Knowing Their Space: Signs of
Jim Crow in the Segregated South
Elizabeth Guffey
Figure 1
Peter Sekaer, Movie Theater, Anniston,
Alabama, 1935-6. Courtesy of Peter
Sekaer estate.
“They had black, well it was “colored” back then, on one side and “white”
on the other, and we had our place on the bus, we had our water fountains
for coloreds and our bathrooms for coloreds . . . we figured that’s just the
way it’s supposed to be.”1
”Jim Crow” was a character portrayed by the black-face minstrel,
Thomas “Daddy” Rice, whose stage performances in the 1830s and
1840s typified many whites’ view of African-Americans through-
out the nineteenth century. Jim Crow segregationist signs, believed
to have been named for this character, are emblematic of south-
1 “Oral History Interview with Sheila
ern white leaders’ unrelenting effort to enforce African-American
Florence, January 20, 2001, Interview
subservience after slavery was outlawed.2 Spread across a vast
K-0544. Southern Oral History Program
region of the southern United States, these visual communications
Collection (#4007),” http://docsouth.unc.
systems confirmed the re-marginalization of African Americans in
edu/sohp/K0544/excerpts/excerpt_1126.
html (accessed September 01, 2008).
the aftermath of the Civil War and subsequent Reconstruction. Four
2 Robert R. Weyeneth, “Architecture of
generations of Southern blacks endured Jim Crow laws; only now,
Racial Segregation: The Challenges of
some 50 years after the height of the Civil Rights Movement, are
Preserving the Problematical Past,”The
scholars beginning to examine the ubiquitous signage that kept this
Public Historian 27 (Fall 2005): 11-44.
system of oppression in place.3 Although these Jim Crow signs have
3 Elizabeth Abel, Signs of the Times,
(Berkeley: University of California, 2010).
© 2012 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
DesignIssues: Volume 28, Number 2 Spring 2012
41
begun to be considered in spatial and semiotic terms, an impor-
tant alternative is to view them through the lens of design history.
Design historians have paid scant attention to Jim Crow signs as
artifacts, or as parts of processes or systems, but doing so illumi-
nates important aspects of the signs’ function and appearance,
examining how their style made them meaningful and authori-
tative. Even more important, when recognized as a feature of
communication design history, they remind us how often design is
used to enforce social regulation (see Figure 1).
To many blacks and whites living in the South, racial
stratification might have seemed “just the way it’s supposed to
be.” However, segregation and the signs that expressed it were
consciously legislated and designed. Moreover, just as they were
rarely considered by contemporary scholars and social critics
of the time, they are rarely examined by design historians today.
Nevertheless, these signs can also be read as an early and practical
example of wayfinding. These signs confirm how design—whether
of individual letterforms and or of complete signage systems—
must always be involved in critical discourses of social, economic,
and political power.
A Missing Design Legacy?
Jim Crow signs existed in the United States for nearly a century,
but the signs themselves have utterly disappeared from public
spaces. Even documentation of their once ubiquitous presence is
rare. After scouring private and public archives, scholar Elizabeth
Abel has uncovered little more than 100 photographs of these
signs.4 As Abel suggests, both the signs and the photos of them
might have been destroyed after Jim Crow laws were overturned;
most likely many of them were simply thrown away.
One likelihood is that the very ubiquity of such signage
has worked against our remembering it today. As Abel notes, Jim
Crow signs were considered “about as worthy of documentation
as telephone poles or traffic signs, and typical y appear, if at all,
only in the background of the places or events whose documenta-
tion was the primary goal.”5 Despite their once pervasive presence
in the American South, the little visual documentation left has led
design historians to overlook this aspect of visual communications
history. Nevertheless, Jim Crow signs il ustrate how maps, signs,
and other wayfinding devices, while providing critical informa-
tion, also can pervade our consciousness and subconsciousness
and subtly shape our choice of action.
Understanding Wayfinding
An outgrowth of urbanism and mass transportation, large-scale
wayfinding systems have emerged in the postwar period. Architect
Kevin Lynch’s 1960 publication The Image of the City introduced
4 Ibid., 107.
5 Ibid.
wayfinding as a distinct field of study by analyzing how people
42
DesignIssues: Volume 28, Number 2 Spring 2012
perceive, remember, think, speak, and solve problems while trying
to navigate urban spaces. Building on Lynch’s seminal work and
noting that wayfinding is anything but static, designer Paul Arthur
and architect and environmental psychologist Romedi Passini
argue that wayfinding is more than generating a static mental map
of a spatial situation: it is a form of spatial problem-solving based
on understanding and comprehension. It involves knowing where
you are in a building or an environment, identifying where your
desired location is, and understanding how to get there. Successful
wayfinding systems do not rely on architecture or barriers alone;
instead, they require the consistent identification and marking of
Figure 2
space. Often seen as essential to the design process, wayfinding
Esther Bubley, Anonymous, A Greyhound bus
today is applied to relatively small-scale projects, including rural
trip from Louisville, Kentucky, to Memphis,
hospitals in Nebraska, as well as to the planning of entire cities
Tennessee, and the terminals. Sign at bus
station. Rome, Georgia, 1943. U.S. Farm
under construction in the Gulf states. Above all, wayfinding is
Security Administration/Office of War
conceived as a form of communications that guides the movement
Information, Prints & Photographs Division,
of large numbers of people, allowing them to perceive, engage and
Library of Congress, LC-USW3- 037939-E.
navigate through physical and conceptual space.6
Unfortunately in design studies today, wayfinding is a
practice-driven field. Designers generally resort to a positivist
conception of wayfinding that aims to protect wayfarers from
the uncertainty that can occur when, in the words of geographer
Reginald Gol edge, “even momentary disorientation and lack of
recognition of immediate surrounds” causes them to feel lost.7
Passini, for instance, emphasizes how “wayfinding difficulties and
6 With the 1960 publication of The Image
disorientation are highly stressful even in benign cases when the
of the City, (Boston: MIT Press, 1960)
user of a setting is merely confused or delayed. Total disorienta-
architect Kevin Lynch highlighted how
tion and the sensation of being lost can be a frightening experience
individuals perceive, remember, think
and lead to quite severe emotional reactions including anxiety and
of, and describe public space. Based
insecurity…“8
on “Perceptual Form of the City,”
a study funded by the Rockefel er
Because wayfinding is deeply infused with an ardent posi-
Foundation and conducted at MIT with
tivism, linking the field with something so loathsome as racial
designer György Kepes from 1954 to
segregation may seem unwarranted or even quixotic. Wayfinding
1959, Lynch’s analysis of how people
today is intended to help, not hinder, an individual’s passage.
