Houses of God

Carlton Wilkinson is in the back room of his Jefferson Street gallery. African masks peer down from one wall, but every other available square inch of space seems to be taken up by paintings.

Dressed in blue short pants, tennis shoes, and a Chattanooga folk festival T-shirt, Wilkinson is digging through a stack of papers. Then the pleasant, 37-year-old Nashville native takes a big cardboard box under his arm, pulls up a chair, and sits down. Jazz is playing on the stereo. The space is cool and serene.

Wilkinson opens the box. He pulls out a stack of photographs. The prints themselves are big—16 by 20 inches. He begins flipping through them, explaining why each of them is important to him.

“This is St. John’s Missionary Baptist Church, in Isoqueena County, Miss.,” Wilkinson says. The left side of the photograph shows a small structure, part wood, part brick. You would hardly know it as a church were it not for a squat, wooden steeple that juts from the roof.

Huge oak trees tower into the sky behind the church. In front are rows of soybeans and corn. The church is weather-beaten, and its paint is peeling. But in the photograph, the church also has great dignity—it is as much a part of the landscape as the trees, the crops, and the towering clouds in the sky. It is a church where a black congregation worships. In Wilkinson’s photograph, it appears to be saying it has nothing on its mind other than doing God’s work in this most simple of places.

Wilkinson had heard about the church while doing research at the Martin Luther King Center in Atlanta. The only roads leading to St. John’s Missionary Baptist were dirt; the Mississippi River flowed by just a quarter-mile away. When Wilkinson got there, he discovered that the church was so remote that it only held services once every two weeks. A circuit-riding preacher would show up every other Sunday to conduct services.

In Wilkinson’s photograph, the church seems to be the essence of peaceful solitude, but things were different three decades ago. “This church,” Wilkinson explains, “got bombed in ’65 because it started a Head Start program. When they rebuilt it, they rebuilt it with fireproof brick.”

Wilkinson was drawn to the church because of its role in the civil rights movement. While St. John’s Missionary Baptist Church is not as well known as some of the larger black churches that actively pushed for integration, it still played a role in integrating the South. Thus, like those larger churches in Birmingham, Jackson, and Nashville, St. John’s came under Wilkinson’s lens.

Time exposure

Wilkinson spent the entire summer of 1984 traveling through Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, photographing some 25 black churches that had become recognized landmarks in the civil rights movement. At the time, Wilkinson was getting his master’s in fine arts at U.C.L.A. The photographs were his master’s thesis.

In the annals of academic research, where most theses are more valuable as scrap paper than as living documents, Wilkinson’s work has achieved a degree of immortality. The photographs of the churches became a one-man show, “On the Altar of Liberty: Historical African-American Churches in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s-60s.” After the show premiered at U.C.L.A., Wilkinson’s work was featured in one-man exhibitions in Santa Barbara, Calif., at Fisk and Vanderbilt Universities, at Notre Dame and Bethune-Cookman College and in Los Angeles.

Wilkinson hasn’t shown his church photographs anywhere since 1991, although there has been some interest from the newly opened Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. Many of the prints were recently purchased by BellSouth and are on display in the lobby of the company’s new downtown building. Prints are also in the collections of the Metro Airport Authority, the Grunwald Center of Prints and Photographs in Los Angeles, and several private collectors, including Nashville Mayor Phil Bredesen and his wife, Andrea Conte.

The most important collector of Wilkinson’s church photographs may be the Schomburg Center, which is part of the New York Public Library System. Located in Harlem, the Schomburg Center acts as the leading photographic, artistic, and written archive of African-American history in the United States. It purchased an entire set of the church photographs.

Gathering places

“The reason this came about was I wanted to do something on civil rights,” Wilkinson says. “And in talking with my mother and others, the church was always the center point of life in the black community.

“The fact is, this whole show was motivated by my childhood experience—I remember King being killed and the tanks in Centennial Park, and I remember how the church fit into everything.”

Wilkinson’s mother is DeLois Wilkinson, who was a prominent figure in the civil rights dialogue in the ’60s. The Wilkinsons worshiped at First Baptist Church Capitol Hill, where the undisputed giant among Nashville’s black preachers, Dr. Kelly Miller Smith, was minister. First Baptist Capitol Hill served as the community center for black worshipers.