'I Painted Those Scenes to Get Them Out of My System'

By Claudia Dreifus

April 2004

The painting is of a scene from recent American history, and the bright forms on the canvas show all the pain, horror, and hope of a certain Sunday in March of 1965.

The painting is called "Selma Bridge Crossing" and it depicts that famous moment when civil rights marchers attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, as they headed to Montgomery for a voting rights demonstration. They were viciously attacked by state troopers. The day has come to be known as "Bloody Sunday."

In the painting, a lone fisherman—a white man—sits in a boat below the bridge, ignoring the carnage. His indifference, symbolically, is the indifference that made the evil of segregation possible.

The artist who created this recent work, Bernice Sims of Brewton, Alabama, was in Selma that day. Thousands claim to have been on the Pettus Bridge at that time, but Sims, now 77, really was.

Because she feared losing her job, the mother of six didn't actually march. Instead, she stood to the side to offer her support. At the time, Sims—who dropped out of school in the 10th grade—supported her family as a housecleaner, seamstress, and insurance saleswoman. Between all that, she was active in secret voter registration work at her home in Brewton, a logging town more than 100 miles south of Selma.

"The Pettus Bridge, Bloody Sunday, that was bad," Sims says of the event that inspired the painting. Seated in the Brewton cottage she shares with family, she now admits, "It hurts, you know, it used to bother me. I had anger inside me, maybe even a little hatred. I painted those scenes to get them out of my system and once I started painting, getting it out where you could see it as an expression, it was a different story."

Indeed, Sims, who has to use a wheelchair because of diabetes and arthritis, has a reputation in the art world as the Grandma Moses of the civil rights struggle. She is what art critics call a "memory painter," specializing in representational narratives drawn from the true dramas of her life. Sims's works are laid out in strong colors that seem to jump from the canvas. They show demonstrators being attacked by police dogs and the Selma to Montgomery March from angles other than the Pettus Bridge. Selma, and what she saw there on that day in 1965, is a subject that Sims returns to again and again.

Back then, Sims was the secret head of Brewton's NAACP branch at a time when the organization was outlawed in Alabama. The NAACP offices up North sent her materials on how to organize voter registration: "We taught people how to read and how to fill out all the forms that were there to keep blacks from the polls, to limit our numbers. You had to know how to read and write and all that stuff [in order to register to vote]."

Sims's children were among the first to integrate Brewton's public schools. As she remembers it, when she registered them for class, a local official demanded, "Who paid you to put your kids up here?"

"Sims…has a reputation in the art world as the Grandma Moses of the civil rights struggle. She is what art critics call a 'memory painter,' specializing in representational narratives drawn from the true dramas of her life."

She replied that she had "too much damn pride to take a dime from anyone for what was already mine, because it was our tax money that had paid for things!"

All this boldness was liberating, but there were frightening moments as well. One night, after a voter registration meeting in a nearby county, she and a friend were pursued by a truck full of Klansmen. How did she know the men in the truck were actually KKK?

"Well, they had their white sheets on," Sims says, smiling. And then she adds, "I had a gun in my purse, with six bullets. I would have used it, if I had to."

Fortunately, she lost her pursuers.

In the early 1980s, after her youngest child had gone off to Job Corps, Sims decided to return to her own schooling. At Jefferson Davis Community College, she took art classes and was mentored by an instructor named Larry Manning, who thought the nice older lady in the corner was gifted.

Manning encouraged Sims to put the stories she told him onto canvas; these weren't just stories of civil rights heroism, but also of Sims's rural childhood—of hog butchering, river baptisms and cotton planting. Her narratives were, for want of a better word, natural. They depicted everyday African American life as she remembered it.

Manning was a creative teacher. One day, he took his students on a field trip to the home of famed Montgomery folk artist Mose Tolliver, who paints under the name Mose T. For Bernice Sims, the visit was life-changing: "I'd never seen work like mine in a museum. Mose Tolliver gave me courage to tell my kind of stories."

Within a decade, Sims's work would be on public exhibit. By the 1990s, her canvases had been acquired by several Alabama museums that collect indigenous art. She'd also been included in the important "Passionate Visions of the American South" show at the New Orleans Museum of Art. In the summer of 2003, one of Sims's Selma paintings was included at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art's homage to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. "I'm really trying to do a little history in my paintings, for my grands and my great-grands," she remarks. Her descendants—and others—"need to see what it was, because you don't find it in the history books or nothing like that."

Claudia Dreifus is a contributing writer to AARP The Magazine.