Liberty Theater by Rosalind Fox Solomon

Liberty Theater is a vivid exploration of race, class and segregation in the American South. The book takes its title from the only cinema in Chattanooga, Tennessee that was open to people of colour in the early 1960s.

Spanning the 1970s–1990s, the project began on the lawns of the Scottsboro Courthouse in Alabama where, in an historic case of injustice, seven young men of colour were falsely accused of rape and sentenced to jail for the better part of their lives.

The courthouse served as a haunting backdrop to a monthly market at which Fox Solomon found a cacophonous performance of cultural ideologies and fantasies. In her acutely symbolic book, we find KKK badges, muskets, fake wigs, church attire and china dolls among preachers, landowners, and labourers.