civil rights photo essay

Photos From the Civil Rights Movement

From rosa park's arrest to the freedom rides, high museum of art.

I Am a Man/ Union Justice Now, Martin Luther King Memorial March for Union Justice and to End Racism, Memphis, Tennessee (1968/1968) by Builder Levy High Museum of Art

The High Museum of Art holds one of the most significant collections of photographs of the Civil Rights Movement. The works in this exhibition are only a small selection of the collection, which includes more than 300 photographs that document the social protest movement, from Rosa Parks’s arrest to the Freedom Rides to the tumultuous demonstrations of the late 1960s. The city of Atlanta—the birthplace of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—was a hub of civil rights activism and it figures prominently in the collection. Visionary leaders such as Dr. King, Congressman John Lewis, and former mayor Ambassador Andrew Young are featured alongside countless unsung heroes. The photographs in this collection capture the courage and perseverance of individuals who challenged the status quo, armed only with the philosophy of nonviolence and the strength of their convictions.

Outside Looking In, Mobile, Alabama (1956/1956) by Gordon Parks High Museum of Art

This photograph was originally published in a groundbreaking Life Magazine photo essay by Gordon Parks, which exposed Americans to the effects of racial segregation. Parks focused his attention on a multigenerational family from Alabama. His photographs captured the Thornton family’s everyday struggles to overcome discrimination.

Department Store, Mobile, Alabama (1956/1956) by Gordon Parks High Museum of Art

Gordon Parks's choice of subject matter sets his series of photographs of a family living under segregation in 1956 Alabama apart from others of the period. Rather than focusing on the demonstrations, boycotts, and brutality that characterized the battle for racial justice, Parks emphasized the prosaic details of one family’s life. His ability to elicit empathy through an emphasis on intimacy and shared human experience made them especially poignant.

Rosa Parks Being Fingerprinted, Montgomery, Alabama (1956/1956) by Unknown Photographer High Museum of Art

This photograph was made at the time of Rosa Parks’s second arrest, and was widely reproduced in newspapers and magazines. Civil rights leaders quickly understood the power of photography to help stimulate awareness of their cause and raise funds for their effort to overthrow segregation laws.

Elizabeth Eckford Entering Central High School, Little Rock, Arkansas (1957-09-05) by Unknown Photographer High Museum of Art

National Guardsman, Montgomery Bus Station, Alabama (1961/1961) by Unknown Photographer High Museum of Art

Members of SNCC Praying at Burned-out Church, Dawson, Georgia (1962/1962) by Unknown Photographer High Museum of Art

March on Washington, D.C. (1963/1963) by Builder Levy High Museum of Art

Builder Levy frequently focuses on social issues, reflecting his personal commitment to causes he has embraced during his thirty-five year tenure as a teacher of at-risk adolescents in a New York inner-city school. This image documents one of the many historic marches on Washington, D.C., that took place during the civil rights era.

Cleaning the Pool, St. Augustine, Florida (1964/1964) by James Kerlin High Museum of Art

The man seen here pouring cleaning agents into a swimming pool occupied by men and women engaging in a “swim-in”, is James Brock, manager of the Monson Motor Lodge in St. Augustine, Florida. Like most other white business owners, he banned blacks from his establishment. While the protestors floated in a pool of chemicals, off-duty policemen dove in and arrested them.

Martin Luther King Jr. and Rev. Ralph Abernathy, John's County Jail, St. Augustine, FL, 1964 (1964/1964) by Unknown Photographer High Museum of Art

Dr. King and his fellow Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) leader Ralph Abernathy led a ten-person contingent to the Monson Motor Lodge in St. Augustine, Florida, in June 1964. King engaged the owner, James Brock, in a discussion that grew long and heated. King explained the kinds of humiliations blacks endured daily, to which Brock replied – smiling into the television cameras – “I would like to invite my many friends throughout the country to come to Monson’s. We expect to remain segregated.” The police arrived to arrest King and his group. They were held without bail in St. John’s County jail for several days.

Firemen Hosing Demonstrators, Kelly Ingram Park, Birmingham, Alabama (1963/1963) by Unknown Photographer High Museum of Art

CORE Demonstration, Brooklyn, New York (1963/1963) by Leonard Freed High Museum of Art

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Baltimore (1964/1964) by Leonard Freed High Museum of Art

In October 1964, King learned that he had won the Nobel Peace Prize. At thirty-five he was the youngest ever recipient. On his way back from Oslo, Norway, to receive his prize he stopped off in Baltimore, where he was thronged by supporters offering congratulations on this landmark honor.

State Troopers Break Up Marchers, Selma, Alabama (1965/1965) by Unknown Photographer High Museum of Art

Civil Rights Demonstrators and Ku Klux Klan Members Share the Same Sidewalk, Atlanta (1964/1964) by Unknown Photographer High Museum of Art

The Ku Klux Klan was picketing a newly desegregated hotel a few doors down from a segregated restaurant where a group of young civil rights workers were protesting. The lettering on a sign held by one of the young demonstrators, bearing the slogan “Atlanta’s Image is a Fraud”, has been enhanced by newsroom staff, presumably to read more effectively in newspaper print. Reflected in reverse in the storefront window behind the protestors is the signage for a Cary Grant movie being screened in a theater across the street.

Coretta King and Family around the Open Casket at the Funeral of Martin Luther King Jr., Atlanta (1968/1968) by Constantine Manos High Museum of Art

Coretta Scott King, Poor People's Campaign, Washington, D.C. (1968/1968) by Larry Fink High Museum of Art

Larry Fink, best known for his portraits of high society reproduced in magazines such as Vanity Fair, was also very engaged with the civil rights cause. He was on hand in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1968 – a month after Dr. King’s assassination - to photograph Coretta Scott King’s arrival at Resurrection City. Fink skillfully framed Mrs. King’s face in the doorjamb of the car, as she is greeted by Fred Bennette, a member of Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

Garbagemen's Parade, Memphis, Tennessee (1968/1968) by Dennis Brack High Museum of Art

The tenacity and courage of members of the Civil Rights Movement - including those on both sides of the camera - continues to inspire social justice activists today. With protests and cries for equality happening across the United States, images like this one resonate more than ever.

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6 Gordon Parks Photos Documenting the Lives of Black Americans During the Civil Rights Era

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The late Gordon Parks was a photographer best known for documenting the lives of African Americans from the 1940s to the 1970s. Born in 1912 in Kansas, he was the youngest of 15 children and experienced hardship and segregation from an early age. In 1937, when he was 25 years old, he picked up a camera for the first time and began documenting issues of race, poverty, and policing in the United States.

Park’s first job as a photographer was for the Farm Security Administration, and he later became a regular contributor to Ebony and Vogue magazine; he was later hired as the first African American staff photographer at Life magazine. But hid talents extended beyond still images. In 1969, he became the first Black director of a major Hollywood film called The Learning Tree .

Parks was not just a prolific artist. He was an advocate for civil rights. He once said, “I chose my camera as a weapon against all the things I dislike about America—poverty, racism, discrimination.” His historical images remain poignant reminders of American history and the racial issues still faced today. Read on to discover the stories behind six of his most famous photos.

Here are six iconic Gordon Parks photographs that capture African American lives during the 2oth century.

American gothic , washington, d.c., 1942.

This photo is one of Parks’ earliest and most recognizable works. It depicts Ella Watson, who was a cleaner at the Farm Security Administration (a government agency created in 1937 to combat rural poverty during the Great Depression in the U.S.). Watson cleaned the offices at night but was never promoted due to her race. Parks learned of her life story and asked permission to photograph her at work, at home, and with her community in a series of at least 90 images taken over several years.

This particular image, titled American Gothic , is a direct parody of artist Grant Wood ’s iconic 1930s painting of the same title. Posed in front of the American flag holding the tools of her labor, this portrait of Watson highlights the racial inequality that was rife during pre-civil-rights America, the “land of opportunity.”

Red and Herbie Levi At the Funeral of Maurice Gaines , Harlem, New York, 1948⁠

Parks’ first photographic essay, Harlem Gang Leader, appeared in the November 1st issue of Life in 1948. For the project, Parks gained the trust of one particular gang and their leader Leonard “Red” Jackson and spent six weeks photographing them. In this emotive image from the series, Red and Herbie Levy mourn over their friend Maurice Gaines who was found dying on a Harlem sidewalk one night in 1948. Parks hoped his images would give a more complete picture of Red and his friends who were often ostracized from society and branded as low-life criminals. This image evokes empathy for the boys, who were clearly faced with a devastating reality.

Emerging Man , Harlem, New York, 1952⁠

Emerging Man was part of a larger photo essay for Life titled A Man Becomes Invisible . The series was inspired by Ralph Ellison’s book Invisible Man which was released the same year. The novel tells a story of a man who goes unnoticed due to the color of his skin. This image, along with three others, was published in a 1952 issue of Life magazine as a visual interpretation of Ellison’s novel. The photo captures a man rising from an uncovered manhole with his face darkened by the night’s shadows. The subject stares straight into the eyes of the viewer, forcing them to really see him.

Outside Looking In , Mobile, Alabama, 1956⁠

In 1956, Life published 26 of Park’s rare color photographs under the title The Restraints: Open and Hidden . The series explored racial segregation, specifically through the eyes of the Thorton family from Alabama. He captured their everyday struggles to overcome discrimination, revealing how prejudice pervades even the most ordinary moments. In this image, titled Outside Looking In , Black children look through a wire fence that acts as a physical barrier between them and a “whites only” fairground.

Untitled , New York, 1963

Parks documented the Civil Rights Movement through the 1950s and 1960s. One of the most pivotal years was 1963, and Parks captured countless images of protests happening in Harlem during this time. This image features a man holding a protest sign that reads, “We are living in a Police State.” More men are seen in the background, also holding up signs with similar messages. The main subject’s emotionally exhausted expression sums up the mood of the time. Images like these, along with the march on Washington, D.C. and Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, stirred up civil rights advocates around the U.S. to fight for change.

The Fontenelles at the Poverty Board , Harlem, New York, 1967⁠

In 1967, Life magazine commissioned Parks to document the lives of Black families living in poverty. In a series titled A Harlem Family , Parks captures the lives of the Fontenelle family. After asking parents Norman and Bessie for permission to photograph them, he spent several days with the entire family without his camera, so that they could first feel comfortable with his presence. The resulting intimate images shed a light on the family’s plight, from their poor living conditions to their lack of education. In this image, titled The Fontenelles at the Poverty Board , the family is captured huddled together behind an office desk, talking to a clerk at the poverty board. Their tired faces capture the frustration felt by many African Americans facing racism and poverty at the time.

Gordon Parks Foundation: Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

All images via Gordon Parks Foundation.

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From segregation to Selma: View iconic photos from the Civil Rights movement

Speaking in Selma on Saturday, President Barack Obama said that the country’s racial history “ still casts its long shadow upon us .”

“So much of our turbulent history – the stain of slavery and anguish of civil war, the yoke of segregation and tyranny of Jim Crow, the death of four little girls in Birmingham, and the dream of a Baptist preacher – met on this bridge,” he said . “It was not a clash of armies, but a clash of wills; a contest to determine the meaning of America.”

As events commemorating “Bloody Sunday” continue this weekend, take a look back at some of the photos of our nation’s history leading up to the march from Selma to Montgomery and the subsequent passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

A drinking fountain on the county courthouse lawn in Halifax, North Carolina, in this April 1938 photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress. REUTERS/Library of Congress/Handout via Reuters - RTR4SDSE

A drinking fountain on the county courthouse lawn in Halifax, North Carolina, in this April 1938 photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress. Photo by REUTERS/Library of Congress/Handout via Reuters

A man drinks at a "colored" water cooler in a streetcar terminal in Oklahoma City, in this July 1939 photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress. Photo by REUTERS/Library of Congress/Handout via Reuters.

