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Los Angeles Times
11 hours ago
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
Could President Trump cancel Juneteenth as a federal holiday?
Thursday is Juneteenth, a holiday that celebrates the day the last American slaves officially learned they were free on June 19, 1865 — more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation had been issued. It has also become, as my colleague Kevinisha Walker put it last year, a day to celebrate Black history, culture and unity. Black communities have celebrated Juneteenth for more than 150 years. But it gained increased national prominence in the wake of the racial reckoning sparked by George Floyd's murder at the hands of Minneapolis police in 2020. That same year, many private companies announced that they would be giving employees the day off. And in 2021, then-President Biden signed legislation into law to make Juneteenth, or June 19, a federal holiday. Biden's signature made Juneteenth the country's 12th federal holiday — and the first new one created since Martin Luther King Jr. Day was established in 1983. But there have been questions about whether President Trump — who has made attacking diversity, equity and inclusion efforts a cornerstone of his agenda — would try and rollback Juneteenth as a federal holiday. Trump wouldn't have the power to do that on his own, according to Loyola Marymount University Law School professor Jessica Levinson. 'Federal holidays are created and abolished by Congress,' Levinson explained, adding that presidents can make recommendations and sign and veto bills, but they cannot unilaterally create or cancel laws. There will be a number of Juneteenth events in Los Angeles Thursday and this weekend, including a Juneteenth Freedom Ride biking event in Leimert Park, an exhibit and panel discussion on reparations for descendants of enslaved African Americans at the California African American Museum and a celebration of Black women athletes at the Autry Museum, among others. There will also be free admission to all national parks and forests. Red-hued foods like watermelon, barbecue and red velvet cake are typically associated with Juneteenth. There are, as my colleague Danielle Dorsey previously reported, differing theories on where this tradition stems from. 'Some believe that early celebrants simply worked with easily accessible and in-season ingredients that happened to be red… Others say that it honors the bloodshed and suffering of enslaved ancestors,' Dorsey wrote in 2023. Black Lives Matter-LA co-founder Melina Abdullah said she and others from her organization would be 'restoring ourselves in the midst of the chaos that's swirling around in the world' at a Juneteenth celebration at BLM-LA's Center for Black Power in Leimert Park. The event will be free to the public, but only open to Black people, Abdullah said. Which brings us to a broader question: Should white people celebrate Juneteenth? There are varied opinions on the matter, with some — like activist and writer Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman — saying that 'White people should celebrate this holiday in the way that centers Black Americans.' Abdullah had a narrower view of the matter. 'This is not a day for white people to be crashing a Black party and eating our food,' Abdullah said. If white people do want to celebrate or commemorate Juneteenth, they should do that by paying reparations, Abdullah said, suggesting they donate to Black organizations. 'We celebrate our freedom. It shouldn't be a time when we have to make everyone else comfortable with that,' Abdullah continued. 'This is a specific and particular African American holiday.' On June 19, 1865, Union Army Major Gen. Gordon Granger entered Galveston, Texas, with General Order No. 3, a proclamation to alert the enslaved Black residents of the state that they were free under the provisions of the Emancipation Proclamation. The day has been commemorated every year since 1866 as Juneteenth, a combination of the words June and nineteenth, as we mentioned above. In 2021, The Times talked to Black Angelenos about their first Juneteenth and why it's a day they'll never forget. Kevinisha Walker, multiplatform editorAndrew Campa, Sunday writerKarim Doumar, head of newsletters How can we make this newsletter more useful? Send comments to essentialcalifornia@ Check our top stories, topics and the latest articles on
Los Angeles Times
15 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
‘Look at what our expansiveness can afford us.' Awol Erizku on a universal language for the African diaspora
