The Movement: Bob Adelman and Civil Rights Era Photography

The Movement: Bob Adelman and Civil Rights Era Photography
January 19, 2014 – May 17, 2014
Organized by NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale as part of its Foto Fort Lauderdale initiative and curated by Peter Boswell.

Via NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale

In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale will present an exhibition featuring the imagery of renowned photographer Bob Adelman. Adelman’s unique vantage point at the forefront of the Civil Rights movement led him to produce some of that era’s most iconic images. The Movement: Bob Adelman and Civil Rights Era Photography, presented by AutoNation, will be on view at NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale from January 19 – May 17, 2014. Featuring 100 black-and-white and color photographs, the exhibition will provide a context in which viewers can revisit these years of struggle and consider how and why certain images have become emblematic of the era.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Museum will present a series of special programs and events.

Between 1963 and 1968, Bob Adelman was a photographer for the Congress of Racial Equality, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and other civil rights organizations. His work granted him unique access to the movement’s most important events and figures, and he forged close ties with such civil rights leaders as Martin Luther King, Jr. , Malcolm X, John Lewis, and James Baldwin. His work was featured in major publications of the civil rights period.

Events documented in the exhibition include: the Freedom Rides; the 1963 Birmingham demonstrations during which demonstrators were hosed and attacked by police dogs; the 1963 March on Washington, which culminated in Martin Luther King's "I have a Dream" speech; voter registration drives; the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery March; and Martin Luther King,Jr funeral. A number of the photographs on view in the exhibition have never before been published.

Adelman has photographed cover stories for many magazines including Esquire, Time, Life, New York, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, and Paris Match, and has photographed or written more than a dozen books and produced many others, including King: The Photobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Abrams, 2004). Adelman has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA grant, and several Art Directors Club Awards. His photographs have been exhibited the Smithsonian, the American Federation of Arts, and other institutions, and are included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He currently lives in Miami Beach.

The Movement: Bob Adelman and Civil Rights Era Photography is presented by AutoNation. Additional support provided by the Community Foundation of Broward; Simkins Hollis Law Group, PC, in loving memory of Dr. Anna Atkins Simkins; the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration Committee, Inc.; W Fort Lauderdale and Media Partner CBS4.

Symposium: With Their Own Eyes: Photographers Witness the March on Washington

Via Library of Congress
Library of Congress Holds Symposium on Jan. 13

With Their Own Eyes: Photographers Witness the March on Washington

A Library of Congress symposium on Jan. 13 will bring together photographers who took pictures at the March on Washington more than 50 years ago.

"With Their Own Eyes: Photographers Witness the March on Washington" is being held in conjunction with the Library’s exhibition "A Day Like No Other: Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington," which is on view through March 1.

The symposium will be held from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 13, in the Whittall Pavilion on the ground floor of the Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First St. S.E., Washington, D.C. The event is free and open to the public. No tickets or reservations are needed.

Photographers featured in the exhibition, along with relatives of photographers no longer alive, will take part in the program. The participants include Bob Adelman; Theresa Lynn Carter, the daughter of Roosevelt Carter; Brigitte Freed, the widow of Leonard Freed; and David Johnson. They will share their accounts of the day and discuss how the march changed their lives. Keith Jenkins will moderate the discussion.

The program will begin with a welcome from Kim Phan, president of the Friends of the Law Library of Congress, which is co-sponsoring the symposium with the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division. The event is made possible through generous donations from Roberta I. Shaffer; the Leica Store in Washington, D.C. and the Friends of the Law Library. Speakers at the Symposium

