Ralph Daily from Birmingham, United States – The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts – CC BY 2.0
The victory Black people (and their supporters) achieved in the U.S. South in the 1960s assured they could vote, hold political office, and benefit from constitutional rights like due process. Oppression remained, however, and not only in the South.
Black people are sicker than whites and die earlier. Schools they attend are inferior. Wealth and income discrepancies are vast. They serve prison time disproportionally.
Meanwhile, white and Black politicians in the South developed working relations. Influential white people looked to be backing away from overt racism. Recently in Alabama, however, old ways were on vivid display.
The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts hired a nationwide artists’ organization, the For Freedoms group, to create images for billboards it sponsored in Montgomery. One of them appearing in early September showed two black-face minstrel-show performers, complete with the genre’s red noses. The words “It’s Time to Get the Clowns Out!” lie above the two faces.
A billboard in Montgomery, Ala., featuring racist blackface imagery alongside a MAGA slogan, was removed after sparking community outrage. Credit: BlackPressUSA / Screenshot from WKRG TV broadcast.
Already in January other racist billboards had cropped up in the city and in Montgomery County. These versions showed an iconic news photo of Selma’s “Bloody Sunday” on March 7, 1965 which portrays massed state troopers confronting civil rights defenders on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Civil rights hero John Lewis appears. The words that time were: “Make America Great Again.”
“Contributed”, according to 1819news.com
On both occasions the billboards noted sponsorship by the Montgomery Fine Arts Museum. Both times, city authorities ordered them taken down.
Montgomery Mayor Steven Reed, quoted in a September 10 news report, stated that “We must be extremely mindful of how we use such images of our shared history, especially when they risk being perceived as politically charged … Our history deserves to be treated with the utmost respect and care, ensuring it unifies rather than divides us as a community.”
The reporter notes that the “decision to take down the billboard exposed a deeper conflict between the city and the museum’s leadership.” One board of trustees appointed by the city council and another appointed by the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts Association administer the Museum jointly. The city owns the Museum facilities and pays for employee salaries and upkeep.
A permanent director has been lacking ever since Mayor Reed fired the last one in 2023. The board named by the Museum Association owns the art collection and is responsible for its curation. Its members are donors, company executives, and other well-heeled community members.
Mayor Reed, formerly a financial analyst and the youngest-ever county probate judge, scored an overwhelming electoral victory in 2019 to become Montgomery’s first African-descended mayor. Montgomery’s population is 60% Black; four Blacks serving on the nine-person city council.
It’s uncertain whether or not Black people’s assertion of political power in a society once given over to white supremacy is enough to account for tensions over the Museum or for the racist billboards. However, for Montgomery people still disappointed about Black people gaining some freedoms, physical remainders of struggle over racial oppression might inflame their residual anti-Black sentiments.
Montgomery, the so-called “cradle of the Confederacy,” is full of such reminders. The Southern Poverty Law Center and Equal Justice Initiative are there. Each is a foremost advocate and partisan on behalf of Black people victimized by legal and societal injustices.
The Equal Justice Initiative has provided its National Memorial for Peace and Justice that commemorates lynching victims; its Legacy Museum; and the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park. The Southern Poverty Law Center offers a Civil Rights Memorial displaying the names of 41 people killed in struggle. Montgomery is home to the Rosa Parks Museum, Freedom Riders Museum, Dexter Parsonage museum, and Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.
Local heirs of the former segregationists can hardly avoid stumbling across these tokens of their damaged worldview. There is also discomfiture at a legacy they may inherit of backwardness and alleged criminality. They would be tired of sidestepping unspoken rebukes and holding in check lingering resentments.
Maybe some among the Museum’s decision-makers latched upon the billboards as a safe means for exercising old prejudices. Maybe they were seeking a low-key mode of giving a nod to white supremacy.
Fortunately for them, the MAGA-dominated U.S. government now offers easy resolution of any quandaries associated with expressing such preference. With its weaponization, the code word DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) signals in neutral-sounding, bureaucratic language the racist intentions of individuals, organizations, and agencies.
The post Alabama Fine Arts Museum Backs Racist Billboards appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by W. T. Whitney.
W. T. Whitney | Radio Free (2025-10-10T05:53:16+00:00) Alabama Fine Arts Museum Backs Racist Billboards. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2025/10/10/alabama-fine-arts-museum-backs-racist-billboards/
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