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Reflection on “A Plaintiff Speaks,” by Clarissa T. Sligh

A Plaintiff Speaks” is an autobiographical reflection on the influences of mid 20th century racial attitudes in the formation of the author’s own creative vision. The story is transports the reader back to Washington DC at a time when the nation is struggling with rectifying a national injustice rooted in Plessy v. Ferguson, and dramatically altered by Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.


To Americans living in the era of the Obama Presidency the Washington DC of 1955-1956 must seem like an alien land. Washington DC has always been a city fixed on the border between north and south, a pawn in the struggle of national ideas. Now a predominantly African American city, it had entered the Civil War a city full of slaves. On April 16, 1862, President Lincoln signed an act abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, months before the Emancipation Proclamation issued on January 1, 1863. Not a state, but a Federal District, even today the people of DC are denied the benefits of statehood and self-rule.


At the center of Clarissa Sligh’s recollection is the impact of pictures. As a 16-year-old African American she found herself entangled in the struggle for equality in Clarissa Thompson et al. v. The Arlington School Board et al. Her recollections of how she was portrayed in pictures in a Washington Post article about her case illustrate the power of pictures. Her own perception of her own images used in the article, is that they betrayed her cause for equity.


A subtle dance of emotive consequences is portrayed in her reaction to her own portrait. She becomes a photographer as a result of her own transformation by photography. She gives herself a life mission of using images as a means to help the viewer become aware of how photographs are really abstract constructions.

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