Mississippi 1964: Artist Statement
Tracy Sugarman (created by)
Offset lithograph on paper
16 inches H
X
13 1/2 inches W
Offset lithograph on paper. Westport artist Tracy Sugarman made over 100 pen-and-ink drawings from his experience during the Freedom Summer Project in Mississippi, many in turn executed after photographs he took during in 1964 and 1965. They demonstrate Sugarman's characteristic lively and spontaneous penwork, evocative ink wash technique, and focused compositions, effectively conveying the indelible moments, people, and places he encountered. In 1968, Sugarman donated his original civil rights-era drawings and photographs to Tougaloo College in Jackson MS, which published a selection as lithographs in a 1996 portfolio. This personal account, and six lithographs in the WestPAC collection, form part of that portfolio. TEXT: "Mississippi 1964 / When I went to the Mississippi Delta with student volunteers for “the long hot summer” of 1964, I wanted to bring back honest images of the reality of apartheid America in its darkest corners. Black Mississippians, the most powerless and exploited poor in the country, and a thousand young, unarmed students were challenging an armed, arrogant and utterly closed society. They were demanding the right of Black Americans to register and vote, and they were doing it nonviolently. It was a naked confrontation, a moral and political challenge that the South and all of American society had to meet. I was determined to report it in my drawings and words./ It was an exhilarating, frightening and inspiring crusade that I witnessed and participated in. With all the violence and all the fear that filled every waking hour, the most abiding memories are those of shared commitment and love that permeated America’s most favored children and her most wretched poor to work together and overcome./ By summer’s end those students had been murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. Scores of blacks and students had been savagely beaten. More than thirty churches had been torched by night-riders. But the nonviolent struggle had turned open the closed society and transformed Mississippi. I made more than one hundred drawings that summer of arrests, of Freedom Schools, of courthouse demonstrations, of picket lines, of the student volunteers and of the heroic blacks who opened their homes and their hearts to all of us who came. Tougaloo College was a certain sanctuary for the Civil Rights Movement, and it is fitting that the drawings made during those troubled times now have a permanent home there./ Fannie Lou Hammer, a very great heroine of the Mississippi struggle, tried to urge us all to “keep on keeping on.” They were wise and useful words. There’s a lot that needs doing in our society. I like to think that I’ll be able to put some of it down in black, white and color in the years ahead./ Tracy Sugarman
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