using a photograph to ponder race and the urban space

While waiting for yet another round of bad weather to pass through Tuscaloosa, I continued thinking about this fall course and where I might take the students on a field trip. Last year, a planned trip to Sloss Furnaces was cancelled because of weather (Weather is a common theme around here. This is interesting for someone who is from South Florida where we have time to prepare for hurricanes).

I am considering Sloss again, but also downtown Birmingham. What stories will we intuit about the past by examining buildings in this city whose initial rise in the late nineteenth century owed largely to the arrival of steel and the railroad?

I wonder, too, about the opportunities for discovering things that late nineteenth century American cities have in common with other cities in other "spaces." The photograph here features a woman of African descent in Puerto Rico in the late nineteenth century. Two things struck me:

1) Only a year before this photo was taken, the United States made claims on Puerto Rico, an archipelago whose name is translated as "rich port." Port cities in and outside of the United States are generally one of the first places we can look to see wealth as people and commerce have across time moved through ports. This was certainly true in the States during the nineteenth century, but also earlier and later.

2) The woman is standing against an old building where a peeling theatre sign hangs. Evidently, an increasingly modern world here presented time for leisure moments, something Gunther Barth points out in his study of city culture in America. He, among other things, uncovers how vaudeville,  another source of entertainment, figured into the rise of urban life in the States. That said, black face entertainment in vaudeville houses revealed the ongoing conflict between people based on wealth and skin color. Such conflict is also evident in Puerto Rico if we ponder the caption under this image, which first appeared in an 1899 book.  According to the caption, the woman is considered attractive partly because she is biracial and not entirely of African descent (One aside, Eileen K. Suarez Findlay has written an outstanding study on the turn-of-the-century surveillance of women of African descent). 

But being of African descent was not the only thing that resulted in racial division in America and the Atlantic World. As the students in this course will learn,   there was also tension between white Europeans, a topic addressed in part by, among others, Dr. Jenny Shaw of UA's History Department.