By Emily Mosier
Troy University’s Rosa Parks Museum, located on the Montgomery campus, held its 8th annual Juneteenth celebration this past weekend, and visitors viewed an art exhibition that focused on privilege and discrimination.
The celebration on Saturday included live Jazz and R&B music, arts and crafts for kids, vendors, and workshops exploring wealth and history.
“We hope people will be moved by this and go out to educate their kids or grandkids that this is where we were in this country . . . to hopefully empower and educate future generations,” said Donna Beisel, Curator and Director of operations for the Rosa Parks Museum.
Juneteenth, which is observed each year on June 19th, commemorates the end of American slavery; In 2021, President Joe Biden signed legislation making Juneteenth a federal holiday, as told by The New York Times.
The Rosa Parks Museum’s new exhibition is called “Illusions of my Childhood” and was created by Mississippi native Stephen Mangum.
The collection features twelve paintings, many six feet tall, of Mangum’s young, blonde grandchildren innocently eating ice cream and candy. The children are painted over stark depictions of black and white photos from the American civil rights era, including a lynching, marching Klansmen, and Bloody Sunday protestors being beaten.
“The way that I could best convey the message was to bring back images from the 1960s and then in a sense superimposed the current day . . . [by] painting the portraits of my grandchildren with a degree of transparency that would allow the background to come through to show that the past permeates the present,” Mangum said. “I would hope that as college students come through the Rosa Parks Museum and see the work that they question the purpose of it, that they are provoked into thinking about the issues, and they are stimulated to learn further.”
Mangum explained that the series was inspired after he recently learned more about Emmett Till, a young black boy who was murdered in 1955 after being accused of talking to a white woman. Mangum also spoke about how the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. – when Mangum was fourteen-years-old – altered how he viewed the world he was growing up in.
“It was the first time that I really became aware of the depth of the hostility that surrounded the civil rights movement, that to have so much hatred to kill somebody, just because they’re trying to level the playing field, which is just beyond comprehension,” Mangum said.
Beisel said the artwork explores topics of racism, privilege, and violence that are still relevant today.
“We chose to display it during this holiday to try to teach people where we came from, connecting those past events to issues that we’re still struggling with,” Beisel said.
“Illusions of My Childhood” will run until July 22nd, but the whole collection can be viewed on Mangum’s website. To read more about the Juneteenth celebration, visit Troy.Today.
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