Growing up in New York City, Adelman hadn’t witnessed much divisive racism in his youth. They’re a document of the original sin of American life-which was slavery, segregation, and racism.” The Kerner Commission published a report using these photographs, and they’re now extensively used in school books and history books. “Photographs were also used in court cases and in congressional investigations. “In addition, my photographs were used for fund-raising, since the movement always needed money,” Adelman adds.
“The photographs were a systematic revelation of the nature of segregation. “People found it completely unacceptable to see others being hosed or beaten just because they had black skin,” says Adelman. In the 1960s, photographs like Adelman’s helped show the injustices of segregation to a wider world that didn’t experience them on a daily basis. ‘We need photographers.'” Adelman’s first gig was photographing sit-ins and freedom rides on Route 40 as a CORE volunteer, and he was compensated $5 per photo for any usable pictures. “‘We have plenty of demonstrators,’ Doc said. Martin Luther King, Jr., speaking to a photographer who attempted to intervene in an attack on a protester. Soon after its 1960 founding in Raleigh, North Carolina, this student-led organization invited photographers to be an integral part of their communications effort.”For most of these photographers, involvement with various social-justice causes has continued throughout their lives.īob Adelman, a photographer who worked for CORE, SNCC, and the NAACP, remembers hearing Dr. As Leslie Kelen points out in the 2011 book This Light of Oursabout photographers of the civil-rights era, individuals documenting the movement “did not then and do not now see themselves primarily as photographers but as ‘activists’ or ‘organizers’ with cameras.” Kelen writes that SNCC “was uniquely farsighted in its usage of photographers and photographs. Many of the most iconic images of the era were taken by photographers working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), though other organizations, like the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), also utilized photographers as part of their mission to eradicate racial inequality.
Courtesy the Bob Fitch Photography Archive. Above: Bob Fitch snapped this picture of a sheriff’s deputy pursuing photographer Matt Herron during a protest in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1966. Top: Protesters at the 1963 March on Washington, captured by photographer Marion S. But none of these emblematic photographswould exist without the brave photographers committed to social justice whose efforts at documenting the movement helped it to succeed. Police dogs attacking non-violent demonstrators a black family forced to use the back door at a public restaurant firehoses turned onto screaming teenagers jeering white folks pouring honey, ketchup, and milk over the heads of silent protesters. Though the technology and methods of dissemination have changed (think “Look” magazine versus Twitter hashtags), photographs continue to distill a moment of lived experience into a powerful message. “Was this worth risking your life for? After a lot of worrying, I decided that it was.” Photographs and videos taken in Ferguson, Missouri, during the past few months bear a chilling resemblance to the images of protests, riots, and police clashes in the 1950s and ’60s, when legalized segregation and voter intimidation were still acceptable in much of the country. Yet after half a century of adjustment to a world where such discrimination is illegal, the United States still hasn’t overcome its legacy of racism. July marked the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, a groundbreaking piece of legislation that outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
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