"'FEEL LIKE I DIED AND WENT TO HEAVEN!"
"'FEEL LIKE I DIED AND WENT TO HEAVEN!" was the response of a Ku-Klux-Klansman to a TV-reporter's question as he celebrated his aquittal on a charge of 'violating the rights' of five victims who, four years earlier, he and others had killed during a 1979 anti-Klan rally in Greensboro, North Carolina. They had already been aquitted of the video-taped murders, which were witnessed on nationally-networked television. The jury that aquitted them was all-white. The five dead were four white men and a black woman, all members of the Communist Workers' Party. As I write there are proceedings against the Greensboro police and Federal agents for alleged complicity.
This image is a memorial to the victims and events, but also an allegory of the societal-conditioning necessary to produce such events while a whole nation watches.
_from the series: A Brief US History, 1985 [18 non-digital, single-exposure, performed photomontages]
