An activist awakens

On a Saturday afternoon beneath an unforgiving August sun, Sarah Redpath flip-flops across “Main Street” — the pristine, pretend downtown square at The Streets at Southpoint. She and a friend in high heels are handing out fliers protesting an exhibition of real bodies at the Durham mall.Sweat is one thing, but the real heat arrives in about 20 minutes. Security guards swarm the women and tell them they can’t continue. The reassuring cascade of a nearby water fountain mixes with the murmur of curious shoppers as Redpath explains herself to “the men in the Smokey the Bear hats,” then tries arguing with them. Finally she asks the ranking guard if they can just stay and get some ice cream if they put away their fliers.

Redpath and her friend chill out with their frozen treats and watch the line form to enter “Bodies … The Exhibition.” Or as she puts it later, “grandmothers and kids, waiting to spend a Saturday afternoon looking at peeled people.”

Redpath hardly recognizes herself. Four months ago, she says, she was an apolitical, work-at-home mother of three, baking treats for neighborhood parties. Now she was obsessed with a popular traveling exhibition that struck her as profoundly dehumanizing.

The summer that Sarah Redpath took on the multinational body-show industry would prove to be a far more frustrating time than she ever imagined. But, for her, it was a far better choice than ignoring it.

The inciting incident

Redpath, 45, is a Pennsylvanian who attended Carnegie Mellon and N.C. State University. She traveled the world in the 1990s while working for IBM in graphics interfacing, a field in which she also holds patents on inventions. Her specialty is troubleshooting system problems at large businesses by understanding the people who work there.

She married another inventor at IBM, settled in Cary and began raising her family and working for IBM part time. Her concerns were typically work- and family-centered — until the bodies came to Durham.

“Bodies … The Exhibition,” mounted by Atlanta-based Premier Exhibitions, uses actual human skeletons with organs, tendons, muscles and skin intact to varying degrees. The bodies are sometimes posed playing soccer or tennis. Healthy organs are displayed next to diseased ones. There is a room of fetuses and another room all about skin. A gift shop sells plastic organs on key chains, T-shirts and other souvenirs.

The exhibition opened at The Streets at Southpoint during Easter break, when The News & Observer published photos and an article that described the exhibition and summarized the controversy that has followed it.

Redpath’s reaction to the feature story was physical. She said she was repulsed and shocked in a way that she had felt only once before: as a teenager seeing a picture of Holocaust victims. She started having nightmares about the exhibit, and she wrote an emphatic letter to the editor.

“There was something about this that would not let go,” she said. “It brought out the mama wolf in me. Something came into my territory that disturbs the kind of world my children will grow up in.”

She began researching the issue voraciously. She found that three companies, each with numerous bodies exhibitions, are touring the United States. It’s a multibillion-dollar market that straddles a subjective line between educational and grotesque.

Most of the specimens come from China. The bodies are processed through Chinese factories, where workers dissect and preserve the corpses using a process called plastination, which replaces fat and fluids with silicone rubber, epoxy or polyester.

Groups concerned with human-rights abuses in China have raised questions about whether the people consented to have their bodies displayed this way, how they died and whether they had been prisoners.

The companies either say they have documentation for each body but won’t disclose it publicly, or they insist that they trust the Chinese government when it represents that the bodies were legitimately obtained from medical schools and only consist of people who died natural deaths.

China’s organ-harvesting industry and recent trade problems with defective and diseased products did nothing to reassure Redpath. And her world travels, she says, made the bodies seem more than just plastic specimens from far away. The exhibition undermined the very essence of human connections, whether on a global scale or within a cul-de-sac.

She knew she had to do more. But what?

Finding her other side

The bodies exhibit brought out a side of Redpath’s personality that she didn’t even know she had, she said. “I’m a get-along kind of person.”

She had found small pockets of opposition that sprouted in other cities where plastinated bodies have been exhibited. She got in touch with some of them and found further encouragement from an international trade law professor in San Francisco.

And she talked about it with sympathetic neighbors, beginning with Hal Goodtree, a wiry, middle-age New York refugee who plays in a rock band, writes Web sites for a living and runs some online blogs and groups. Goodtree was struck by her sudden fervor for the cause and agreed to help her set up an informational Web site with a petition to stop the exhibitions.
“She’s absolutely normal,” he said. “She’s known for her fried green tomatoes, crepes and her funky garden. This was a shot out of the blue.”

In June, Redpath gathered her sympathizers for a strategy session. She served them her grandmother Millie’s baked apple pie. “How wholesome is that?” Goodtree said.

Among them was her mother, Shirley Donan, the widow of a physician who has become something of a self-styled gumshoe in a variety of issues that have engaged her in recent years, including trying to get a Philadelphia museum to return an ancestor’s etched brass tombstone to its cemetery in England.

“We tilt at windmills,” Redpath said. “We’re an idealistic family. We believe in the better nature of things.”

This was a new step in mother-daughter relations, because Donan usually rolled her eyes at her daughter’s lack of interest in politics and other causes. Together, they set out to get some answers.

Redpath visited the Durham city manager’s office, called the FBI, the state Attorney General’s Office, the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the police. Whose responsibility is this? Where is the documentation? Can you show it to me?

She didn’t have much luck. Eventually, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent appeared to take an interest, which encouraged Redpath.

Back home in Pennsylvania, her mother tried to find out whether the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had inspected any of the bodies coming into the country, and if not, why not? While visiting her mother, Redpath met a curator at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh. The curator had just resigned over her objections to “Bodies … The Exhibition,” which was headed there when it left Durham.

