http://www.palisadespost.com/lifestyles/content.php?id=5321
By Michael Aushenker
2009-11-25
The African-American fight for civil rights is one of the most
profound, turbulent and tragic chapters of 20th-century American
history. A new exhibit at the Skirball Cultural Center captures that
epic struggle.
'Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement,
1956'1968' is a story told via nearly 170 large, crisp gelatin silver
prints divided in chapters like a book, and its authors are some 35
photojournalists and movement members. They include Bob Adelman,
Morton Broffman, Bruce Davidson, Bill Eppridge, Larry Fink, James
Karales, Danny Lyon, Builder Levy and Steve Schapiro.
While some images on display have been published in periodicals,
others have never been publicly shown before, including an incredible
sequence of photos (taken on Mother's Day, 1961) depicting the
firebombing of a Greyhound bus of Freedom Riders taken from an
unusual perspective: a Klansman photographer.
'There are extraordinary narratives that surround each of these
individual images,' said curator Julian Cox at the Skirball last week.
Represented in 'Road' are such turning points in the civil rights
movement as the Montgomery bus boycott, the March on Washington, and
the Selma-to-Montgomery march, while the penultimate chapter brings
the struggle home with images culled from parts of Los Angeles:
Pasadena, Westwood, Valley College and downtown. The final wall
conveys the 1968 assassination of the movement's leader and its
aftermath. One of the compelling images is Adelman's 'Dr. Martin
Luther King, Lying in State, Atlanta, Georgia,' an open-casket
portrait of the slain Civil Rights leader.
Among the reasons that a Jewish-American museum has for running this
exhibit is the affinity Jews have always had with the
African-American struggle; the common fight against discrimination
and for social justice, and the fact that many participants in the
movement were Jewish, from the photographers on display here, to
young civil rights workers Michael Schwermer and Andrew Goodman, who
were murdered with an African-American, James Chaney, in Mississippi,
to Rabbi Abraham Herschel, who marched alongside Dr. King. One Jewish
student, Lyon, shot photos that were turned into posters for his
organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
One of the featured photographers, Dr. Doris Derby, 70, visited the
Skirball last week. She was an African-American student at Hunter
College in New York who had gone down to the South intending to stay
for only a year to teach literacy. She wound up living in Mississippi
for nine years, all the while snapping images for magazines and for
brochures for various pro-rights grassroots organizations. Derby
explained that Fannie Lou Hamer, the subject of a poignant portrait
by Schapiro, became an activist who galvanized other
African-Americans to vote after her daughter was refused medical
attention at an all-white hospital and died while en route to a
segregated one in Memphis.
'We were veterans, too,' Derby said, reflecting on a month during
which our nation's military is honored each year. 'We saw our friends
and many people we didn't know get beat up, tortured and killed.'
'Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement,
1956'1968' runs through March 7.
The Skirball Cultural Center is located off the 405 freeway at 2701
N. Sepulveda Blvd. Tickets: $10 general; $7 seniors and full-time
students; $5 children 2 to 12. Free to all on Thursdays. For more
information, visit www.Skirball.org or call 310-440-4500.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment