University Place

Civil Rights Photography Beyond the South

[Katie Schumacher, Wisconsin Historical Society]

Today we are pleased to introduced Mark Speltz as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum’s History Sandwiched In lecture series. The opinions expressed today are those of the presenters and are not necessarily those of the Wisconsin Historical Society, or the museum’s employees.

Mark Speltz is an author and public historian who researches and writes about civil rights era photography, Wisconsin culture, architecture, and history. He is the coauthor of the award-winning “Bottoms Up: A Toast to Wisconsin’s Historic Bars and Breweries, and “Fill ‘er Up: The Glory Days of Wisconsin Gas Stations,” both published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press.

His third book – book, “North of Dixie: Civil Rights Photography Beyond the South,” was published by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in November 2016. He currently lives in Madison where he is a Senior Historian at American Girl. So, please, join me in welcoming Mark Speltz.

[applause]

[Mark Speltz, Author and Historian]

Thank you, Katie.

Thank you, Katie, for that introduction, and thank you to the Wisconsin Historical Society and the Museum on the Square for making this venue available and welcoming me here. It’s great to be here.

I’m also grateful to Wisconsin Public Television for making this talk available to its viewers, both online and on television.

It’s really, really great to be here. When you work for something, work on a project for a decade, you can’t wait to tell people about it. And I’m got to tell you all about it, but I’m not got to read from the book. I’m not got to show you every single picture.

I want to pique your interest.

I want you to go to your public library and say, “Will you, please, buy this book?” Look for it at bookstores, tell your friends about it, but most importantly I want you to learn something today about civil rights photography that will maybe change the way you think about photography both then and now.

So, I’m got to share some of my favorite photographs –

[slide of Welcome featuring a photo of a protest at a Columbus Ohio swimming pool by photographer Bob Adelman]

– got to talk about a few stories about how the book came to be and highlight some of the core themes. And then at the end we’ll have plenty of time for questions and a signing afterwards. So, thank you, everybody, for coming.

[slide of two Civil Rights protest photos, one from Jackson, Mississippi in 1963 and one from Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1967]

North of Dixie began a decade ago when I became deeply interested in Civil Rights era photography, and every conversation since has gone like this, “How on earth did you ever get started on this project?

[Mark Speltz]

“Why just north of Dixie?” And it all started with the two photographs that you see up on the screen.

[return of the slide of two Civil Rights protest photos side-by-side]

I began a photography and visual culture class at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2007, and we were asked to select a photograph, to read it like a historical source, to interpret it, to see what was going on, see what it meant and what stories it held. And I knew immediately I wanted to look at Civil Rights era photography. I had always been moved by the compelling images that I saw in my history books, that I’d see in TV and in magazines. So, I dove into the Wisconsin Historical Society’s Social Justice Collection

[Mark Speltz]

– all of the photographs and materials that they began collecting during the 1960s, and they hold a treasured collection today.

Some of the photographs came from the South. Snapshots from Freedom Summer, 1964, actual pictures that people brought back with them, never been published before. Photographs from Little Rock, Arkansas, the Daisy Bates Collection. And some of the iconic photographs, which you might recognize and have seen before, including the photograph on the left side of the screen.

[return of the slide of two Civil Rights photos side-by-side]

This picture was taken in Jackson, Mississippi in 1963 at a sit-in at a Woolworth, trying to sit-in to integrate the lunch counter stools. And the photograph encapsulates everything that we think of when we think of the Civil Rights Movement or look at the most iconic images. It’s got a sense of danger, a sense of violence. The youth and some adults behind are threatening the interracial marchers, or protesters. They’re being covered with condiments, sugar, salt, verbally abused.

The image on the right, I had never seen before. It holds nothing in it that I would have recognized in a Civil Rights photograph. This one was taken in Milwaukee in 1967. It’s Father Groppi and the N.A.A.C.P. Youth Council. Marchers marched 200 nights in a row for open housing. In this particular photo, they are marching through the white south side. Doesn’t look particularly dangerous at this moment; but you can tell the officer has his gun drawn and at the ready, staring straight into the cameraman’s eyes.

[Mark Speltz]

It was an incredibly tense time. This was the second night, and marchers were met by thousands of counter-protesters. People from the sidewalks threw bags of urine, rocks, firecrackers, bottles. It was an incredibly dangerous time.

When I was in graduate school in 2007, that was the 40th anniversary of those open-housing demonstrations, and we were beginning to work on a public history project with interviews with activists, people who led the marches, young kids then in grade school who participated.