A man drinks at a segregated water cooler in a streetcar terminal in Oklahoma City, in this July 1939 photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress. Photo by REUTERS/Library of Congress/Handout via Reuters.

The bus station in Durham, North Carolina, in this May 1940 photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress. Photo by REUTERS/Library of Congress/Handout via Reuters.

A high school student being educated via television during the period that schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, were closed to avoid integration, in this September 1958 photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress. Photo by REUTERS/Library of Congress/Handout via Reuters.

Marchers, signs, and a tent during the civil rights march on Washington D.C., in this August 28, 1963 photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress. Photo by REUTERS/Library of Congress/Handout via Reuters.

A crowd of surrounding the Reflecting Pool and continuing to the Washington Monument during the civil rights march on Washington D.C., in this August 28, 1963 photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress. Photo by REUTERS/Library of Congress/Handout via Reuters.

A young woman casts her ballot at Cardoza High School in Washington D.C., in this November 3, 1964 photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress. REUTERS/Library of Congress/Handout via Reuters.

Video: Obama speaks in Selma on 50th anniversary of civil rights marches

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The Importance Of Photography In The Fight For Civil Rights

Arts and Culture Reporter, HuffPost

Some images are difficult to ignore. The dashboard camera footage of Sandra Bland's arrest, three days before her wrongful death in prison. The still image of Michael Brown's body covered by a sheet, just after the unarmed 18-year-old was fatally shot by a police officer. Protest photos of massive crowds bearing a single message, so simple it's absurd: "Black Lives Matter."

A camera is not in itself political. But the photographic tool carries with it the potential for widespread awareness, reform and revolution. Contemporary protest movements are propelled by the images and videos circulating across social media, broadcasting in plain sight the systemic injustices and atrocities still inextricably linked with blackness in America.

In 1912, when Gordon Parks was born in Fort Scott, Kansas, photographers didn't document the lives of people of color or the struggles they were forced to endure. Simply being seen was a fight in itself, a fight to which Parks dedicated his life.

He grew up in poverty, the youngest of 15 children. After graduating high school, he worked a string of odd jobs -- a semi-pro basketball player, a waiter, a busboy and a brothel pianist. Over time, Parks became enamored with the photography of the Farm Security Administration -- how artists like Jack Delano and Dorothea Lange captured the plights of migrant workers and Depression-era communities.

" I saw that the camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all sorts of social wrongs ," he told an interviewer in 1999, seven years before his death. "I knew at that point I had to have a camera." Eventually, Parks visited a pawn shop and purchased a camera of his own.

From 1948 to 1972, Parks served as a photographer for Life magazine, becoming the first African-American photographer in the publication's history. During his time at Life, Parks captured images that have since become immortalized in the history of Civil Rights, his visuals piecing together a history that otherwise may have never been told.

An exhibition titled " Gordon Parks: Higher Ground " will revisit eight of Parks' most influential Life photo essays, commemorating the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War. The images simultaneously ignited revolution and documented the process, capturing the immense power of photography as a dynamic weapon of change. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1961 : "The world seldom believes the horror stories of history until they are documented via the mass media."

Park's essays begin with "A Man Becomes Invisible," based on Ralph Ellison's 1952 National Book Award-winning novel Invisible Man . Ellison's novel, from the perspective of an unnamed black protagonist, explores the isolating experience of being a black man in America. In one of Parks' photos, titled "Invisible Man Retreat," an unnamed subject sits alone, listening to Louis Armstrong records, illuminated by the glow of 1,369 light bulbs.

Soon after, in 1956, Parks embarked on a series titled " Segregation Story ," documenting the lives of an African-American family, the Thorntons, living under Jim Crow segregation in 1950s Alabama. Instead of focusing on the milestone moments in the fight for racial justice, Parks focuses his lens on quiet acts of prejudice -- a separate line at the ice cream shop, a back entrance at the local department store -- that often go undocumented.

Together, the images sought to debunk the most heinous myth at the core of racism -- that there is something inherently different about individuals of different skin colors. Chronicling the Thorntons in their most banal moments -- sitting on the couch, playing outside -- Parks captured the beautiful ordinariness of African-American life, not significantly different from American life whatsoever.

His images exposed many Americans to the realities of segregation for the first time, setting off an irreversible sequence of events that catalyzed the Civil Rights movement as we know it today. Parks' 1963 series "The March on Washington" documents the titular occasion in black rights history, including one unforgettable image of the Washington Monument, brimming with people of all backgrounds desperate for change.

Parks also documented another faction fighting for racial justice, the Nation of Islam, crusading for the separation of black and white America. Led by Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad, the movement refused to speak with white journalists, allowing Parks unprecedented access to their self-sustaining subculture, complete with schools, stores, places of worship and self-defense training.

Like Parks, Malcolm X was well aware of the power of visual representation -- Maurice Berger called him one of the " most media-savvy black leaders of the period ." Aside from carefully performing a charismatic and authoritative persona on camera for the masses, Malcolm X often carried a camera himself, to document the progress of the insular society flourishing around him. Parks called it " collecting evidence ."

Other photo essays featured in "Higher Ground" revolve around Duke Ellington, Muhammed Ali and the Black Panthers. They illuminate both the history of civil rights and black photography, which can never quite be pulled apart. Today photographers like Carrie Mae Weems, LaToya Ruby Frazier and Lorna Simpson are just some of the individuals continuing Parks' legacy of truth telling and activism through images.

" I feel very empowered by it because when you can take a strong look at a crisis head-on ... it helps you to deal with the loss and the struggle and the pain," Frazier, who received a MacArthur Fellows grant in 2015, explained to NPR. "And it also helps you to create a human document, an archive, an evidence of inequity, of injustice, of things that have been done to working-class people."

Today, both disheartening and inspiring images regarding black life in America circulate social media with a lifeblood all their own, whether stills from Beyoncé's "Formation," the alarmingly white cover of The Hollywood Reporter's Oscar edition , or photos of the water residents of Flint, Michigan, were encouraged to drink .

The late Parks didn't just document some of the most important moments in American history. With his camera in tow, he paved the way for a generation of image-makers, documentarians, activists and artists; people who cannot consciously bring themselves to look away.

"Gordon Parks: Higher Ground" runs through April 2, 2016, at Jenkins Johnson Gallery in San Francisco .

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Gordon parks’ cinematic photos captured the injustices of the civil rights era.

He photographed fashion for Vogue, directed the 1971 blaxploitation film “Shaft,” composed orchestral scores, and wrote memoirs, novels and poems. But it was with his sensitive, insightful documentary photos of black America that Gordon Parks made himself one of the 20th century’s most important cultural figures.

The pain of the civil rights struggle through the eyes of artists who lived it

It’s this contribution that New York’s Jack Shainman Gallery is revisiting with “ Gordon Parks: I am You | Part 2.” The exhibition follows a month-long look at look at the photographer’s lesser known work with portraiture and fashion photography.

"Gordon Parks: I am You | Part 2" at Jack Shainman Gallery

Born in Fort Scott, Kansas, Parks worked his way from advertising and portrait gigs in Saint Paul, Minnesota and Chicago to an apprenticeship with the Farm Security Administration and, in the mid-1940s, a post as Vogue’s first black photographer.

In 1948, he made history again when he became the first black staff photographer at Life magazine, a position he would hold for two decades. He would go on to fill the magazine’s pages with photo essays of black life in the segregated south as well as northern states. Eventually, he would photograph the great leaders of the civil rights era, including Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver, and those who rallied behind them.

“(Parks) went through so much scrutiny as a African-American photographer and as an African-American in general, and wanted to have his voice heard,” Peter W. Kunhardt Jr., executive director of the Gordon Parks Foundation , said in a phone interview. “He felt that, by picking up a camera and using his creative works, he could tell a story and show the injustices of America.”

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It would seem that, in the current political moment, his work has taken new urgency. According to Kunhardt, the foundation has “absolutely” seen an increase in requests related to both exhibitions and education opportunities recently. (The Foundation offers scholarships and fellowship opportunities, and hosts education programs.)

“Gordon’s now been dead for 12 years, and I’m certain that if you were still around he would say that that that dialogue has to continue on today, and that’s what we’re doing with the foundation,” said Kunhardt.

“His fight was never over and his struggle to end racial segregation and the ability for everyone’s voice to be heard would be louder right now given what’s happening in this country right now. This struggle is not over.”

Last summer, 12-time Grammy-winner Kendrick Lamar reinforced the point when he recreated scenes from some of Parks’ most memorable photos in the video for his single “ELEMENT.” For two and a half months, stills from the video were on displayed alongside the images that inspired them at the Gordon Parks Foundation headquarters in Pleasantville, New York.

Kunhardt, who considers Lamar a “friend of the foundation,” called the rapper’s appropriation a work of “pure genius and creativity.” (Lamar will host the Foundation’s annual awards gala with Alicia Keys and producer Swizz Beatz later this year.)

“What he did in his appropriations, you couldn’t have commissioned someone to do that. He was taking Gordon as a legendary figure in the African-American historical context and using him in such a contemporary way that brought millions and millions of eyes to him that would not necessarily have ever known who Gordon Parks was,” Kunhardt said.

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“There are so many contemporary artists – and I don’t just mean painters and sculptors, but I also mean musicians and choreographers to poets and writers – who are doing their work today because of what Gordon was able to pave the way to. And they feel so strongly that that Gordon needs to be honored and recognized for having a voice at a time where that voice was much harder to have heard.”

“Gordon Parks: I am You | Part 2” is on at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York until March 24, 2017.

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Reliving The Civil Rights Movement, In 55 Powerful Photos

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33 Powerful Photos Of The March On Washington That Changed Civil Rights In America

Perhaps the most simultaneously helpful and harmful thing that historians, writers, teachers, and Americans as a whole have done to the civil rights movement is to label it as such.

A label as monolithic as "the civil rights movement" helpfully conveys just how pervasive were the wrongs that the movement sought to right and just how courageously the movement went about doing so.

Yet a label so monolithic also harmfully conceals just how multifarious were the kinds of wrongs that the movement sought to right and just how varied were the perspectives of its leaders.

What we summarize as "the civil rights movement" of 1954 to 1968 included African-Americans' struggle for equality in voting rights, housing standards, education, public transportation, employment practices, immigration procedures, marriage laws, political representation, and more.

And while these various struggles were indeed united under common themes of equality, dignity, and respect, each of these battles had to be fought largely on its own and resolved by its own piece of legislation: the Montgomery bus boycott fought the transportation battle while the Selma to Montgomery marches protested voting rights inequalities; the Brown v. Board of Education decision declared segregation to be unconstitutional while the Voting Rights Act of 1965 ended racial discrimination at the polls.

It's when we thus unpack the monolithic notion of "the civil rights movement" that we can appropriately remember each and every struggle and that figured into it.

From the Harlem riots of 1964 to the Watts riots of 1965, from the March on Washington to the March Against Fear, and from Martin Luther King to Malcolm X, explore the multifaceted struggle and hope of the civil rights movement in the photos above.

After this look at the civil rights movement, discover six civil rights leaders you don't know, but should. Then, see 20 of the most powerful civil rights protest photos .

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This story was originally published in 2017 with the title 'They call you boy until you 50 or 54'.