Late last year, I developed a connection with one of Awol Erizku's artworks somewhat by accident. I was on the dance floor at Living Room, one of L.A.'s newest member clubs and nightlife hotspots, being bathed in the fragmented, dazzling light of a disco ball in the form of Nefertiti's bust. As the night grew more navy with time, I finally looked up, and was struck by the beauty and powerful presence of African royalty above me. Erizku, a 36-year-old Ethiopian-born, Los Angeles-based contemporary artist, has most recently installed that artwork, 'Nefertiti–Miles Davis,' at the California African American Museum as part of his first solo museum exhibition, 'Awol Erizku: X.' Composed of new and recent works, the show is a celebration and reexamination of Afrocentric aesthetics — an approach to expression the artist calls 'Afro-esotericism.' Malcolm X is at the heart of it all, his image anointing the walls and a photograph of his former home, boarded up with a sign advertising its rehabilitation, presented without comment. It's a show about preserving Black history, about the spiritual implications bubbling beneath familiar objects with double meanings in the culture, from ice to bricks. Elsewhere in Los Angeles, Erizku's exhibition 'Moon, Turn the Flames…Gently Gently Away,' his inaugural solo with Sean Kelly Gallery on view through July 3, features hypersaturated still lifes that reflect the beauty (flowers), temptations (money) and struggles (smoke) of cultural life in L.A., a city he has now lived in for 10 years. On the occasion of that opening, I met Erizku at Living Room again, but this time it was face-to-face and not through a chance encounter with his work. The multidisciplinary artist, who works across photography, sculpture, painting, installation, film and sound, was grounded, warm and most interested in eschewing the politics and oft-performative pleasantries of the art world in favor of genuine connection with the community of guests. Though we didn't know each other, there was an instant familiarity, which is perhaps the most sacred, inexplicable part of the African diasporic experience: that sense of recognition, which is more a feeling than anything that can be adequately described. In this way, the very spirit of Blackness is art — a stirring beyond language. And it is this focus on the feeling of wordless understanding that guides Erizku's approach to creation. Evan Nicole Brown: Both of your L.A. shows hinge on a symbol: the five colorful, interlocking Olympic rings. Symbolism is such a deep and dominant part of your work: How do you approach adding your aesthetic to ready-made symbols — like the Olympic rings, the Hollywood sign, the L.A. Dodgers logo — which are familiar to us as viewers, in order to make them your own? Awol Erizku: Symbols, for me, have become a way to communicate and have an immediate effect. So by simply turning the Dodgers logo and literally just swapping the colors to those of the Pan-African flag, I'm able to speak to Black folks directly. I think when you see that, you know that's for you, you know that's a unifying symbol. That's what I'm after — symbols that we can use in a universal manner. ENB: That just made me realize the true power of visual symbolism as a shorthand, as a way to say so much without saying anything at all. Even a color can be a shorthand to demonstrate something. AE: That also resonates with the 'Nipsey blue' in the background of the [gallery] show. I've said this in passing, but I thought about making [the show] a love letter for my son. And I still do think about it that way, because a lot of the topics in the exhibition, especially at the gallery, is a conversation that I think any father would have with their son. [I'm] looking back at some of the things that I've been thinking about a lot consciously, and I found a way to communicate that by distilling certain symbols to make juxtapositions that then gave a new meaning. Like the evidence markers and cowrie shells are two things that shouldn't be together, but somehow by putting them together in this way, it creates a third, or new, meaning. [With those images], I'm looking at the killings of Sean Bell and Amadou Diallo, and the third subject is kind of open-ended, which is the sad reality. But with those two men in particular, I remember being a younger man living in New York and thinking about how it happened, when it happened and how people reacted to it. On a deeper level, in my lexicon, I title the works in a way that isn't so direct. The piece for Sean Bell, 'Sean Bell - Shawny Binladen,' is actually the title of a Shawny Binladen song, which then complicates this narrative even further. And the title of [the piece for Amadou Diallo], 'American Skin (41 Shots) - Bruce Springsteen,' is in reference