Dick Gregory gave a wonderful speech at the 40th anniversary celebration. There was a march across the bridge, and a lot of oral history and public history projects. It was a really exciting time to be a public historian, to be a public historian in training, really. So, my advisor said, “We know a lot about the iconic photographs. Why don’t you look at the Milwaukee ones? That’s an angle that hasn’t been looked at.” And that’s how the book began.

So, like any good researcher I dug as deep as I could, on and on, time and time again, in 2007 for the course itself, 2009 for a conference, 2012 for a national conference and an article, and just this past year for a photograph article in the Wisconsin Magazine of History. And as I dug deeper

[slide with four Civil Rights era photographs from Milwaukee in 1966 and 1967, Black protestors being hauled away by police, Black protestors carrying an American flag at the head of a march, a priest holding a young Black girls hand and Neo-Nazis marching for white power in the streets]

– I kept learning more and more and finding more photographs.

I cranked through all the Journal Sentinel newspapers on microfilm to see what photographs ran, and what the captions were, and what the stories – which stories were told. Then I went downtown Milwaukee to the photograph morgue and held all the prints in my hands. And there’s probably a file this big there on the open-housing marches.

[Mark Speltz, holding his hands very wide]

If you know how many photographs run in the newspaper, probably that many

[Mark Speltz, holding his fingers about an inch apart]

– were used. And you can look at those and flip them over, and look at the caption that they used, the time that they were taken, who the photographer was, when they were developed. And the same thing with the unused photographs. The photographers’ names on there, the time, no captions, though.

So, I wrote down those photographers’ names, and I began to track them down one by one. Probably talked to about three, four different people. And they told me how dangerous it was, how they were just learning to cover these demonstrations, and how they had to protect themselves. You can see the gentleman on the left photo, on the far right wearing a helmet. He’s got a camera about just high. He’s wearing a helmet; people had protective gear on because they, too, were getting hit by the bottles and the rocks.

And they talked about how they were the young ones on the totem pole. So, they were the ones working the nights and the weekend shifts when all the marches were taking place. So, they got a lot of really amazing experience. And the photos are incredibly relevant. You can see on the left the type of counter demonstrations that popped up in Milwaukee, and you can see the youth in Milwaukee holding Father Groppi’s hand. That photo has always deeply touched me, and it’s won many awards in Milwaukee, and Erv Gebhard was the photographer who took that, has since retired. He let me interview him two different times over the period of a couple of years and talked about what it meant to take that type of photograph, and how that helped define his career, and then how he later had contact with this woman, who then worked in Washington DC in politics. So, these things made a difference in the young peoples lives.

[slide with photos of the front page of the Milwaukee Star in the 1960s, an image of the front cover of Jet magazine from the same era and a photo of a speaker and crowd at an open housing protest in Milwaukee]

I also then tracked down people who worked for the Black press. The far-left newspaper is the Milwaukee Star, which competed against the Milwaukee Courier. So, there were two African American weekly newspapers in Milwaukee at that time, documenting the community and what was taking place. And they covered the marches, all all of the marches as much as they could.

And they had a particular unique angle. They were in the community. The photographers grew up in the neighborhoods. They were educated

[Mark Speltz]

– in the local schools, learned photography through the local programs, and then worked in their community to document both the community functions, the business openings, funerals, those types of celebrations around town, but also social justice issues, like marches.

It’s a different perspective than youll than you’ll see on some of these later screens that showed what the mainstream media portrayed.

I also then tracked down national photographers. Jet and Ebony came to town.

[return to the slide of the Milwaukee Star and Jet magazine photos]

At that time Jet covered it three weeks in a row, and they had 500,000 different subscribers. So, their photographer – photographs were seen by many, many Americans nationwide. You can see the cover says, “Racial Strife That’s Making Milwaukee Infamous.” So, they helped get the story out.

Ebony Magazine came, as well; they were also owned by Johnson Publishing. They had a million subscribers, and in November, about a month and a half after the marches, they ran 17 different photographs of the marches. So, the nation was told about the Miracle in Milwaukee

[Mark Speltz]

– as it was described at that time. You might wonder well, “Why would they use the word miracle?” But it was an interracial civil rights demonstration group coming out of a church, led by a white priest, yet preaching Black Power. Not always using nonviolence. They would contest that they could use violence if act/hit upon. And that was, you know, not where the Civil Rights Movement was at. Interracial groups were on their way out; Black Power was on their way in. A white leader of a group of youths was not common. So, they were sort of the last hope for that type of opportunity, that type of movement, and they were called “The Miracle in Milwaukee.”

But when I turned away from these sources, and looked at the traditional sources, the traditional Civil Rights photography books, the secondary literature, I began to see all the other photographs; and none of them were focusing on Milwaukee, or places like Chicago and Cleveland. So, I began to wonder what did Civil Rights look like up north and beyond Dixie?