I chased the shimmering reflection of ancient trees through the cypress swamps that flank the Natchez Trace, a lone driver speeding ever faster to get to an interview in Indianola, Mississippi. Mary King, who had worked in communications for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Jackson in 1964 to help register African Americans to vote, sat in the passenger seat. I felt the power and weight of her history acutely, as if a third passenger were in the car. King joined the Civil Rights Movement at the age of 22, and she had committed her life to working towards greater equality. Over 52 years later, in January 2016, she returned to the state that had defined the meaning and due north of her life.

When King and I arrived in Jackson, we met Senator David Jordan on the floor of the Mississippi State Senate. He talked about how there was no need to continue flying the Confederate flag over the state capital. He explained, "2017 is the bicentennial of Mississippi becoming a state. We don't need an image flying over this capital that reminds our great, great grandsons of 247 years of free labor. There are a million of us here out of three million."

After introducing us on the floor of the senate, Jordan walked us to his office, where he offered us a copy of his book From the Mississippi Cotton Fields to the State Senate: A Memoir . He discussed the importance of meeting President Obama: "My daddy, when he was in the cotton field, he wore a shirt that all on the back of that shirt would be white – that was the salt he sweated out," explained Jordan. "He would say, 'I hope that someday while I'm living one of my boys will meet the president.' That has been fulfilled. I met three."

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Civil Rights, One Person and One Photo at a Time

The hands of the father and his young daughter wave emphatically: the two are not in agreement. The man talks. His eyes are closed; he looks pained. The child listens, but gazes at a plate of cookies on the dinner table.

The scene is not unusual: a father is telling his daughter that she will not be going to an amusement park. But he is doing so not because it is a school day, or because he is punishing her. He fears for her safety.

The father is Martin Luther King Jr.; the child is his 7-year-old daughter Yolanda; and the two are engaged in a conversation that no parent wants to have. He is explaining to the girl for the first time the hazards of segregation and the reasons she cannot visit Fun Town, a popular but restricted theme park in Atlanta.

This photograph, ( Slide 6 ) which first appeared in a 1963 photo essay in Look magazine, is emotionally intimate and psychologically insightful, like many of the images in “ Controversy and Hope: The Civil Rights Photographs of James Karales ” (University of South Carolina Press). The book, by Julian Cox, provides a singular opportunity to re-evaluate the innovative work of Mr. Karales, who died in 2002 , at age 71.

Race Stories

A continuing exploration of the relationship of race to photographic portrayals of race by the professor and curator Maurice Berger.

Framing Beauty»
Images of Emancipation »
Erased Lynchings »
Malcolm X, Visual Strategist »
Gordon Parks’s Radically Prosaic Approach »

As Dr. King ’s aide and confidante Andrew Young notes in the book’s foreword, Mr. Karales’s photographs were distinguished by their ability to reveal the “complexity of emotions intertwined with the hopes and hardships of the struggle.” Their personal, contemplative approach was not always in step with a mainstream press enthralled by the high drama of historic speeches, conflagrations and demonstrations. This approach may also have been the reason Dr. King, who was fiercely protective of his family, granted the photographer unprecedented access to them.

Mr. Karales typically favored the individual over the collective, and his photographs are more like artful portraits than the straightforward documentation of momentous events. In his reporting on the Selma to Montgomery march for voting rights in the spring of 1965, for example, he frequently photographed participants — the famous and the unknown — up close, carefully rendering their individuality and state of mind.

His images of the march resonate with nuances of emotion and psychology: a tight, brooding shot of a young demonstrator in profile; the bitter, scowling face of a segregationist being arrested ( Slide 16 ); a black child nestled contently on the shoulders of a bearded white man ( Slide 11 ); the indelibly memorable photograph of an African-American teenager staring wearily into the camera ( Slide 12 ), the word “vote” emblazoned on his whitewashed forehead.

This intimate viewpoint aligned Mr. Karales more with the strategies of the black press than those of the mainstream media. Just as the mainstream media dispensed profiles about white people — relegating people of color to stereotypical, sensationalistic or communal reporting — publications owned and operated by African-Americans covered the private lives of the ordinary and famous alike.

These profiles, accompanied by photographs or drawings, were the mainstay of one of the earliest black pictorial magazines, The Crisis, edited by the civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois. In the civil rights era, the profiles continued to have a central role in the periodicals of the Johnson Publishing Company — Ebony, Jet and Tan, the first black women’s magazine — subtly challenging the status quo by emphasizing, rather than concealing, African-American humanity, individuality and psychological nuance.

If Mr. Karales’s method was akin to that of the black press, it was driven not by sympathy — the motivation Mr. Cox ascribes to it — but by empathy. Born into an immigrant Greek family in Canton, Ohio, in 1930, Mr. Karales struggled to learn English. He experienced firsthand the hardships of a community routinely viewed as exotic, inferior and not quite American. After working blue-collar manufacturing jobs, he enrolled in Ohio University and studied photography.

Mr. Karales was determined to use his camera in the service of social justice. From his first photo-essay — a tender, keenly observed profile of Canton’s working-class, Greek-American community ( above ) — he strove to reveal the complexity of his subjects by stressing the individual details lost amid collective stereotypes and biases.

Over a half-century career, including a staff position at Look that gave him a national platform, Mr. Karales continually fixed his lens on the marginal, the besieged and the politically fraught: coal miners in the racially integrated but economically depressed town of Rendville, Ohio; racial discrimination in organized religion; the quagmire of the Vietnam War; and segregation in New York City. (Those last photographs went unpublished, perhaps because they upended the era’s myth of Northern racial tolerance.)

Nowhere is Mr. Karales’s defiance of racial clichés more apparent than in his 1960 Look profile of Richard Adams, a pioneering speech therapist and social worker. The photo-essay inverted racial typecasting: Adams was black, his students were mostly white, and they coexisted not in a Northern city but in rural Iowa. These images of adoring youngsters and their dedicated teacher spoke to the possibility of racial harmony. But they also called into question an abiding myth of integration: that African-Americans had the most to gain from it.

Mr. Karales’s focus on the individual succeeded — paradoxically, as Mr. Cox notes — because it added to his work “some sense of a common, shared humanity.” By affirming our fundamental similarities, his images implored Americans, in an age of turmoil and transition, to re-examine their own humanity. Rather than presenting predictable scenes of racial disunity, they challenged a nation to face the individuals it had reduced to collective symbols of fear, condescension and hate. There, in the midst of crowds and chaos, he found one person, one image.

Maurice Berger is a research professor and the chief curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and a consulting curator at the Jewish Museum in New York. He is the author of 11 books, including a memoir, “ White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness .” He curated a show, “ For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights ,” and contributed essays to “ Gordon Parks: Collected Works ” (Steidl, 2013).

Follow @ MauriceBerger and @ nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook .

From Today’s Paper: Fighting Floodwaters in the Midwest

Pictures of the week.

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The week in pictures: june 23, 2017.

Credit Pablo Blazquez Dominguez/Getty Images

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The week in pictures: june 16, 2017.

Credit Adam Dean for The New York Times

The Week in Pictures: June 9, 2017

Credit Ivor Prickett for The New York Times

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The week in pictures: june 2, 2017.

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Photo Essay - The 1963 March on Washington

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Organized by such leading lights of the American civil rights movement as Martin Luther King Jr., Bayard Rustin, and A. Philip Randolph, the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom drew some quarter of a million demonstrators to the nation's capital. A landmark event among landmark events in an era of fundamental cultural and social change, the March on Washington brought the civil rights movement to a wider public consciousness and helped bring about the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Though perhaps less immediately recognizable than his more visible peers in the movement, it was Bayard Rustin (1912–1987) who was perhaps most directly responsible for organizing the massive 1963 demonstration. He's seen here in a photograph by Warren K. Leffler at a press conference concerning the March at the Statler Hotel on 27 August 1963.

This image of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was captured immediately before he delivered his classic, transformative "I Have a Dream" speech in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial on 28 August 1963.

The Calypso singer, musician, actor, and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte (b. 1927) has a long history of involvement with the American civil rights movement, including helping to fund the Freedom Rides. This photograph was taken on 28 August 1963.

James Baldwin (1924–1987), author of Go Tell It on the Mountain , poses for a photograph with the movie star Marlon Brando (1924–2004). Brando financially supported the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), and Baldwin returned from his self-imposed exile in Paris to take part in the struggle for civil rights in his native country.

Political scientist, author, and the first African American winner of the Nobel Peace Prize (1950), Dr. Ralph Johnson Bunche (1904–1971) lived a life dedicated to the principles of nonviolence and an untrammeled hope in the capacity of human beings to peacefully coexist.

Many notable entertainers performed for the crowd on the Washington Mall, among them the folk musicians Joan Baez (b. 1941) and Bob Dylan (b. 1941). For many young people of the 1960s Baez's and Dylan's music was the soundtrack of the movement.

Among his many contributions to the American civil rights movement, A. Philip Randolph (1889–1979) founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, widely considered the first African American labor union in the United States.

When Jackie Robinson (1919–1972) broke Major League baseball's color line in 1947 he forever changed the landscape of American professional sports and popular culture. He appears in this image with his son.

The multitalented Ossie Davis (1917–2005), actor, writer, and director, struggled throughout his long and dignified career to force Hollywood to change its view of African American actors and to offer them roles outside the stereotypes that had trapped earlier performers.

A member of the so-called Rat Pack with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and others, Sammy Davis Jr. (1925–1990) helped to integrate once-segregated nightspots by refusing to perform in them.

Actress and singer, the great Lena Horne (b. 1917) spent much of her film career on the cutting-room floor, at least in the American South. Since southern theaters often refused to show scenes featuring African American performers, many of their scenes or numbers were simply edited out.

Gordon Parks' (1912-2006) photographs graced the covers of Life magazine for nearly two decades and included images of some of the civil rights movement's most important figures. Among the first mainstream African American motion picture directors, as well, Parks helmed such movies as The Learning Tree (1969) and Shaft (1971).

To those who are only familiar with the film actor Charlton Heston's (b. 1923) late political persona, in particular his role as president of the National Rifle Association and liberal bete noi , it may come as something of a surprise that in his younger days he was a strong advocate of gun control, an enemy of segregation, and an outspoken and passionate champion of civil rights for African Americans.

President John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) came slowly to the idea of advancing civil rights through mass public demonstration, fearing the reaction of southern politicians and the effect on his own political fortunes. In this image by Cecil Stoughton, the president meets with the leaders of the 1963 March.

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date: 09 September 2024

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At the Black Lives Matter Protests in NYC: A Photo Essay

Rachel cobb documents 10 days in the streets of new york.

In the days following the killing of George Floyd by white policeman Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis on May 25, protests erupted across the US and many parts of the world. After weeks of Covid-19 confinement, hundreds of thousands poured into the streets to express their outrage, to demand police reforms, and to fight for social justice. I’ve been documenting this moment.

–text and photos by Rachel Cobb

Ibrahim Diop, 20, at a rally in Washington Square Park, June 6, 2020 “The principles of how this country was founded—the stolen land, the people who were stolen from Africa—this country is rooted in racism. I would like everyone to be aware of the skeletons they’re walking on.”

Jada Cooper, 20, at the Memorial Prayer for George Floyd, Cadman Plaza, June 4, 2020: “We’re tired of our youth being afraid of cops—our people dying, our youth dying. Our boys need to be able to make mistakes.”

Protestor arrested in Lower Manhattan, May 29, 2020

Minutes before 8 pm curfew begins, police watch protestors at Barclays Center, Brooklyn, June 6, 2020.

Marie Blanchard, 34, at the Memorial Prayer for George Floyd: “The whole world is screaming and crying for the same things we’ve been saying for generations.”