to a Bruce Springsteen song, which again complicates the narrative even further because now you're not just talking about police murder and rap, now I'm using someone from a different genre who's also talking about police brutality in America. There's a deeper concern and awareness of the ripple effects of police brutality in America as it relates to young Black men specifically. ENB: How does your Ethiopian heritage figure into your work, particularly as you make artistic choices that connect the broader diaspora? In your images, I see you exploring police brutality on American soil, but also recurring motifs like cowrie shells, smoke and flowers seem to be more conceptual reminders of home, ritual, currency and cultural memory. AE: The sad thing is — and this is why I feel these two subject matters have maybe been in my consciousness for so long — is that Amadou Diallo was Guinean, and Sean Bell was a foundational Black American, but to police you're still a Black man at the end of the day, you know? So whatever qualms we may have on the nuance level, to the outside world we're a monolith, even though we know we aren't. For me, that's the nucleus of the work. It's all about creating a language that we can use throughout the diaspora in a universal fashion. 'Afro-esotericism,' an ideology that I've been building for the last [several] years, relates to my 2023 monograph 'Mystic Parallax,' which shows you a version of Black aesthetics cohabitating and existing in the same universe; it's far more interesting to create a new way of looking at the world by [using] the things that we already have exposure to. ENB: How does the landscape of Los Angeles, the home of Hollywood and many other cultural exports, inform your practice, particularly your projects that engage celebrities and the concept of fame? AE: I personally am distant from that world. I mean, there's some work-related things that I do every once in a while, but as a whole, I went to school and I focused a lot on theory. So the commercial stuff really doesn't hold that much water for me. L.A. can be isolating, it can be welcoming, it can be territorial. It's a multifaceted city; that's what I love about it and that's where I find the inspiration for most of these works. I find L.A. to be inspiring as an artist because it gives you a lot of room to breathe, and a lot of room to practice different things; it's almost like an empty canvas that is just waiting to be filled with ideas. ENB: I'm constantly thinking about the tension between the produced version of L.A. and the natural world of the city, and how the quality of light here from the sun contrasts with the artificiality of neon. AE: When it comes to neon, I think it's a medium that I'll continue to work with until I can't. I find neon to be this medium that uses light in a more poetic way. A great example of that is 'NO ICE'; it's so simple, but you can really read into it. The duality and double entendres in hip-hop is so important and crucial. Why is 'OPPS' in the style of the Cops [T.V. show] logo? If you know, you know, you know what I mean? ENB: Let's circle back to 'Afro-esotericism,' which has to do with symbolism, spirituality and this legacy of mythmaking. AE: It's the intrinsic feelings, expressions, gestures, thoughts and just overall [experience] of being a Black human being on this planet, like the things that we already have in us. There are all these things that end up getting co-opted by people on the internet, but I'm more interested in the things that they can't tap into, the things that they can't steal. It's an open source [ideology]; I'm open to people adding to it, to make some sort of atlas or an encyclopedia [with] knowledge of being. ENB: The richness of Black culture is so special so I really resonate with that. But I am also curious about whether you create space in your practice for play — not to undercut the depth of all that you're exploring, but I'm almost exhausted by Blackness being such a serious subject, and being so profound. It's so fun seeing memes just about the way we laugh while running away from each other, you know? How do you leave room for that sort of register of Blackness in your work, too? AE: That is precisely what I'm trying to get out. I'm merely saying, look at what our expansiveness can afford us. Evan Nicole Brown is a Los Angeles-born writer, editor and journalist who covers the arts and culture. Her work has been featured in Architectural Digest, Dwell, The Hollywood Reporter, the New York Times, T Magazine, Time and elsewhere. She is the managing editor of Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles and the founder of Group Chat, a conversation series in L.A.