These are the photographs

[slide with four photos (clockwise from upper right), Martin Luther King, Jr. giving his address at the Lincoln Memorial, a Civil Rights march in Montgomery, Alabama, a photo of firefighters turning a fire hose on protesters in Birmingham, Alabama and a photo of a Black girl being harassed on her way to school in Little Rock, Arkansas]

– I saw time and time, again, which makes a lot of sense. When I say the word Civil Rights Movement, it’s likely that a scene like this pops into your head. Something that’s used again, and again in textbooks, or documentaries.

So, I needed to understand why these were iconic

[Mark Speltz]

– what they represented, who took them, why we think of them when we say the word Civil Rights Movement, and how they’ve changed over time, and how they affect the way we think of the movement today.

So, I began devouring books on the topic and about the images. I learned about Charles Moore, who on the bottom-left photograph

[return to the slide with the four iconic Civil Rights photos]

– took that for Life Magazine. And I knew about it; I’ve seen that photo many times before, but I didn’t understand the context on how it came to be, and how it was exactly what people like Dr. Martin Luther King and the S.C.L.C. wanted to happen. In Birmingham, they were trying to provoke city leaders, police, and the fire department into reacting, just like that. So, they brought as many people out of the churches as they could. They filled up the parks. They filled up the jails until the city couldn’t jail anybody else. And when the city commissioner Bull Connor overreacted, the news press was there. The television cameras, the photojournalists to document scenes like this. You’ll also remember the police dogs siccing on protesters.

Those are violent. They’re iconic, but they’re exactly what they were hoping for, because suddenly the press, both national and international

[Mark Speltz]

– were paying attention to the issue. And they’re rumored to have made President Kennedy sick. The photographs were that graphic and moving.

The image on the far-right I always kind of like. You might recognize it maybe from the Eyes on the Prize documentary. It’s used at the beginning, it set the music. It’s used on the cover. It’s been used

[return to the slide of the four iconic Civil Rights photographs]

– on some iconic photograph books over the years. I’ve always just, kind of, loved this photograph, but I finally read about the photographer James Karales, who worked for Look Magazine. And he documented this on the Selma to Montgomery March, the one where John Lewis was beaten at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, along with everybody else in March 1965. And when they finally were able to make the march happen on the third day, this took place within 10 minutes of finishing the march. They’re just outside of Montgomery. And he got down in the in the ditch there, and shot upward, and got the cloud, stretched it out with his lens. And it’s become kind of an iconic bent – arc bending towards justice photograph, but I never knew that he took it at the, you know, just minutes to spare before that march was done. So, it’s fun to learn about those things.

But as I learned about these photos

[Mark Speltz]

– and saw how often they were used, I began to understand what was missing, what was being left out. And no matter how iconic these photographs are, they only tell part of the story. So, there was a need for a book like “North of Dixie.”

So, “North of Dixie” is just this small effort

[slide with three photos, one of the book cover for North of Dixie, a portrait of a Black woman and a Civil Rights march in Louisiana]

– 10 years’ worth of effort, to recast the visual narrative. It’s a visual exploration of the movement beyond the best-known locations, individuals, and iconic images. The goal of the book is to make visible lesser known, but equally inspiring stories from L.A. to Harlem, from coast to coast.

Book features 100 photographs taken from the late 1930s into the 1970s, that capture the breath of the movements, the diversity of the issues that local communities challenged.

[Mark Speltz]

So, everybody asks, “Where’d you find all the photographs? On the Internet?” And I found some; but that’s not the best way to do research, as as you should know. I began searching through online galleries, searching for galleries that supported photographers who were active during that area. Museums, photo archives, collectors, anything I could find, the books. Checked them out from the library. Read as widely as I could on the movement in places I had never thought of like St. Louis, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Seattle.

And then I began traveling

[slide with three photos, one of a Civil Rights speech in Harlem, one of a montage of film negatives from various demonstrations and one of three N.A.A.C.P. members holding anti-lynching signs]

– doing research trips. Went to the Library of Congress, where I spent several days looking through the N.A.A.C.P. photograph collections. The top-left photograph from St. Louis. You can see what issues concerned the N.A.A.C.P. in 1942. In St. Louis, lynchings; the double V in the middle, victory at home and victory against racism. Abroad and at home. All of them were Americans.

I visited the Chicago History Museum. I worked with the Schomburg Curators in Harlem at the New York Public Library, and I went to the Getty Museum in L.A., and worked through a collection of a little known C.O.R.E. photographer from Los Angeles, Charles Brittin. What was really nice about Charles Brittin’s collection is I not only got to see the photographs that were blown up, and framed, and hung in an art museum, I got to see all of his work prints, his negatives, the contact sheets. You can see in the middle where he circled the particular image that he really liked, and the one just to the left. There are other ones where he might have highlighted a certain area that he wanted to develop differently, and some that he just crossed out altogether.