• Bob Adelman is a photographer known for his images of the Civil Rights Movement. His interest in social and political events of the day drew him to the sit-ins staged by young students across the American South. In the early 1960s, he volunteered to photograph demonstrations for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). He was close friends with Martin Luther King, Jr. and U.S. Rep. John Lewis. Adelman continues to be involved with civil rights issues and the human condition.
• Theresa Lynn Carter is the daughter of Roosevelt Carter (1926-1981), who traveled to Washington with a church group from Columbus, Ohio. He brought along his camera to capture a personal view of the day. He focused on the thousands of faces along the March route from every walk of life, including the many celebrities.
• Brigitte Freed is the widow of Leonard Freed (1929-2006) and was his darkroom assistant. The couple was based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, until a photograph taken by Leonard Freed of a black American soldier guarding the Berlin Wall compelled him to return home to the United States to document the civil rights struggle in 1963. Freed’s photographs from 1963 to 1965 were published in the now-classic book "Black in White America."
• David Johnson is a professional photographer who credits Ansel Adams as his major influence. Johnson documented black life and culture in the early years of the Civil Rights Movement. He attended the March on Washington as a delegate from the Bay Area NAACP and covered the event for a local newspaper.
• Keith Jenkins, director of photography at the National Geographic Society, is a former supervising senior producer for multimedia at National Public Radio. Prior to working at NPR, Jenkins was the first director of photography at AOL. He spent 13 years at the Washington Post in various positions, from staff photographer to photography editor for the Washington Post Magazine and Washingtonpost.com. Earlier, Jenkins worked as a staff photographer for the Boston Globe.

After the symposium, tours of the exhibition will be offered. "A Day Like No Other: Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington" which opened on Aug. 28, 2013 and closes on March 1, 2014, consists of 40 iconic black-and-white images that mark what Martin Luther King, Jr., called "the greatest demonstration for freedom in the nation’s history." The photographs, part of the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division collections, convey the immediacy of being at the march and the excitement of those who were there. A video-screen display in the exhibition features another 75 images.

The Prints and Photographs Division includes more than 15 million photographs, drawings and prints form the 15th century to the present day. International in scope, these visual collections represent a uniquely rich array of human experience, knowledge, creativity and achievement, touching on almost every realm of endeavor: science, art, invention, government and political struggle, and the recording of history. For more information, visit www.loc.gov/rr/print/.

The Library of Congress, the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution and the largest library in the world, holds more than 155 million items in various languages, disciplines and formats. The Library serves the U.S. Congress and the nation both on-site in its reading rooms on Capitol Hill and through its award-winning website at www.loc.gov.

50th Anniversary of the March on Washington

 

©Steve Schapiro: Jackie Robinson, March on Washington, 1963

 

On August 28, 2013 citizens from across this country will converge upon our nation’s capital to commemorate and celebrate the historic March On Washington which occurred 50 years ago on August 28, 1963.

 

This site provides information and updates on the numerous commemorative marches that are being planned throughout this country. In addition, this site provides citizens an opportunity to leave their remembrances and pictures of the march that changed the world.

 

Full details here.

 

 

 

Related: 

 TIME:  “One Dream” — a multimedia commemoration of the 1963 March on Washington and the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech

Exhibit: 1963

50th Anniversary of the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham

Getty Publications publishes "This is the Day: The March on Washington Photographs by Leonard Freed

 

© Estate of Leonard Freed - Magnum Photos (Brigitte Freed).

Via ArtDaily.org

 

LOS ANGELES, CA.- August 28, 1963, marked a great day for democracy in America. On that day nearly fifty years ago, more than 250,000 people gathered at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to mount a peaceful protest demanding equal rights and economic equality for African Americans. Led by a contingent of civil rights organizations, The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom called for the desegregation of public schools, protection of the right to vote, and a federal program to train and place unemployed workers. This demonstration ultimately led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and soon became the iconic expression of social protest that inspired the women's rights movement, as well as rights for the disabled and other disenfranchised groups, and serves to this day as a blueprint for democratic action.

This Is the Day: The March on Washington, which will be published by Getty Publications in February 2013 to coincide with Black History Month and the 50th anniversary of the march, presents Magnum photographer Leonard Freed's stirring and nuanced visual testimony of the event that culminated in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s prophetic "I Have a Dream" speech, delivered at the base of the Lincoln Memorial. The 75 photographs in this volume, most of them never before published, were chosen from hundreds of images Freed made in the nation's capital the day before, during, and after the march. These images present spectacular wide-angle views of the hundreds of thousands of marchers overflowing the National Mall, intimate group portraits of people straining to see the speakers, and tight close-ups of individual faces filled with hope and yearning.

