OVER the years I must have been to dozens of exhibitions on black liberation. Some in Britain, some in Australia, some in the US and one in South Africa which had me in tears when I saw on display a “Free Mandela” sticker that I had designed for the Young Communist League in London in the 1960s.

They were all about the politics and the campaigning but, this spring, the Turner Contemporary Gallery on Margate’s traditional seafront has an amazing exhibition that looks at this subject from a totally unique point of view.

The exhibition looks at the way the various arts have reflected the amazing struggle of black people in the US’s southern states, particularly in the battle for civil rights.

The exhibition, entitled We Will Walk — Art and Resistance in the American South, runs until May 3 this year. It showcases the work of all sorts of artists from Alabama and surrounding states.

This is the first exhibition of its kind in Britain and reveals a little-known aspect of the civil rights struggle from the 1950s until today.

It brings together sculptural assemblages, paintings and quilts by more than 20 African American artists who lived through the civil rights struggle and its aftermath, often in conditions of dire poverty.  

Times were hard, certainly too hard for artists to buy expensive materials like paints and canvas. So much of the work is characterised by the remaking and reusing of materials.

These works are often assemblages — sculptures made from found objects, like old tree roots and even a weathered rocking chair.

The symbol of the exhibition is Ralph Griffin’s eagle with outstretched wings from scraps of old wood. Griffin worked on a cotton farm, and spent years working as a labourer and later as a security guard.

Griffin’s eagle is alive, about to fly, and you can see that the artist was not only recording what he had seen so often soaring in the Alabama sky but also was yearning to take wing himself.

The exhibition draws on the tradition of the Yard Show, temporary outdoor displays made from salvaged materials assembled and displayed in the yards or porches of, often slum, housing.

One such artist whose work is on show at Margate is Thornton Dial who was born in 1928 to a teenage mother, Mattie Bell, on a former Alabama cotton plantation.

In 1940, when he was 12, Dial moved to Bessemer, Alabama, where he noticed the art in people’s yards and decided to have a go himself.

In Bessemer, Dial worked as a metalworker building railroad cars. Today his work is heralded in international arts circles.

Over the years, his work has expanded to showcase political and social ideas about black history, slavery and racial discrimination.

Other notable works include the root sculptures of Bessie Harvey. She was one of 13 children. Married at 14, she was raising 11 children by the age of 35.  As a child she created her own toys and colourful dolls.

Harvey’s sculptures — some still dolls — are typically wood decorated with paint, beads, shells, cloth, and other found materials.

Her work first gained attention when she entered a piece in the Blount Memorial Hospital’s annual art show in 1974, where she was working as a housekeeper’s aid.

One of the doctors introduced her to a New York City gallery. Now her work is in galleries and private collections all over the world.

Emmer Sewell’s iconic sculptures are created from unlikely found objects like tyres, old fridges and dog kennels. She finds them around her home in Marion County. Sewell, one of 14 children, started drawing very young often after a hard day’s work harvesting cotton.

Without even paper and pencil her medium was the muddy ground left after the cotton harvest. She shows her political sympathies with a series of Black Panther scarecrows and today her work is shown in major galleries including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

A superb extra feature of the exhibition features civil rights-inspired music playing in the exhibition spaces with some amazing tracks from Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit to numbers from Nina Simone, Bob Dylan, John Coltrane, Joan Baez and more.

One story told at the exhibition is of the remarkable women quilt makers of Gee’s Bend — a small, remote exclusively black community in Alabama.

Today their abstract quilts, made of recycled fabrics and clothing are being compared to some of the US’s most outstanding abstract painters. The Turner’s exhibition has a rich collection of these quilts.

Gee’s Bend was a plantation of slaves on an island surrounded by the Alabama River. The only way on and off the island was by ferry.

In 1967, at the height of the battle for civil rights, the only way for blacks to cross the river to register to vote was by ferry.

The local white authority simply shut the ferry, imprisoning the Gee’s Bend population in what seemed to them to be a concentration camp. The ferry would not be allowed to run again until 2006.

Gee’s Bend quilt makers have produced countless patchwork masterpieces beginning as far back as the mid-19th century. Early examples, on show in Margate, date from the 1920s.

These astounding creations constitute a crucial chapter in the history of African American art. Quilt making gave black women an opportunity to meet together and talk without fear of retribution from white racist authorities.

I’m sure these black women discussed and planned far more than what scrap of fabric they would sew into their next quilt.

Few other places can boast the extent of Gee’s Bend’s artistic achievement, the result of both geographical isolation and an unusual degree of cultural continuity.

In few places elsewhere have works been found by three and sometimes four generations of women in the same family.

Many of the, exclusively female, quilt makers bear the name Pettway — the name enforced on them by slave owner Mark H Pettway who bought the plantation and hundreds of slaves in 1845.

When a collection of quilts from Gee’s Bend was shown at the Houston Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum in New York City, they set the world of conventional US art aflame.

Several leading critics compared the abstract quilts with the very best of contemporary US abstract painting.

Music and craft come together in Margate with the collection of remarkable guitars by Freeman Vines. One is made from the wood of an ancient tree with a long history of racist lynchings.

Some fine documentary photographs show some of the artists at work and reveal the links between their art, and its context.

The exhibition looks at a wider time scale than just the years of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. It also looks at centuries of slavery, segregation, racial persecution, lynchings and white supremacy movements like the Ku Klux Klan throughout the US’s history.

A video of Angela Davis talking about W E B Du Bois links just two amazing heroes at two different times in this immense struggle.

Sadly in their captioning the exhibition, curators fail to mention that both the speaker and her subject we members of the Communist Party USA.

Books by authors like Davis and James Baldwin are part of a useful and surprisingly large collection of books, pamphlets and other material that you are encouraged to sit in comfort and read at you leisure.

Produced from the mid-20th century to the present, many of the artworks have come to Europe for the first time.

In an era of worldwide protest on the streets, We Will Walk addresses issues of race, class and resistance through a diverse range of works developed outside of the mainstream.

We Will Walk is at the Turner Contemporary, Rendezvous, Margate, Kent CT9 1HG, Tel 01843 233 000 [email protected]
The show is open to May 3 2020. Admission in free.