perceive, remember, think, speak, and
Arthur and Passini admit that “it is unlikely that a person will actu-
solve problems while trying to navigate
ally die from the stress of getting lost.” With the result that “we
urban spaces introduced wayfinding as
a distinct field of study.
have tended to downgrade this problem as being relatively unim-
7 Reginald G. Golledge, Wayfinding
portant.”9 In this study, I explore Jim Crow signage within the
Behavior: Cognitive Mapping and Other
larger design tradition. As theorists like Kevin Lynch and practitio-
Spatial Processes (Baltimore: John
ners like Otl Aicher were developing the beginnings of wayfinding
Hopkins University Press,1998), 5.
thought and systems, this earlier, if only partial, system of wayfind-
8 Romedi Passini, “Wayfinding Research
and Design,” in Jorge Frascara, Design
ing was being dismantled. Although the Jim Crow system predates
and the Social Sciences: Making
the more modern ideas of wayfinding, its function and execution
Connections,” (New York: Taylor and
are best understood as an early example of the spatial decision
Frances Press, 2002), 97.
making that wayfinding now represents (see Figure 2). Counter to
9 Romedi Passini and Paul Arthur,
Arthur and Passini’s view, however, segregation signs were, in fact,
Wayfinding: People, Signs, and
part of a larger racial caste system that made them a life or death
Architecture (New York: McGraw Hill,
1992), 6.
DesignIssues: Volume 28, Number 2 Spring 2012
43
issue. In the larger design context, segregation signage involves a
complex negotiation—both guiding individuals and molding their
behavior. Jim Crow signs clearly inscribe space, but what “way”
did these signs help people to find?
Space and Jim Crow Geography
As the relatively recent development of critical geography has
pushed geographers from studying landscapes and objects to
examining the space around them, historians have begun to
re-examine notions of segregation in the South. French sociologist
and philosopher Henri Lefebvre studied the “production of space”
as a largely theoretical construct.10 A Marxian philosopher, Lefebvre
argued that space can be social as well as geographical, and concep-
tions of space have a cultural and highly changeable basis. Insisting
that conceptions of space can deny individuals’ and communities’
“rights to space,” Lefebvre argued for greater understanding of the
struggles over and meanings of space. Building on these insights,
geographers have begun in the past 30 years to urge an examina-
tion of lived experience and the spaces that shape ordinary life.11
In that light, scholars explore the evolution and effect of Southern
segregation, noting that it reflects a complex constellation of issues
revolving around racialized space. For example, Lawrence Levine
suggests that slaves created a metaphorical separate space for their
own cultural forms, and that “slave music, slave religion, slave
folk beliefs—the entire sacred world of the black slaves—created
the necessary space between the slaves and their owners and were
the means of preventing legal slavery from becoming spiritual slav-
ery.”12 Meanwhile, in Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in
10 Indeed, Lefebvre introduces the notion
the South, historian Elizabeth Grace Hale argues that segregation-
of the production of space as something
ists in the twentieth century tried to establish not metaphorical
that “sounds bizarre, so great is the say
but literal black and white spaces that shaped patterns of living;
still held by the idea that empty space
is prior to whatever ends up filling it.”
she sees this landscape of territorialism and exclusion as both
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space
driven and challenged by capitalist expansion in the South.13 For
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 15.
Hale, “consumer culture created spaces—from railroads to general
11 This notion is linked to the German
stores and gas stations to the restaurants, movie theaters, and
phenomenological concept that geog-
more specialized stores of the growing towns—in which African
raphers have adopted of lebenswelt
or “lifeworld.” See J. Eyles, Sense of
Americans could challenge segregation. . . The difficulty of racial
Place (Warrington: Silverbrook Press,
control over the new spaces of consumption, in turn, provoked an
1985) and David Seamon, Geography
even more formulaic insistence on ‘For Colored’ and ’For White.’”14
of the Lifeworld: Movement, Rest, and
More recently, Elizabeth Abel provides a rich discussion of
Encounter (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
segregation, examining for instance the “science” of racial differ-
1979).
ence; in doing so, she considers the Jim Crow signs and the rare
12 Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and
Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk
WPA photographs that documented them as part of a semiotic
Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New
system. Looking at archival photographs of the signs today, she
York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 80.
argues, “we can chart the changing intersections among a specific
13 Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness:
disposition of racial terms, the angles of vision they afford, the
The Culture of Segregation in the South,
photographic practices they enlist, the modes of resistance they
1890-1940 (New York: Vintage, 1999).
14 Ibid., 125.
44
DesignIssues: Volume 28, Number 2 Spring 2012
galvanize, and the critical perspectives they engage.” While she
focuses primarily on photography’s “ostensibly neutral practice
of observation,” Abel strives to reveal “a more charged interac-
tion with the cinematic camera, [as well as] a political y engaged
photojournalism” that documents this signage. By concentrat-
ing on photographs of Jim Crow signs rather than on the signs
themselves, Abel’s analysis engages the process and purpose of
photography; in so doing, she includes signage as one part of a
larger “mode of expression” made by “public officials and private
individuals, professional signmakers and amateur scribblers.”
She concludes that the photos of Jim Crow signs are a form of
“American graffiti.”15 Meanwhile, the signs themselves, far from
being a subversive form of public communication casual y scrib-
bled on abandoned wal s, represent a particular aspect of a design
tradition—one that not only involved intentional design, but
that carried a power and intent that can be linked to larger legal
systems (see Figure 1).
Jim Crow Law
Jim Crow laws were relatively rare before 1895, when the African-
American Homer Plessy lost his Supreme Court suit against the
State of Louisiana. Plessy’s lawsuit was intended to bring atten-
tion to an 1890 Louisiana law that dictated segregated transport;
ironically, the authority and publicity of the Supreme Court judg-
ment helped concretize the concept of “separate but equal” spaces,
providing firm legal footing for institutionalized racism in the
United States. Southern segregation signs reflect a pervasive patch-
work of local and state laws that formed a racialized order through-
out the region.
In the decade following the Plessy ruling, state and munic-
ipal legislators throughout the South passed a spate of new laws
that regulated daily life;16 these mandates were so pervasive that the
phrase “Jim Crow law” first appeared in the Dictionary of American
English in 1904.17 Many of the most prominent segregation laws
15 See Abel’s first chapter, “American
dictated separate spaces on public transportation, including trains,
Graffiti: The Social Life of Jim Crow
streetcars, and trolleys. By 1909, 14 state legislatures enacted laws in
Signs,” 36.
