This is a printer-friendly version of an article from Zip06.com.

The Force of People Working Together for Change

When La Tanya S. Autry started her work as curator of a new photography exhibit on display at the Yale University Art Gallery called Let Us March On, it was a welcome break from her traditional area of study, lynching photography.

“I was studying lynching photography…and I loved the work and felt it was important, but I wanted to do more than this one field, which was narrow and intense,” says Autry, a Ph.D candidate at the University of Delaware studying art history with a focus on American art and photography. “I felt it would be good to break out a bit and work on something that was similar, but with differences.”

The Let Us March On: Lee Friedlander and the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom exhibit, on display through July 9, focuses on the work of Lee Friedlander during the Pilgrimage for Freedom, and is characterized in the exhibit program as “a critical yet generally neglected moment in American civil rights history.

“On May 17, 1957—the third anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, which outlawed segregation in public schools—thousands of activists, including many leaders from religious, social, educational, labor, and political spheres, united in front of the Lincoln Memorial, in Washington, D.C.” the program says. “At this first large-scale gathering of African Americans on the National Mall, an event that was a forerunner of the 1963 March on Washington at which Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his famed ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, protesters called on federal authorities to enforce desegregation, support voting rights, and combat racial violence.”

The photographs were taken by Friedlander when he was just 22 years old. Some of them focus on the famous people at the march, including King, Ella Baker, Harry Belafonte, Mahalia Jackson, and Rosa Parks. Most of the photos focus on people in the crowd.

Autry says the photos and related materials from the march were eventually gathered in a book, titled Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, and published in 2015. The title of the exhibit, Let us March On, is taken from a song that is one of the authorized hymns in the Episcopal hymnal, one that is often characterized as the Black National Anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” The lyrics include these lines:

“Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,

Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us,

Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,

Let us march on till victory is won”

In her examination of the photos and related archival materials, Autry says she was struck by the fact that many of the issues central to the march in 1957 are still relevant today.

“Enforcing desegregation in public schools, supporting voting rights for African Americans, combating the surge of racial violence—these are still relevant today,” she says. “That’s what really got to me. I read the speech that King gave, ‘Give Us the Ballot,’ and I thought, these are still problems today. It’s just so clear when you read the speech. It’s just sad. Some schools are more segregated than they were in the 1950s. Voting rights? There is still a ton of suppression. Racial violence? There has been waves of that, in the news and with people taking cell phone images being shared more on social media.”

Friedlander’s practice of wading into the crowd and focusing on individual people gives the viewer a glimpse of what it might have been like to take part in such an event, at that time in history, Autry says. The artist’s term is “working on the edge,” and that refers to the practice of working within the crowd of people, rather than just taking pictures showing them as a monolithic group.

“The way Lee takes photographs honors them as activists, people who had to give up a day of work to attend,” Autry says. “It was a big deal to show up back them. They country was very segregated. There were very few places for people to stay. It wasn’t like they could stay in just any hotel.”

On buses, on trains, in hotels, in restaurants, and in other public spaces, Jim Crow laws and practices were in force until they were officially overruled by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Autry says she is struck by the “Sunday best” dress of the people who attended the march.

“They are dressed, and dressed well,” Autry says. “This was such an important moment, they wanted to be dressed in their best clothes. It’s May. It’s hot. It’s humid. And there are women with fur stoles on. They were trying to show they were respectable people.”

Organizers wanted the event to portray a decorous environment, Autry says. Participants were asked to wave white handkerchiefs rather than clap.

“It’s like a church gesture, praising the speaker, when you’re in agreement, you wave something,” she says. “This really in many ways was like a church service for them. Martin Luther King, Jr., was there, along with other religious leaders. And if you look at the program, there were a lot of scriptures and hymns and prayer readers. It was like a religious event.”

The exhibit also focuses on Friedlander’s interest in “visual complexities” and “figural subjects,” along with “playful juxtapositions, emphasis on line and space, and careful attention to dynamic alignment of form,” the exhibit brochure says.

Autry says some of the photos are more like art photos than straight journalism.

“He’s really looking for the interesting angle, a repetition of shapes, and that odd moment that is very telling,” she says.

Perhaps in part because of that, or because some publishers did not see this as a worthy subject, Friedlander for decades had a hard time getting the photos published, Autry says.

“He tried to share these photographs, but couldn’t get anyone to publish them,” she says. “It was hard for him to get anyone in the white mainstream press to empathize with these images.”

Autry says with Friedlander’s photographs, “there’s the problem of the rejection of the photographs by the mainstream press. No one really engaged with them much until the artist collaborated with Eakins Press decades later to produce his lovely 2015 book Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom...In this case, the omission, or rather rejection of the photographs, disempowers this moment of racial justice.”

The subject of the circulation of photography was one that she examined with working on the lynching photography, Autry says, adding that the circulation of photography and the construction of photographic archives as forms of shaping public memory of the civil rights movement is the connection for her between her earlier work on the lynching photographs and her work on this exhibit. In other words, the context of the photos can shift according to who owns them and who shows them, and why they show them.

“The distribution patterns of lynching photography have intrigued me,” she says. “I’m concerned about what it means to own these photographs and how the meaning changes based on who owns them and how and where they are used. I considered how they operated as forms of disempowerment in one context, but also forms of empowerment for African-American anti-lynching activists.

“I also think that the insertion of the series [of Friedlander photos] now serves as a form of empowerment for activists and all who strive for social justice. The circulation of the series of photographs legitimizes the hard work many people did prior to the 1960s.”

Autry says she was signed up to participate in the March on Washington on Saturday, Jan. 21, but then had second thoughts and wondered if it would be too much trouble to travel all the way to Washington from Connecticut.

And then she thought of the people in Friedlander’s photographs, some of them losing a day of work, traveling on trains and buses that made them sit in specific areas due to the color of their skin, and the trouble they might have had finding a place to stay.

“These people experienced a lot more inconveniences than I will. They had to go through the Jim Crow,” she says. “I have the ability to take a bus and not worry about a thing. I have to get over myself. I am going to have that experience to be with that group of people and see how that galvanizes us.”

Autry says her hope is that the exhibit reminds people of “the force of people working together for change.”