Chip Thomas stands in front of a black-and-white photo taking up an entire wall in the Riles Building on Northern Arizona University’s north campus. The faces of two-dozen or so men stare back in solemn silence from another time.
“If you look at this image, it states ‘The Arizona Lumber Mill, hiring Negroes since 1891.’ So we know that African Americans were working here in the lumber mill since the late 1800s,” he says.
The mill, at the base of what today is Observatory Mesa in Flagstaff, employed an integrated workforce, a rarity for its time.
“This piece is important to me because just 30 miles away in Williams, there was the Saginaw and Manistee Mill and Box Company, which explicitly did not hire African Americans,” he says.
Thomas is no stranger to such grand artistic displays. As his alter ego, Jetsonorama, he’s created countless large-scale, public wheat-paste murals across the Navajo Nation and beyond. But for this project, Thomas wanted to pull back the curtain on the hidden history of one of northern Arizona’s key industries.
“This exhibition is an opportunity to bring the idea of Black lumberjacks to the home of Louie the Lumberjack,” Thomas says.
The image of a stereotypical lumberjack is seared in most people’s minds: a big bushy beard, flannel shirt, an axe. And almost universally white. But this exhibit explores the legacy of this enduring western icon that Black workers helped cement. Thomas says it’s inherently a migration story.
By the late 19th century, the forests in the American South had become overcut, which triggered an exodus west for many workers during Jim Crow segregation.
“And there were race laws in place in the South. And some of that came to Arizona,” Thomas says. “You know, socially, the employees lived in segregated housing and segregated neighborhoods, but they were still able to work together. I mean, it’s comparable to the Great Migration northward in a lot of ways … The African American lumbermen who came from the South were highly skilled. And so, they were a skilled labor force that brought their expertise with them to this area.”
The exhibit is a collaboration between Thomas and students in NAU’s Department of Comparative Cultural Studies.
“The idea was to take some of what Chip is best known for, like the Painted Desert Project up at Gray Mountain, and to bring that sort of street art, public-art practice indoors, and then to build sort of the environment around Chip’s work,” says teaching professor Russell Pryba.
On another wall, the words “Imagine, Louie, Black, Latino, Native, female” are scrawled in silver ink on three tintype photos of Black lumberjacks.
“It’s not just the archival image,” says Pryba. “It’s the use of the image to create like a total work of art … That’s really significant because you’re not just experiencing the history, but you’re seeing that through the lens of an artistic expression.”
One black-and-white image depicts a man wielding a crosscut saw after having felled a massive pine tree. It’s accompanied by a short personal story from Bernadine Lewis, who’s the program director for NAU’s Center of Inclusive Excellence and Access.
“I’m from the Geechee Gullah culture of the coastal islands of Georgia, and from an island that is now just about 19 descendants of enslaved peoples,” says Lewis.
She recalls stories her aunt told of the larger-than-life men who communed with the trees as they worked in Southern forests.
“They had certain songs when they were cutting down the trees, making those certain sounds, those tones that in our culture and our belief was magical. Right? And even the tools that they used was given to them by one of the African gods of iron,” Lewis says.
But she came to discover that the rest of the world had a much different image of these men that the one she’d grown up with.
“So I moved here and, of course, working at NAU and I see a lumberjack that looks more like Paul Bunyan, but not like the ancestors that I know and the pictures that I had seen,” Lewis says.
And she wants to set the record straight by presenting a different set of lived experiences.
“These invisible stories or unheard stories, or lesser-known stories also help create the quilt, the fabric of Americans, of America’s history,” Lewis says. “So African American history is not just 28 days in February, it’s 365 days. And it is America's history.”
The Black Lumberjacks in Northern Arizona exhibit is on display through Juneteenth on Friday, June 19 in the Riles Building on the NAU campus. A more expansive version is planned for next year at the Coconino Center for the Arts in Flagstaff.