16 For more on Jim Crow laws at the state
which passengers were assigned separate coaches, compartments,
level, see Pauli Murray (ed.), States’
or seats on the basis of race.18 These laws were first enforced by
Laws on Race and Color (Athens:
conductors and ticketing agents, whose duties included maintain-
University of Georgia Press, 1997).
ing segregated spaces; railroad companies could be fined as much
17 C. Vann Woodward and William S.
as $100 a day for violating segregation laws.19
McFeely, The Strange Career of Jim Crow
But Jim Crow legislation did not end there. By the time the
(Oxford University Press, 2001), 7.
18 Richard Henry Boyd (ed.), The Separate
United States entered into the First World War, laws in Southern
or “Jim Crow” Car Laws (Nashville:
states ordered racial segregation in marriage, education, and
National Baptist Publishing Board,
health care. Laws also molded the shape of daily life in other ways,
1909), 6.
as state and local prohibitions prevented different races from rent-
19 North Carolina Railroads (ch. 60, art. 12,
ing in the same building and required that movie theaters seat the
secs. 94-98, inclusive; secs. 101 and 103,
and 135-37, inclusive).
races separately, that amateur baseball teams play on diamonds
DesignIssues: Volume 28, Number 2 Spring 2012
45
Figure 3
separated by two or more blocks, and that restaurants instal parti-
Danny Lyons, Segregated Taxi, Birmingham,
tions at least seven feet high between areas reserved for white and
Alabama, 1960, Magnum Photos, NYC16911.
non-white diners.
In the post-Civil War South, reformers argued that trans-
portation, education, and infrastructure would transform this
impoverished region. Little did they anticipate, however, that the
very trains, street cars, parks and hospitals that these reformers
helped introduce and develop would become part of complex
systems of racialized wayfaring. The rapid growth of cities like
Atlanta shows just how closely Jim Crow segregation followed
Southern urbanization. This emblem of the New South also
became one of the most segregated cities in the nation. Jim Crow
became the very public face of new civic ordinances that extended
not only to public spaces under the city’s jurisdiction (e.g., parks
and libraries), but also to privately-owned ones like saloons and
restaurants. Legislation mandated that black barbers could not
cut the hair of white women or children under 14, and separate
Bibles were required for white and black witnesses in the Atlanta
court system. In cities like Atlanta and Birmingham, taxis had to
be labeled by race “in an oil paint of contrasting color,” and laws
stipulated that drivers had to be the same race as their customers
(see Figure 3).20
Separation of Public Space in the New South
For whites and blacks, most day-to-day activities in the American
20 Woodward and McFeely, 116.
South were carried out in racialized space. Mark Schultz notes,
46
DesignIssues: Volume 28, Number 2 Spring 2012
however, that race relations in the rural (as opposed to urban)
South were marked by a “culture of personalism,” which shaped
racial interaction on the basis of close relations and custom, rather
than on the law.21 In these settings, Jim Crow space was rarely
labeled; tradition alone, for instance, clearly dictated that blacks
were to step aside for passing whites on a sidewalk. Many small
towns enforced Saturdays as “Black People’s Day,” when town
business districts were given over to weekly shopping trips by
African Americans flush with Friday paychecks. County fairs
often sold tickets marked “colored” to African Americans, and
they would be open to whites on Tuesdays through Fridays, thus
leaving Saturdays for blacks. Wilhelmina Baldwin, a teacher from
Waynesboro, GA, remembered that the entire town became white
after dark: “They also had a curfew for blacks. If you were just a
run-of-the-mill black, your curfew was at 9:30. If you were, you
know, what they called an educated black, you could stay out ‘til
10:30. If you stayed out beyond 10:30, you had to have a written
statement from the chief of police.”22
Because race relations were relatively settled in less densely
populated rural and farming districts, wayfinding systems in these
areas were often unnecessary. Most residents living in these small
communities were born there, and few feared getting lost, either in
physical or social terms. Outsiders who stumbled into small and
often isolated towns could read the unwritten signs that signaled
segregation. George Butterfield, an African-American Supreme
Court judge and then congressman in North Carolina, noted that,
“when you live in the South and have been in the South all your
life, you could find [places to eat and sleep] instinctively.“23
Nevertheless, as the towns and cities of the new urbanized
South grew, residents encountered unfamiliar problems; here,
where strangers could casually meet and interact, traditions were
not established. Complex racialized spaces had to be negotiated,
and expectations for behavior had to be articulated. Restaurants
frequently erected wood screens through their dining rooms, and
21 Mark Schultz, The Rural Face of White
train cars were sometimes designed with panels that divided
Supremacy: Beyond Jim Crow (Urbana:
carriages into two distinct compartments; in a Virginia courthouse
University of Illinois Press, 2005), 6.
22 Wilhelmina Baldwin, Duke University
and along a South Carolina swimming shore, ropes separated the
archive. See also James W. Loewen,
black and white sections of the court and the beach.24 And, as archi-
Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of
tectural historian Tim Weyeneth has demonstrated, large-scale
American Racism (New York: The New
building projects increasingly dictated the terms and conditions of
Press, 2005).
racialized space25 as specifically-designed schools, libraries, hospi-
23 George Kenneth Butterfield, oral history
tals, mental hospitals, homes for the aged, orphanages, prisons,
interview, July 19, 1994, Behind the Veil
project, use tape 12, tray C, Tuskegee,
and cemeteries were built across much of the South in the first half
AL., Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special
of the twentieth century. In Richland County, SC, for instance, the
Collections Library, Duke University.
1940s remodeling of Columbia Hospital by Lafaye and Associates
24 Weyeneth, 21.
included the construction of a smaller, separate hospital two blocks
25 For more on exclusion in Southern
away from the main, whites-only complex.26 When building such
architecture, see Weyeneth, 13-15.
26 Weyeneth,16.
DesignIssues: Volume 28, Number 2 Spring 2012
47
completely separate spaces was deemed too costly or otherwise
inefficient, structures were commonly designed to include both
separate and shared spaces under a single roof. Hospitals, for
instance, would have segregated wings, public housing would be
divided into separate districts or even units, and public parks were
fenced or roped into grounds and facilities designated as “white”
or “colored.”
