White supremacy had been enshrined in Mississippi’s state constitution since 1890. The Black vote was suppressed in a variety of ways—lynching, poll taxes, literacy tests. Black registrants were expected to satisfactorily explain, in writing, the concept of habeas corpus, or to answer ludicrous questions, such as “How many bubbles in a bar of soap?” In the Delta city of Indianola, business and civic leaders established the first White Citizens’ Council, which opposed integration through economic terrorism: members could get Black people who tried to vote fired, or worse. “Virtually everyone” who was invited to join the council in Neshoba County did so, Mars wrote: “Refusal would have been seen as an act of traitorous disloyalty to Mississippi and to the South.”
Meanwhile, Mars had moved on from painting to photography. “Because I knew the street scenes of Philadelphia would soon begin to change,” she wrote, “I bought a camera and an enlarger, built a darkroom, and began to snap thousands of pictures.”
Mars shot in black-and-white, with a Graflex 22. She found many of her subjects, most of whom were Black, outdoors—sitting on a wooden bench, stirring the contents of a cast-iron pot. She captured residents of Neshoba County in their church clothes, wearing aprons over housedresses, blazers over overalls; battered shoes; bare feet. The scent of seared dust almost rises off her photographs. A small child at a fish fry stands next to an open sack of Mahatma rice. White boys climb the town square’s Confederate monument. Most of Mars’s subjects stare straight into her lens.
Gertrude Williams, a Black former bootlegger who had never been taught to read, sometimes accompanied Mars on her photographic excursions, providing “access to arenas of black experience that few white photographers ever saw,” Campbell, the Stanford historian, writes in “Mississippi Witness,” a collection of Mars’s photographs, published in 2019. Campbell and his collaborator, Elaine Owens, raise comparisons to the documentary photography of the New Deal era, particularly the photographs of the novelist Eudora Welty, who shot for the Works Progress Administration. (Mars likely wouldn’t have seen Welty’s photos, which weren’t widely known until 1989.) Although Welty and Mars were both single and white and “lived at once inside and outside the confines of a conservative, racist, patriarchal society,” Campbell writes, Welty’s photos “bespeak a certain political innocence.” Mars, on the other hand, was directly responding to a metastasizing political cruelty—the backlash to Brown. Eastland, the senator, had told Mississippians that they were “obligated to defy” the Supreme Court’s ruling.