And then I got to begin to see the ephemera collection that came with it, like brochures

[Mark Speltz]

– posters that they produced, pamphlets. So, not only how he took his photographs, what he liked, which ones they used, but then how they used them and what types of pamphlets and materials. So, it allowed me to see more than just the photography but learn about his work in the Civil Rights Organization C.O.R.E.

I then also worked with photo-photographers who were still living, such as Bob Adelman, who just passed away a year ago now. He sent me about 2,000 photographs via – via the Internet. Places he worked north and south. He took many iconic photographs, but he grew up in New York, worked with C.O.R.E. in New York, and documented all types of campaigns there, and shared these photographs that had never been published before. I ended up using about five or six of his.

Then I worked with the Gordon Parks Foundation, the first African American photographer with Life Magazine. Was able to use a couple of photographs from his collection that were never used before in print. So, there’s been a lot of fun opportunities to work with well-known photographers. But where I think the book excels is, I ended up using 50 different photographers, photojournalists, artists, well-known individuals, even amateurs, and police, and F.B.I. photographers.

Finally, I went for a nice geographic distribution. I have 25 different cities represented. Tried to go from the far west to the northeast.

By now you’re wondering, “How do the photos differ between the North and the South?” And the answer is not much, actually. I knew I had to answer this in this book, and I spent two years writing the book, many years on the research, but actually sitting down every morning and every night, and writing. And I had to come up with that answer, and it’s really underwhelming that they don’t differ. It differs in how they were used, and how the newspapers used them. The photographs, there was no shortage of dramatic confrontations, racist actions, or even inspiring moments.

But the northern media, like the media here in Milwaukee

[slide with photos from newspaper clippings in Milwaukee in the 1960s]

– preferred to bury and downplay local concerns. They cast them aside in favor of the non-heroic movement in the south. So, when Birmingham flared up, and police dogs were attacking protesters, that would be on the front page, or very near the front, but not the local issues.

That is until they blew up.

Then this is what you’d see on the front page. This was the day after the first march in Milwaukee, the open-housing marching. You see a sign that says, Groppi, The Black God. See a Confederate flag, and you see a police officer pointing a teargas gun at a crowd to disperse the white counter-protesters.

The media had the same insatiable appetite for active, dramatic and eye-grabbing images. They would throw them on the front page, call attention to the issues, but it was not always the story that the activists wanted to get out, right? They wanted to call attention to the issues. They knew that they could get the press there to cover it, but, in the end, they’re not the ones who ended up on the front page. It was often the police, the city leaders, like the mayor, or counter-protesters. You can see some people being arrested here, as well.

Down there is a picture that was taken for the black press, or by an African American photographer for Ebony. It’s a very different scene. That’s a rally with youth and leaders in St. Boniface up by the altar singing freedom songs, steeling their nerves, getting ready to go out into the community. Cheering cheering everybody up. A hopeful scene, those are not the ones that would appear in the mainstream press.

[Mark Speltz]

The southern stories fit a comfortable storyline. They were simpler to frame, much, much easier to point a finger south, blame racism on the South, racial issues on the South, than to address the issues in your community. I think seeing northern photos of endless marches and struggles against police

[slide with three photos, one of a female Black protester in Chicago, one of anti-Civil Rights protesters holding a Confederate flag in Chicago and a one of a Black female defending herself from a police officer in Milwaukee]

– hopeful images, and Confederate flags on the streets of Chicago or Milwaukee complicate the way that we think about the Civil Rights Movement.

The North was not the racially benevolent place that we like to think it was. Many millions of migrants to the North during the Great Migration didn’t find the Northern Promised Land they were hoping for.

[slide with three photos, one of a Civil Rights march in St. Louis, one of protesters lying in front of a steam shovel in Cleveland and one of white nationalist counter-protesters in Chicago]

Northern activism is all but absent in the way that we characterize, teach, and remember the era. So, I think it’s important if we want to understand the breadth of the movement, if we want to understand the true potential of this most important and defining social movement of modern American history, we need to see it all.

[Mark Speltz]

We need to assess what happened nationwide. Dr. King would often remind people that America’s racial issue was not a sectional, but a national problem. Racism and discrimination were more hidden and subtle in the North. There were not separate drinking fountains. There were not signs for separate bus seats by the 50s and 60s. Photographers had to work a lot harder to make that discrimination visible.

There were segregated swimming pools and parks, but the signs didn’t say as much. They were enforced by force. They were enforced by society pressure. So, photographers had to march in – march alongside white, excuse me, march alongside demonstrators into a white Chicago neighborhood to call attention to the issue.

