamentally altered since the organization was created in 1957. 

The exhibition picks up the story of SCLC eleven years after it was founded to "redeem the soul of America." By 1968 Congress had finally passed landmark legislation on civil rights, voting, and housing. The visible markers of "white only" and "colored" were coming down. But the reality of poverty, inadequate schools, a Jim Crow justice system, and discrimination in housing and employment continued to dominate the lives of millions. With the assassination of its iconic leader, Martin Luther King, Jr., the question soon became how SCLC could mount an even more complex campaign for justice and equality, especially with the Nobel Peace Prize winner no longer at the helm.

The decision to take on the larger human rights agenda of jobs, housing, and health care — while shoring up the still-precarious civil rights victories of the 1950s and '60s — is the essence of this exhibition. During the movement, SCLC's nonviolent tactics had required the discipline of the protesters — often ministers, teachers, students, and other well-dressed icons of respectability — and a readily identifiable enemy — racist sheriffs unleashing German shepherds or bullwhips on unarmed citizens. Yet by the late 1960s, both of those pillars had crumbled. Overt racism had been discredited; still, the forces that maintained inequality were as powerful as Jim Crow but more elusive and harder to define and identify. In addition, those who felt the brunt of continued inequality did so without the shield of respectability to garner public sympathy and outrage. Poor, incarcerated, or afflicted with HIV/AIDS, they found themselves instead consigned to the "unworthy."

Another factor that hampered SCLC's ongoing quest for equality was a nation intent on "moving on." Unequal schools, impoverished neighborhoods, and scarce job opportunities were now no longer considered to be the result of years of discrimination and public policy but the culmination of a "culture of poverty" and an individual's bad decisions. In the process, the United States' responsibility for nearly 400 years of slavery and Jim Crow faded from the public consciousness. In addition, as apartheid in South Africa demonstrated, the pursuit of international human rights required organizational nimbleness to deal with the complications inherent in global economics and politics.

SCLC's answer, as AND THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES suggests, was not to shy away, collapse, or rest on its laurels. Instead, it faced these challenges with an unshakable belief in the power of God and the church — and the courage to be on the right side of justice.

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The Lucille Clifton Exhibition Come Celebrate With Me: The Work of Lucille Clifton is currently on display in the MARBL gallery on the 10th Floor of the Robert W. Woodruff Library. The exhibit is co-curated by Kevin Young, Curator of Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at MARBL, and Amy Hildreth Chen, Emory PhD student in English.

A second exhibit which focuses on Clifton's work as a children's book author, She Sang So Sweet: Lucille Clifton's Children's Literature, and curated by Amy Hildreth Chen, will be available on the 2nd Floor of the Woodruff Library in mid-September. The following is the essay which accompanies the exhibition, written by Kevin Young.

National Book Award winner, Fellow of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, Emmy Award-winner, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, children's books author, mother, memoirist, Jeopardy champion, survivor, poet, and national treasure, Lucille Clifton was at the height of her poetic powers when she died in February 2010.

Born Lucille Sayles in 1936, just outside Buffalo in Depew, New York, Sayles would meet her future husband through Ishmael Reed. Reed, Sayles, and Fred Clifton performed in the Buffalo Community Theater Workshop. Later, Clifton herself would attend the historically black Howard University.  Howard in the 1950s was a very fruitful time for African American letters; her cohort included fellow writers Toni Morrison, later to be her editor at Random House, as well as teachers like Sterling Brown. Clifton's mature work began in earnest later, in the early sixties, yet even before her first book, we can see her distinctive voice in poems whose line and music suggest her future development.

After the appearance of her first full-length book of poetry, Good Times, in 1969, Clifton wrote steadily and assuredly, publishing poetry, children's books, and even prose. In tracing the roots and telling the tales of a black family, her groundbreaking memoir Generations (1976) could be said to forecast the rise in the attention paid to black genealogy. But Clifton's poetry also critiques family and country, mourns and makes known what one book of hers calls "the terrible stories." She's as interested in soul as body, her poetry paying "homage to my hips" and providing "wishes for sons"; biblical in her lines as Whitman, she invites an American "I," this time lowercase.

To mention Clifton's winning Jeopardy is not to say that Clifton is interested in trivia, but rather, in knowledge. Like Pablo Neruda, she writes of love, politics, loneliness, and justice. Like Neruda, she crafts odes to her elements (cooking greens), the body (hair, hips), spirit, and a large-scale idea of America. One of these includes what it means to be a black woman, something Clifton names, implies, connects with, and calls out from—often to her fellow women poets, from Gwendolyn Brooks to Margaret Walker to the late Adrienne Rich. One of her earliest poems, from the 1950s, is "To E.D."—Emily Dickinson, whose short lines and unique punctuation, or lack thereof, Clifton would seem to call kin.

In Clifton's hands, the ordinary, including punctuation, is transformed—like Superman, who figures in some of her poems, she leaps and soars, crossing bridges as one poem has it, "between starshine and clay." She is also a poet often engaged with the mystic, whether in receiving "messages from the Ones" or writing as the "two-headed woman," that soothsayer and homemade prophet. If Whitman's poetic self contained a multitude, Clifton embraces the multicultural multitude by writing through the fact and metaphor of family.

Curated with Amy Hildreth Chen, Emory PhD student in English, this exhibition includes a family reunion of writings by Clifton taken from her archive in the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library—ranging from her earliest poems with their delicate penmanship, to poems composed on her beloved Videowriter word-processor, to last works composed at writer's workshops, dashed off in an email, or found in her many daybooks. All are on view here in an exhibition that only hints at the breadth of her work and the richness of Emory's holdings.