March past Trump Tower, Columbus Circle, Manhattan, May 30, 2020.

Justin Maffett, 26, says “the 1033 program is probably the most significant vehicle for fueling the militarization of police in America that you have never heard of. It is directly responsible for putting weapons, machinery, equipment and technology made for the war zone on American streets. Write to your congressman and demand that they defund and eliminate the 1033 program.”

A protestor faces the police at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge in Lower Manhattan. May 29, 2020.

Diana Rose, 48, says “a badge does not give you the right to murder. Any cop that has a history of abuse should be put in a database of priors.”

Times Square, May 30, 2020.

Jibrill Morris, 26, at the Memorial Prayer for George Floyd: “I have five younger siblings and I promise they will not have to face the injustices I have. Not one more.”

Heidi G., 31, would like to see “police reform [that] would include the repeal of article 50-A that makes it so that police misconduct records are confidential unless you go through court order. If that’s repealed, the public would have access to the records. And more support for the police—mental health checks.”

On the first weekend after George Floyd’s murder, New Yorkers protested throughout the city. Some demonstrations turned violent and dozens of police vehicles were burned. May 30, 2020.

Anthony, a retired policeman hired as a security guard at the Soho Louis Vuitton store calls for police backup. May 31, 2020.

Outside Louis Vuitton store, Soho, Manhattan May 31, 2020.

Union Square, Manhattan May 30, 2020.

Police arrive late to the scene in the Soho neighborhood of Manhattan. In New York City, as elsewhere, the majority of protests have been peaceful, however, in the first few days, rage sometimes gave way to destruction. Soho, May 31, 2020.

Bobby C., 37: “I would like to see police reform nationwide, accountability for police who use excessive force. I believe the arrest of four officers in the George Floyd case was the beginning. Systematic reform is needed nationwide.”

Andrew Akinmola, 16: “Any time a black person steps outside of their house, they’re immediately accused whereas a white person is free to do anything they want.”

At 10:33, two and a half hours after curfew was imposed on New York City, a white man jogs past a dozen police cars on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. June 4, 2020

Michael Thomas, 53, hopes that “white America hears our voice. You don’t have to dehumanize a person to lock them up. You can still do it with their dignity intact.”

Nysheva-Starr, 43, at a protest at Barclays Center, Brooklyn, would like to see “the implementation of a policy that will hold officers accountable whenever they take a life.” June 6, 2020.

Rebecca Oginni, 32, at the Memorial Prayer for George Floyd: “I realize how powerful the police unions are. I want people to absolutely demand transparency in their local communities from their local police department.”

Isaiah D., 25, the Memorial Prayer for George Floyd, hopes “that we can imagine a better world is possible and we can collectively manifest that world.”

Paulette P., 82, waits for a bus to take her to lower Manhattan, so she can join a protest, 10:05 PM, June 7, 2020. “After the 60s we saw some change. I was in Paris in 1968 on the Left Bank when they were protesting and throwing paving stones. My wish is that this will never happen again.”

__________________________________________

Rachel Cobb

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“A Fire That No Water Could Put Out”

Civil rights photography.

Photography played a crucial role in the civil rights movement. Powerful images taken by professional and amateur photographers alike spread awareness across the country about the ongoing struggle for equality. Because of the principle of nonviolent resistance, photographs showed civil rights activists quietly and peacefully enduring often violent abuse at the hands of authority figures. These photographs trace events in the movement both large and small from 1956 to 1967.

Outside Looking In, Mobile, Alabama

In 1956, Life magazine published a photo essay titled “The Restraints: Open and Hidden” by Gordon Parks, the magazine’s first African American staff photographer. The disturbing and poignant color photographs documented the reality of life under segregation in the Jim Crow South. The chain-link fence in this image acts as a physical barrier, preventing the young girls from entering the manicured playground on the opposite side, but also as a metaphorical one. As Parks’s title indicates, the children stand on the “outside looking in” at the kind of life that institutionalized discrimination prevents them from having.

Elizabeth Eckford

One of the most iconic images of the civil rights era, this photograph shows 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford walking alone in front of Little Rock High School while being taunted by a menacing, hateful mob. Eckford was alone because she failed to receive notification that the date for desegregating the school had been postponed by a day. The following morning, the nine students chosen to integrate the previously all white Little Rock Central High School returned together under armed guard.

Martin Luther King Jr. Arrested, Montgomery, Alabama

On September 3, 1958, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. attempted to attend a hearing for fellow civil rights activist Ralph David Abernathy at the Montgomery, Alabama, courthouse, when he was violently arrested. Photographer Charles Moore followed the commotion from the street into the police station, where King was booked for loitering. Once inside, Moore recalled, “I saw an opening on the other side of the counter. I ran there real quickly. Nobody stopped me.”

From his privileged place behind the police counter, Moore captured this image of King being manhandled by the arresting officers, while Coretta Scott King looked on. The Associated Press distributed Moore’s photograph across the country, prompting nationwide outrage.

Firemen Use Hose to Push Back Crowd Protesting Integration of Central High School

Elizabeth Eckford and the Little Rock Nine successfully enrolled at Central High School in 1957, but protests against integration of Southern schools continued for years. In this press photograph, firemen use hoses to suppress the forward movement of pro-segregationist marchers carrying American flags.

Many photographs from this time show such violent crowd-suppression techniques being used against civil rights marchers, but here the firemen aggressively spray activists on the other side of the issue. The photographer stood directly behind the fireman and police chief, who are separated from the protestors by a great, white wall of water. By framing the image in this way, the photographer subtly implicates the viewer in the violence.

Passive Resistance Training, SNCC

Nonviolent resistance was a key tenet of the civil rights movement. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led the way after studying the strategies Mahatma Ghandi had used in India. By refusing to move or fight back, activists exposed the barbarism of segregation and institutionalized racism.

James Karales’s photograph shows the rigorous training administered by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) that young people went through to prepare themselves for activism. These civil rights workers learned not to respond to even the most extreme provocations, including aggressive verbal abuse and vigilante violence, that frequently occurred at demonstrations and sit-ins. At the same time, activists were asked to assume a deep faith in the possibility of human transformation through peace and love.

Daddy, I Want to Be Free Too

Ernest Withers was one of the first African Americans permitted to join the Memphis police force in the 1950s. Concurrently, he joined the civil rights movement early on as both an organizer and a photographer.

In this photograph, the encounter between the police and a peaceful protester with his daughter mirrors Withers’s own conflict between his role as a protester and the racist laws he was employed to uphold as a civil servant. In 2010, an investigation revealed that Withers had worked as a paid informant for the FBI during his years in the movement, a fact that further complicates the legacy of this important Southern photographer.

SNCC Field Secretary John Lewis and Others Pray During a Demonstration

The poised, introspective body language of these young demonstrators praying during a demonstration exhibits the effectiveness of their passive-resistance training. By remaining calm and peaceful in situations that could often turn violent and chaotic, protesters sent a strong message to the world by not engaging with the brutality they faced.

At the time he took this image, SNCC photographer Danny Lyon was a mere twenty years old; his subject, future Congressman John Lewis, was 22. The photograph’s formal elegance and Lewis’s commanding focus suggest his strong clarity of purpose and natural leadership abilities.

Police Dog Attack, Birmingham, Alabama

Bill Hudson captured this shocking altercation between officer Dick Middleton, fifteen-year-old Walter Gadsden, and a police dog from only few feet away, bringing viewers into the brutal immediacy of the scene. The use of attack dogs was one amongst many severe techniques ordered by Bull Connor, fervent segregationist and Public Safety Commissioner of Birmingham, to break up a peaceful protest in Kelly Ingram Park comprising mostly children and teenagers.

The photographs published from this day went on to incite greater national support for the civil rights movement by both public and federal legislators, who one year later signed the Civil Rights Act into law. Hudson’s photograph inspired a sculpture made to honor the protestors, which was installed in the park where these events unfolded.

Freedom Bus Riders, Summer of ’64

During the summer of 1964, more than 1,000 volunteers from across the country traveled on “Freedom Rides,” like the one pictured in this photograph. They rode to Mississippi to participate in a massive voter registration drive and educational initiative organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in a project called Freedom Summer.

Over the course of the summer, 1,062 participants were arrested, 80 Freedom Summer workers were beaten, 37 churches were bombed or burned, 30 black-owned homes and businesses were bombed or burned, 4 civil rights workers were killed, and at least 3 black Mississippians were murdered for supporting the civil rights movement.

Freedom Singing, Selma, Alabama

Freedom songs were fundamentally important to the civil rights movement, especially during marches and public demonstrations. These hopeful pieces of music expressed the difficulty of the struggle and the collective yearning for freedom and equality. Charles Moore’s photograph shows a group of civil rights marchers—among them (left to right) James Orange, Bob Mants, John Lewis, Hosea Williams, Andrew Young, and Amelia Boynton—singing before beginning their walk to the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965.

Boy, Man, and Graffiti

Though not a conventional documentarian of the civil rights movement, Roy DeCarava approached photography as a way to chronicle the black lived experience in New York City. In New York, segregation was not the law of the land as it was in the south, but the presence of overt and institutional racism affected him deeply.

DeCarava also actively fought for equal rights and appreciation for black photographers’ work. He protested Life Magazine for the lack of diversity among its staff photographers and co-founded The Black Photographers Annual, a publication that celebrated and shared the work of black photographers across the country.

Negro Leaders Call on White House

President Johnson and several key black leaders of the day, including (left to right) Roy Wilkins, Executive Director of the NAACP; James Farmer, National Director of the Congress of Racial Equality; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; and Whitney Young, Head of the Urban League, met at the White House to discuss the president’s war on poverty and concerns over the high percentage of poverty among blacks across the country. Johnson later signed into law the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which built on the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Rare and unpublished photographs of the civil rights movement from the Life Magazine archive

Martin Luther King 1929 - 1968
Photos: MLK at Home
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Image Set Civil Rights Movement (PPT/ZIP 14.1MB)

Activity Civil Rights Movement: Respond and Relate

Civil Rights Movement: Race in US History , Facing History and Ourselves

Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Movement , PBS

Putting the Movement Back into Civil Rights Teaching , Civil Rights Teaching

Danny Lyon, Magnum Photos, John Lewis and Colleagues, Prayer Demonstration at a Segregated Swimming Pool, Cairo, Illinois , 1962, printed 1969, gelatin silver print, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase), 2015.19.4466

What role did artists and artwork play in the civil rights movement?

What role did young people play in the civil rights movement?

How does the civil rights movement relate to today’s struggles for freedom and equality?

“[These images] are a testament to the ability of a committed, determined people to transform a nation, even the most powerful nation on earth, and bring it more in line with the call for justice.” —Congressman John Lewis

In 1962 photographer Danny Lyon captured three young African Americans protesting through prayer in front of a “whites-only” swimming pool and recreational facility in Cairo, Illinois. Their demonstration was part of a larger effort to integrate businesses and other spaces in the town. Lyon was involved in the movement and developed strong relationships with members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a group of young people who were committed to full-time grassroots organization. Through his involvement, Lyon captured many aspects of SNCC’s efforts, from prayer demonstrations led by a young John Lewis (at left) to violence suffered by students at the hands of the National Guard. John Lewis continued his activism for many years and was elected to the US Congress in 1986, where he continues to serve as a representative for Georgia in the House of Representatives.

SNCC used this 1962 photograph to develop its public image in support of expanded rights for African Americans. For example, it was used as part of a poster series; printed in bold below the demonstrators’ photograph were the words “come let us build a new world together.”