Although no urban planner designed fully segregated
cities, architects clearly planned buildings that not only included
separate black and white spaces but also ensured segregated
routes for finding those spaces. For example, architectural draw-
ings of cinemas designed by Erle Stillwell in North Carolina,
reveal not only separate African-American seating areas but also
careful y planned systems of diversions, including entrances (for
a similar configuration, see Figure 1), and passageways explicitly
designed to lead non-whites away from white-designated spaces.27
When Stil wel designed Raleigh’s Ambassador Theater in 1938,
27 Going to the Show (www.docsouth.unc.
he planned for African Americans to enter the building at a side
edu/gtts) is a digital library project that
entrance. Patrons climbed a discrete staircase that led them to a
documents and illuminates the experi-
landing housing what Stillwell’s plans called the “colored” box
ence of movie-going in North Carolina
between 1896 and 1930. It should be
office. Up another flight of stairs, African Americans could find
noted that women, too, were segregated
toilets, a small room for the use of “colored ushers,” and balcony
from men in a similar way. And, as
seats.28
Elizabeth Abel notes in “Bathroom Doors
Although the Ambassador Theatre was torn down in 1979,
and Drinking Fountains: Jim Crow’s
the relatively complex passage by which African Americans entered
Racial Symbolic,” Critical Inquiry 25
(Spring 1999): 448, court rulings “endors-
the movie house from the street, then found the “colored” box
ing separate car laws often cited gender
office, then found their seats and separate facilities suggests just
separation as a model for racial segrega-
how byzantine Jim Crow wayfinding could be. Recalling a less
tion.” For example, the state Supreme
carefully planned theater in Waynesboro, GA, Wilhemina Baldwain
Court of Pennsylvania cited the analogy
described exiting a matinee showing of a film in the late 1930s;
of the ‘ladies’ car,’ which is ‘known upon
white patrons insisted on not even seeing African Americans who’d
every well-regulated railroad’ and whose
‘propriety is doubted by none.’”
attended the same show. “There was usually nobody there. We’d
28 The pressure to accomplish this separa-
go to the ticket window, buy our tickets, and go upstairs (to the
tion was clear; as a point of pride, many
segregated seating for blacks). And likewise there was nobody
theaters explicitly advertised themselves
there when we would come out. Well, one day there was a little
as “white” theatres. Those theaters
white boy. . . eight or nine years old. . . he was standing there, with
that did admit blacks rarely stated so,
but even they abided by norms of racial
his hands across the door. . . and so when we got to the bottom of
segregation. If provided at all, seat-
the steps I said ‘excuse me please.’ He said ‘Niggers can’t come out
ing for African Americans was usually
till the white people get out.’” At least a decade older than the boy,
relegated to theater balconies; railings or
the movie-going Baldwin talked the boy down but recalled seeing
other barriers were commonly installed
other African Americans obeying his directions.29
to separate shared balconies. For more,
Blocked doors, the construction of isolated buildings and the
see Robert Allen, “Going to the Show:
Mapping Moviegoing in North Carolina,
erection of barriers were useful but only effective for a limited time
Documenting the American South,
to segregationists. Similarly, duplicate architectural features such as
http://docsouth.unc.edu/gtts/index.html
entrances, exits, elevators, and stairwells, might have served imme-
(accessed November 27, 2010).
diate racist ends. However, if they lacked specific labels to indi-
29 Oral History Interview with Wilhelmina
cate their function, such structural elements lost their significance.
Baldwin, July 19, 1994, use tape 12, tray
C, Tuskegee, AL, Behind the Veil project.
48
DesignIssues: Volume 28, Number 2 Spring 2012
When President Franklin Roosevelt inspected the construction of
the Pentagon in Arlington, VA in 1941, he questioned the inclu-
sion of “four huge washrooms placed along each of the five axes.”
The astonished president, a native of New York, was informed
that Virginia’s segregationist legislation “required as many rooms
marked ‘Colored Men’ and ‘Colored Women’ as ‘White Men’ and
‘White Women.’” Military officials, heeding larger issues of waste
and inefficiency, ultimately disregarded the local law; signs were
never mounted on the doors and the duplicate spaces lost their
initial meaning.
Finding the Way to Jim Crow Space
While Arthur and Passini suggest that wayfinding is a form of
spatial problem-solving, they insist that successful wayfinding
systems do not rely on architecture or barriers alone; instead, they
require the consistent identification and marking of space. Without
signage, the Pentagon’s Jim Crow bathrooms lost their mean-
ing. Reading the plans of Raleigh’s Ambassador Theater, with its
carefully designated “colored box office” and room for “colored
ushers,” makes clear how the architect created a labyrinth of
passageways that guided African-American customers away from
whites. But without labeling, the theater’s maze of passageways
would have been incomprehensible.
As a field, wayfinding was in its infancy when Jim Crow
laws and signs were at their height. However, as the older Jim
Crow signs make clear, by the early twentieth century, public
signage could construct complex systems when supported by
custom and law. Of course, segregation was so pervasive a system
that whites also abnegated a degree of freedom by embracing it.
They, too, arranged their shopping around “black days” in town
and avoided taking colored taxis. Jim Crow signage dictated both
white and black space. The white writer and sociologist Kathryn
DuPre Lumpkin recalled, “as soon as I could read, I would care-
fully spell out the notices in public places. I wished to be certain
we were where we ought to be. Our station waiting rooms—‘For
Whites.’ Our railroad coaches—‘For Whites.’” White passengers
could be ejected from trolleys and buses when they chose to sit in
the back rows. Jennifer Roback, for instance, points to the case of
J. M. Dicks, a white Augusta, GA ironworker who violated state
segregation ordinances by insisting on sitting in the back of a street-
car in May 1900. Arrested by the train’s conductor, Dicks explained
to the court “When I got off from work yesterday afternoon I was
feeling tough and looking tough. . . . I saw some ladies up ahead
and did not want to sit by them looking like I was.”30 Calling the
conductor a “d--- fool,” the passenger was faced with a perplexing
30 Jennifer Roback, “The Political Economy
situation: violating social custom on the one hand or transgressing
of Segregation: The Case of Segregated
the law on the other.
Streetcars,” The Journal of Economic
History 46 (December 1986): 902.
DesignIssues: Volume 28, Number 2 Spring 2012
49
Despite the limits that also affected them, whites—especially
men—were often accorded a degree of flexibility in infringing on
segregated spaces. For example, where African Americans were
strictly prohibited from whites-only passenger cars on trains, the
colored cars could double as smoking cars (for whites) or as spaces
where the white crew could lounge and relax. Ticketed white
passengers could pass through the Jim Crow cars, but African-
Americans were often prohibited from walking through those set
aside for whites. Indeed, public space was often deemed “white”
by default, unless otherwise designated.31
Even when signage clearly circumscribed white behav-
ior, the legal system often treated white’s infractions lightly. For
instance, when a municipal judge heard the case of J. M. Dicks,
the Augusta, GA ironworker who insisted on sitting in the colored
section of a city street car, the judge publicly belittled the conduc-
tor and arresting officers for their lack of judgment and dismissed
the case.32 Jim Crow signs dictated the decisions and actions of both
black and white Southerners, but there was no doubt who ulti-
mately held power in these situations.
