The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders relied on the power of photographs to persuade and to motivate. For many white Americans outside the South, it was easy to be unaware — or ignore outright — the segregation of the Jim Crow era.
But images of the everyday inequalities as well as the barbaric violence inflicted against children and peaceful protesters forced all Americans to notice, and to choose sides.
“The world seldom believes the horror stories of history until they are documented via the mass media,” Dr. King wrote in a letter to the novelist Harold Courlander in 1961.
Leaders like Sojourner Truth and Malcolm X embraced the photograph’s potential as evidence and its ability to combat stereotypes. The camera was the “weapon of choice” for Gordon Parks, the first African-American staff photographer for Life magazine. Maurice Berger writes our Race Stories series for the Lens blog and often looks at the effects of photography on the lives of African-Americans and how they are represented in visual news media. For Dr. King’s birthday, we went into our archives and selected eight of his previous “Race Stories” to share with you.
1. Civil Rights, One Person and One Photo at a Time
In the midst of the national struggle for civil rights, James Karales, born into an immigrant Greek family in Ohio, turned his camera on the individuals fighting for rights and respect. See more.
2. A Radically Prosaic Approach to Civil Rights Images
Gordon Parks’s photographs of blacks in the South at the height of the Jim Crow era showed African-Americans living “in a complete universe.” Many, however, were unpublished or unseen for over 50 years. See more.
3. Making A Confederate Flag Invisible
Removing the Confederate flag from the public square is but a first step toward deeper reflection on race. See more.
4. A Momentous Day Driven by Ordinary People
The photography of Leonard Freed, whose images explored the March on Washington at ground level, still resonates 50 years after that historic day. See more.
5. In Ferguson, Photographs as Powerful Agents
The history of black representation has resonated with the types of images now prevalent in social media. Whether in 1950s Mississippi or Ferguson today, the camera has served as witness, provocateur and agent of change. See more.
6. When Glamour Speaks Your Name
A new book looks at the history of how black women used style and substance to counter stereotypes — or invisibility — in the mainstream. See more.
7. Re-imagining A Tragedy, 50 Years Later
Dawoud Bey explores the relationship of past to present with diptychs of people the same age as the victims of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing — both at the time of the bombings and in the present day. See more.
8. Kamoinge’s Half-Century of African-American Photography
A new book takes a look at the collective’s groundbreaking work in “speaking of our lives as only we can.” See more.
Maurice Berger is a research professor and the chief curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and a consulting curator at the Jewish Museum in New York.
Follow @MauriceBerger and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.