Download: Civil Rights Movement Image Set (14.1MB)

Explore: Classroom activities related to Civil Rights Movement

SNCC and other community groups organized for the right to equal access to public facilities, the right to vote, and the right to equal employment. However, these ideas needed a higher profile in order to gain popular support. Recognizing the recent and widespread use of photographs in the news, grassroots organizers and community leaders worked with photographers to craft compelling stories and evoke a sense of urgency in the greater American populace. Benedict J. Fernandez, another prominent photographer of the civil rights era, documented the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as well as the activists around him. Fernandez followed King in the last few years of his life, photographing both his family and public life. His photographs help us see the larger community around King, highlighting his allies, young marchers, large crowds at rallies, and the everyday realities of life at that time.

Through their work, artists of the civil rights era captured and communicated a people’s movement—a movement of ordinary people, many of whom were young, who came together to expand rights for all. Images created by Lyon, Fernandez, and many other artists played a pivotal role in shaping the public’s understanding of the civil rights movement and inspiring citizens to action.

Today, photographers continue to pick up their cameras to highlight injustices. Artist Dawoud Bey’s Birmingham Project , which focuses on the legacy of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963, asks viewers to reflect on how the past impacts the present. Images like Bey’s force viewers to consider the ongoing legacy of the civil rights movement—using insights from the past, specifically those captured in photographs, to help us more fully understand the struggles for freedom and equality today.

Danny Lyon, Segregated Drinking Fountains, County Courthouse, Albany, Georgia , 1962, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Gift of the Friends of the Corcoran), 2015.19.4465

The photograph seen here is of two water fountains: one marked “white” and one marked “colored.” Water fountains became symbols of the segregation that permeated all parts of life in the South. This image did not show direct physical violence; instead it demonstrated how Jim Crow laws, which were made at a state and local level in order to enforce segregation, influenced everyday activities such as the simple act of taking a drink of water.

Danny Lyon was a photographer from New York who hitchhiked to Illinois in 1962 in order to document the desegregation movement that was underway there. He was recruited by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) as their first staff photographer. Lyon spent two years documenting segregation, racial violence, and demonstrations.

Take a long look at the details in this photograph. Why might this image be important to the civil rights movement?

Elizabeth Catlett, ...and a special fear for my loved ones , 1946, linocut, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Reba and Dave Williams Collection, Florian Carr Fund and Gift of the Print Research Foundation, 2008.115.36

Elizabeth Catlett created a series of 15 linocuts—prints made by cutting a relief drawing into a piece of linoleum—titled I Am the Negro Woman . The series featured both famous and everyday African American women, with accompanying texts celebrating their courage and determination. Catlett’s prints called attention to the daily struggles of African Americans, especially in the South.

Look carefully at the details of this print. What details are included and what details are left out? What is your vantage point as the viewer? This linocut depicts a lynching, the unlawful murder of an African American at the hands of white Americans, in response to an alleged crime or violation of social norms. Lynching was a constant threat that plagued the African American community from the time of emancipation in the late 19th century into the civil rights era.

Discuss the meaning of the title …and a special fear for my loved ones . What other fears might people have felt at this time? What fears might people have now?

Gordon Parks, Department Store, Mobile, Alabama , 1956, printed later, silver dye bleach print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (The Gordon Parks Collection), 2016.117.195

“I picked up a camera because it was my choice of weapons against what I hated most about the universe: racism, intolerance, poverty.” —Gordon Parks

In 1956 Life magazine published a photo-essay titled “The Restraints: Open and Hidden,” featuring 26 color images by staff photographer Gordon Parks. These photographs exposed white Americans to the realities of racial segregation by focusing on the day-to-day activities of families in Alabama.

Jim Crow laws—common in many states from the 1890s to the 1960s, especially in the South—mandated the segregation of public spaces, including bathrooms, drinking fountains, restaurants, public transportation, schools, and theaters, such as the one shown here with its neon “colored entrance” sign above Joanne Thornton Wilson and her niece, Shirley Anne Kirksey. Parks’s photo-essay documented the impact of Jim Crow laws on individuals. Rather than focusing on boycotts, demonstrations, or the brutality that marked the fight for justice, Parks captured intimate views of inequality. He also wanted to undo racial stereotypes of African Americans by providing positive accounts of real people.

What “weapons” can you use to fight for what you believe in?

Danny Lyon, John Lewis and Colleagues, Prayer Demonstration at a Segregated Swimming Pool, Cairo, Illinois , 1962, printed 1969, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase), 2015.19.4466

What does “come let us build a new world together” mean to you? What other slogans or images have inspired you to act? How is kneeling used as a form of protest today?

The face of a young Black woman fills most of this horizontal black and white photograph. The top of her head is cropped. She has straight black hair, which sweeps down in bangs across her forehead, and her hair is either cut short or pulled back. Her lips are closed and she looks steadily with dark eyes off into the distance to our left. Only the white or light-colored collar and very top of her right shoulder, on our left, are visible, though a dark narrow strap over her shoulder near her neck suggests a purse or backpack. She is positioned slightly to our left and to our right, the left half of a young Black man’s face is cropped by the right edge of the photograph. He stands closer to us, in front of the woman’s shoulder. His face is out of focus and he looks directly at the camera. More people fill the background between the woman and man but specific features are indistinguishable.

Roy DeCarava, Mississippi freedom marcher, Washington, D.C . , 1963, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Robert B. Menschel Fund, 1999.67.3

On August 28, 1963, photographer Roy DeCarava attended the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which culminated in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. In this striking photograph, DeCarava turned away from common displays of political demonstration—placards and crowds—to capture the confidence, interiority, and stoicism of a single marcher. DeCarava described this portrait, with its subtle gradations of gray and black, as representing “a beautiful black woman who was beautiful in her blackness….I wanted to pay homage to that person, that spirit.”

How does this image compare to other photographic documentation of the civil rights movement? What effect might a photograph like this have had for the civil rights movement?

Arthur Ellis, Civil Rights Demonstration for Fair Employment and Housing Legislation, Washington, D.C . , June 14, 1963, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Gift of the Estate of Frederica Ellis, wife of Arthur J. Ellis), 2015.19.5005

Arthur Ellis was a leading photojournalist for the Washington Post from 1930 through the early 1970s. He captured a period of dramatic change across the country through the lens of the nation’s capital.

Here Ellis has captured one of many demonstrations during the civil rights movement, a 1963 protest demanding equitable housing opportunities and fair labor laws. The fight for equal housing would continue for five more years until the Fair Housing Act of 1968 was passed. This act prohibited discrimination concerning the sale, rental, and financing of housing based on race, religion, national origin, or sex, expanding on the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Choose one person in the photograph. Imagine you are that person. What might you see, feel, hear, taste, or smell? How might it feel to be in this crowd?

Danny Lyon, Clifford Vaughs, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Photographer, Arrested by the National Guard, Cambridge, Maryland , 1964, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Gift of the Friends of the Corcoran), 2015.19.4463

Congressman John Lewis befriended photographer Danny Lyon in the 1960s, when they were both working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), an organization that aimed to desegregate the United States. In 2002 Lewis described this picture, in which National Guard troops dragged Clifford Vaughs, an activist, out of a sit-in:

“We had discussions about the role of photography in SNCC, but it was only later that I really understood what we were trying to do. We had to find a way to help educate and sensitize people, especially non-Southerners. We were trying to put a face on the movement, to make it real, to make it very plain and simple to ordinary people. We wanted to say, ‘This is what is happening.’ Many people across the country saw all these unbelievable photographs in newspapers or magazines and were inspired by them….They became a tool to educate, inspire, and enlighten the public.”

What strikes you about this photograph? Choose one person in the image and consider that person’s point of view. What might that person be thinking?

Benedict J. Fernandez, Newark Riots, Day After Day , 1967, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Gift of Alexander Wolf Levy), 2016.22.121

This photograph was taken during what was known as the “long, hot summer of 1967.” It was a season marked by racial tensions that exploded into a series of deadly riots in California, New York, Michigan, and New Jersey. The Newark riots, the subject of this photo, erupted on July 12 when residents of a large public housing development witnessed the beating of an African American cab driver by white police officers. Over the course of several days, 26 people were killed (making it among the deadliest of the riots), another 700 were injured, and entire blocks were burned to the ground, causing millions of dollars in damages.

Benedict J. Fernandez made a series of artistic choices in this photograph. What details did he include? What can you see through the window? What do you think Fernandez is trying to convey in this photograph?

Benedict J. Fernandez, Memorial to Martin Luther King, Jr., Central Park, New York , April 1968, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Gift of Michael S. Engl), 2016.22.112

On April 5, 1968, a crowd of New Yorkers, including several thousand high school students, gathered in Central Park. They came together to mourn the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who had been shot and killed the previous day. The mourners listened to several speeches from local leaders before marching down Broadway to city hall. This was largely a peaceful demonstration in respect for King’s belief in nonviolence.

Consider the title of this photograph. What do you think the photographer, Benedict J. Fernandez, meant by this? Look at the facial expressions of the three young men. How would you describe them?

Benedict J. Fernandez, Memphis, Tennessee , April 1968, printed 1989, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Gift of Eastman Kodak Company and Michael S. Engl), 2016.22.104

In February 1968, over 700 African American sanitation workers went on strike in Memphis to advocate for higher wages and protest poor working conditions following the death of two workers. This strike, known as the Memphis Sanitation Strike, had the support of the local union and lasted over two months. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came to Memphis to support the strike, and on April 4 he was assassinated. Placards like the ones held by these two men were created for a memorial march held in Memphis four days after King’s assassination. The photographer, Benedict J. Fernandez, had developed a close relationship with King and was an active participant in many of the events where King was present.

Look carefully at this image. What clues are there about what this event was like? Why might Fernandez have chosen this moment to depict?

Benedict J. Fernandez, Poor People’s Campaign, Washington D.C. , Summer 1968, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Gift of Michael S. Engl), 2016.22.108

In this photograph, we see two men resting on the steps of a church in Washington, DC. In the foreground, there is an iconic protest sign with the words “I Am a Man.” Another sign, worn by one of the men, says “Honor King: End Racism!”

During the summer of 1968, activists took over the National Mall in order to raise awareness of the widespread effects of poverty. The movement was known as the Poor People’s Campaign. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a central figure in the campaign, bringing together different groups of people in support of a living wage for all. On June 19, over 150,000 people gathered on the National Mall to support the movement’s goals, culminating with a Solidarity Day rally in celebration of Juneteenth, the historical date of emancipation across the former Confederate States of America. This photograph, captured by Benedict J. Fernandez, is from this summer of 1968 in Washington, DC.

Explore the composition of this photograph and the prominence of the sign in the foreground. What might the photographer want us to know? What story or stories are being told here? What effect do these two slogans have on you?

Glenn Ligon, Untitled (I Am a Man) , 1988, oil and enamel on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Patrons’ Permanent Fund and Gift of the Artist, 2012.109.1

Untitled (I Am a Man) is a representation of actual signs carried by over 700 striking African American sanitation workers in Memphis in 1968. Prompted by the wrongful deaths of two coworkers from faulty equipment, the strikers marched to protest low wages and unsafe working conditions. They took up the slogan “I Am a Man,” a variant on the first line of Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952): “I am an invisible man.” By deleting the word “invisible,” the Memphis strikers asserted their presence, making themselves visible in standing up for their rights. This slogan and these signs continued to be used throughout the civil rights movement.

In this work, Glenn Ligon differentiates his painting from the original signs by reorganizing the line breaks and painting the black letters in eye-catching enamel.

