Freedom Now! Forgotten Photographs of the Civil Rights Struggle

Relying exclusively on works available to the mainstream press, including the archives of the Associated Press and Time/Life Pictures, UC-Santa Cruz art historian Berger (Seeing Through Race) explores “how and why particular people, events, and issues have been edited out of the photographic story we tell about our past.” After revisiting the canonical photographs (for example, firemen hosing demonstrators in Birmingham) and a sampling of familiar 19th-century photographs, the second half of this groundbreaking book brings the forgotten to the foreground, with images organized thematically: “Strength,” “Women,” “Children and Youths,” “Joy.” For example, the famous photograph of Elizabeth Eckford in Little Rock, Ark., tells one heroic story, while the photo of an unidentified student surrounded by empty chairs in Clinton, Tenn., tells another—the latter more typical of the “lonely, daily struggles black students faced… away from the street battles and court clashes that so animated accounts in the white press.” While the images are remarkable and all meaningfully annotated, Berger’s content is what makes this an important book: a cautionary tale for those for whom the “civil rights story is overwhelmingly one of well-behaved black protestors victimized by racist and violent whites,” a thought-provoking assay about the role media played in the gap between white assumptions about, and black experiences of, the movement, and an admonition for historians. (Jan.)