Decision-Making in a Jim Crow World
Especial y for African Americans, finding the way to one’s “own”
space in the Jim Crow South clearly could be a complex and coun-
ter-intuitive process. However, failing at it also carried high stakes.
While theorists today describe wayfinding as a process that can
keep people from being lost and afraid, in the Jim Crow South,
mistaking a turn or using the wrong facilities could result in
violence or death.
Passini suggests that wayfinding involves a hierarchy of
decision making that begins long before an individual starts to
move through space. Choosing a destination—that is, deciding
to move from point A to point B—is a high-order decision. The
scale of the trip is unimportant; the resolutions to shop at a store
31 As Tim Weyeneth notes, “much of the
down the street or to take a trip across the country both reveal
time signage was unnecessary because
that a high-order decision has been made. In the South, the very
white space was commonly recognized
choice of where one could and could not go was complex; a host of
and acknowledged by both races. The
white university and the white library
semi-public spaces (e.g., white churches, beauty parlors or funeral
had no need to post a sign. No black man
homes) were simply off limits to blacks. Indeed, most African
traveling to a southern city would seek to
Americans in the rural South relied not only on signs but also on
stay in its major hotels. In a small town
a series of learned codes of conduct, habituated through years of
everyone knew that the white doctor
living in racialized space and passed from one generation to the
did not welcome black patients into his
next. This learning was part of what black activist and academic
office.” Weyeneuth, 14.
32 As a municipal judge, the magistrate
Cleveland Sellers calls a “subtle, but enormously effective, condi-
who heard the case insisted that he
tioning process. The other people in the community, those who
didn’t have the authority to enforce the
knew what segregation and Jim Crow were all about, taught us
state-wide segregation law (Augusta at
what we were supposed to think and how we were supposed to
this time was working on a city ordinance
to the same effect, but it was still in
proposal stages). Roback, 902-3, note 25.
50
DesignIssues: Volume 28, Number 2 Spring 2012
act. They did not teach us with words so much as they taught us
with attitudes and behavior. There wasn’t anything intellectual
about the procedure. In fact, it was almost Pavlovian.”33
As an early, if incomplete, form of wayfinding, the Jim Crow
spatial system complicates Passini’s theory. In his view, wayfind-
ers make high-order decisions in a sociological vacuum; but unlike
Passini’s empowered wayfinders, African Americans who under-
stood the shaping of Jim Crow space automatically formed their
higher order decisions around Jim Crow exclusion. Certain desti-
nations were automatically off limits; others were simply avoided.
Remembering these limitations, Wilhemina Baldwin recalled how
her parents shielded their children, avoiding taking them to public
spaces dominated by whites. “There were just certain things that
we did not do,” she recalled. “For instance, going to wherever
we went out of town, they took us. We never had to go to the bus
station for anything. Until I got to be 10 years old, they didn’t
take me to buy shoes. They bought my shoes. And if they didn’t
fit, they’d take them back and get another size. They bought the
clothes for all of us like that. So we didn’t get into the stores to have
to deal with the clerks and whatnot.”34
Planning Action in Jim Crow Spaces
African Americans in the Jim Crow South might have practiced a
highly selective decision-making process, but as Passini reminds us,
wayfinding involves more than choosing where to go. Having fixed
a destination, the wayfarer then begins executing a series of lower
level decisions that make that action possible. For most wayfar-
ers, this planning involves designating a route and developing
an action plan. Again, African Americans chose their routes with
care. Long distance car trips through the South were often experi-
enced as a gauntlet. African American wayfarers needed “exquisite
planning,” carefully weighing the need to stop for gas and food in
segregated gas stations and restaurants, and often driving for three
or four days without stopping, loading up on cold cuts and stuff-
33 Cleveland Sellers, The River of No
ing ice boxes and lard buckets ful of ice to provide rudimentary air
Return: The Autobiography of a Black
conditioning.35
Militant and the Life and Death of SNCC
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
Even planning simple routes around one’s hometown could
1990), 10.
be fraught with peril, and many African Americans chose routes
34 Oral History Interview with Wilhelmina
that avoided white spaces altogether. As Ralph Thompson recalled,
Baldwin, July 19, 1994, use tape 12, tray
his parents warily planned his childhood visits to Memphis. His
C, Tuskegee, AL, Behind the Veil Project.
mother, for example, took elaborate precautions to sidestep the
35 Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other
“things that would be embarrassing, when they couldn’t fight back.
Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great
Migration (New York: Random House,
. . If we went downtown and they had the colored drinking foun-
2010), 196.
tain and white drinking fountain, my mother would always tell us
36 Ralph Thompson interview, Remembering
to drink water before we left home. So we didn’t get caught into
Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About
drinking water out.”36 Dr. Charlotte Hawkins Brown ran the Palmer
Life in the Segregated South, William H.
Memorial Institute, a missionary-funded school in Sedalia, NC, and
Chafe, Raymond Gavins, Robert Korstad
(eds.) (New York: The New Press, 2001).
DesignIssues: Volume 28, Number 2 Spring 2012
51
she taught her students to develop action plans that worked around
Jim Crow restrictions. Taking her students to the movies, for exam-
ple, she’d rent the entire cinema for the day and avoid the segre-
gated upper balcony.37 But no amount of careful planning could
erase the ubiquitous presence of the signs that shaped the very
environment in which African Americans lived their daily lives.
Wayfinding in Action: Lower Order Decisions
Indeed, in the Jim Crow South, signs were used to separate
the races on a limited, local level, room by room, seat by seat.
Segregation was most tangible when confronted in person, as a
wayfarer moved toward his or her destination. Moreover, even
if an African-American bus passenger momentarily mixed with
white passengers on a crowded platform, that passenger would
constantly remain aware of the larger spatial system intended to
eventual y isolate him or her in a specific section of the bus itself
or station.
