As featured in February/March 1998
Appeal to this Age
Civil rights photographers’ show spurs dialogue on race
By Vincent F.A. Golphin
Images in black and white freeze moments of violence, irony, sadness and pain from the 1950’s and 1960’s. Dogs and water cannons grind bodies into buildings. White mobs push against lines of federal troops. Martin Luther King Jr. is hustled to Birmingham jail. Malcolm X hawks The Final Call newspaper on a Harlem street corner. “Freedom,” scream placards. Finally, a young woman brandishes a cardboard sign that pleads, “Justice.” Those sights are only in photographs, but it is hard not to hear the call.
The United States’ premier photography showcase celebrated Martin Luther King Day, this year with the opening of an exhibition of largely unseen photographs that document the civil rights movement.
Appeal to this Age: Photography of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968, on display through May 31, transports visitors to Rochester’s George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film back to one of the nation’s most turbulent, yet hope-filled eras.
“The modern civil rights movement was the most important social upheaval in post-war America,” says Steven Kasher, curator for the exhibition. “It cannot be understood without considering the photographs that accompanied it, photographs that had such a great influence in their time.”
The New York City artist, photographer, writer, curator, and art dealer, organized the show. He also wrote the companion book, The Civil Rights Movement: A Photographic History, 1954- 1968, published in 1996 by Abbeville Press. The George Eastman House show is one of six on photography of the movement he has put together since 1993. Three are currently on the road.
Appeal to this Age originated and is circulated by New York’s Howard Greenberg Gallery. Seventy-five classic and seldom-seen images by photographers such as Gordon Parks, Richard Avedon, Danny Lyon, Eugene Smith, and Henri Cartier-Bresson carry viewers from the desegregation protests of the 1950s to the sanitation workers strike that brought The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis where he was assassinated in 1968. The display is augmented by the civil rights documentary, Freedom On My Mind, which runs continuously on television monitors throughout the gallery. The film centers on the voting rights struggle in Mississippi.
“No other American pictures radiate so brightly a collective passion for justice,” George Eastman House officials said. “These photographs are about participation, collaboration, struggle, and jubilation. Utopian visions become real here. . . . These people stood up to power and took some of that power for themselves. Fists and guns were thrust in their faces, clubs and water cannons tore at their bodies, but they did not stop, they went on. As always, power did not concede willingly. Among these pictures are some of our most vivid representations of state barbarism.”
The Civil Rights Movement history is filled with conversion tales related to photos. Researchers often recall how a certain picture drew a convert to the cause, turned a senator’s vote. It’s clear the senseless violence against kneeling and praying protesters sickened Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, goading them to new legislative initiatives.
National newspaper, magazine and television images exposed the brutality of segregationists’ desperate acts to maintain the status quo. They became part of King’s strategy.
There were two main types of shooters: photojournalists, who came from outside the movement and picture-takers supported by civil rights organizations. Whether the photographers knew they were recording crucial moments for a transforming nation is unknown.
Charles Moore, whose shots of Martin Luther King’s arrest in Birmingham for Life magazine are among the exhibit’s classic images, says was just doing a job. At the same time he became more involved because of what he heard in King’s speeches. He was fascinated. A Southern Baptist minister’s son from Tuscumbia, Alabama, Moore said, “The first time I worked with him, and was photographing him with the cross behind his head, and I was just amazed with the man’s oratory.”
He was chief photographer for the Advertiser and the Alabama Journal, the two daily papers in Montgomery. “The Montgomery Advertiser did a pretty good job covering the movement,” he said during a recent visit to the George Eastman House exhibit. “They put pictures on the front page.”
The images in the Montgomery papers brought him to Life magazine’s attention. His first major assignment, in late September 1962, was the admission of James Meredith, the first black student, to the University of Mississippi. During the riots that surrounded the event, two men were killed and 28 U.S. marshals were wounded. Eventually, Moore followed King throughout the South.
Kodak honored Moore’s movement shots in April, 1989, with the first KODAK Crystal Eagle Award for Impact in Photojournalism, designed to honor a photojournalist whose coverage changed peoples’ lives or beliefs. Throughout his more than thirty-year career, Moore has received a variety of awards of merit and excellence from corporate clients that include DuPont, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and 20th CENTURY FOX. However, the photographer said a child made him realize the works’ true impact.
“I was speaking at Iowa State University and gave a lecture,” Moore recalled. “They asked me to stay over the next day, to talk with 740 students in the middle grades. I agreed and went into this huge auditorium and talked with them about the civil rights movement and Dr. King. I expected spitballs and laughing and all this, but I had a really receptive audience who were incredible. They listened and watched the pictures. Afterwards, they came up to have me sign posters and pictures and some asked questions. One chubby white boy who had been waiting in line for a long while came up and asked me to sign a little piece of paper because he didn’t have a poster. Then he said, ‘You know we have been studying about Dr. King and have been learning a lot about him, but we never knew what it was really like until we saw the pictures you showed today. Now I know all those things that happened and it really was good, but it was bad.’
“It was good, but it was bad,” Moore repeated the sentence during last month’s interview, pausing to savor the simple wisdom. “This was a little kid. I felt so good that the pictures could reach these kids and make them understand.”
The civil rights movement was many struggles, from the initial concentration on eliminating legal segregation, to the emphasis on securing voting rights, to the ascendancy of ideals of black nationalism. Appeal to this Age reminds visitors it was also an insurrection, pitting citizens against the state. Some images show the vital role of prayer and church and clergy in the rebellion. Others document Mahatma Ghandi’s nonviolent creed and tactics which inspired those who stood firm in the truth.
The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s was the crest of a wave spurred by a series of bids throughout the 1930s and 1940s to reverse the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which called for separate-but-equal public facilities for blacks and whites. It provided a legal basis for racial segregation throughout the nation for more than a half-century. In 1954, momentum built with the high court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, which called for school desegregation, “with all deliberate speed.” The arrest of Montgomery, Alabama, seamstress Rosa Parks catapulted decades of desire into a movement led by a young Baptist minister, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., until his assassination in 1968.
Appeal to this Age covers the 15 years that spawned the greatest fervor in the ongoing struggle for civil rights. The photographs’ collective moral energy and unbridled cry for human equality make them among the nation’s most compelling and inspirational images.
Appeal to this Age Photo Gallery
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