Segregated Sectors

Abstract

In late August 1961, Jewish American photojournalist Leonard Freed visited the Berlin Wall. His chance encounter with an unnamed Black soldier, who he photographed, guarding the newly erected wall inspired his new project: mapping lines and lineages of racial segregation in the United States. This chapter explores Freed’s movements in and out of Berlin during the early years of the Berlin Wall, with an eye toward locating the single-shot image of a Black GI within the broader currents of cultural history. It first delves into the larger context of the Berlin crisis and the walling of Berlin by means of cultural productions, texts, and voices that sought to connect the German wall with the lined and legacies of American segregation. Second, it looks to how Freed’s development as a photographer informed his understanding of geopolitical division and identification in the context of transnational geopolitics and cultural memory. Finally, the chapter closes with a consideration of Freed’s Black in White America (1967/8) and Made in Germany (1970). Freed’s images suggest he viewed the American post-WWII democratic project as a fragile construct.