They had to capture

[return to the slide of three photos from St. Louis, Cleveland and Chicago]

– protesters laying down under a steam shovel in Cleveland. They wanted to stop another school being constructed in a Black neighborhood that would further entrench school segregation there. There are great pictures of Milwaukee of people doing the exact same thing in 1964.

The picture on the top-right is from St. Louis. During World War II, not a single black was hired at the factory at which they were protesting. The factory was booming with wartime business for the war machine in World War II, yet they were discriminating against Black St. Louis residents. And, so, they were calling attention to that.

I think what’s important about the struggle in the North is there are many types of discrimination that are not written off with a piece of legislation. They’re very intertwined. Housing segregation, redlining, and bank loans, racial steering. Neighborhood boundaries are often protected by force. People were kicked out of their apartments, pianos thrown out of third-story windows. Everything that they accumulated in 10 years, this one particular family in Chicago, was gone and burnt in about two hours.

Housing patterns then led to school segregation and unequal schools. Inadequate city services, garbage collection, overzealous policing, job discrimination, urban renewal. The list, kind of, builds upon itself, and again, none of them are easy to separate or legislate away. So, the photos in the book make plain just how complex the movement was. It wasn’t a series of issues like voting rights, or segregated lunch counters that could be overcome so easily. And I think when we see the broader struggle in the images that show how the movement was waged nationwide, it shows the true breadth of the issue. It helps us see the whole context of where we are today.

But one of the benefits of looking beyond the most well-known stories is we’re better able to identify and appreciate lesser-known grassroots movements that were conceived of, built by, and waged locally by ordinary Americans. We see a woman on her knees

[slide with two photos, one of a Black woman on her knees on her protest sign in Brooklyn and one of Black men and women picketing in front of a hotel in San Francisco]

– on her protest sign in Brooklyn, blocking a dump truck at a construction site. This was a huge hospital construction program supported by federal dollars, state dollars; and her way to make a difference was to kneel, and block, and slow that construction, to call attention to the issue.

We see activism and we see agency. We see an individual woman making a difference.

In San Francisco we see a group of men and women picketing outside of a Tony San Francisco hotel at a cab stand, picketing The Yellow Cab Company because they wouldn’t hire a single Black driver for the whole city. 40,000 African Americans and not one in San Francisco was employed by that company. So, we see people making change, not waiting for it to come to them. We see agency.

[Mark Speltz]

And I think that’s important and inspiring because a lot of people, young and old today, will say, I wish that I was active during that time, or I wish I was around during the Civil Rights Movement when real change was happening. When there when Dr. King was making it happen. But the truth of the matter is, was individuals like this leading the struggle, thinking on how to slow the construction site, how to make change in their localized community. And then, if all went well, a national organization might able – be able to step in.

Dr. King went to Birmingham when that local movement had it to a boiling point, and they could bring national dollars, national press attention. Same thing will happen in Chicago, as we’ll talk about.

Many of the pictures upend long-held assumptions about the era and about the Civil Rights Movement itself. Most popular accounts of the Civil Rights Movement in the North and documentaries begin by saying that the movement came north in the mid-1960s with Dr. King, when he marched into Chicago to end the slums. Then the story continues that the movement flounders, Black Power arrives, and all hell breaks loose. Violence and rioting, urban rebellions, that’s the end of the movement in the North in a period of a couple of years. But in reality, what historians have been documenting for years now, and what North of Dixie illustrates, is the roots of campaigns go decades back, as early as 1930s, World War II.

The top-right picture shows –

[slide with two photos, one of a protest at White City roller rink in Chicago in 1946 and one of a group of Black men and women showing dilapidated housing in Harlem in 1960]

– a protest in Chicago just after World War II ends. This was at a roller-skating rink called White City. It was in a Black neighborhood that had transitioned within the previous decade into a – from a white neighborhood to a Black neighborhood. And the roller-skating rink would not allow Blacks to skate there.

So, they were out there protesting every Saturday, and the Congress of Racial Equality, which was formed in Chicago in the 40s, picked up the battle and started picketing and protesting. It went on for at least a year or two before they began to gain traction to make a difference.

And how they eventually made – brought the management to its knees was they innovated from doing every Saturday, doing a picket and just walking around, and calling attention to the issue, they started to do stand-ins. So, they innovated from their

[Mark Spletz]

– sit-ins in a lunch counter in 1943 in Chicago to stand-ins in front of the ticket booth so nobody could get in on a Saturday night. And as the company began to lose more and more business, they got agitated, and the police would come and try to move them away. There would be struggles, even more attention. The Black press would cover it. But what really made the difference was C.O.R.E. recruited some of its members who had been in World War II, just the year before, fought for freedom abroad, and they said, You should wear your uniforms. And they made up signs that said

[return to the slide with photos from Chicago and Harlem]

– The draft boards did not exclude Negroes. So, they showed that they fought for freedom and democracy abroad, but they had a second-class citizenship at home. Couldn’t even roller-skate with their friends in the same place in their own neighborhood.

