Slide Show

Photographing Civil Rights, Up North and Beyond Dixie

Credit Cox Studio, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Slide Show

Photographing Civil Rights, Up North and Beyond Dixie

Credit Cox Studio, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Photographing Civil Rights, Up North and Beyond Dixie

An elegantly dressed African-American woman kneels in the middle of a road, her knees protected by a sheet of cardboard. She is blocking dump trucks, an act of civil disobedience to protest unfair hiring practices at a hospital construction site.

The 1963 image by Bob Adelman appears to be a typical civil rights photograph. But it is not. The solitary woman’s act of defiance was far from the Deep South: It took place at Brooklyn’s Downstate Medical Center.

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A woman blocking dump trucks, slowing construction through civil disobedience as part of a protracted battle against unfair hiring practices at the Downstate Medical Center. Brooklyn. 1963. Credit Bob Adelman

The picture appears in a new book by the historian Mark Speltz, “North of Dixie: Civil Rights Photography Beyond the South” (J. Paul Getty Museum), which provides a more expansive view of the civil rights movement, both geographically and culturally. It is a much-welcome corrective to standard histories, as well as journalistic coverage at the time, which focused on Jim Crow segregation in the South, especially as captured in some historic, disturbing and indelible images of the day.

The most widely published and acclaimed photographs of the period typically documented extreme incidents of violence, murder and civil disobedience in the South, events that spurred such reforms as the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education or the passage of the Civil Rights Act a decade later. Ultimately, this narrative concentrated on harsh oppression, black and white resistance, and political triumph.

But the story of racism and its confrontation was more complex. The discrimination African-Americans experienced — especially outside of the South in supposedly more liberal Northern climes — was sometimes de facto or indirect. During the civil rights movement, some photographs helped make visible that which many Americans refused to see or acknowledge, allowing individuals and groups to demonstrate the pervasiveness of racial prejudice as well as combat stereotypes and shape their public image.

“A small, frequently reproduced selection of the era’s most vivid photographs has since become iconic and is considered by many to represent the entire movement. These widely recognized images from the South tell a powerful and compelling story, but … it isn’t the whole story,” Mr. Speltz wrote. “… Cast by the media at the time as sporadic and less significant than the heroic, nonviolent protests in the South, the local activism that took place in the North, West and Midwest is all but absent in the way we characterize, teach, and remember the civil rights era.”

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Protesters demonstrating against racial discrimination at the White City Roller Rink, 63rd and South Parkway (later King Drive). Chicago. 1946.Credit Goldman and Parrish, via Chicago History Museum

The book surveys a range of photographers, including Ruth-Marion Baruch, Don Hogan Charles, Diana Davies, Jack Delano, Leonard Freed and Charles (Teenie) Harris, among others, whose images remind us that the struggle took place not just in Selma, Birmingham and Little Rock, but in cities and towns across the United States.

Although black Americans sought safer and freer lives as they moved northward and westward during the Great Migration between 1910 and the end of the 1970s, they were followed by the prejudice they fled. Mr. Speltz documents the reality: covenants that prevented the sale, lease or rental of houses to black people; African-American communities bulldozed and replaced by highways and urban renewal projects; segregated and inferior schools and public accommodations, from swimming pools to restaurants; widespread employment discrimination; and police brutality, surveillance and unrest.

The photographs in “North of Dixie” portray a range of activities and places: a demonstration in front of the segregated White City Roller Rink in Chicago; a boy with his hands in the air as National Guard troops in Newark march behind him; a portrait of the African-American actress Fredi Washington wearing an anti-lynching armband; a boy trying on a coat at the Black Panthers’ free clothing program in Toledo, Ohio; a black family admiring a house in a whites-only neighborhood in Philadelphia; jeering counter-protesters in Chicago waving a Confederate flag; and activists waging a sit-in and hunger strike outside the Los Angeles Board of Education.

These photographs did more than dispute the idea of racism and segregation as a singularly Southern problem. They also disrupted the self-image of white Northerners as racially benevolent, in contrast to the ferocious bigotry of their Southern counterparts that was depicted in the news media.

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The Non-Violent Action Committee conducting a shop-in at a grocery store to protest hiring discrimination at Van de Kamp’s Holland Dutch Bakeries. Los Angeles. Circa 1964. Credit Bruce Hartford

During the period of the civil rights movement, mainstream newspapers and magazines — which earlier, in contrast with the African-American press, had rarely covered issues of racism, segregation and black activism — usually depicted these problems through a Southern lens, relying on sensationalist images of violence and murder to arouse the interest of readers. “Historical photographs of northern struggles remain less familiar today for a variety of reasons, but primarily because the uncomfortable truths they contain complicate a celebratory civil rights narrative,” Mr. Speltz wrote.

In the book’s epilogue, Mr. Speltz recognizes that the struggle continues, and with it greater recognition of the geographical breadth of the problem. During a time when some question the legitimacy of the nation’s first black president and African-Americans protest police shootings from Baltimore to Ferguson, Mo., and New York to Tulsa, Okla., the camera remains a reliable and powerful force.

“These resonant pictures and their recurring themes should remind us that racism and concerted efforts to roll back hard-won civil rights gains persists,” Mr. Speltz wrote about the photographs in “North of Dixie.” “The ongoing and constantly evolving struggle against police brutality and militarism, entrenched poverty, institutionalized racism, and everyday microaggressions suggests that photographs will continue to play a crucial role in documenting the struggle and advancing the much needed dialogue around it.”


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.

Follow @MauriceBerger and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook and Instagram.

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