A Visionary Portrait of Democracy
Freed's images reveal the powerful impact of the march, which took place in the midst of the civil rights movement, when racial inequities were being most painfully exposed to the nation and the world. Freed's holistic approach to photographing the events of this historic day is revealed in the details he chose. In the hours before the march, he photographed the area surrounding the Mall as people arrived in buses and cars, protest signs were being stacked in preparation for distribution, policemen took up their posts, and people passed by the famed Ford Theatre, where a sign reads "House Where Lincoln Died." With the Washington Monument, the Reflecting Pool, and the Lincoln Memorial as his visual anchors, Freed photographed the massive crowd as it gathered and swelled, and then went in tight to capture groups of marchers chanting and singing in their Sunday-best clothes, a range of individual expressions, and the interplay of text and image on placards. He photographed well into the evening when the remaining marchers linked hands for a final rendition of "We Shall Overcome," and the aftermath as the crowds dispersed and the visual remains of this history-making event were reduced to placard scraps blanketing the ground.

Return Visits to Washington, D.C.
Freed would return to the National Mall numerous times to photograph other marches and rallies, including Vietnam War protests. In 1964 he photographed individual African Americans exercising their right to vote for the first time, and in the same year made an iconic photograph--reproduced in the book--of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. being celebrated in a Baltimore motorcade after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. This Is the Day includes a selection of Freed's images from the 20th Anniversary March of 1983. These photographs, which reveal a more casual trend in American style and dress, from the dark suits and pearls of 1963 to T-shirts and shorts in 1983, show a youthful Jesse Jackson three months before he declared he would run for president and placards calling for President Reagan to cut the military budget.

The Legacy of Freedom Fighters
Freed was born in Brooklyn, New York on October 23, 1929, to a working-class Jewish family of Eastern European descent and strong social values. Working in Germany in the 1960s Freed photographed a black soldier standing before the Berlin Wall and was struck by the realization that while this soldier was defending freedom in Europe, his brothers and sisters were fighting for their own freedom at home. This thought inspired him to return to the United States and produce a photo-essay examining the daily life of blacks across America, from the East Coast to the Deep South. His resulting photo-essay culminated in the book Black in White America, first published in 1967/68 and reissued in 2010 by Getty Publications. It was during the course of this project that Freed photographed the March on Washington. After Freed's death in 2006 his widow, Brigitte, was inspired to compile a book on the March on Washington from her late husband's archive when she heard then-Senator Barack Obama remark to an audience of civil rights activists, "I stand here because you walked."

Accompanying the photographs are a first-hand, backstage account of the preparations leading up to the march by civil rights activist and author Julian Bond; an introduction to the importance of the march, and Dr. King's involvement, by sociology professor and author Michael Eric Dyson; and an informative discussion of Freed's approach to the photographic project by scholar Paul Farber.

Book Launch Event at Library of Congress
A book launch event will be held at 12 Noon on Tuesday, February 5 at The Library of Congress's Center for the Book in Washington, D.C., as part of its "Books & Beyond" program. The event is a conversation with Brigitte Freed and authors Paul Farber and Michael Eric Dyson who will discuss the significance of the march and how its legacy lives on in the present day. The conversation will be followed by a Q&A and book signing. The event takes place in the West Dining Room, Madison Bldg. (101 Independence Avenue, SE, Washington, DC, 20540). Many other activities are being planned throughout the year.

Leonard Freed (American, 1929-2006) began making photographs in 1954 and joined Magnum Photos as a full-time member in 1972. He photographed extensively in Germany, Holland, Italy, and Israel, and published numerous books and photo-essays. It was, however, his coverage of the American civil rights movement in the 1960s that brought him the most acclaim. Getty Publications reissued his book Black in White America, first published in 1967/68, in 2010. Freed's photographs are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Julian Bond is a social activist and civil rights leader as well as a writer, teacher, and lecturer. While a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, during the early 1960s, he helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He was the first president of the Southern Poverty Law Center and was elected to both houses of the Georgia legislature, where he served a total of twenty years. He was chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1998 to 2010 and is professor emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

Michael Eric Dyson is a widely published writer, media commentator, and professor of sociology at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He is the author of sixteen books, including April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Death and How It Changed America and I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr.

Paul M. Farber is a scholar, currently completing his doctorate in American culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is currently a visiting instructor of Urban Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.