So, they began to break it down, and they integrated that in 1946. And the photo is not only a great photo because you can see the excitement, see the interracial group. You can see the military veterans taking part. But it shows that the struggle, and many local campaigns like this in Chicago were taken place two decades before Dr. King came. The movement was alive and well decades earlier.

The picture on the left I like to talk about because it makes something that wasn’t visible on city streets visible. The camera made an issue more visible.

This was taken in Harlem in 1960, and it’s kind of a pretty common technique. The gentleman on the left, though, you can’t read his armband. It says the N.A.A.C.P. He’s leading a tour of some housing, some dilapidated housing in Harlem, trying to make visible the conditions that African Americans faced.

Now you’ll remember they had a hard time moving out of the neighborhood because there were loan restrictions. There were property boundaries that people would enforce with violence. So, it was difficult to move out of certain neighborhoods. And then within that neighborhood, you faced high prices, high demand, overcrowding, and poor conditions, such as fallen plaster, leaky pipes, dangerous wires, frequent fires, and rats.

In this particular case

[Mark Speltz]

– they’re pointing at plaster that fell when leaky water pipes loosened the keys and that plaster came crashing to the ground. This was an incredibly common occurrence, and you can turn almost the pages of any African American newspaper in an urban city at this time and find pictures of women lying in bed with big, white bandages covering their heads, and it talking about fallen plaster.

There are also pictures of holes in people’s kitchens, where rats as big as cats could come and go, and chew their food, crawl over their beds. This incredibly awful daily situation.

And what the photographs do is they challenge assumptions about the civil rights protests, what’s considered a protest and what’s not. In our mind we don’t think of these types of things as civil rights, but they certainly were. And if you were dealing with this daily for decades, and you reach a breaking point, and there is a little altercation with a police officer in your neighborhood, and something sparks, you know, decades worth of conditions like this, various conditions in civil rights issues blow up. So, whether you call it a riot or a rebellion, they don’t just happen out of thin air. And the photographs show how they were often decades in the making.

And I think seeing protests against segregation and unsafe housing, poor city services, unequal schools. That urban unrest, though violent, looks more like a reaction to protest, or an action to inaction. Complacency in silence.

One of the chapters in the books focuses on activist photographers, and how civil rights organizations, such as S.N.C.C., C.O.R.E., the N.A.A.C.P., how they used photography. And one of the best-known activist photographers during the early movement was Danny Lyon

[slide with two photos by Danny Lyon, one with two Black men and a Black child bowing their heads with the phase Come let us build a new world together underneath and one with a Black woman mopping an office]

– who took the picture on the far left. Danny Lyon was going to the University of Wisconsin-Chicago. Excuse me, University of Chicago. And he headed south with his camera to join up with a protest taking place in southern Illinois in Cairo. And a group of activists there were protesting segregation at a city pool. African American kids were not allowed to swim in the city-funded pool, so they would go swim in the nearby rivers, and every year or two somebody would die, and then they would initiate this protest, again, to desegregate the city pool.

And in 1962 the protesters were, you know, locked out, attacked with pipes, jailed, and they caught the attention of the young college-aged group S.N.C.C., Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And Danny Lyon went down with his camera and began to document the protests. This particular photograph, the far-left gentleman is Congressman John Lewis, now Congressman John Lewis.

And S.N.C.C. liked this photograph so much that they used it on their first poster that they printed, and it says, Come let us build a new world together. They were taking a different approach than other civil rights organizations. They weren’t

[Mark Speltz]

– holding up one male leader, like Dr. King, and follow this person. They were in it together, young and old. They were nonviolent. In this picture it looks like they might be praying. And they learned that this photographer, this photograph in this poster, could not only inspire people, it could not only be put up in a storefront window, or maybe in a college dorm

[return to the slide of the two Danny Lyon photos]

– it could also be used as a fundraising mechanism. They printed these and sold them for a dollar a piece. Printed 10,000 of them and raised badly needed funds. So, photographs could also help fundraise.

Danny’s work is very well known, and there’s a national exhibit right now in – at the De Young Museum in San Francisco. And I’d always seen his books and his work, and so, I wanted to understand how other groups in the Midwest, in the far west, used photography, or how they understood their relationship to photography.

