This Light of Ours: Activist Photographers of the Civil Rights Movement
The Exhibit
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 eight men and one woman who chose to document the national struggle against segregation and other forms of race-based disenfranchisement from within the movement. Unlike images produced by photo-journalists, who covered breaking news events, these photographers worked primarily within the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) framework and documented its activities by focusing on the local people and student activists who together made it happen.
The core of the exhibition is a selection of 157 black-and-white photographs representing the work of Bob Adelman, George Ballis, Bob Fitch, Bob Fletcher, Matt Herron, David Prince, Herbert Randall, Maria Varela, and Tamio Wakayama. Images are grouped around four movement themes and convey black life in the Deep South as well as SNCC’s voting rights activities, resolve in the face of violence, and impact on the nation’s cultural and political consciousness.
Additionally, photographers’ eye-witness accounts of life in the movement—their descriptions of how and why photographs were taken, what impact images had, and their revelations of the movement’s impact on their own lives—are incorporated into audio guides prepared for adults and children (8-12). These guides are presented through the actual voices of the photographers and personalize the movement, allowing exhibit visitors to understand how activists were affected by participation in a quest for social justice that transformed American life.
A central aim of This Light of Ours is to expand public understanding of the Civil Rights Movement by presenting the actions 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 sociologist Charles Payne observed: “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.”
Project Team
Matt Herron
Matt Herron is the exhibition’s curator and one of its contributing photographers. In 1964, Matt, Jeannine (his wife), and their two children became one of the few families to move south and join the Civil Rights Movement. In 1964 Herron organized the Southern Documentary Project, which consisted of seven photographers who sought to document social change during that tumultuous time period. Currently, he manages Take Stock, a photography library specializing in civil rights and farm worker photography.
Charles E. Cobb Jr.
Charles E. Cobb Jr., SNCC veteran and award-winning journalist and author, is the exhibit’s historical consultant. He prepared the exhibit’s didactic text and photo captions. 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 (National Public Radio), and a writer/ correspondent for the PBS program FRONTLINE.
Maria Varela
Maria Varela is an exhibit consultant 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 Southwestern Studies Endowed Chair at Colorado College, where she is a visiting professor.
Left-to-right: Kent Miles, CDEA exhibits coordinator (with hat); Leslie Kelen, CDEA executive director; and Norm Judd, exhibit designer, discuss exhibit presentation possibilities.
Judy Richardson
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 is available to consult with future venues to create Civil Rights Film festivals to complement the exhibition.
Antonia Bryan
Antonia Bryan, exhibit 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 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
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 CDEA Salgado Exhibit in 2005, Clark Planetarium in 2003, LDS Church Visitor Center in 2001, and the SLC Olympic Legacy Pavilion in 2007.
Gil Schaefer
Gil Schaefer, exhibit graphic designer, is the founder and director of Schaefer Design, a graphic design company established in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1996. Schaefer has more than twenty years of experience carrying out custom and environmental graphic design projects. He created the visual design of This Light of Ours, which included the layout of the didactic text and all exhibit brochures. Schaefer also was the graphic designer for CDEA’s 2005 Salgado exhibit.
Exhibit Photographers
Bob Adelman initially photographed the efforts of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to desegregate restaurants and bus terminals on Route 40, between New York and Washington, DC. He later went to Birmingham, where the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, headed by Dr. Martin Luther King, was carrying out “Project C,” and took some of his best movement images. Adelman’s movement photos caught the attention of magazine editors and brought him national and international assignments and, later, acclaim. In 2007, Life published Mine Eyes Have Seen, Adelman’s retrospective on the Civil Rights Movement in its Great Photographers Series.
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, he amassed the largest body of still photographs on this subject, more than 30,000 images. He also 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 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 photographer 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 and Florida.
Matt Herron is the exhibition’s curator and one of its contributing photographers. In 1964, Matt, Jeannine (his wife), and their two children became one of the few families to move south and join the Civil Rights Movement. In 1964 Herron organized the Southern Documentary Project, which consisted of seven photographers who sought to document social change during that tumultuous time period. Currently, he manages Take Stock, a photography library specializing in civil rights and farm worker photography.
Dave Prince was the only full-time college student employed as a photographer in the summer-long Southern Documentary Project. After the summer, he returned to Athens, Ohio, and graduated from Ohio University. He later gave up photography and became a documentary filmmaker. “I made several strong films for PBS,” he explained, “and then got enticed back to Ohio University, where I was hired as one of their professors and taught film for 30 years.”
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 is currently active in the Kamoinge Workshop, a forum for African-American photographers based in New York City, which he helped found.
Maria Varela is an exhibit consultant 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 Southwestern Studies Endowed Chair at Colorado College, where she is a visiting professor.
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 assembledDream of Riches: The Japanese Canadians 1877-1977, an exhibit presenting the 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.
Comments Book Highlights
The deeply moving visitor comments that follow were taken from the October 2011-June 2012 debut of “This Light of Ours: Activist Photographers Of The Civil Rights Movement” at The Leonardo, in Salt Lake City.
Curriculum Guide
Gallery
“This Light of Ours” is in-the-process of being installed at The Skirball Museum in Los Angeles. The display was at The Skirball from October 19, 2013 – February 25, 2024.