This iconic sign—both its language and design—is particularly powerful, as evidenced by its continued use today. It was recently used by groups of children protesting family separation at the US-Mexico border. They edited the text to say, “I Am a Child.” Why do you think this slogan is so powerful?

Norman Lewis, Untitled (Alabama) , 1967, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of the Collectors Committee, 2009.45.1

Although there is no official title for this painting, Norman Lewis’s widow reported that he called it Alabama . Its composition reflects and exaggerates the shape of that Southern state, which is a tapering quadrilateral with a “handle” at Mobile, where the United States meets the Gulf of Mexico. In Lewis’s work, there is a sharp contrast between the painting’s two dominant geometric shapes and their black surroundings. The shapes have razor-edged outlines and angles, and are abruptly cropped at the edge of the canvas—forming the profile of a meat cleaver or guillotine. In the larger shape, the hood of a Klansman emerges from a mass of black and white brushstrokes, adding a menacing figure to Lewis’s dramatic composition.

Consider this abstract painting in conjunction with the photographs in this image set. What new insights does this painting give you on the civil rights era? What can this painting tell us that a photograph might not?

Dawoud Bey, Mary Parker and Caela Cowan , 2012, printed 2014, 2 inkjet prints, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of the Collectors Committee and the Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund, 2018.12.3.1–2

On September 15, 1963, four Klansmen bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama; four young girls were killed and two teenage boys were murdered in racially motivated violence following the incident. In 2005 American photographer Dawoud Bey (b. 1953) visited Birmingham to explore the possibility of making artwork to commemorate the event. He created a series, The Birmingham Project , composed of diptychs—works of art on two combined panels. Each diptych pairs a portrait of a young person the same age as one of the victims with a second portrait of an adult 50 years older—the child’s age had she or he survived.

Look carefully at these images. What emotions do they stir up in you? How might these photographs help us to connect the past to the present?

Essay: The Civil Rights Movement

The Civil Rights Movement sought to win the American promise of liberty and equality during the twentieth century. From the early struggles of the 1940s to the crowning successes of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts that changed the legal status of African-Americans in the United States, the Civil Rights Movement firmly grounded its appeals for liberty and equality in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Rather than rejecting an America that discriminated against a particular race, the movement fought for America to fulfill its own universal promise that “all men are created equal.” It worked for American principles within American institutions rather than against them.

African-Americans endured racial prejudice that compelled them to fight racism in World War II while fighting in segregated units. It was particularly hard to accept because the war was fought against the racist Nazis who were attempting to eradicate the Jews grounded in racially-based totalitarianism. For black soldiers, the stark contradiction with American wartime ideals was as repulsive as their daily condition of fighting separately. Many black units—most famously the Tuskegee Airmen—fought just as courageously as their white counterparts. Fighting for the “Double V” for victory over totalitarianism and racism, returning black veterans were not keen on returning to the Jim Crow South with legal (de jure) segregation nor to a North with informal (de facto) segregation.

On the national level, African-Americans sought to overturn segregation with legal challenges up to the Supreme Court, pressuring presidents to enforce equality, and lobbying Congress for changes in the law of the land.

In the postwar years, civil rights leaders prepared a dual strategy of attacking all discrimination throughout American society. On the national level, African-Americans sought to overturn segregation with legal challenges up to the Supreme Court, pressuring presidents to enforce equality, and lobbying Congress for changes in the law of the land. On the local level, marches were held to demonstrate the fundamental immorality and violence of segregation and to change local laws.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was established by W.E.B. DuBois and other black and white, male and female reformers in 1909 to struggle for civil rights, helped lead the legal battle in the courts. The NAACP legal team, led by Thurgood Marshall, who would later become the first black justice on the Supreme Court, scored the first major success of the Civil Rights Movement with Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954) decision that indirectly overturned Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which had set the precedent for legalizing segregation. New Chief Justice Earl Warren persuaded his fellow justices to issue a unanimous 9-0 decision for the moral force to overcome expected white southern resistance. The outcome was a landmark for black equality that initiated the Civil Rights Movement.

The good outcome led many to overlook the questionable legal reasoning employed in the decision. The Supreme Court shockingly admitted white and black schools were equal despite evidence to the contrary. Moreover, the Court stated that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment had “inconclusive” origins related to segregated schools and doubted whether it could be applied to this case. Instead, the Court turned to social science as the basis for its decision. It referred to experiments in which black children played with dolls of different races. Members of the Court misread the evidence because the results of the studies actually showed that the segregated black children chose to play with black dolls. The Court mistakenly reported that the black children played more with the white dolls and had a “feeling of inferiority.”

The Court settled for declaring the edict that segregated schools were “inherently unequal” based on dubious social science and missed an opportunity for a constitutionally-grounded precedent banning all racial discrimination.

In Plessy v. Ferguson , Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote this powerful dissent: “Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of our civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.” (John Marshall Harlan, Plessy v. Ferguson Dissenting Opinion, 1896).

By ignoring Harlan’s understanding of the equality principle in the Constitution and settling for the use of social science, Chief Justice Warren diminished the constitutional force of the decision, which, if read narrowly, did not exactly overturn Plessy .

Even with the unanimous decision that Chief Justice Warren sought, the case encountered opposition, and it took more than a decade of direct action by African-Americans and others to win equality. In 1955, the Montgomery Bus Boycott initiated a decade of local demonstrations against segregation in the South. In December 1955, Rosa Parks courageously refused to give up her bus seat to a white man because she was tired of being treated like a second-class citizen. African-Americans applied economic pressure for more than one year to force concessions for desegregation at the local level, and a charismatic young Baptist minister, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., provided vision and leadership for the emerging movement at Montgomery.

As a result of the Brown decision, many white politicians and ordinary citizens engaged in what they called “massive resistance” to oppose desegregation. In 1957, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus refused to use the state National Guard to protect black children at Little Rock High School. President Dwight Eisenhower sent in troops from the 101st Airborne Division to compel local desegregation and protect the nine black students while federalizing the Arkansas National Guard to block Faubus. The Little Rock Nine attended school under the watchful eye of federal troops. The principles of equality and constitutional federalism came into conflict during this incident because the national government used the military to impose integration at the local level.

4.1 dwight d eisenhower official presidential portrait

In 1957, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus refused to use the state National Guard to protect black children at Little Rock High School. President Dwight Eisenhower sent in troops from the 101st Airborne Division to compel local desegregation and protect the nine black students while federalizing the Arkansas National Guard to block Faubus.

In the early 1960s, African-Americans continued to press for equality at the local and national levels. In 1960, black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina started a wave of “sit-ins” in which they took seats reserved for whites at segregated lunch counters. The sit-ins led to applying the economic pressure of a boycott that successfully desegregated the local lunch counters.

In 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. used his moral vision and rhetoric to achieve the greatest successes of the movement for black equality and the end of segregation. King helped to organize marches in Birmingham, Alabama, where police dogs and fire hoses were turned on the Birmingham marchers and caused shock and outrage across the nation when the violence was televised. King and hundreds of others were arrested for demonstrating without a permit.

From his jail cell, King wrote his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” defending the civil rights demonstrations by quoting the great Christian authority St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.” Employing the principles of America’s Founders, King explained that a just law is a “man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God.” King posited that just laws uplift the human person while unjust laws “distort the soul” (Martin Luther King, Jr. “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” April 16, 1963).

He argued that just laws are rooted in human equality, while unjust laws give a false sense of superiority and inferiority. Moreover, segregation laws had been inflicted upon a minority who had no say in making the laws and thereby passed without consent, violating American principles of republican self-government.

King closed the letter by asserting that the Civil Rights Movement was “standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence” (Martin Luther King, Jr. “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” April 16, 1963).

On June 11, 1963, President Kennedy responded and addressed the nation on television. “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution,” he told the nation. For Kennedy, the question was “whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities” (John F. Kennedy, “Civil Rights Address,” June 11, 1963).

Kennedy was mindful of the historical significance of the year when he appealed to Lincoln’s Proclamation freeing the slaves: “One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free…And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free” (John F. Kennedy, “Civil Rights Address,” June 11, 1963).

On August 28, 1963, the greatest event of the Civil Rights Movement occurred with the March on Washington. More than 250,000 blacks and whites, young and old, clergy and laity, descended upon the capital in support of the proposed civil rights bill. From the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King evoked great documents of freedom when he said “Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation” (Martin Luther King, Jr. “I Have A Dream,” August 28, 1963). The Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves one hundred years before on January 1, 1863. Simultaneously, he also subtly referred to the other great document of 1863, Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address,” which was inscribed in the wall of the memorial, and begins, “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” (Abraham Lincoln, “Gettysburg Address,” November 19, 1863).

King offered high praise for the “architects of our republic” who wrote the “magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.” King began his evocative peroration “I Have a Dream” by declaring that his dream is “deeply rooted in the American dream.” “One day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal’” (Martin Luther King, Jr. “I Have A Dream,” August 28, 1963).

African-Americans won the fruits of their decades of struggle for civil rights when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Civil Rights Act legally ended segregation in all public facilities. The act had to overcome a Southern filibuster in the Senate and the fears of conservatives in both parties that it was an unconstitutional intrusion of the federal government upon the rights of the states and into local affairs and private businesses.

Although the Fifteenth Amendment had been ratified a hundred years before, African Americans still voted at low rates, especially in the Deep South. A number of devices—literacy tests, poll taxes, and grandfather clauses that prevented descendants of slaves from voting—severely curtailed black suffrage. Violence and intimidation were the main vehicles of preventing African-Americans from voting in the mid-1960s.

In March 1965, Martin Luther King and other leaders organized marches in Selma, Alabama, for voting rights. After enduring beatings by club-wielding mounted police officers on “Bloody Sunday,” the marchers eventually set out again several days later and reached Montgomery under the watchful eye of federal troops. Congress soon passed the Voting Rights of 1965, banning abridgment of the right to vote on account of race.

Yet in the wake of the great legislative triumphs for social and voting equality the summer of 1965 (and successive summers) witnessed the explosion of racial violence and rioting by black citizens in American cities. Despite gaining rights of equal opportunity African-Americans still lived under obvious economic disparities with whites. The passage of federal laws securing equal opportunity led to rising expectations of immediate equality, which did not happen. Young “Black Power” advocates also began advocating self-reliance as a race, a celebration of African heritage, and a rejection of white society. Forming groups like the Black Panthers, a minority of young African-Americans spoke in passionate terms advocating violence, leading to confrontations with police. Many white Americans were shocked and confused at the urban riots occurring just after legal equality for African-Americans had been achieved.

In the 1970s and 1980s, plans of “affirmative action” were introduced in college admissions and in hiring for public and private jobs that soon became controversial. Intended to remedy the historic wrongs of slavery and segregation, affirmative action policies established preference or quotas for the number of African-Americans (and soon women and other minorities) who would be admitted or hired. Its proponents sought to achieve an equality of outcome in society rather than merely equal opportunity in American society. Some whites complained that this was “reverse discrimination” against whites that tolerated lower standards for the benefited groups. The most notable Supreme Court case addressing the issue was the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) decision, in which racial preferences, but not racial quotas, were upheld.

The Supreme Court essentially agreed with the supporters of affirmative action who argued that “discrimination against members of the white ‘majority’ cannot be suspect if its purpose can be characterized as ‘benign’” (Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., Regents of the University of California v. Bakke , Opinion, 1978)

The Civil Rights Movement

The Civil Rights Movement sought to win the American promise of liberty and equality during the twentieth-century. From the early struggles of the 1940s to the crowning successes of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts that changed the legal status of African-Americans in the United States, the Civil Rights Movement firmly grounded its appeals for liberty and equality in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Rather than rejecting an America that discriminated against a particular race, the movement fought for America to fulfill its own universal promise that “all men are created equal.” The Civil Rights Movement worked for American principles within American institutions rather than against them.