And one of my favorite photographs that I came across from Milwaukee was never printed. I found it – this was at the Milwaukee Public Library’s collection. And it’s incredibly boring. Right? There’s nothing going on there, but I’ll show you what I see. The top left. Those are photographs of them. Those are articles about them. They clipped them out. They knew that they had an ability to attract the attention of the press. They knew that if they confronted the mayor of Milwaukee, or the local neighboring communities, the National Guard would come. They even knew that the Ku Klux Klan would come. There are pictures in the black press and the white press of white hoods near Milwaukee, and they drew them out, and that was photographed, and that was made visible. Those are things that we don’t think of in relation to Wisconsin, or Milwaukee, but they drew it out of the woodwork, out of the shadows.

So, this photograph to me really helped me prove visually that they were aware of their coverage, that they paid attention to it. It corroborated quotes from people like Prentice McKinney, who would tell me in interviews, you know, We knew we needed the press to air this out.

[Mark Speltz]

We knew we needed photography, photojournalists, to make it visible.

Another one of my favorite civil rights activist photographers came from Los Angeles. Bruce Hartford

[slide with two photographs by Bruce Hartford, one of Black and white protestors in a grocery store protesting Van De Kamp with a pamphlet underneath and one of a Black man who had been assaulted in a protest with a bandage over his right eye and one on his forehead]

– took the picture on the left, and it’s a really crummy photograph. It’s kind of fuzzy, almost out of focus, but for me it captures exactly what he told me they were trying to do. It captures the sense of action. It’s not posed. There’s nobody staring and smiling at the camera. They are doing a guerrilla action in a local grocery store. They were protesting hiring discrimination at the Van de Kamp Bakery Products Company. So, their tactic was to march into a grocery store, any grocery store they could find that sold their products. They would wear their signs, throw leaflets on the ground, walk in singing freedom songs, and then fill the baskets, the shopping carts, with all the bakery goods, wheel them up to the counter, and then walk out.

And he admitted it wasn’t the best tactic. It didn’t call too much attention to it, and the police came after them after about two or three stories – stores. But it wasn’t something that they tried and improved upon. He was not a professional photographer; he didn’t even have a good camera. He had a little Brownie box camera from 20 years earlier when he was a kid. And he would bring it along

[Mark Speltz]

– and he would just take these photographs, a variety of different scenes. And they knew from people like S.N.C.C., and organizations like S.N.C.C., that the photography, the images added immediacy. They could be used on pamphlets and brochures, like the one down below.

[return to the slide of two Bruce Hartford photographs]

That particular one was for a sip-in at a Van de Kamp’s cafe, where they sold the bakery products. So, he knew that they could add urgency, help visualize the issues, help dramatize the issues, and I thought that that was one of my favorite photos in the book. It wasn’t ever published before.

The far-right picture is a challenging picture to look at. This one was located at Wayne State University in their Detroit chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. Detroit’s chapter was the largest one in the nation. There was a huge black middle class because of the auto industry, and all the businesses related to the auto industry. And they were very active against school inequalities, housing segregation, and police brutality.

And in this particular case, they used the camera to make the issue visible. Between 1956 and 1960, they investigated over 150 allegations of police brutality; and those are only allegations where people knew that they were interested in the issue and came in to talk about it. There were a lot that probably never made it to their office. They were never aware of. And of those 150, over one-third of the allegations and attacks happened in a precinct office. So, out of the view of the public. They weren’t happening on the street, like you might think of today, or something. So, when the individuals came in and told them about that, the photography made it visible. They would write a press release, take an affidavit, make sure they had all their statistics

[Mark Speltz]

– and then take the photographs and send the photographs in a press release to the white press and the Black press. And the Black press would occasionally run a story and use the photograph; but the white press never covered it. And the Detroit Free Press covered the South – Southern issues. They had the police dogs and the policy brutality elsewhere on the front page, or in the first few pages, but wouldn’t cover it in their own community. Of course, another one of the major issues, and then the sparks with Detroit rebellion in 1967.

The fourth and final chapter in the book is built around the theme of surveillance. So, the concept that the camera was an incredibly powerful weapon for the Civil Rights Movement. It helped reshape American history in the 1960s, and lead to important pieces of legislation. But the power of the camera was never lost on law enforcement agencies. They knew that you could turn that around and use it against the movement.

If you page through a Civil Rights photography book, and look at some of the most important marches in the best-known locations, lining the sidewalks and the dusty roads are often police officers with cameras. And some of them

[slide with four photos one of Black people picketing open housing, one of a state trooper with a camera taking pictures of a protest, one of a large contact sheet of photos from a protest and one with three negatives from a protest]

– are wearing uniforms, just like the gentleman on the top right in Cairo. They’re wearing uniforms, snapping pictures of the protest. And sometimes they’re very functional, and there’s a purpose behind them, such as how many people are there? Where they’re coming from, what intersections, so they can better plan in the future for handling demonstrations.

