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

Christian Century, Feb 5, 1997 by Betty Thompson

By Steven Kasher. Abbeville, 256 pp., $35.00

REYNOLDS PRICE recently termed the legacy of slavery the central theme of American life. "An entire people from a vast continent had been, by the millions, abducted, molested, raped in every conceivable posture and forced to tend the fruit of those unions or watch them sold into still crueler hands, worked under torture, then freed in cataclysmic war to live abandoned in fact, abandoned by master and righteous liberator through all the years since." Price also referred to "the great earth movement of freedom" which has lifted millions in the past 30 years, and to the hundreds of thousands yet "unmoved, unreached."

Two illustrated books remind us of that ugly past and the struggle to wrest justice and freedom from a reluctant majority. Brenda Wilkinson's book starts with 1691 when the first slaves were brought to Virginia. Nearly half of its pages tell the story up to the mid-20th century. Cartoons, paintings and photographs are included--the majority of them from the Bettman Archives.

Wilkinson's book is especially valuable for its history of the years before the current civil rights struggle. This book could well be a high school or college text. In a foreword and an afterword the author describes her own experiences. She was born in Moultrie, Georgia, the first baby of the year in 1946--but she didn't receive the traditional shower of gifts. The white merchants waited until a white child came along.

Steven Kasher's collection relies on the work of fine photo journalists like Danny Lyon, Gordon Parks, Kenneth Thompson, Elliott Erwitt, Richard Avedon and W. Eugene Smith. It will be cherished by those who love "concerned" photography. The volume is based on the exhibition Kasher developed, "Appeal to This Age: Photography of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-68."

The photos are carefully chosen for composition and impact and more handsomely printed than Wilkinson's, but Wilkinson's themes are more varied and her book ranges further.

Candidates in the recent presidential election ignored race, though tile culture wars that often mask the debate were evident. At the end of the 20th century there is a massive denial that racism persists.

Wilkinson and Kashers histories remind US of both how far we have come and how much still needs to he done. Their record of hope and courage is a good accompaniment to Andrew Young's recent record of the movement in An Easy Burden. These books show what can happen when public revulsion says "no more."

Reviewed by Betty Thompson, public relations director of the United Methodist Board of Global Ministries in New York City.