The Civil Rights Movement: A Photographic History, 1954?68

by Steven Kasher, Myrlie Evers Williams (Foreword by)

Overview

The first book to tell the story of the civil rights movement through the rousing and often wrenching photographs that recorded, promoted, and protected it.

With a striking selection of images and a lively, informative text, Steven Kasher captures the danger, drama, and bravery of the civil rights movement. After an introduction explaining the significance of photography to the movement, the text in this important book proceeds from the Montgomery bus boycott through the student, local and national movements; the big marches; Freedom summer; Malcolm X; and the death of Martin Luther King.

Each chapter begins with a fast-paced narrative of a crucial event in the movement, complemented by a portfolio of the most effective and evocative photographs of the subject. Ranging from the well known to the rare, these images were shot by such photographers as Richard Avedon, Danny Lyon, Charles Moore, Gordon Parks, Dan Weiner, and more than 50 others. Many of the pictures are accompanied by thought-provoking remembrances and analysis by various photographers and participants.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780789206565
Publisher:	Abbeville Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/01/1996
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	9.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Steven Kasher, who lives in Manhattan, is a photographer, writer, and curator. He organized the traveling exhibiton "Appeal to This Age: Photography of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968."

Myrlie Evers Williams is an American civil rights activist and former NAACP chairwoman who worked for over three decades to seek justice for the 1963 murder of her husband and fellow activist Medgar Evers. She recounts her journey as a community leader in her memoir Watch Me Fly: What I Learned on the Way to Becoming the Woman I Was Meant to Be.

Read an Excerpt

Excerpt from:
The Civil Rights Movement




Foreword


My husband lay dying in a pool of blood on the doorstep of our home in Jackson, Mississippi. His body had been toppled by a cowardly assassin's bullet and left for the world—and his children—to see. I can still see Medgars' handsome features distorted in excruciating pain as he succumbed to death's premature call. It is this distinct memory of his final hours during that June day in 1963 that has haunted me as I have looked back over this book's often scathing yet also inspiring images.


I don't remember the details of his funeral. That widely publicized photo of a tearstained young woman mourning the death of her first love could not have been me. I was too inexperienced to have been a widow. And my husband was too peace-loving to have been a casualty of war.


Just days before Medgars' death, he had remarked to a reporter: "If I die, it will be in a good cause. I've been fighting for America just as much as soldiers in Vietnam." I wonder about the images that my husband must have carried within him on his quest for equality. How emotionally draining it must have been on his spirit to bear in mind the unrecognizable portrait of the battered Emmett Till as Medgar pursued justice to bring the young boy's murderers to trial. Nothing could have shielded Medgars' eyes from the deplorable conditions of the Mississippi sharecroppers or from the "strange fruit" hung on trees by brutal barbarians.


When the struggle for freedom began in the late 1950s, the individuals participating in the civil rights movement could not possibly have foreseen that protesting in support of basic human dignity would culminate in one of the most heartrending civil wars of American history. The stories and the photographs seen in this book testify to the shameful conditions endured by black Americans during a period when democracy was being promoted and fought for on the international front. Most blacks in America lived without even the limited liberties afforded citizens of third-world countries. The faces that stare at you from the pages that follow are marked with the determination of individuals who were prepared to die for their own right to be free.


While some of the faces in these photographs reflect the scars and weary tears of battle fatigue, there are also visions of hope mirrored in the eyes of the warriors. A picture of the Little Rock Nine studying in quiet determination pending their admittance into the towns previously segregated high school offers evidence that we were moving in the right direction. Just three years before, the victorious 1954 decision of Brown v. Board of Education had struck down segregation in the nations public schools, and it has also been applied to promoting equality in all aspects of American society. And who can forget the moving, spirited challenge of Fannie Lou Hamer's emotional testimony, when she moved the hearts of all those who heard her during the 1964 Democratic Convention. These are but two of the proud images to be seen in this work.


Every battle has its public and its private moments of defeat and victory. Every historical moment is made up of a multitude of personal experiences. Those battles and those experiences within the civil rights movement have been prolifically documented in written histories, but the camera has captured them with even greater force. For those of us who lived through these events, nothing brings them to mind more vividly than the extremely moving photographs seen here. They also serve to educate generations who were not alive during this provocative stage in our history. A young woman recently commented to me that she "hears so many speak about that period of time. It helps to hear the story, but we want—and need—more. Photos help because we can touch them and try to feel what it was like to live during that time."


As we search for answers to help us solve the pressing issues in this country, books such as this one will play a major part. Not only does it take us back to a period when events originated that would shape the American scene for years to come, but it also reinforces the need to address civil rights issues into the twenty–first century.