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Civil Rights Movement

By: History.com Editors

Updated: May 14, 2024 | Original: October 27, 2009

Civil Rights Leaders At The March On WashingtonCivil rights Leaders hold hands as they lead a crowd of hundreds of thousands at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Washington DC, August 28, 1963. Those in attendance include (front row): James Meredith and Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929 - 1968), left; (L-R) Roy Wilkins (1901 - 1981), light-colored suit, A. Phillip Randolph (1889 - 1979) and Walther Reuther (1907 - 1970). (Photo by Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

The civil rights movement was a struggle for social justice that took place mainly during the 1950s and 1960s for Black Americans to gain equal rights under the law in the United States. The Civil War officially abolished slavery , but it didn’t end discrimination against Black people—they continued to endure the devastating effects of racism, especially in the South. By the mid-20th century, Black Americans, along with many other Americans, mobilized and began an unprecedented fight for equality that spanned two decades.

Jim Crow Laws

During Reconstruction , Black people took on leadership roles like never before. They held public office and sought legislative changes for equality and the right to vote.

In 1868, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution gave Black people equal protection under the law. In 1870, the 15th Amendment granted Black American men the right to vote. Still, many white Americans, especially those in the South, were unhappy that people they’d once enslaved were now on a more-or-less equal playing field.

To marginalize Black people, keep them separate from white people and erase the progress they’d made during Reconstruction, “ Jim Crow ” laws were established in the South beginning in the late 19th century. Black people couldn’t use the same public facilities as white people, live in many of the same towns or go to the same schools. Interracial marriage was illegal, and most Black people couldn’t vote because they were unable to pass voter literacy tests.

Jim Crow laws weren’t adopted in northern states; however, Black people still experienced discrimination at their jobs or when they tried to buy a house or get an education. To make matters worse, laws were passed in some states to limit voting rights for Black Americans.

Moreover, southern segregation gained ground in 1896 when the U.S. Supreme Court declared in Plessy v. Ferguson that facilities for Black and white people could be “separate but equal."

World War II and Civil Rights

Prior to World War II , most Black people worked as low-wage farmers, factory workers, domestics or servants. By the early 1940s, war-related work was booming, but most Black Americans weren’t given better-paying jobs. They were also discouraged from joining the military.

After thousands of Black people threatened to march on Washington to demand equal employment rights, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 on June 25, 1941. It opened national defense jobs and other government jobs to all Americans regardless of race, creed, color or national origin.

Black men and women served heroically in World War II, despite suffering segregation and discrimination during their deployment. The Tuskegee Airmen broke the racial barrier to become the first Black military aviators in the U.S. Army Air Corps and earned more than 150 Distinguished Flying Crosses. Yet many Black veterans were met with prejudice and scorn upon returning home. This was a stark contrast to why America had entered the war to begin with—to defend freedom and democracy in the world.

As the Cold War began, President Harry Truman initiated a civil rights agenda, and in 1948 issued Executive Order 9981 to end discrimination in the military. These events helped set the stage for grass-roots initiatives to enact racial equality legislation and incite the civil rights movement.

On December 1, 1955, a 42-year-old woman named Rosa Parks found a seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus after work. Segregation laws at the time stated Black passengers must sit in designated seats at the back of the bus, and Parks complied.

When a white man got on the bus and couldn’t find a seat in the white section at the front of the bus, the bus driver instructed Parks and three other Black passengers to give up their seats. Parks refused and was arrested.

As word of her arrest ignited outrage and support, Parks unwittingly became the “mother of the modern-day civil rights movement.” Black community leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) led by Baptist minister Martin Luther King Jr ., a role which would place him front and center in the fight for civil rights.

Parks’ courage incited the MIA to stage a boycott of the Montgomery bus system . The Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted 381 days. On November 14, 1956, the Supreme Court ruled segregated seating was unconstitutional.

Little Rock Nine

In 1954, the civil rights movement gained momentum when the United States Supreme Court made segregation illegal in public schools in the case of Brown v. Board of Education . In 1957, Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas asked for volunteers from all-Black high schools to attend the formerly segregated school.

On September 4, 1957, nine Black students, known as the Little Rock Nine , arrived at Central High School to begin classes but were instead met by the Arkansas National Guard (on order of Governor Orval Faubus) and a screaming, threatening mob. The Little Rock Nine tried again a couple of weeks later and made it inside, but had to be removed for their safety when violence ensued.

Finally, President Dwight D. Eisenhower intervened and ordered federal troops to escort the Little Rock Nine to and from classes at Central High. Still, the students faced continual harassment and prejudice.

Their efforts, however, brought much-needed attention to the issue of desegregation and fueled protests on both sides of the issue.

Civil Rights Act of 1957

Even though all Americans had gained the right to vote, many southern states made it difficult for Black citizens. They often required prospective voters of color to take literacy tests that were confusing, misleading and nearly impossible to pass.

Wanting to show a commitment to the civil rights movement and minimize racial tensions in the South, the Eisenhower administration pressured Congress to consider new civil rights legislation.

On September 9, 1957, President Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 into law, the first major civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. It allowed federal prosecution of anyone who tried to prevent someone from voting. It also created a commission to investigate voter fraud.

Sit-In at Woolworth's Lunch Counter

Despite making some gains, Black Americans still experienced blatant prejudice in their daily lives. On February 1, 1960, four college students took a stand against segregation in Greensboro, North Carolina when they refused to leave a Woolworth’s lunch counter without being served.

Over the next several days, hundreds of people joined their cause in what became known as the Greensboro sit-ins. After some were arrested and charged with trespassing, protesters launched a boycott of all segregated lunch counters until the owners caved and the original four students were finally served at the Woolworth’s lunch counter where they’d first stood their ground.

Their efforts spearheaded peaceful sit-ins and demonstrations in dozens of cities and helped launch the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to encourage all students to get involved in the civil rights movement. It also caught the eye of young college graduate Stokely Carmichael , who joined the SNCC during the Freedom Summer of 1964 to register Black voters in Mississippi. In 1966, Carmichael became the chair of the SNCC, giving his famous speech in which he originated the phrase "Black power.”

Freedom Riders

On May 4, 1961, 13 “ Freedom Riders ”—seven Black and six white activists–mounted a Greyhound bus in Washington, D.C. , embarking on a bus tour of the American south to protest segregated bus terminals. They were testing the 1960 decision by the Supreme Court in Boynton v. Virginia that declared the segregation of interstate transportation facilities unconstitutional.

Facing violence from both police officers and white protesters, the Freedom Rides drew international attention. On Mother’s Day 1961, the bus reached Anniston, Alabama, where a mob mounted the bus and threw a bomb into it. The Freedom Riders escaped the burning bus but were badly beaten. Photos of the bus engulfed in flames were widely circulated, and the group could not find a bus driver to take them further. U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (brother to President John F. Kennedy ) negotiated with Alabama Governor John Patterson to find a suitable driver, and the Freedom Riders resumed their journey under police escort on May 20. But the officers left the group once they reached Montgomery, where a white mob brutally attacked the bus. Attorney General Kennedy responded to the riders—and a call from Martin Luther King Jr.—by sending federal marshals to Montgomery.

On May 24, 1961, a group of Freedom Riders reached Jackson, Mississippi. Though met with hundreds of supporters, the group was arrested for trespassing in a “whites-only” facility and sentenced to 30 days in jail. Attorneys for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP ) brought the matter to the U.S. Supreme Court, which reversed the convictions. Hundreds of new Freedom Riders were drawn to the cause, and the rides continued.

In the fall of 1961, under pressure from the Kennedy administration, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued regulations prohibiting segregation in interstate transit terminals

March on Washington

Arguably one of the most famous events of the civil rights movement took place on August 28, 1963: the March on Washington . It was organized and attended by civil rights leaders such as A. Philip Randolph , Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King Jr.

More than 200,000 people of all races congregated in Washington, D. C. for the peaceful march with the main purpose of forcing civil rights legislation and establishing job equality for everyone. The highlight of the march was King’s speech in which he continually stated, “I have a dream…”

King’s “ I Have a Dream” speech galvanized the national civil rights movement and became a slogan for equality and freedom.

Civil Rights Act of 1964

President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 —legislation initiated by President John F. Kennedy before his assassination —into law on July 2 of that year.

King and other civil rights activists witnessed the signing. The law guaranteed equal employment for all, limited the use of voter literacy tests and allowed federal authorities to ensure public facilities were integrated.

Bloody Sunday

On March 7, 1965, the civil rights movement in Alabama took an especially violent turn as 600 peaceful demonstrators participated in the Selma to Montgomery march to protest the killing of Black civil rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson by a white police officer and to encourage legislation to enforce the 15th amendment.

As the protesters neared the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they were blocked by Alabama state and local police sent by Alabama Governor George C. Wallace, a vocal opponent of desegregation. Refusing to stand down, protesters moved forward and were viciously beaten and teargassed by police and dozens of protesters were hospitalized.

The entire incident was televised and became known as “ Bloody Sunday .” Some activists wanted to retaliate with violence, but King pushed for nonviolent protests and eventually gained federal protection for another march.

Voting Rights Act of 1965

When President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law on August 6, 1965, he took the Civil Rights Act of 1964 several steps further. The new law banned all voter literacy tests and provided federal examiners in certain voting jurisdictions.

It also allowed the attorney general to contest state and local poll taxes. As a result, poll taxes were later declared unconstitutional in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections in 1966.

Part of the Act was walked back decades later, in 2013, when a Supreme Court decision ruled that Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act was unconstitutional, holding that the constraints placed on certain states and federal review of states' voting procedures were outdated.

Civil Rights Leaders Assassinated

The civil rights movement had tragic consequences for two of its leaders in the late 1960s. On February 21, 1965, former Nation of Islam leader and Organization of Afro-American Unity founder Malcolm X was assassinated at a rally.

On April 4, 1968, civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on his hotel room's balcony. Emotionally-charged looting and riots followed, putting even more pressure on the Johnson administration to push through additional civil rights laws.

Fair Housing Act of 1968

The Fair Housing Act became law on April 11, 1968, just days after King’s assassination. It prevented housing discrimination based on race, sex, national origin and religion. It was also the last legislation enacted during the civil rights era.

The civil rights movement was an empowering yet precarious time for Black Americans. The efforts of civil rights activists and countless protesters of all races brought about legislation to end segregation, Black voter suppression and discriminatory employment and housing practices.

Six Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement

Though their stories are sometimes overlooked, these women were instrumental in the fight for equal rights for African‑Americans.

How the Black Power Movement Influenced the Civil Rights Movement

With a focus on racial pride and self‑determination, leaders of the Black Power movement argued that civil rights activism did not go far enough.

8 Key Laws That Advanced Civil Rights

Since the abolishment of slavery, the U.S. government has passed several laws to address discrimination and racism against African Americans.

A Brief History of Jim Crow. Constitutional Rights Foundation. Civil Rights Act of 1957. Civil Rights Digital Library. Document for June 25th: Executive Order 8802: Prohibition of Discrimination in the Defense Industry. National Archives. Greensboro Lunch Counter Sit-In. African American Odyssey. Little Rock School Desegregation (1957). The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute Stanford . Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Global Freedom Struggle. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute Stanford . Rosa Marie Parks Biography. Rosa and Raymond Parks. Selma, Alabama, (Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965). BlackPast.org. The Civil Rights Movement (1919-1960s). National Humanities Center. The Little Rock Nine. National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior: Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site. Turning Point: World War II. Virginia Historical Society.