Redpath met with June Atkinson, state superintendent of schools for North Carolina. Atkinson, after doing her own research, allowed Redpath to quote her on the Web site saying the exhibition was inappropriate for school field trips.

“She had done such an excellent job of developing her case that I had no reservations about saying, ‘Sarah, I believe you’re right,’ ” Atkinson said in a recent interview.

But as the summer wore on, their momentum seemed to wane. Promising avenues at Customs and the CDC had dead-ended into bureaucratic silence.

Finding a new ally

The Southpoint exhibition was proving to be a popular attraction. Even with tickets at $24.50 each, it drew a steady crowd.

A review of visitor comments during late summer showed no complaints, and the run was extended for two weeks. Most people in the Triangle didn’t seem to have a problem with it. Redpath thought people must not understand that these bodies had been real people.

At loose ends, she found herself brooding.

“The quiet of the cul-de-sac makes you feel you’ve gone off the deep end sometimes,” she said.

Then she connected with a new ally.

There was at least one more person who Redpath knew felt the same way. A woman in Durham had been the only other person to write a letter to the editor of The N&O expressing outrage. With a few keystrokes she found Robin Kirk’s e-mail address.

“Dear Ms. Kirk,” she began typing, “On a whim I looked you up on the Internet and read with surprise and great interest about your various projects.”

Unlike the suburban mom, Kirk had a lot of experience taking on the powers that be. She had been a researcher for Human Rights Watch and spent much of the ’90s in the Andes investigating corruption and abuse. She published two books on Colombia and Peru.

Kirk also worked on death penalty cases in North Carolina. She is now director of the Human Rights Center at Duke University, where her husband, Orin Starn, is a professor in the divinity school. Kirk saw this as a human rights issue that, for once, was right here at home. Yet no one else seemed to care.

“I was surprised to be contacted, given the complacency,” Kirk said. “No one was really up in arms about it. I was charmed by Sarah’s passion.”

Kirk was also impressed by Redpath’s research and the fact that she elicited a public statement from the schools superintendent, which could provide ammunition against future exhibitions. She marveled that Redpath had posted an extensive entry in Wikipedia with everything footnoted and hyperlinked.

Grass-roots movements always begin this way, Kirk said, with small groups of committed people building alliances and slowly gathering support. Then Redpath, bolstered by the connection with Kirk, decided she could do more.

Protest comes to a head

The day after her first flier foray at Southpoint, Redpath returns with Kirk. They last an hour.

This time the security officers take Redpath’s picture, present her with a “notice to depart and forbid entry” and say she cannot return to Southpoint for six months. Kirk describes the confrontation as fun. Redpath says her lip was quivering, “as though I’d had a minor traffic accident.”

With the exhibition about to close, they decide to organize one final protest. With the notice to depart, Redpath will not join in. “I can’t go to jail,” she says. “My kids are about to start school.”

On Sept. 1, four Duke professors, enlisted by Kirk, and a couple of their children arrive with placards and fliers to hand to about 60 people lined up for the exhibition to open. Some ignore the protesters, some argue and some walk away with fliers in one hand and tickets to the show in the other.

Within four minutes, five security officers and a Durham sheriff’s deputy encircle the group.

“I’m not asking you to leave,” security officer Lt. D. Johnson tells them. “Just put up your signs. This place is for shopping. That’s it.”

An hour later, Kirk and Goodtree, who stayed in the background to photograph the protest, meet Redpath at a nearby cafe to fill her in. Kirk’s cell phone rings: Two of the professors returned and planted their signs in landscaping outside the exhibition. Starn and Anne Allison, chair of Duke’s cultural anthropology department, were cited for trespassing and given a court date on the misdemeanor charge.

“Wow, that’s great,” Redpath says.

Goodtree leans back in his chair. “That kicks things up a notch,” he says.

Isn’t it ironic, Kirk says, that the mirage of Southpoint’s main street dissolves as soon as someone tries to exercise free speech there?

Moving on and not

A few days later “Bodies … The Exhibition” finished its run at Southpoint — replaced, of all things, by a seasonal Halloween store — and was reassembled in Pittsburgh.

“Some people have had emotional and exaggerated responses to its content,” the Carnegie Science Center director told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Premier claims more than 5 million people have seen its exhibitions, including more than 300,000 schoolchildren across the nation. Happy customers far outnumber the sprinkling of protesters.

“It’s our intent to try and dialogue as best we can when we have differences of opinion about our exhibition,” Premier spokesman Roy Glover said last week. “Unfortunately, whenever we’ve had someone like this opposed to what we’re doing there’s never really an opportunity for us to get together and talk about these issues and try to understand each other.”

Glover became Premier’s spokesman in 2004, after retiring as an anatomy professor at the University of Michigan. He said most people who are apprehensive change their minds once they see what’s inside.

Redpath had no intention of setting foot inside. Even though the exhibition has left Durham, the fight is not over.

“I wish it would let me go,” she said. “It’s got me by the throat.”

Pennsylvania, being her home state and the place where her mother still lives, is the new battleground. Redpath has plans but won’t talk about them. She doesn’t want to tip off the other side, because the whole business makes her a little nervous.

Kirk says it’s the Bodies promoters who should be nervous.

“If I was Premier I’d be very afraid of her,” Kirk said. “She is the normal person who asks the obvious question.”