I find it difficult to look at these photographs without flinching from the memories and from the anger they invoke. But I must look. I must remember, as you must. For this was history in the making. Like it or not, you cannot hide from the camera's eye.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents from:
The Civil Rights Movement




Foreword by Myrlie Evers-Williams


Introduction: "Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare"


The Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955: "My Soul Is Rested"


Little Rock Central High, 1957, and the University of Mississippi, 1962: "Don't Let Them See You Cry"


Sit-ins and Freedom Rides, 1960–62: "This Was the Answer"


The Birmingham Movement, 1963: "I Don't Mind Being Bitten by a Dog"


The March on Washington, 1963: "We Stood on a Height"


SNCC and Mississippi, 1960–64: "A Tremor in the Middle of the Iceberg"


Selma, 1965: "We Must Go to Montgomery and See the King"


Black Power and the March Against Fear, 1966: "The Oppressed Against the Oppressor"


The Eclipsing of Nonviolence, 1965–68: "It Is Not Over"


Notes and Sources


Chronology of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954–68


Acknowledgments


Selected Bibliography


Index

Editorial Reviews

"The images…hold a mirror up to Americans, white and black, and what they show us is both terrifying and profound. We were so bad and we were so good; it makes you sad, and it makes you proud."

Chicago Tribune

Praise for
The Civil Rights Movement:




"The images…hold a mirror up to Americans, white and black, and what they show us is both terrifying and profound. We were so bad and we were so good; it makes you sad, and it makes you proud." — Chicago Tribune



"This book, which collects some 150 black-and-white photos, is indeed a history, offering many lesser-known images that also resonate. See…a bespectacled Elizabeth Eckford, one of the "Little Rock Nine," walk stoically ahead of jeering white students; Julian Bond pose with fellow SNCC volunteers, seemingly too young to help change history; and a Mississippi-delta organizing house that has painted the word Freedom on a cross burned by the Klan. Kasher's chapter introductions are lucid overviews of the movement, while the captions—some of which reproduce the original, stilted wire-service captions—are also effective and informative. A moving tribute." — Publisher's Weekly

From the Publisher

The civil rights movement has produced enduring images, and the famous ones are collected here: separate (and unequal) white and black water fountains, police dogs on the streets of Birmingham, Martin Luther King proclaiming "I Have a Dream," Memphis strikers with their "I Am a Man" placards. As New York City photographer Kasher observes, "No other American pictures radiate so brightly a collective passion for justice." This book, which collects some 150 black-and-white photos, is indeed a history, offering many lesser-known images that also resonate. See legendary organizer Septima Clark lead older women in a citizenship class; a bespectacled Elizabeth Eckford, one of the "Little Rock Nine," walk stoically ahead of jeering white students; Julian Bond pose with fellow SNCC volunteers, seemingly too young to help change history; and a Mississippi-delta organizing house that has painted the word Freedom on a cross burned by the Klan. Kasher's chapter introductions are lucid overviews of the movement, while the captionssome of which reproduce the original, stilted wire-service captionsare also effective and informative. A moving tribute. Author tour. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The catalog for a traveling exhibition organized by New York City-based photographer, writer, and curator Kasher, this book contains images by more than 50 photographers, whose images were borrowed from photo agencies, galleries, and private collections. Ten accompanying essays break the Civil Rights movement into chronological periods. Kasher's research, writing, and photo selection are impeccable and engaging, resulting in perhaps the strongest book yet published on this topic. He pulls the reader into a narrative that recounts and analyzes events so outrageous that one who didn't live through the period might think them impossible. What remains are feelings of deep national shame and of admiration for the courageous protesters. The book ends with the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King and the Poor People's March on Washington in 1968, far short of the end of racism in this country. Myrlie Evers-Williams, widow of Medgar Evers and chair of the NAACP, provides an eloquent foreword. Highly recommended for general collections and collections on photojournalism and photo-history, sociology and social history, political science, and African American history.-Kathleen Collins, New York Transit Museum Archives, Brooklyn

Library Journal

In an era saturated by media, our collective memory is formed by visual images. The historical images collected here by photographer and writer Kasher in The Civil Rights Movement ( Oct. 1996; ISBN 0-7892-0123-2) are necessary reminders, in a time of white backlash, of just how bitter and bloody and heroic the battle for civil rights was. From Gordon Parks, Dan Weiner, and other photographic chroniclers of the era, we see the Little Rock Nine integrating Central High, surrounded by National Guardsmen; a policeman holding a protestor in a chokehold; buses running empty during the Montgomery bus boycott while blacks crowd the street corners waiting for rides. These aren't pretty pictures, but collectively, and with Kasher's text, they tell a central—perhaps the central—story of midcentury America.

Kirkus Reviews