Appearances and (Non)Erasures: Mapping Confederate Monuments and the Racial Conditionedness of Liberation

"The nonviolent sit-in during the civil rights movement was a radical act of defi- ance that exceeds the possibility of photographic representation. Civil rights protesters routinely faced mortal danger at the hands of law enforcement, whether in the form of water cannons, dogs, or arrest, and it was within this state of normalized violence that the “Greensboro Four”—Ezell Blair Jr., David Richmond, Franklin McCain, and Joseph McNeil, young African American stu-dents at North Carolina A&T University—staged the first sit-in on February 1, 1960, at the Woolworth’s lunch counter. They broke Jim Crow laws, challenged the racist legal system, faced taunts and physical abuse by white patrons, and confronted the threat of being thrown in jail or even the loss of their lives. They took radical action to bring about radical change" 

Appearances and (Non)Erasures: Mapping Confederate Monuments and the Racial Conditionedness of Liberation, by Mario Gooden

Excerpted from "Appearances and Erasures," ...and other such stories, Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2019.