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.
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