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Collection Civil Rights History Project

Youth in the civil rights movement.

At its height in the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement drew children, teenagers, and young adults into a maelstrom of meetings, marches, violence, and in some cases, imprisonment. Why did so many young people decide to become activists for social justice? Joyce Ladner answers this question in her interview with the Civil Rights History Project, pointing to the strong support of her elders in shaping her future path: “The Movement was the most exciting thing that one could engage in. I often say that, in fact, I coined the term, the ‘Emmett Till generation.’ I said that there was no more exciting time to have been born at the time and the place and to the parents that movement, young movement, people were born to… I remember so clearly Uncle Archie who was in World War I, went to France, and he always told us, ‘Your generation is going to change things.’”

Several activists interviewed for the Civil Rights History Project were in elementary school when they joined the movement. Freeman Hrabowski was 12 years old when he was inspired to march in the Birmingham Children’s Crusade of 1963. While sitting in the back of church one Sunday, his ears perked up when he heard a man speak about a march for integrated schools. A math geek, Hrabowski was excited about the possibility of competing academically with white children. While spending many days in prison after he was arrested at the march, photographs of police and dogs attacking the children drew nationwide attention. Hrabowski remembers that at the prison, Dr. King told him and the other children, “What you do this day will have an impact on children yet unborn.” He continues, “I’ll never forget that. I didn’t even understand it, but I knew it was powerful, powerful, very powerful.” Hrabowski went on to become president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where he has made extraordinary strides to support African American students who pursue math and science degrees.

As a child, Marilyn Luper Hildreth attended many meetings of the NAACP Youth Council in Oklahoma City because her mother, the veteran activist Clara Luper, was the leader of this group. She remembers, “We were having an NAACP Youth Council meeting, and I was eight years old at that time. That’s how I can remember that I was not ten years old. And I – we were talking about our experiences and our negotiation – and I suggested, made a motion that we would go down to Katz Drug Store and just sit, just sit and sit until they served us.” This protest led to the desegregation of the drug store’s lunch counter in Oklahoma City. Mrs. Hildreth relates more stores about what it was like to grow up in a family that was constantly involved in the movement.

While some young people came into the movement by way of their parents’ activism and their explicit encouragement, others had to make an abrupt and hard break in order to do so, with some even severing familial ties. Joan Trumpauer Mulholland was a young white girl from Arlington, Virginia, when she came to realize the hypocrisy of her segregated church in which she learned songs such as “Jesus loves the little children, red and yellow, black and white.” When she left Duke University to join the movement, her mother, who had been raised in Georgia, “thought I had been sort of sucked up into a cult… it went against everything she had grown up and believed in. I can say that a little more generously now than I could have then.” Phil Hutchings’ father was a lifetime member of the NAACP, but couldn’t support his son when he moved toward radicalism and Black Power in the late 1960s. Hutchings reflects on the way their different approaches to the struggle divided the two men, a common generational divide for many families who lived through those times: “He just couldn’t go beyond a certain point. And we had gone beyond that… and the fact that his son was doing it… the first person in the family who had a chance to complete a college education. I dropped out of school for eleven years… He thought I was wasting my life. He said, ‘Are you … happy working for Mr. Castro?’”

Many college student activists sacrificed or postponed their formal education, but they were also picking up practical skills that would shape their later careers. Michael Thelwell remembers his time as a student activist with the Nonviolent Action Group, an organization never officially recognized by Howard University and a precursor to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC): “I don’t think any of us got to Howard with any extensive training in radical political activism. By that I mean, how do you write a press conference [release]? How you get the attention of the press? How do you conduct a nonviolent protest? How do you deal with the police? How do you negotiate or maneuver around the administration? We didn’t come with that experience.” Thelwell’s first job after he graduated from college was to work for SNCC in Washington, D.C., as a lobbyist.

Similar reflections about young people in the freedom struggle are available in other collections in the Library. One such compelling narrative can be found in the webcast of the 2009 Library of Congress lecture by journalist and movement activist, Tracy Sugarman, entitled, “We Had Sneakers, They Had Guns: The Kids Who Fought for Civil Rights in Mississippi.” As is readily apparent from that lecture and the previous examples, drawn from the Civil Rights History Project collection, the movement completely transformed the lives of young activists. Many of them went on to great success as lawyers, professors, politicians, and leaders of their own communities and other social justice movements. They joined the struggle to not only shape their own futures, but to also open the possibilities of a more just world for the generations that came behind them.

IMAGES

Civil Rights Movement Archive
Photo Essay
Photographing Civil Rights, Up North and Beyond Dixie
Civil Rights Photo Essay Project by Simply Learning and Design
Essay: The Civil Rights Act of 1964: Breaking Barriers and Advancing
Civil Rights

COMMENTS

Photo Essay
Photo by Warren K. Leffler. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. By the 1970s the nonviolent southern-led Civil Rights Movement had been superseded by the more militant Black Power Movement which was influenced by the experiences of young African Americans from the urban inner cities.
Photos From the Civil Rights Movement
Elizabeth Eckford Entering Central High School, Little Rock, Arkansas (1957-09-05) by Unknown Photographer High Museum of Art. One of the most iconic images of the civil rights era, this photograph shows 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford walking alone in front of Little Rock High School while being taunted by a menacing, hateful mob.
Civil Rights Photos: How a Picture Changed a Family's Life
A Fire That No Water Could Put Out: Civil Rights Photography runs through May 27, 2018. Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006), Outside Looking In, Mobile, Alabama, 1956, printed 2012, pigmented ...
Gordon Parks' 1950s Photo Essay On Civil Rights-Era America Is As
The essay chronicles the lesser-seen daily effects of racial discrimination, revealing how prejudice pervades even the most banal and personal of daily occurrences. Parks doesn't photograph protests, rallies, acts of violence or momentous milestones in civil rights history. No, he prefers the quieter moments in and around the home.
6 Gordon Parks Photos That Document the Civil Rights Era in America
Emerging Man was part of a larger photo essay for Life titled A Man Becomes Invisible. ... Parks documented the Civil Rights Movement through the 1950s and 1960s. One of the most pivotal years was 1963, and Parks captured countless images of protests happening in Harlem during this time. This image features a man holding a protest sign that ...
Gordon Parks's Alternative Civil Rights Photographs
Yet, as effectively as any civil rights photograph, the portrait was a forceful "weapon of choice," as Mr. Parks would say, in the struggle against racism and segregation. He took the picture on assignment for a September 1956 Life magazine photo-essay, "The Restraints: Open and Hidden ...
From segregation to Selma: View iconic photos from the Civil Rights
See images of segregation, protests, and voting rights from 1938 to 1964. A 1963 photo of a segregated bus is an example of a primary source that shows the history of racial discrimination in America.
Photographing Civil Rights, Up North and Beyond Dixie
The picture appears in a new book by the historian Mark Speltz, "North of Dixie: Civil Rights Photography Beyond the South" (J. Paul Getty Museum), which provides a more expansive view of the civil rights movement, both geographically and culturally. It is a much-welcome corrective to standard histories, as well as journalistic coverage at the time, which focused on Jim Crow segregation in ...
The Importance Of Photography In The Fight For Civil Rights
An exhibition titled "Gordon Parks: Higher Ground" will revisit eight of Parks' most influential Life photo essays, commemorating the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War. The images simultaneously ignited revolution and documented the process, capturing the immense power of photography as a dynamic weapon of change.
Powerful photos capture injustices of the civil rights era
Gordon Parks' cinematic photos captured the injustices of the civil rights era. Link Copied! He photographed fashion for Vogue, directed the 1971 blaxploitation film "Shaft," composed ...
Reliving The Civil Rights Movement, In 55 Powerful Photos
See 55 powerful images of the civil rights movement in America from 1954 to 1968. Explore the multifaceted struggles and achievements of African-Americans for equality in voting, education, employment, and more.
In Photos: The unfinished work of the Civil Rights Movement
Mary King and Alice Driver traveled to Mississippi in 2016 to interview former SNCC members about their work and challenges in the Civil Rights Movement. They met Mac Cotton, who was active in the movement and whose grandfather was murdered for teaching people to read.
Civil Rights, One Person and One Photo at a Time
This photograph, (Slide 6) which first appeared in a 1963 photo essay in Look magazine, is emotionally intimate and psychologically insightful, like many of the images in " Controversy and Hope: The Civil Rights Photographs of James Karales " (University of South Carolina Press). The book, by Julian Cox, provides a singular opportunity to ...
Photo Essay
Photo Essay - The 1963 March on Washington. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Organized by such leading lights of the American civil rights movement as Martin Luther King Jr., Bayard Rustin, and A. Philip Randolph, the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom drew some quarter of a million demonstrators to the nation's capital. ...
At the Black Lives Matter Protests in NYC: A Photo Essay
This web page is a photo essay of the Black Lives Matter protests in New York City after the killing of George Floyd by police. It does not show any image of George Floyd or blacks falling back in Ed, which is the query.
Civil Rights Timeline
In 1956, Life magazine published a photo essay titled "The Restraints: Open and Hidden" by Gordon Parks, the magazine's first African American staff photographer. The disturbing and poignant color photographs documented the reality of life under segregation in the Jim Crow South. ... Concurrently, he joined the civil rights movement early ...
Black Lives Matter: What Role Do Photographs Play?
AP Photo U.S. National Guard troops block off Beale Street as Civil Rights marchers wearing placards reading, "I AM A MAN" pass by on March 29, 1968. It was the third consecutive march held by the ...
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Rare and unpublished photographs of the civil rights movement from the Life Magazine archive. Martin Luther King 1929 - 1968. Photos: MLK at Home. Email.
Civil Rights Movement
Learn how artists and artwork played a role in the civil rights movement, from photographers like Danny Lyon and Benedict J. Fernandez to Dawoud Bey. Explore images, activities, and resources related to the struggle for freedom and equality.
Essay: The Civil Rights Movement
On August 28, 1963, the greatest event of the Civil Rights Movement occurred with the March on Washington. More than 250,000 blacks and whites, young and old, clergy and laity, descended upon the capital in support of the proposed civil rights bill. King offered high praise for the "architects of our republic" who wrote the "magnificent ...
Articles and Essays
Explore various topics and perspectives on the civil rights movement in the United States through articles and essays from the Library of Congress. Learn about the march on Washington, music, nonviolent philosophy, school integration, voting rights, women, and youth activism.
Civil Rights Movement: Timeline, Key Events & Leaders
The civil rights movement was a struggle for social justice that took place mainly during the 1950s and 1960s for Black Americans to gain equal rights under the law in the United States. Learn ...
Youth in the Civil Rights Movement
At its height in the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement drew children, teenagers, and young adults into a maelstrom of meetings, marches, violence, and in some cases, imprisonment. Why did so many young people decide to become activists for social justice? Joyce Ladner answers this question in her interview with the Civil Rights History Project, pointing to the strong support of her elders in ...

Photos From the Civil Rights Movement

Incredible, Innovative, and Unexpected Contemporay Furniture Designs

6 Gordon Parks Photos Documenting the Lives of Black Americans During the Civil Rights Era

Here are six iconic Gordon Parks photographs that capture African American lives during the 2oth century.

Red and Herbie Levi At the Funeral of Maurice Gaines , Harlem, New York, 1948⁠

Emerging Man , Harlem, New York, 1952⁠

Outside Looking In , Mobile, Alabama, 1956⁠

Untitled , New York, 1963

The Fontenelles at the Poverty Board , Harlem, New York, 1967⁠

All images via Gordon Parks Foundation.

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