Lynne Scott Constantine
Digital Photomontage, 2023-2024. 28” x 20”

Museums are vital. They solidify the palpable reality of the past. But for me, learning the back story of the Red Shirt in the museum case can’t be the whole story. Encasing the red shirt in a museum’s glass case is a way of making it not just past but “the” past, giving its actions weight and permanence. So I designed this artwork as an anti-memorial, pulling against the shirt’s centrality. I wanted also to mark the triumphant resistance, the human resilience that will not take a brutal no for its ultimate answer.

Since the actions of the Red Shirts were intended to keep Black Americans from voting and holding political power, to get beyond the museum case I began researching all those Americans, especially Black Americans, who keep fighting for voting rights and full equality despite violence, intimidation, and utter disrespect.

Here, the witnessing consciousness goes beyond witnessing. She steps away from the museum case, and she gets to work.

Image Sources: The red shirt in the image is a highly manipulated version of an 1890s Red Shirt in the collection of the North Carolina Museum of History. Since the Wilmington massacre and coup was an egregious attempt to deny Black voting and political rights, the photographs on the borders of the image memorialize several extraordinary contributors to the effort to secure those rights. From the top left: Mary Church Terrell, first president of the National Association of Colored Women, seen here picketing in front of the White House in January 1917 (Library of Congress); Captain Richard Etheridge, who commanded the first all-Black lifesaving crew at the Pea Island Lifesaving Station and who objected when the Union Army failed to keep its promises to grant land to the Blacks of the Freedmen’s Colony on Roanoke Island (US Coast Guard Historian’s Office); Anna Julia Cooper, feminist and suffragist, author of “A Voice from the South, by a Black Woman of the South” (Library of Congress); Thurgood Marshall, who argued landmark civil rights cases and was the first Black justice on the US Supreme Court (Associated Press); and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, journalist and civil rights leader (from the 1893 book, “Women of Distinction,” Wikimedia Commons). Also on the border is a banner from the National Association of Colored Women bearing the organization’s motto, “Lifting as We Climb” (NACWC archives). The silhouettes in the photomontage are derived from a photograph I made and have manipulated for use in the artworks in this exhibition.