Medgar Evers’ house is a festive green—a color that an upscale clothing catalog might term “sea foam” or “island reef.” The concrete driveway has a pronounced crack right down the middle, and you can look down it and right through the carport into the back yard. The lawn is just clover and the kind of weedy, junk grass that will grow anywhere. 

You might not imagine that one of the civil rights movement’s true heroes lived in this unprepossessing, one-story structure. If you drove past the house, you might not give it a second thought.

He lived here and died here. For in 1963, Evers returned to this house from a movement meeting, got out of his car, and was shot and killed. His ghost still lingers.

What is a ghost anyway? A sudden, surprising movement glimpsed out of the corner of one eye? A hair-prickling sensation that makes you flinch and say: “God, what was that?” Or a presence not seen at all?

Many of the latter sort of ghosts appear in the exhibit of Rich Frishman’s photos, “Ghosts of Segregation”, where you can take in the entire scoop of this amazing project. Frishman’s work, which has won him two Sony World Photography Awards, is also in the collections of numerous institutions including Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts and the New Orleans Museum of Art. Frishman’s other major project, “American Splendor”, can be seen here and Frishman talks about the project “Ghost of Segregation” here.

Medgar Evers died eleven years after he’d joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. in 1952. He spent the intervening period traveling from his home in Jackson, across the state of Mississippi, encouraging other people of color to register to vote, to integrate schools and public facilities, and to join in the resistance against racial injustice. 

The other ghosts among Frishman’s images are not so well-known. There are lovely but haunted trees and river scenes; crumbling, collapsed, and totally vanished buildings; sharecropper shacks; and lonely gravestones. The people who passed this way—strung up on a Golead, Texas hanging tree, firebombed in a Opelousas, Louisiana church, dumped into the Black Bayou from a bridge in Glendora, Mississippi, or partying at a rundown Merigold, Mississippi juke joint—are long gone. 

I have childhood memories of that peculiar time: The Memphis department-store water fountains tagged “whites only.” The hardscrabble, Third World shacks in Pike County Mississippi where you couldn’t imagine anyone actually living. The white-neighborhood dogs barking like fury whenever any dark-skinned person dared venture onto their turf. The red-dirt-road country stores with their Moon Pies and Nehi peach sodas. A conversation with a gangly blonde girl who couldn’t tell whether she was ashamed or proud that her uncle was an officer in the Ku Klux Klan. Dressing up in white sheets and threatening violence in the name of white supremacy? That’s just not something anyone at the country club would do. Still, it was probably the only bit of fame anyone in her family would ever have.

Frishman’s shots of little roadside restaurants are to me the most evocative of the time and place. A now apparently abandoned “Tastee Shack” must have tempted passersby with its fragrance of burgers and onions sputtering on the griddle. Frishman’s caption tells us that it was from this place in 1964 that two Mississippi teenagers were abducted, driven into a woods, tortured, and dropped alive into the Mississippi River to die.

Edd’s Drive-In in Pascagoula, Mississippi glows Hopper-like in the late-evening dark. At its front window, two African American youths consider a menu, as white and black workers bustle inside. All are likely oblivious to the side window, from which customers of color were once required to place their orders. But the drive-in’s proprietors remember the window’s original purpose, Frishman tells us. “If we forget where we’ve been,” one owner has told him, “we can get lost again.”

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