THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT 
              Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Wednesday, January 29, 1997           TAG: 9701290006
SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A12  EDITION: FINAL 
TYPE: Editorial 
                                            LENGTH:   30 lines

CHRYSLER EXHIBIT RECALLS CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT IMAGES WERE ALLIES

Photographic images were powerful allies of Southern blacks who took to the streets in the late 1950s to demand entry into mainstream America. ``The Civil Rights Movement: A Photographic History,'' a dramatic exhibition that will linger at the Chrysler Museum of Art until April, contains 75 memorable images of the civil-rights struggle in the '50s and '60s.

The photographs were made in the period that began with the U.S. Supreme Court's May 17, 1954, Brown vs. Board of Education decision, which outlawed racially segregated public schools and ended with the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the leader of peaceful protests against governmental and institutional policies that denied black Americans justice before the law and equal opportunity in the workplace and elsewhere. TV, newspapers and magazine thrust the Civil Rights Revolution into her home.

Hundreds of adults and schoolchildren have seen the exhibition since it opened in mid-January. Hundreds more will see it before it closes. For the the children, the civil rights movement is something - like the American Revolution - - that they learn about in the classroom. For millions of their millions of their parents and grandparents, however, the movement is history that they helped make, and so it is part of their own personal histories. To these elders, the movement is not far-distant history; they remember it as if it were only yesterday.