Yahoo
05-05-2025
- Yahoo
Column: Lewis W. Hine's photos helped child labor laws pass a century ago. We need him again
Legislatures in 16 states, Florida prominent among them, have been deliberating rolling back child labor laws. In some cases, major steps have already been taken to loosen restrictions on work by kids as young as 14. The erasures, almost exclusively promoted by Republicans, target legal prohibitions against child exploitation that have been in place for nearly a century. Here's a surprise: Radical transformations in photography are one primary reason the threatened rollbacks have gotten traction. In the first decade of the 20th century, sociologist Lewis W. Hine (1874-1940) picked up a camera and trained it on the cheap labor performed by children, which had become commonplace everywhere from Pittsburgh steel mills to Carolina textile factories, from an Alabama canning company for shucked oysters to West Virginia factories for glass. When published, Hine's haunting pictures scandalized America, and laws to protect kids emerged. An entire modern artistic genre — documentary photography — was weaned on the growing social effort to rein in the abusive practice of forcing children to toil in sweatshops and on farms in the wake of the Gilded Age. Emblematic is Hine's luminous picture of a young girl — called a spinner — at North Carolina's Whitnel Cotton Mfg. Co. He positioned the shabbily dressed child between a seemingly unending row of whirling textile bobbins, where her job was to patrol the interminable line and speedily repair broken threads, and a row of factory windows where light streams in from outdoors to illuminate the interior scene. She has stopped her work to face the camera, clearly at the photographer's instruction. Her right hand, fingers curled, rests on the infernal machine, while her left hand is open on the windowsill. She's a juvenile hostage, an innocent trapped between captivity and freedom. A spinner's toil in a textile mill was not especially dangerous, although loss of a finger was certainly a risk. However, as Stanford art historian Alexander Nemerov has sharply observed, the damage recorded in Hine's entrancing photograph was inflicted at least as much on the young girl's soul as on her body. An aura of entrapment is evoked. A repetitive, tedious, mechanically determined routine is her present and her future, stretching into infinity. When her focused gaze meets yours, a coiled look of resignation stiffens her soft face, and it is painful to see. You might move on. But for her, this is it. The transformation in photography today is not that artists have abandoned a productive interest in the state of the world, including these sorts of cruel labor conditions, which social documentary photographs explore. They haven't. LaToya Ruby Frazier is one impressive example. 'The Last Cruze,' her moving exhibition at Exposition Park's California African American Museum in 2021, registered the lives of union workers at the General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio — workers displaced and disrupted when the factory was shuttered two years earlier. Frazier's installation of 67 black-and-white photographs and one color video told an unflattering story of the human aftermath, and it did so in fascinating ways. But it is also fair to say that her soulful installation did not — could not — generate the same sort of outrage that Hine's photographs did. In 1908, when he began to publish his images of young children working under bleak conditions in factories and on farms, the context in which the pictures appeared was radically different from today's visual environment. Simply put, photographs were still scarce, relatively speaking, but they were on their way to replacing woodblock illustrations in newspapers and periodicals to become the dominant form of visual media. Camera pictures were disruptive. They connected straight to the world in front of the lens, and they had the capacity to grab eyeballs, pulling minds along with them. Today, living in a media-saturated landscape, there's no escape from them. Only rarely do they disrupt. Wake up in the morning, check your phone, and scores — maybe even hundreds — of pictures flash by before breakfast. In such a milieu, Hine's troubling 1908 photographs would easily disappear, perhaps seizing a moment but soon evaporating into the visual miasma that floods the zone daily. And now, with the advent of artificial intelligence, assumption of a direct connection to reality unravels. Skepticism about photographic authenticity arises. Hine, then in his early 30s, was part of a growing Progressive movement that sought large-scale social and political reform following the collapse of post-Civil War Reconstruction and the explosion of the grasping Gilded Age. John Spargo, a self-educated British stonemason who emigrated to New York in 1901, became an unlikely political theorist of the movement. His book 'The Bitter Cry of the Children' fiercely condemned child labor practices, arguing in part that interrupting school with work caused lifelong impairment. Novelists as different as Jack London and H.G. Wells agreed, and they said