According to Passini, a journey is begun with a high-level
goal but enacted by low-level decisions. Wayfaring, compris-
ing simple actions like “walk down the hall” or “open this door,”
combines observation of local features (e.g., stairs and doors) with
previous acquaintance with a space (e.g., earlier instructions or
consultations with a map or guide). As Reginald G. Golledge notes,
this navigation can be a “dynamic process;” as the wayfarer absorbs
information from the environment, his or her original action plan
is “constantly being updated, supplemented, and reassigned.”38
Finding one’s way through streets and intersections or corridors
and stairs may seem relatively simple; for most wayfarers, deciding
what turn to take or which stair to follow, or choosing whether to
continue or to stop and acquire information from the environment
is clear and negotiated with relatively little thought. Navigating a
route in the Jim Crow South, however, required African Americans
to maintain constant vigilance.
Jim Crow signs exerted their most devastating power at
precisely this level, consistently challenging and deflecting African
Americans’ action plans. Indeed, higher level destinations could
be chosen while knowing where one would and would not be
welcome. However, confronted with “white only” trains and wait-
ing rooms, African-American wayfarers were faced with immediate
lower level decisions. Segregation signs in the South filled multiple
roles, but in wayfinding terms, they can be broken into two general
37 Charles Weldon Wadelington, Charlotte
types: identification signs and directional signs.
Hawkins Brown and Palmer Memorial
Institute: What One Young African
Identification Signs
American Woman Could Do (Chapel
Often called “the building blocks of wayfinding,”39 identification
Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
signs mark out spaces by displaying their name or their function.
1999),186.
Since the mid-nineteenth century, in rapidly growing cities like
38 Golledge, 7.
39 Ibid., 48.
New York and London, public signage proliferated, labeling space
52
DesignIssues: Volume 28, Number 2 Spring 2012
and addressing passersby.40 Simple labeling techniques (e.g., posted
street names and addresses, room numbering signs, name plates,
and other forms of labeling) became ubiquitous in the United
States after the Civil War. But the marking of Jim Crow space was
more specific and relied on fairly consistent terms of identification.
Clearly understood labels like “colored only” and “whites only”
were most common, although some relied on more cursory words,
such as “white” or “black.” Such signs routinely rerouted travelers.
Directional Signs
Coupled with exclusionary phrases, like “Whites This Way” or an
arrow with the words, “Colored Dining Room in Rear,” Jim Crow
signs not only identified, but also directed. Usually mounted on
walls or placed overhead, directional signs dictated who could
drink at which water fountain or where to sit in a restaurant (see
Figure 4).
These directives could also be complex, involving a sequen-
tial process of multiple decisions, such as entering a train station
through the “right” door, buying a ticket at the “right” window,
finding the “right” waiting room, moving from that waiting room
to the “right” platform, then finding the “right” train car. At this
time, signage systems meant to control behavioral actions (e.g.,
turning left or going up stairs) were still in their infancy. But
simple graphic prompts, such as prominent arrows or the Victorian
letter jobber’s pointing finger, or manicules still had the power to
shape decisions.41
Jim Crow Laws as Signage: Substance and Make
The Jim Crow system may seem monolithic today, but it was
actual y held together through a patchwork of legislation, and it
varied not only from state to state, but even from town to town.
40 David Henkin, “Word on the Streets:
While individual signs could convey an indisputable authority, it
Ephemeral Signage in New York,” The
took time for them to develop a consistency that would resemble
Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture
a careful y planned wayfinding system developed by designers.
Reader (New York: Routledge, 1994), 195.
Essential y, segregation signage fil ed multiple functions; at once,
41 Gillian Fuller, “The Arrow—Directional
it indicated the existence of laws intended to guide individual
Semiotics: Wayfinding in Transit,” Social
Semiotics 12 (2002): 231.
behavior, it educated both whites and blacks about where they
42 Acts of Tennessee, Chapter 10 No. 87.
should and should not be, and it served as references for train
43 Laws of Mississippi, 1904, Chapter 99:
conductors, police officers, and other authorities in case of confu-
4060.
sion. Some Jim Crow legislation specifically called for signage
44 For example, in order to “promote
to be instal ed and these statutes often dictated such particulars
comfort on streets cars,” a 1905
Tennessee law, authorized “large” signs
as the size of the lettering, the medium, and the placement. For
to be kept in” a conspicuous place,” (Acts
example, to “promote comfort on street cars,” a 1905 Tennessee
of Tennessee, Chapter 10 No. 87). Some
law, authorized “large signs shall be kept in a conspicuous place,”42
laws were even more specific. A 1904
meanwhile, a 1904 Mississippi law ordered street car signs to be
Mississippi law, for instance, ordered
8x12 inches in size.43 While legislation sometimes dictated particu-
the size of street car signs to be eight by
lars in this way,44 implementation was often left to municipalities,
twelve inches high (Laws of Mississippi,
1904, Chapter 99, 4060).
DesignIssues: Volume 28, Number 2 Spring 2012
53
Figure 4
Anon. Showing how the colour line was
drawn by the saloons at Atlanta, Georgia.
1908, Courtesy of The New York Public
Library. www.nypl.org.
local transit authorities, or individual business owners. It was not
uncommon for individuals to go beyond the law by creating and
placing signs on an ad hoc basis; for instance, no state or local law
regulated the race of patrons using a Coca Cola machine at a sport-
ing goods store in Jackson, TN, despite its being marked “White
Customers Only!”45
Although Jim Crow signage clearly was part of an elabo-
rate system that created separate Jim Crow spaces, the signs that
made up this network varied in style and content; indeed, where
wayfinding devices today aim to be uniform and predictable, Jim
Crow signs were stylistical y diverse. Dating from a period when
graphic design was still coalescing as a self-identified profession,
individual designers or firms were rarely associated with these
communications. Initial y Jim Crow signs were often the work of
local or itinerant sign painters or skil ed itinerants whose work
included advertising murals and lettering on shop windows and
vehicles. Many of these signs reflect their painters’ pride in their
craft; Jim Crow signage often includes decorative flourishes and
other embellishments that seek to anesthetize the regulatory
message. For example, the decorative sweeps and italicization
of an Atlanta saloon sign from 1908 reflects a degree of elegance
often displayed in late Victorian signage (see Figure 4); in this case
the sign tries to integrate “white only” with the business’s name,
“Cohen & Union Beer.” Similarly, a 1939 photograph of the sign
for “The Gem Theatre: Exclusive Colored Theatre” reveals an orna-
mental italic subscript that reinforces both its Anglicized spel ing
“Theatre” and preferential description “Exclusive” (see Figure 5).
In both these cases, the aestheticized letterforms seem to be an
attempt to mask the blow of segregation by “prettifying” it, domes-
45 See Library of Congress, Prints and
ticating it, or at least making the regulatory message more palat-
Photographs Division, Visual Materials
able. The politesse of a hand-lettered sign on a North Carolina
from the NAACP Records. Call LOT
13087.
