When Design (nearly) Solved Systemic Racism in America

[There's that amazing TikTok post by Joy Oladokun "Graphic Design is the Cure to Racism" suggesting pics of a Black hand and a white hand interlaced is the perfect distraction. Consider this a 60-year old attempt...]

In 1958, before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, before bussing to integrate schools, before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but just a few years after Rosa Parks and Brown v. Board of Education, there was an Expo (World’s Fair) in Brussels the US participated in with a major pavilion…and a minor one that was briefly the first official attempt at acknowledging the issue of racism in America. And it was primarily an exercise in design that carried the message.

It wasn’t just altruism (or an advanced moral compass); the Cold War was raging and one of the most potent rejoinders, to the US accusing The Soviet Union of human rights violations, was the Soviets pointing back at America’s hypocrisy in its inability to address racial discrimination. “Call us when you’ve solved your own human rights (i.e. race) issues” was the convenient brushoff used then, just as it is used now, by every country with human rights records as bad as, or worse, than the US. To preempt this familiar response the organizers of the USA Pavilion, at the time the USIA (US Information Agency) who ran the Pavilion (unlike now, a catastrophe we can discuss later) with a fair amount of independence to promote the US abroad.

Expo’s have always been venues for international bragging rights, soft diplomacy and commercial promotion. Occasionally there is even some hard diplomacy, as at the American Pavilion during the Expo-like bilateral show in Moscow in 1959, where Khrushchev and Nixon sparred over the representation of the typical US kitchen, leading to one of the funniest international incidents ever. The guy walking Khrushchev around was Jack Masey, who later ran the Expo unit (and whose books are the main source material for any reevaluation of those Expos) building something like 6 or 7 Class One USA Pavilions, hiring Buckminster Fuller, Chermayeff & Geismar, The Eames, George Nelson, Fumihiko Maki and everyone else, not on a competitive price basis, but just because they were the best.

The State Department controlled the USIA and the messages conveyed to the world via these pavilions, and took a tiny step by authorizing a minuscule side show about race in America, or what was called “The Negro Problem”. That label is a pretty good indication of how the onus of American racism was shifted to Black America; it was the Negro problem, not white America’s problem. The micro-pavilion, outside the actual USA Pavilion, was officially “Unfinished Business”, but was titled “The unfinished work” on site (actually displayed in lower case, another way to de-emphasize the exhibit), though whose unfinished work it refers to is unclear. The preemptive role of the exhibit was paramount, but the message had to be tempered to admit as little as was necessary to avoid the Soviet charge of hypocrisy.

It was 1958, after all, and segregation (American Apartheid, really) was a mainstream ideology, including nearly every southern senator. Senator Strom Thurmond took the Senate floor in the longest talking filibuster (more than 24 hours) to derail the 1957 Civil Rights Act. He failed, it passed, but the bill was largely emasculated; it set up a Civil Rights Commission and began the process of creating a foundation for later bills. Maybe that was the unfinished business?!

It seems, on one level, shocking that serious men (there was a single woman and no African Americans in the 1957 Senate) would publicly proclaim that segregation was ‘best for both races’, but how different is that now? Yes, there are more women and blacks in the Senate (though the single black Republican is, to put it mildly, sitting on the wrong side of the aisle) and yes, it is now primarily Republicans whose racism is on the surface today (as opposed to the Dixiecrats i.e. racist Democrats).

In 1957, as a result of Brown v. Bd. of Ed., schools in Little Rock Arkansas were to be integrated, starting with an all-white high school in which 9 carefully selected African American students were enrolled. The governor called out the National Guard, not to protect the students (by then called the Little Rock Nine, further de-humanizing these highly qualified Black students) but to bar them from the school to ‘prevent violence’. The violence, of course, was from white students, not the few petrified Black students just trying to get a better education.

The National Guard was federalized by President Eisenhower and ordered to protect the Little Rock Nine as they entered the school. The Nine were spat upon, screamed at and suffered a year of abuse and threats, all of which was covered in international press. At the end of the year, the local superintendent decided to close all the schools and lease them to private schools, which would continue segregation. This just increased white resentment and hatred, further confirming to the local government that violence needed to be prevented by not integrating schools. It was against this background that the State Dept. recognized that saying nothing was worse than saying something and planned for a tiny gesture to forestall criticism. It didn’t go as planned.

The hundreds of state bills being passed today to suppress voting by people of color is nothing less than proof that the legacy of the ’50s is a country as fully steeped in maintaining white minority rule today as then. Looking at America in 1958 feels way too familiar; despite massive change in technology, medicine, culture, global independence and virtually every metric of life on earth the problem of race in America persists and the tale of the 1958 Expo seems eerily current. The consistent message is ‘do as little as possible to appear to be addressing an issue you have no intention of attempting to solve’.

