'I AM a MAN!' New Black Archives photo exhibit stares civil rights movement straight in the eyes
Civil rights attorney Basil L. North Jr. speaks at the ribbon cutting Nov. 17 for the I AM a MAN! photo exhibit at the Black Archives of Mid-America. The free exhibit runs through Jan. 7
The eyes catch you: A young woman in a line of women, defiantly sitting-in at a Woolworth’s diner counter in Greensboro, N.C., looks into a photographer’s black-and-white lens 62 years ago.
A young boy, crouching with a line of Ku Klux Klan demonstrators, looks into the camera’s eyes in Salisbury, N.C., 58 years ago.
A mother, surrounded by her children on hard benches under the steepled roof of a plywood shack during the Poor People’s Campaign at the U.S. Capital, catches the photographer’s eyes with a nursing baby in her arms, 54 years ago.
The line of men, hundreds of them, that same year, grimly eye the camera from the front of a Memphis, Tenn., solidarity march of striking sanitation workers, every one wearing a sign board that says I AM a MAN!
They never age. The images, freshly hung on the walls of Kansas City’s Black Archives of Mid-America, 1722 E 17th Terrace, mean to make real the sacrifices of the 1960s to a new generation that still struggles with civil rights.
“We have marched,” Kansas City civil rights attorney Basil L. North Jr. said at the exhibit’s ribbon cutting. “We have cried. We have prayed. And we have died, to achieve the rights to which we all know we are very much entitled.”
The collection of pictures, North said, “will do a great part in presenting that story to young people who don’t know anything about this story as many of us here do.”
The exhibit, brought to Kansas City by the Black Archives with the collaboration of the Mid-America Arts Alliance and an anonymous donor, takes its title from the signboards of many of the marchers:
I AM a MAN!
The pictures, all capturing turmoil of the 1960s, represent “the modern civil rights movement,” Black Archives of Mid-America Executive Director Carmaletta Williams said at the ribbon cutting. “Because ever since Black folks touched foot on diasporic soil, we have been striving for civil rights.”
Foremost, the exhibit honors the men and women at the front of the struggle, and it honors the photographers who captured their images for history.
The sit-ins in Greensboro. The family in a southern tent city, evicted for trying to vote. National guardsmen poised with rifles, protecting a bus of Freedom Riders in Montgomery, Ala. The stark image of an effigy of James Meredith, the first black student admitted to the University of Mississippi, hanged with a confederate flag in Oxford, Miss.
The exhibit shows the Rev. Hosea Williams, John Lewis and others face-to-face with the Alabama state troopers blocking their path from Selma to Birmingham in Alabama.
You see the grueling close-up photo of the blistered feet of a marcher at rest during that 54-mile trek.
An 105-year-old woman in Greenville, N.C., a former slave, registers to vote in 1965.
And so many more.
“We have to write our own histories,” Williams said. “We cannot let other people tell our stories . . . This is our story.”
The exhibit is free and continues through Jan. 7.
By Joe Robertson/LINC Writer