so in short stories and magazine essays. A private, nonprofit National Child Labor Committee formed to lobby state and federal officials, while embarking on public education. The NCLC hired Hine. His research experience as a sociologist had led him to the pioneering photographs of Jacob Riis, a police reporter for the New York Tribune. Riis exposed Lower East Side slum conditions in tenement photographs that would form the basis for his renowned book, 'How the Other Half Lives.' Hine, recognizing the power of photographs as visual evidence, soon picked up the camera too. His pictorial documents of child labor began to appear in weekly magazines, like Charities and the Commons, and in widely distributed NCLC pamphlets with such dry if explanatory titles as 'Child Labor in Virginia' and 'Farmwork and Schools in Kentucky.' The publications might have had limited circulation, but their poignant photographs seeped into the popular press. For readers who did not spend their days walking the factory floor or supervising the sorting of coal chunks sliding down a chute, an incisive picture would stand out. Witnessing a photograph of a naive child climbing up barefoot into massive machinery or shadowed beneath big tobacco leaves sprayed with pesticides could easily stick in the mind. Hine's 1917 picture of a 10-year-old boy working Connecticut's Gildersleeve tobacco farm, south of Hartford, shows him on his knees in an irrigation ditch between rows of what is probably the tough tobacco used for cigar wrappers. (More tender tobacco, shredded for the filling, was grown in the South, not New England.) It's the first picking, when three fully grown leaves near the bottom of the stalk are cut and stacked. First one side's plant, then the other's, would be picked — and on the child would go, plant by plant in the humid, late-summer heat down lengthy rows covering acres of farmland. Soon, the second tier of leaves would mature and the process repeated. Then the third tier was ready, picked while reaching up, and so on until, standing, the plant was fully harvested. The labor's grueling tedium is stifling. My own first summer job as a kid in search of after-school pocket money was picking cigar tobacco on a Connecticut farm just north of Hartford. I was 14. I lasted less than a week. Hine's tousled little boy, who looks forlornly into the camera with scowling dark eyes beneath a furrowed brow, likely had no such liberating choice. Read more: In Don Bachardy's vivid portraits at the Huntington, show business isn't what you think Today's drive to roll back state child labor laws is being pushed by conservative groups like the Foundation for Government Accountability in Naples, Fla., a well-funded anti-welfare organization. (Ironically, according to its 2023 tax filing, the CEO of the FGA, a nonprofit seeking to loosen child labor restrictions, received more than $498,000 in salary and other compensation.) In that tourism-dependent state, the Orlando Weekly reported that Gov. Ron DeSantis' office wrote his state's bill, saying changes made by the legislature last year to loosen working restrictions for minors 'did not go far enough.' If passed, teenagers as young as 14 could work overnight hours on school nights or long shifts without a meal break. The Miami Herald reported that, in defense of his plan, the governor explained to the Trump administration's border czar that a younger workforce could be part of the solution to replacing 'dirt cheap' labor from migrants in the country illegally. The bill, he added, would 'allow families to decide what is in the best interest of their child.' DeSantis asked, 'Why do we say we need to import foreigners, even import them illegally, when you know, teenagers used to work at these resorts; college students should be able to do this stuff.' College students, of course, are adults, not children, their average age between 18 and 25. And the Child Welfare League of America notes that, in 2022, parents committed 71% of reported child abuse in Florida, so an appeal to family decision-making as a replacement for laws regulating child labor is fraught. The historical example of Lewis Hine's exceptional documentary photographs — and their beneficial impact on children's lives — would help illuminate the current, highly contentious subject. His work is found in many public collections. The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, N.Y., are two that hold thousands of prints and negatives. The Getty Museum in L.A. has more than 100. But there's a hitch: However much art museums today express a commitment to social relevance, their programming is the opposite of nimble. It takes years to produce and schedule an exhibition. Today's child labor fight might be over. If ever there were a vital reason for a virtual show on an art museum's website to be presented and vigorously promoted, this is it. During the first Trump administration, the popular digital magazine Bored Panda did just that, mounting an extensive anthology of Hine's riveting child labor photographs. Demand for cheap labor never goes away, but sometimes it crests. We're there again. Get notified when the biggest stories in Hollywood, culture and entertainment go live. Sign up for L.A. Times entertainment alerts. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