54
DesignIssues: Volume 28, Number 2 Spring 2012
Figure 5
Russell Lee, Gem Theatre Sign, Waco,
Texas, 1939, Courtesy of the Library of
Congress U.S. Farm Security Administration/
Office of War Information, Prints &
Photographs Division, Library of Congress,
LC-USF33- 012498-M2.
Figure 6
Jack Moebes, Jim Crow sign being removed
from a Greensboro, NC bus, in response
to a court ruling, 1956. Copyright Jack
Moeges/Corbis.
bus read “NORTH CAROLINA LAW/White Patrons, Please Seat(sic)
From Front/Colored Patrons Please Seat(sic) from Rear/NO SMOKING”
using an italic script to suggest an effort at elegance that matches
the decorous use of “please” (see Figure 6). In some African-
American owned establishments, however, such signage could be
cursory and grudging. A haphazard col ection of signs hanging on
a mixed-use living quarters and juke joint for migratory workers
in Bel e Glade, FL, for example, includes one clearly hand-painted
sign stuck off to the side, reading “COLORED ONLY,” fol owed by
the phrase “POLICE ORDER” (see Figure 7).
Institutionalization and Mass Production
In the early years of Jim Crow signage, the use of ink and paint was
sometimes legally stipulated; an 1898 Tennessee law, for instance,
insisted that such signs not only be placed in a “conspicuous
place,” but that they be painted or printed.46 Widespread demand
ultimately led to the mass manufacture of Jim Crow signs, and
46 Acts of Tennessee, Chapter 10 No. 87.
DesignIssues: Volume 28, Number 2 Spring 2012
55
Figure 7 (left)
by the 1940s, such signs were standard retail products commonly
Osborne, “Colored Only: Police Order,” Belle
available at national chains (e.g., Woolworth’s and Western Auto),
Glade FL, 1945, Copyright/Corbis.
as well as at local home supply and hardware stores throughout the
South. The manufactured signs were quite different from the hand-
Figure 8 (right)
Russell Lee, “Man drinking at a water cooler
drawn and -painted signs of a generation earlier, tending toward
in the street car terminal, Oklahoma City,
the utilitarian rather than the decorative; they were more matter-
Oklahoma,”1939, Courtesy of the Library of
of-fact rather than persuasive (see Figure 8). Moreover, as wayfind-
Congress U.S. Farm Security Administration/
ing devices, they were not as descriptive and provided less explicit
Office of War Information, Prints &
directions for users. William Kennedy, a journalist for the Pittsburgh
Photographs Division, Library of Congress,
Courier, reported from Jacksonville, FL in 1961, that “best sellers”
LC-USZ62-80126.
were the “catch-all plain race labels, which could be tacked on any
door” and simply read “white” and “colored.”47 While most manu-
factured signs were produced with standard industrial printing
processes, including offset lithography and silkscreen, Jim Crow
signs were also customized with stencils and vinyl letterforms and
were printed on more permanent materials, including metal and
porcelain. At the new Tennessee Valley Authority headquarters,
for instance, an imposing “WHITE” sign was crafted in metal and
installed above public water fountains, conveying a tangible sense
of institutional authority. While the sans serif letters were clearly
influenced by the spare, unadorned typographic forms of the emer-
gent Modernist movement, their function was utterly antithetical
to the egalitarian, even utopian, goals that drove designers such as
Jan Tschichold and Herbert Bayer to develop typefaces that would
promote universal legibility.
The tradition of hand-made, and especially painted, Jim
Crow signs continued until the Civil Rights movement obvi-
ated the entire system in the early 1960s. Nevertheless, as mass-
produced signs became more and more common, the increasing
consistency of segregation signs’ appearance began to convey
a kind of uniform identity, flatly assigning races to different
47 William Kennedy, “Dixie’s Race Signs
spaces. Nevertheless, this increasing uniformity was misleading:
‘Gone with the Wind,’” Reporting Civil
the South’s segregation laws and customs were inconsistent and
Rights 1 (New York: The Library of
America, 2003), 627.
56
DesignIssues: Volume 28, Number 2 Spring 2012
inconsistently applied; in addition, the signs’ authoritative appear-
ance belied a system of racializing space that, while pervasive, was
far from universal y understood.
Ambiguous Spaces and Incomplete Wayfinding Systems
Jim Crow segregation differs from latter-day wayfinding in several
notable ways. While Passini defines wayfinding as “essentially
congruent with universal design” and a formal desire for inclu-
siveness, Jim Crow signage was dictated by racial exclusivity.48
Moreover, the Jim Crow system was held together through a
diverse hodgepodge of legislation that varied not only from state
to state, but even from town to town. The patchwork of laws
was essentially reflected in the many different forms of graphic
expression; the style, content, and materials used to make Jim
Crow signage were wide-ranging. There was no consistent look
to the signs until they began to be mass-produced. Finally, no
one “designed” Jim Crow signs; indeed, the earliest signs predate
modern notions of design and designer.
Not surprisingly, Jim Crow space was piecemeal and
fraught with inconsistency. Some spaces (e.g., city sidewalks)
proved impossible to formal y regulate; rarely, if ever, was specific
behavior or action in these areas dictated by signs. Similarly,
while crowded train and bus depot platforms frequently included
numerous “white” or “colored” signs designed to instill order in
the spatial and social chaos, these spaces were often fluid, evok-
ing both spatial and racial confusion. Indeed, the wayfinding signs
sometimes added to the system’s inherent dysfunctionality. Easily
destroyed, moved, obscured from view or lost, the signs were
anything but permanent, and the spaces they were designed to
regulate remained transitory and amorphous rather than strictly
defined and demarcated.
Some Jim Crow signs were even designed to serve dual
purposes. Despite legal requirements to provide separate facili-
ties for both races, some impoverished Southern towns could only
purchase a single public water fountain; by default, such amenities
were marked with a “whites only” sign. As Lillian Smith observed,
however, “sometimes when a town could afford but one drinking
fountain, the word White was painted over one side and the word
Colored on the other. I have seen that. It means that there are a few
men in that town whose memories are aching, who want to play
fair, and under ‘the system’ can think of no better way to do it.”49
48 Romedi Passini, “Wayfinding Design:
Principal flashpoints of racial tension were the street cars
Logic, Application and Some Thoughts
on Universality,” Design Studies 17
and trolleys that ran in larger Southern cities in the late nineteenth
(1996): 319.
century; as the journalist Ray Stannard Baker noted, what made
49 Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream,
them volatile spaces was the “very absence of a clear demarca-
(New York: W. Norton, 1994 reprint of
tion.”50 Streetcar interiors created what he called a racial “twilight
1949), 95.
