The Civil Rights Movement: A Photographic History, 1954-68 [Paperback]

The first book to tell the story of the civil rights movement through the rousing and often wrenching photographs that recorded, promoted, and protected it.

With a striking selection of images and a lively, informative text, Steven Kasher captures the danger, drama, and bravery of the civil rights movement. After an introduction explaining the significance of photography to the movement, the text in this important book proceeds from the Montgomery bus boycott through the student, local and national movements; the big marches; Freedom summer; Malcolm X; and the death of Martin Luther King.

Each chapter begins with a fast-paced narrative of a crucial event in the movement, complemented by a portfolio of the most effective and evocative photographs of the subject. Ranging from the well known to the rare, these images were shot by such photographers as Richard Avedon, Danny Lyon, Charles Moore, Gordon Parks, Dan Weiner, and more than 50 others. Many of the pictures are accompanied by thought-provoking remembrances and analysis by various photographers and participants.

Excerpt from:The Civil Rights Movement

Foreword

My husband lay dying in a pool of blood on the doorstep of our home in Jackson, Mississippi. His body had been toppled by a cowardly assassin's bullet and left for the world—and his children—to see. I can still see Medgars' handsome features distorted in excruciating pain as he succumbed to death's premature call. It is this distinct memory of his final hours during that June day in 1963 that has haunted me as I have looked back over this book's often scathing yet also inspiring images.

I don't remember the details of his funeral. That widely publicized photo of a tearstained young woman mourning the death of her first love could not have been me. I was too inexperienced to have been a widow. And my husband was too peace-loving to have been a casualty of war.

Just days blæ