If a photograph tells a 1,000 words, millions are told about the civil rights movement in the new exhibit at the Mississippi Museum of Art in downtown Jackson, “This Light of Ours.”
Unlike the photojournalists who worked for the press, these photographers worked in the movement, belonging to the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) or the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
Their pictures reflect that intimacy. There’s Martin Luther King chuckling with others in the 1966 Meredith March. There’s Stokely Carmichael, firing up the crowd in Greenwood with the words “Black Power,” a phrase that would soon sweep the nation. There’s King with Andy Young and Lawrence Guyot sitting in a living room in Canton, Miss., the mood obviously pensive.
Some photographs are iconic, such as those of the Selma march and of Victoria Gray’s beaming smile as she carries a banner championing the vote. She helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, bringing the nation’s attention to African Americans being barred from voting.
Some photographs shed a new light on history. Photographs show activists attending a 1964 memorial service of James Chaney on the ashes of what had been the Mt. Zion Methodist Church.
Chaney and fellow civil rights workers, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, had been investigating the Ku Klux Klan’s burning of that church when Neshoba County Deputy Cecil Price arrested the trio and jailed them for “speeding.”
That night of June 21, 1964, he released them into the darkness and the hands of waiting Klansmen, who shot them.
Forty-four days later, FBI agents uncovered the bodies, buried 15 feet beneath an earthen dam.
While Bob Moses and other activists spoke at the memorial, a photograph shows Price watching the memorial the whole time.
In 1967, a federal jury convicted Price and six others, but it wasn’t until 2005 that the state ever tried anyone for murder. Edgar Ray Killen continues to serve 60 years in prison.
In addition to the photographs, the museum is also featuring The Slaves Series Quilts by Gwendolyn A. Magee.
Both can be seen through Aug. 17.
The good news is all these photographs are now available in “This Light of Ours,” a new book published by the University Press of Mississippi. They serve as a reminder that ordinary people dedicated to an important cause can make an extraordinary difference.