The Exhibition

This Light of Ours: Activist Photographers of the Civil Rights Movement is a paradigm-shifting exhibition that presents the Civil Rights Movement through the work and voices of nine activist photographers—men and women who chose to document the national struggle against segregation and other forms of race-based disenfranchisement from within the movement.

Unlike images produced by photojournalists, who covered breaking news events for major magazines and newspapers, these photographers lived within the movement—primarily within the SNCC framework—and documented its activities by focusing on the local people and student activists who together made it happen. Their photographs, combined with an exhibit narrative that provides context and chronology, will convey SNCC’s distinctive yet little known “bottom-up” community organizing strategy as well as its organizational development. As historian Charles Payne explains, understanding this strategy offers a “different sense” of the southern freedom struggle by providing “a greater emphasis on the long-term development of leadership in ordinary men and women.”

The core of the exhibition is a selection of 156 black-and white photographs, representing the combined work of photographers Bob Adelman, George Ballis, Bob Fitch, Bob Fletcher, Matt Herron, David Prince, Herbert Randall, Maria Varela, and Tamio Wakayama. The images are grouped around four major themes and are supported by didactic text, photo captions, and a selection of movement artifacts that together convey SNCC’s organizational development, impact on the national consciousness, and usage of images to present critical messages.

 In addition, photographers’ eye-witness accounts of life inside SNCC—their descriptions of how and why photographs were taken, what impact images had, and their personal revelations of the movement’s impact on their own lives—will be incorporated into audio guides prepared for adults and children. The audio guides will be presented, in large part, through the voices of the photographers, and will personalize the movement, allowing visitors to better understand how activists were affected by their contributions to a nonviolent quest for social justice that transformed American life.

A thirty-minute exhibit film, directed by award winning KUED-TV filmmaker Nancy Green, also is planned. The film is designed to explore, chronicle, and preserve the experiences of men and women from Utah who participated in the Civil Rights Movement. This film will complement a major PBS release that is commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides, and will be incorporated into the exhibit as a concluding presentation only at The Leonardo venue.

A central aim of this exhibition and its interpretive features is to expand and deepen public understanding of the Civil Rights Movement by presenting the actions and achievements of young organizers and “ordinary” people who emerged from the grassroots of local communities and fashioned a movement that changed the South and America. As movement historian Charles Payne eloquently observes: “Ordinary people who learn to believe in themselves are capable of extraordinary acts, or better, of acts that seem extraordinary to us precisely because we have such an impoverished sense of the capabilities of ordinary people.”

Symposium

A month-long symposium also is being explored with faculty from the University of Utah, Salt Lake Community College, Westminster College, and Utah Valley University for the fall of 2011. Through the symposium, we aim to provide public forums for a fuller discussion of the history, legacies, and lessons of SNCC, its role and influence in the social and political life of the 1960s and beyond, and the significance of recent movement scholarship on our teaching of the Civil Rights Movement.

Project Team

Matt Herron is the exhibition’s curator and one of its contributing photographers. In 1964, Matt, Jeannine, and their children became one of the families to move South and join the Civil Rights Movement. In 1964 Herron organized the Southern Documentary Project, which consisted of a team of photographers who sought to document social change during that tumultuous time. Currently, he manages TakeStock, a photography library specializing in civil rights and farm worker photography.

Charles E. Cobb Jr., SNCC veteran and award-winning journalist and author, is the exhibit’s historical consultant. He oversees preparation of the exhibit’s didactic text and the selection of original SNCC artifacts. His books include: On the Road to Freedom a Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Trail; No Easy Victories: African Liberation and American Activists over a Half-Century, 1950-2000; and Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project. He has been a staff writer for National Geographic magazine, a foreign affairs reporter for NPR, and a writer/ correspondent for the PBS program FRONTLINE.

Maria Varela is a consultant for the symposium and a contributing photographer. She was a SNCC staff member from 1963-1967. In 1990 Varela was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for collaboration with Mexican American and Native American artisans and livestock growers in the Southwest who preserved pastoral cultures through sustainable economic development strategies. In 1997-98 she became the Hulbert South-western Studies Endowed Chair at Colorado College, where she is a visiting professor.

Judy Richardson, media resource consultant, is a writer, teacher, lecturer, and award-winning filmmaker whose projects include: Eyes on the Prize (Co-Producer); Malcolm X: Make It Plain; and television documentaries on slave catchers, slave resistance, and African American historic sites. Richardson will work with all three venues to create Civil Rights Film festivals to complement the exhibition.

Antonia Bryan, audio guide producer, has produced hundreds of temporary exhibition and permanent collection tours for adults and children at institutions all over the country. She has worked on subjects from Tutankhamun to contemporary Islam, from Rembrandt to Pixar animation, American history to glassblowing, and Vermeer to Picasso. Among her clients are: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and Cleveland Museum of Art.