50 Ray Stannard Baker, Following the Color
Line, American Magazine (1908): 30-1.
DesignIssues: Volume 28, Number 2 Spring 2012
57
zone.” Rather than run two sets of trolleys at great expense, trans-
portation authorities often followed the letter of the law by segre-
gating the interior space of each tram. Local laws, such as the
one established in 1900 in Augusta, GA, stipulated that African
Americans must first fill seats in the rear of a car, while whites were
to sit in the front seats. Although the first two seats of each car were
reserved for exclusive use by whites and the last two seats reserved
for blacks, the undefined middle zone was segregated according
to the capacity of any given car and its relative use at any given
time.51 In response, ”white” or “colored” signs were often hung on
strips and slid along the length of the car; if trolleys were crowded,
many municipalities empowered conductors to determine the loca-
tion of the car’s “middle” and to allocate seats accordingly. Indeed,
conductors were often legally provided with the power to arrest
and otherwise enforce their temporary regulations.
This movable streetcar and later bus signage created an
unstable space that became a flashpoint for racial conflicts, result-
ing in fights, arrests, and even death.52 To illustrate, in 1917, African-
American members of the U. S. Army’s 24th Infantry Battalion
were ordered from Columbus, NM, to Houston, TX. Fearing the
onslaught of large numbers of negro troops, local politicians tight-
ened segregation. When the soldiers arrived in the city, however,
they simply ignored the Jim Crow signs hung in movie theaters and
street cars. At times they tore the signs down and at least once, at
a local dance, made them objects of ridicule by wearing them; their
anger at Houston’s ordinances percolated into a full-scale mutiny
by August 1917.53
Such uprisings occurred throughout the South. In a single
year, beginning in September 1941 and ending 12 months later,
at least 88 cases occurred when blacks occupied “white” space on
public transportation in Birmingham, AL.54 After the war, men,
51 Jennifer Roback, “The Political Economy
particularly African-American veterans returning from active
of Segregation: The Case of Segregated
duty—more actively resisted these signs. In 1946 in Alabama,
Streetcars,” 901.
a black ex-Marine removed a segregationist sign from a trol-
52 Carol Anderson, Eyes off The Prize: The
ley; in the resulting melee, he was shot dead by the local chief of
United Nations and The African American
police.55 As late as 1956, just as Jim Crow travel restrictions were
Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955
(New York: Cambridge University Press,
being lifted from interstate travel, Jet Magazine announced the
2003), 58.
death of Robert L. Taylor, a 30-year-old veteran from Ohio, who
53 Arthur E. Barbeau and Florette Henri,
dared to use a whites-only restroom on a speeding train in central
The Unknown Soldiers (Cambridge: Da
Tennessee; Taylor’s body was found the next day beside the train
Capo Press, 1996), 28.
tracks.56 At best, Jim Crow wayfinding was based on a rigid race-
54 Robin D.G. Kelley, “’Not What We Seem’:
based caste system; for soldiers who’d experienced spatial freedom
Black Working-Class Opposition in the
Jim Crow South,” Journal of American
in the North, the West, or overseas, the extent to which it shaped
History 80 (June 1993): 75-112.
the lives of African Americans and their day-to-day movement
55 Anderson, 58.
was inexcusable.
56 ”A Fear That a Negro Ohio War Veteran,
Robert Taylor, Was Slain for Using
White Toilet on Tennessee Train,” Jet
Magazine, January 5, 1956.
58
DesignIssues: Volume 28, Number 2 Spring 2012
Figure 9
Ladies are not adults, photo by Eric Bruger,
used under the Share Alike license of Creative
Commons. Photograph URL: http://www.flickr.
com/photos/uw-eric/3182483073/
Ending Jim Crow Signs
When Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her seat on a
Montgomery, AL, bus to a white man in 1955, she sat in the bus’s
fifth row—officially the beginning of its colored section but also one
of the ambiguous “twilight zones” that a conductor might trans-
form from “black” space to “white” space by simply repositioning
a printed sign. Her act of civil disobedience reflected the increas-
ing questioning of Jim Crow segregation and the system it repre-
sented by both whites and blacks. Indeed, Parks’ action was well
timed; after 1946, when the Supreme Court’s decision in Morgan v.
Virginia ruled segregation illegal on interstate bus travel, Jim Crow
laws were increasingly challenged at the local level.
In considering the system under the rubric of wayfinding,
defined as spatial problem solving, a critical need is to identify just
whose problems wayfinding actually addresses. For the whites
on Parks’ bus, Jim Crow signs directed African Americans away
from white space, thus perpetuating a sense of racial entitlement.
Of course, this study of Jim Crow signs as wayfinding signals is
more than a historical exercise in remembering the forgotten past
and more than a theoretical exercise in overlaying the two systems.
More critical y, this study is intended to prod us to consider more
recent wayfinding systems that perpetuate similar entitlement. In
South Africa, for instance, racialized wayfinding was explicit and
careful y control ed during that country’s long-standing system of
apartheid. Meanwhile, in other countries, most notably in Saudi
Arabia today, gender-specific wayfinding systems continue.
Whether applied to hotel gyms and pools which are off-limits to
women, or McDonald’s restaurants, which are restricted to women
and families, the Saudi kingdom has shaped a complex system of
spaces for women and aims to guide them toward it (see Figure 9).
Segregation signs not only point to separation in public space; they
DesignIssues: Volume 28, Number 2 Spring 2012
59
also serve as reminders that both law and signage are “designed”
and that “designers” have a role to play in thinking critical y about
their purpose. We have no record of what figures like Aicher and
Lynch made of the Jim Crow system; in some ways, this system
might have been the underbel y of or the precursor to the univer-
sal signage and systems that began to develop just as the segre-
gation system was being dismantled. In modern public spaces,
strangers can meet and mix in an informal manner. Traditional
mores are no longer relevant and residents must be guided
through unfamiliar spaces.
The most pervasive designed systems are often invisible
to those who follow them; if Sheila Florence simply assumed that
segregated racial spaces were “just the way it was,” she would
never have reflected on the powers that shaped Jim Crow signs.
Signage systems have hardly disappeared; but for designers today,
the fundamental issue is not just in noting them or designing them
from a disconnected, disinterested position. The real question
is about how well we know our own spaces and the power that
resides in them.
60
DesignIssues: Volume 28, Number 2 Spring 2012