05-05-2025
- Los Angeles Times
Lewis W. Hine's photos helped child labor laws pass a century ago. We need him again
Legislatures in 16 states, Florida prominent among them, have been deliberating rolling back child labor laws. In some cases, major steps have already been taken to loosen restrictions on work by kids as young as 14. The erasures, almost exclusively promoted by Republicans, target legal prohibitions against child exploitation that have been in place for nearly a century. Here's a surprise: Radical transformations in photography are one primary reason the threatened rollbacks have gotten traction. In the first decade of the 20th century, sociologist Lewis W. Hine (1874-1940) picked up a camera and trained it on the cheap labor performed by children, which had become commonplace everywhere from Pittsburgh steel mills to Carolina textile factories, from an Alabama canning company for shucked oysters to West Virginia factories for glass. When published, Hine's haunting pictures scandalized America, and laws to protect kids emerged. An entire modern artistic genre — documentary photography — was weaned on the growing social effort to rein in the abusive practice of forcing children to toil in sweatshops and on farms in the wake of the Gilded Age. Emblematic is Hine's luminous picture of a young girl — called a spinner — at North Carolina's Whitnel Cotton Mfg. Co. He positioned the shabbily dressed child between a seemingly unending row of whirling textile bobbins, where her job was to patrol the interminable line and speedily repair broken threads, and a row of factory windows where light streams in from outdoors to illuminate the interior scene. She has stopped her work to face the camera, clearly at the photographer's instruction. Her right hand, fingers curled, rests on the infernal machine, while her left hand is open on the windowsill. She's a juvenile hostage, an innocent trapped between captivity and freedom. A spinner's toil in a textile mill was not especially dangerous, although loss of a finger was certainly a risk. However, as Stanford art historian Alexander Nemerov has sharply observed, the damage recorded in Hine's entrancing photograph was inflicted at least as much on the young girl's soul as on her body. An aura of entrapment is evoked. A repetitive, tedious, mechanically determined routine is her present and her future, stretching into infinity. When her focused gaze meets yours, a coiled look of resignation stiffens her soft face, and it is painful to see. You might move on. But for her, this is it. The transformation in photography today is not that artists have abandoned a productive interest in the state of the world, including these sorts of cruel labor conditions, which social documentary photographs explore. They haven't. LaToya Ruby Frazier is one impressive example. 'The Last Cruze,' her moving exhibition at Exposition Park's California African American Museum in 2021, registered the lives of union workers at the General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio — workers displaced and disrupted when the factory was shuttered two years earlier. Frazier's installation of 67 black-and-white photographs and one color video told an unflattering story of the human aftermath, and it did so in fascinating ways. But it is also fair to say that her soulful installation did not — could not — generate the same sort of outrage that Hine's photographs did. In 1908, when he began to publish his images of young children working under bleak conditions in factories and on farms, the context in which the pictures appeared was radically different from today's visual environment. Simply put, photographs were still scarce, relatively speaking, but they were on their way to replacing woodblock illustrations in newspapers and periodicals to become the dominant form of visual media. Camera pictures were disruptive. They connected straight to the world in front of the lens, and they had the capacity to grab eyeballs, pulling minds along with them. Today, living in a media-saturated landscape, there's no escape from them. Only rarely do they disrupt. Wake up in the morning, check your phone, and scores — maybe even hundreds — of pictures flash by before breakfast. In such a milieu, Hine's troubling 1908 photographs would easily disappear, perhaps seizing a moment but soon evaporating into the visual miasma that floods the zone daily. And now, with the advent of artificial intelligence, assumption of a direct connection to reality unravels. Skepticism about photographic authenticity arises. Hine, then in his early 30s, was part of a growing Progressive movement that sought large-scale social and political reform following the collapse of post-Civil War Reconstruction and the explosion of the grasping Gilded Age. John Spargo, a self-educated British stonemason who emigrated to New York in 1901, became an unlikely political theorist of the movement. His book 'The Bitter Cry of the Children' fiercely condemned child labor practices, arguing in