Lillian Pruitt-Goins

Cinema & Media Studies and American Studies major

I am a multidisciplinary scholar and artist. African American, born and raised in Conway and Little Rock, Arkansas, where and who I am from informs my work and craft. I am an American Studies and Cinema and Media Studies student who has concentrated my studies in African American Visual Culture with art history, history, and studio classes. Fascinated by found objects and photography, I first fell in love with contemporary art when I encountered how it can be used as a tool for cultural expression and education, as well as social critique. I am conscious of the history of photography and its complexities in the imaging of marginalized people; with this consciousness, I am intrigued by rescriptions that are used with tools that have formerly caused harm by the descendants of the harmed.

John Carter: Broadway and Ninth

archival inkjet prints, digital scans of 4x5 Kodak Portra film

Jewett Hallway Galleries

This series of prints images the spirit of John Carter. John Carter, an African American man of either 22 or 38, per various sources, lived in Little Rock, Arkansas, my home, where my family still lives. In fact, the landscapes that this project features are just blocks away from my aunt’s home. This is jarring considering the history of what happened here, at this intersection of Broadway and Ninth St, which is layered with varying transparencies of Carter’s portrait.

On May 4th, 1927, John Carter was made a victim of racialized terror and violence. On May 4th, 1927, an angry white mob kidnapped John Carter, hanged him from a telephone pole, and shot him. The mob then attached John Carter’s body to a caravan of cars, dragging him through the streets of Little Rock. They stopped the parade of John Carter’s corpse at Broadway and Ninth Street, the center of the city’s African American community. An estimated 5,000 white people including women carrying babies, rioted at Broadway and Ninth for hours. The mob tore doors and stole furniture from Black homes in the neighborhood, building a bonfire in which they burned John Carter’s body. Despite police presence, the police did nothing to stop the violence. Instead, they directed traffic around the mob, traffic which was also being directed by members of the mob violence using John Carter’s charred limbs, broken off his body. The rioting continued for hours until the Arkansas National Guard was deployed to the site.

The next day, police arrested a boy for selling pictures of John Carter’s lynched body for fifteen cents a copy.

That image, although accessible, is intentionally not featured in this project. Instead, I chose to reveal John Carter’s face, his only portrait, to force the confrontation with this human subject to the most horrific, yet normalized, violence I can imagine. To this day, images of Black death dominate representations of African Americans–a legacy of the normalized terror of African American people and the documentation of it, which became a cultural currency. The boy selling the pictures of John Carter’s lynched body is a sign of the times, as photographs of lynchings across the United States were exchanged as postcards, often with violent white mobs posing with the dead Black bodies. Lynchings were spectacles, and they were community gatherings.

The Lynching of John Carter was not the only instance of racial terror in Arkansas. Other massacres are public knowledge in this place I call home. What is harrowing about Broadway and Ninth Street, and what happened to John Carter, is that I have been through and at the very intersection of his burning countless times. It is the site of the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center, a museum of African American history, as well as where the African American community has annual Juneteenth celebrations. I am horrified by the spirit of violence that thousands of Arkansans coexist with daily: the ground we must come in contact with, which contains the last trace of John Carter’s body, unjustly turned to dust. What remains to demarcate it all? Nothing–no plaque, no memorial.

I embarked on this project to impose some sort of trace of John Carter on Broadway and Ninth, not to trap him in the associations of his horrific death, but to make visible the history of the place, which is trafficked by hundreds of Arkansans daily.

I made these photographs with a large-format camera. An analog process made with 4x5 color film, some of the photographs are quadruple exposures, others are light leaks that I edited in post. I embraced the light leaks–they felt spiritual, as if John Carter’s spirit entered the frame and mediated the experience of standing at the intersection. For each photo but the one in the center, I layered John Carter’s portrait and reduced the opacity, conveying a spiritual haunting and intrigued by which images made his features more or less visible. For the image in the center, I printed the quadruple exposure of Broadway and Ninth, exposed at each corner of the intersection. I printed the image and burned it, invoking the bonfire, but layering it over a print of John Carter’s portrait, allowing his visibility to prevail through the violence, which was not afforded in the happenings of his tragic murder.

I do not entertain the idea that John Carter’s spirit is trapped in the location of such a demoralizing and generationally traumatic episode of mob violence. I correct the erasure of white supremacist violence for the benefit of pacification. Acknowledging the history of Broadway and Ninth is not divisive. The goal of this acknowledgment is not to assail a certain demographic. The goal is to make John Carter visible in the context of a place that rendered him otherwise. The hypervisibility of Blackness has always been dangerous; optionally described as the “visibility trap,” being gazed upon does not always mean you are seen. Like countless Black men, women, and children, a representation of Blackness was imposed on Carter and was used to justify the mob violence that followed. When the reasoning of the mob violence can be likened to contemporary corporal and state violence, making known the story of John Carter, is integral to informing the shifts we shall make for a better future. This is what depicting John Carter as spectral achieves. Knowing about him shifted how I see my home and how I imagine its future. He has a legacy that can be reflected and preserved, despite the limits of his representation.

 << previous artist |  back to Tender Instincts  |  next artist >>