THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 2, 1997 TAG: 9701250533
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY BILL RUEHLMANN, BOOK COLUMNIST
LENGTH: 74 lines
New York photographer-writer Steven Kasher lectures today at 3 p.m. in Norfolk's The Chrysler Museum Theater on the American fight for civil rights.
This is an electric opportunity for every individual who would seek to understand the struggle for racial equality in our time.
It has been at once a terrible and an inspiring struggle, and it is far from finished. Racism is an insidious cancer still consuming not only the body politic but also the collective soul of the United States. Especially now, we need to acknowledge the troubled legacy of a past that enslaved some of us at the price of putting all of us in bondage afterward.
Kasher organized the traveling exhibition, ``Appeal to This Age: Photography of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968,'' which continues through March 2 in the Alice and Sol B. Frank Photography Gallery at The Chrysler.
The exhibition features the direct image of a black woman holding a small sign with the word ``JUSTICE'' emblazoned upon it. The photograph becomes even more eloquent when one learns the woman is picketing the courthouse at Monroe, N.C., on Aug. 26, 1961. In response to formal integration protests at the local swimming pool and elsewhere, the Monroe city council limited picketers to 10 at a time, marching single file 15 feet apart, carrying signs no larger than two feet across and containing no ``inflammatory language.''
The city council, of course, was white. So was the swimming pool. Today the spare abstraction ``JUSTICE'' held in this woman's hand must be inflammatory to anyone with a conscience.
Kasher produced an important book that expands on this exhibit: The Civil Rights Movement: A Photographic History, 1954-68 (Abbeville Press, 256 pp., $35).
The book becomes testimony for the extraordinary power of images in telling - and documenting - a story. Not all of these images are as reticent as the one of the woman with the sign. Some - of lynchings, assassinations and sanctioned brutality - will make the sensitive reader recoil. But they must be seen and remembered.
The Klan is here. The fire hoses and the attack dogs are here. The twisted faces of prejudice, the howling crowds closing in on frightened children who simply want to go to school, are here.
As Myrlie Evers-Williams - widow of martyred Medgar Evers and chairwoman of the NAACP - notes in her introduction, ``The stories and the photographs seen in this book testify to the shameful conditions endured by black Americans during a period when democracy was being promoted and fought for on the international front. Most blacks in America lived without even the limited liberties afforded citizens of third-world countries. The faces that stare at you from the pages that follow are marked with the determination of individuals who were prepared to die for their own right to be free.''
Some of them did die.
The photo of young demonstrator William Gadsden, set upon by K-9 units outside 16th St. Baptist Church in Birmingham, May 3, 1963, went all over the world. Congressman Peter Rodino was attending a conference in Geneva at the time. One of the delegates showed Rodino the image, captured on the front page of the European edition of The New York Times. ``Is this,'' he inquired, ``how you practice democracy?''
``And I,'' recalled Rodino, ``had no answer.''
We live in a country famous for exporting rights we long denied - and some still begrudge - many of our own.
But Kashner's exhibit and book do more than reproach. They also hearten. Included are the faces of protest, resistance and legislative triumph, and they are not all black.
The picture I carry away from Kashner's moving display shows thousands of men and women, black and white, gathered together at the Washington Monument in the March for Jobs and Freedom, Aug. 28, 1963.
Brothers and sisters, the preserved image of that generation offers hope to this one and the next:
We can do a lot better than just get along. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann mass communication professor at Virginia
Wesleyan College.