I’ve just finished reading Elizabeth Abel’s
Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow
(University of California Press, 2010). Spread across a vast region of the
Southern United States, Jim Crow signage confirmed the remarginalization of
African Americans in the aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Abel
does not consider these signs within a design tradition, but I do; for several
years I’ve been collecting examples of miscellaneous “Whites Only” and “Colored
This Way” signs. When seen as part of a lost design history, they
challenge us to reconsider our notions of design during this period. Can
these signs be considered a repressed underside to the work of Otl Aicher at the 1972 Summer Olympics at
Munich or the AIGA’s sign symbol system for the US
Department of Transportation? Only traces of these segregation signs remain
today. After years of research, Abel notes that she has found roughly a hundred
images of Jim Crow signs. I add this striking image, taken by Gordon Parks for Life
magazine in 1956.