part that interrupting school with work caused lifelong impairment. Novelists as different as Jack London and H.G. Wells agreed, and they said so in short stories and magazine essays. A private, nonprofit National Child Labor Committee formed to lobby state and federal officials, while embarking on public education. The NCLC hired Hine. His research experience as a sociologist had led him to the pioneering photographs of Jacob Riis, a police reporter for the New York Tribune. Riis exposed Lower East Side slum conditions in tenement photographs that would form the basis for his renowned book, 'How the Other Half Lives.' Hine, recognizing the power of photographs as visual evidence, soon picked up the camera too. His pictorial documents of child labor began to appear in weekly magazines, like Charities and the Commons, and in widely distributed NCLC pamphlets with such dry if explanatory titles as 'Child Labor in Virginia' and 'Farmwork and Schools in Kentucky.' The publications might have had limited circulation, but their poignant photographs seeped into the popular press. For readers who did not spend their days walking the factory floor or supervising the sorting of coal chunks sliding down a chute, an incisive picture would stand out. Witnessing a photograph of a naive child climbing up barefoot into massive machinery or shadowed beneath big tobacco leaves sprayed with pesticides could easily stick in the mind. Hine's 1917 picture of a 10-year-old boy working Connecticut's Gildersleeve tobacco farm, south of Hartford, shows him on his knees in an irrigation ditch between rows of what is probably the tough tobacco used for cigar wrappers. (More tender tobacco, shredded for the filling, was grown in the South, not New England.) It's the first picking, when three fully grown leaves near the bottom of the stalk are cut and stacked. First one side's plant, then the other's, would be picked — and on the child would go, plant by plant in the humid, late-summer heat down lengthy rows covering acres of farmland. Soon, the second tier of leaves would mature and the process repeated. Then the third tier was ready, picked while reaching up, and so on until, standing, the plant was fully harvested. The labor's grueling tedium is stifling. My own first summer job as a kid in search of after-school pocket money was picking cigar tobacco on a Connecticut farm just north of Hartford. I was 14. I lasted less than a week. Hine's tousled little boy, who looks forlornly into the camera with scowling dark eyes beneath a furrowed brow, likely had no such liberating choice. Today's drive to roll back state child labor laws is being pushed by conservative groups like the Foundation for Government Accountability in Naples, Fla., a well-funded anti-welfare organization. (Ironically, according to its 2023 tax filing, the CEO of the FGA, a nonprofit seeking to loosen child labor restrictions, received more than $498,000 in salary and other compensation.) In that tourism-dependent state, the Orlando Weekly reported that Gov. Ron DeSantis' office wrote his state's bill, saying changes made by the legislature last year to loosen working restrictions for minors 'did not go far enough.' If passed, teenagers as young as 14 could work overnight hours on school nights or long shifts without a meal break. The Miami Herald reported that, in defense of his plan, the governor explained to the Trump administration's border czar that a younger workforce could be part of the solution to replacing 'dirt cheap' labor from migrants in the country illegally. The bill, he added, would 'allow families to decide what is in the best interest of their child.' DeSantis asked, 'Why do we say we need to import foreigners, even import them illegally, when you know, teenagers used to work at these resorts; college students should be able to do this stuff.' College students, of course, are adults, not children, their average age between 18 and 25. And the Child Welfare League of America notes that, in 2022, parents committed 71% of reported child abuse in Florida, so an appeal to family decision-making as a replacement for laws regulating child labor is fraught. The historical example of Lewis Hine's exceptional documentary photographs — and their beneficial impact on children's lives — would help illuminate the current, highly contentious subject. His work is found in many public collections. The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, N.Y., are two that hold thousands of prints and negatives. The Getty Museum in L.A. has more than 100. But there's a hitch: However much art museums today express a commitment to social relevance, their programming is the opposite of nimble. It takes years to produce and schedule an exhibition. Today's child labor fight might be over. If ever there were a vital reason for a virtual show on an art museum's website to be presented and vigorously promoted, this is it. During the first Trump administration, the popular digital magazine Bored Panda did just that, mounting an extensive anthology of Hine's riveting child labor photographs. Demand for cheap labor never goes away, but sometimes it crests. We're there again.