Norm Judd, exhibit designer, owns Dimensional Design and is design director for Insight Exhibits.　He has 33 years of experience in museum and commercial trade show design and construction projects including the CDA Salgado Exhibit in 2005, Clark Planetarium in 2003, LDS Church Visitor Center in 2001, Hill Air Force Base Museum Addition in 2005, and Salt Lake City Olympic Legacy Pavilion in 2007.　

Project Photographers

George “Elfie” Ballis (1925-2010) began as a labor reporter in Chicago and came to migrant photography via work as an editor for a California union newspaper. After working in the Southern Documentary Project in 1964, he moved back to California and photographed Cesar Chavez and the emerging United Farm Worker movement over the next seven years, amassing the largest body of still photographs on this subject, more than 30,000 images. He has shot and produced several documentary films including “I Am Juaquin,” a Chicano film-poem, and “the Dispossessed,” the struggle of Pit River Indians to regain tribal lands. In 1995, he produced “Dream What We Can Become and Rejoice,” a multi-media, multi-cultural, bi-lingual picture-poem.

Bob Fitch is an ordained minister who ventured South in 1965, at age 24, to join Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) as a staff photographer. His pictures appeared initially in the northern African-American press, which could not afford to send staff into the South. After photographing for SCLC, Fitch returned home to California and began to apply lessons learned in the South to the forces of social change rapidly coalescing along the West Coast. In the 1970s he devoted himself to documenting the actions of the United Farm Workers in northern California. He is still active photographing social justice activities.

Bob Fletcher was photographer and administrator for a tutorial program of the National Student Association in Detroit and later at the Harlem Education Project in New York. From 1964 to 1968, he was based in Mississippi as a photojournalist for SNCC and also taught in a Mississippi Freedom School. He has worked on two documentary films about African independence movements, A Luta Continua (“The Struggle Continues”) 1971, and O Povo Organizado (“The People Organized”) 1975. He currently practices law in New York City.

Matt Herron (see biographical summary above)

Dave Prince was active in the 1964 Southern Documentary Project. While most of his civil rights era photographs were lost, two sets of stunning vintage prints have recently been discovered. He is currently a documentary filmmaker.

Herbert Randall is of Shinnecock and African-American ancestry. He was a freelance photographer until 1964 when he went South during Freedom Summer to document SNCC activities in Hattiesburg, Mississippi in fulfillment of a Whitney Fellowship. He was awarded the Creative Artist’s Public Service Grant for Photography for 1971-72, and he later served as a photographic consultant to the National Media Center Foundation. He currently remains active in the Kamoinge Workshop, a forum for African-American photographers, in New York City, which he helped found.

Maria Varela (see biographical summary above)

Tamio Wakayama spent his early childhood in the Tashme internment camp in British Columbia. He studied journalism and philosophy at the University of Western Ontario. In 1963 he became a SNCC staff member and, later, a SNCC photographer. Upon his return to Toronto in 1966, he assembled Dream of Riches: The Japanese Canadians 1877-1977, a photographic reconstruction of the memory of the Nikkei community, which toured Canada and Japan. He is the author of six books, including A Dream of Riches and Inalienable Rice.

Consulting Scholars

Clayborne Carson is currently director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University and Martin Luther King, Jr. Distinguished Professor at Morehouse College in Atlanta. He has been a visiting professor or fellow at American University; the University of California, Berkeley; Emory University; and Harvard University. He has authored several seminal works on the Civil Rights Movement relating to Dr. King and to SNCC, particularly In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s published in 1981.

Emilye Crosby is a professor in the Department of History at State University of New York at Geneseo. She is the author of A Little Taste of Freedom: The Black Freedom Struggle in Claiborne County, Mississippi (2005) for which she was awarded Honorable Mention for the Liberty Legacy Foundation Award of the Organization of American Historians. She has edited two books forthcoming in 2010.

John Dittmer is Professor Emeritus of History at DePauw University, Greencastle, Indiana. His work presents one of the strongest voices on the theme of ordinary people in the movement. He is the author of Black Georgia in the Progressive Era, 1900-1920. His book Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi won several awards including the Bancroft Prize in American History and the 1995 Outstanding Book on the subject of human rights in North America given by the Gustavus Myers Center.

Wesley Hogan is Associate Professor of History at Virginia State University, where she was co-director of the Institute for the Study of Race Relations, 2006-2009. She is author of  Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC’s Dream for a New America (2007) and has written chapters for two books forthcoming in 2010 edited by Emilye Crosby (mentioned above).

Hasan K. Jeffries, Associate Professor in the Department of History at Ohio State University, is author of the newly released Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt. The book tells the story of the local people and SNCC organizers who ushered in the Black Power era by transforming rural Lowndes County, Alabama from a citadel of White supremacy into the center of southern Black militancy.

Charles M. Payne is the Frank P. Hixon Professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. He is the author of I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (1995) that has won awards from the Southern Regional Council, Choice Magazine, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in North America. He also is co-author of Debating the Civil Rights Movement (1999).