Into this highly charged moment Leo Lionni, the renowned graphic designer who was the Art Director at Fortune Magazine, owned by Henry Luce, was drafted to design a small mini-pavilion in an adjacent garden. The design was perfect, and today looks utterly modern:

Three elevated units, like tiny train cars linked by a single linear path through them all, were set up as a guided tour of the “Unfinished Business” of the US. Sitting on delicate little legs it was the allegorical form that was so remarkable; the first ‘car’ was ‘crushed’ into a crystalline folded form with triangular panels painted in whites, browns and blacks (get it?); the second began to unfold with larger less fractured geometry, painted in red, white and black (again, get it?); the third most optimistic unit had flattened out entirely and was painted in blue and white…

Inside, the first fractured car was lined with photos and images of newspaper headlines chronicling the unrest that was the ‘problem’; the second began to suggest efforts and ‘solutions’; while the third was an aspirational view of children playing together in a totally unselfconsciously diverse way. It was so simple, so anodyne by today’s standards, that any objection would seem hard to support, but members of Congress didn’t see it that way…to some it was an unfairly one-sided view of race relations in America(!), as if the racist side had not been properly represented.

Unsurprisingly the grievance politics of the right has a long history. The last president spent an inordinate amount of time, and his acolytes have carried on, complaining how he was treated more unfairly than anyone, ever, in the history of the world. The most powerful man on earth whined constantly that he was the victim, just as the members of the 1958 Congress who heard about the exhibit (which none, btw, had bothered to actually see in person) whined about how the other side of the apartheid in the south had not been represented. And they were right; the oppressor’s views were not in need of explication.

In a letter from Senator Talmadge of Georgia he objected to the exhibit on several grounds, which can be deconstructed into a conceptual playbook for every objection then and now:

It’s an internal issue, not one for public airing

“It is incomprehensible to me that the United States Government should be a party, whether directly or indirectly, to a fawning display of its internal problems before the rest of the world” which cannot “by any stretch of the imagination be said to be one of legitimate concern to the citizens of other countries”

[The Trump administration altered the Voice of America mission to avoid any criticism of right wing efforts in its international broadcasts]

It is entirely one-sided

“the Fortune exhibits will present only one side of this issue and will seek to show in the worst possible light those states and regions of our country in which segregated society has proved to be in the best interest of all races concerned”.

[‘there are very fine people…on both sides’ was Trump’s attempt to balance racists and neo-Nazis with the anti-fascist protestors in Charlottesville]

Simple fairness demands a false equivalency

“Even assuming for the sake of argument that such exhibits are a proper subject for international presentation, it would only a matter of simple fairness to the taxpayers of the South who are paying their proportionate share of the bill for American participation in the Exposition that both sides be presented and conclusions left to the viewers”.

[Trump crafted the 1776 Project to rebut the 1619 Project, essentially creating a government-sponsored propaganda project to counter an entirely private NY Times project to more clearly frame slavery in the creation of the American ideal]

An insult to States and States Rights

“such exhibits constitutes an unwarranted invasion of the rights and prerogatives of the States of the South and constitutes a gross insult to the good name and conscientious citizens of that region”.

[Trump and others claimed that Confederate statues, erected decades after the end of the Civil War to legitimize Jim Crow and minority oppression, were just there to celebrate the pride of the South. You know, just like all the statues of Hitler in Germany are there just to…what, there are none?!]

It’s Not Your Place to Judge

“I call on you…to repudiate the impression that the Dept. of State has set itself up as an arbiter of right and wrong in matters of purely internal import”.

[In response to Putin’s tendency to murder his opposition Trump said “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?”]

And The State Department Reaction…

The response from the Dept. of State was swift and dismissive (just kidding, they folded immediately, even crafting language to shift blame from content to craftsmanship):

“exhibit be closed as soon as possible without creating undue press furor not repeat not on grounds of subject matter but because of poor craftsmanship”.

Well played John Foster Dulles.

Whether our more contemporary example is the removal of artwork at the Brooklyn Museum found ungenerous to racists (thanks, Rudy Giuliani) or the creation of the “Lost Cause” narrative for the Civil War, or the deliberate conflation of ‘systemic racism’ with ‘racist people’ by the right (to object as a personal insult to that which is describing an irrefutable description of the economic and social structure of the US) not much has changed.

Of course, the exhibition was altered and then declared a success by sycophantic diplomats, but what was lost was a chance for America to confront, in the tamest possible ways, a legacy that looks like it may never be reconciled. Unlike Germany, that (eventually) looked at Nazism and the holocaust, genocide, cultural theft, human atrocities and distortion of an entire generation of Germans with an eye toward a genuine societal reconciliation. Or unlike South Africa and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that heard from both victims and perpetrators of apartheid to attempt a meaningful reassembly of society. These cultures at least attempted to look at problems squarely with hope for resolution; the US has done none of the work, none of the admission of guilt, none of the genuine reparation that will need to be sorted out to reassemble American society.

Now it is Critical Race Theory that is getting the ‘white people are the victims’ treatment. The vociferous denials and legislative bans from teaching CRT, are precisely the proof that CRT is indeed describing a real racist phenomenon in America; the irony seems lost on the perpetrators. The further irony that America at my birth has looped back decades later to resurrect (or simply be less hidden about) the same racist issues today is not lost on me.

Without projects like ‘Unfinished Business’ we will continue to face divisions in society that are unlikely to heal. And it is so reassuring that the power of design can actually move things and people closer, as long as those in charge of Congress don’t undo the good. We weren’t ready for it in 1958, or 1964 or today, but perhaps one day.

And let’s hope there is a Leo Lionni at hand to translate our needs into an emotionally powerful, timeless design.

Or we could just rebuild Leo’s original idea.