But one of the points of wearing the uniform is also to intimidate. So, if you were in Milwaukee and you had a police record, but you were joining the open-housing marches, and you saw an officer going – taking pictures, you’d be probably persuaded not to come the next time.

[Mark Speltz]

So, the overt surveillance is sometimes intimidating.

Other groups were more secretive, like the Chicago Red Squad. You’d be just in a normal suit, taking photographs, blending in with the crowd. And the Chicago Red Squad, which was completely silent and and secretive, built surveillance files on organizations and individuals that they deemed suspicious or did not agree with.

So, for the book I tracked down the photo collection, which is at the Chicago History Museum. It was it was gained through a lawsuit in the 1970s. So, instead of the photographs being thrown out or destroyed, they were able to preserve them, and then they put a number of restrictions on who can access them, who can see them and use them. So, in order to even see them, you have to sign an affidavit, and then in order to publish one, or use it in an exhibit, you have to get the permission of the person in the image. And if they’ve died, you need to get the permission of their family. So, I ended up using three or four of them, and it took about a month or two of let – email writing to get those permissions. But I think that they help us illustrate, not only these files and how they were built, but what role photography played in that.

One of the photographs in the book has a number one next to this woman, who’s simply holding a sign at an anti-policy brutality protest. And I flipped it over, and there was her name, and it was a pretty unique last name, so I was able to track her down online. And she’s like, How’d you get this photo? And I told her about it and all of that. She told me what the protest was so I could get the context behind it, and then gave me the permission to use it. She didn’t know what else was in her file, but, typically, if you were involved in a group, say S.N.C.C. of Chicago, and you were a leader or pretty active and visible, if you were at a protest and there was an article about it, or something, or you were arrested, they’d highlight your name or underline it, and put a clipping of that in your file.

Other known examples are people would show up to your employer and say, Did you know that so and so is involved with C.O.R.E., and is doing this and this? So, the police and federal agencies could use that type of surveillance and information against you, or to intimidate you or your employers.

The photo on the top left I love.

[return to the slide of four photos]

It was taken in Seattle. And, you know, I’d seen it on a few websites related to open housing in Seattle, and I wanted to know where it came from and what the story was behind it. So, this is a case where they had been digitized, and they were available online. So, I was incredibly excited. As I started going through them, I suddenly started to see that people were, kind of, covering their faces, or maybe flashing a peace sign and looking away. And at the very end, like the 25th image, there was this little 10-year-old boy, very bravely sticking his tongue out at the photographer. And it’s right then that it struck me that they didn’t want to be photographed.

And, sure enough, with a little digging, and the help of a helpful archivist at the Seattle City Municipal Archives, she tracked down a document that went with the photographs that said, Dear, Mayor blah, blah, blah, these photographs were taken at an open-housing

[Mark Speltz]

– protest at picture floor plan’s office on this street. These are the license plates that were parked nearby. These are the people we know, and here are 25 photographs taken by Sergeant Noble. So, this was an important enough demonstration that they document it, sent them to the mayor.

The photographs on the bottom left

[return to the slide with the four photos]

– I like to talk about. They came from New York. I know you can’t see the ones on the left, the farthest left, but those are from a protest that took place after the beatings in Selma on March, 1965. So, just as we might have a protest in Madison after something happens, that’s what happened here. Hundreds of cities had protests against the violence in Selma. The police there were documenting who was there.

The one on the middle from 1969, they’re very small, but they were taken at a Black Panther’s protest in 1969 at the city courthouse. And why I like to show this is because one photographer for the police department took six rolls of film of one demonstration, in one city, one Black Panther rally. So, I think it gives you a feel for the scale, the amount of surveillance photographs that were taken over the years, and the amount that’s out there.

So, I think it’s you know, I can’t look at one of those and said that changed the way things happened, or changed the overarch of history, but

[Mark Speltz]

– coupled with the F.B.I. programs, like COINTELPRO, programs to infiltrate, set people against each other, and break down Civil Rights organizations and Black Power organizations, photography played an important role in that. And I think it’s important to know how it both helped the movement and slowed or changed the – the arc of the movement.

So, as you might imagine, working on a book about Civil Rights during the last two to three years was an incredibly powerful project, and it kept becoming more and more relevant. Sadly, it was more and more relevant with each passing month.

I think what I found were – I kept seeing examples of the same issues time and time again, and they were achingly familiar. So, I’d see a picture from the 1960s for hiring discrimination, and then I would see pictures from a city suffering from unemployment, or lack of opportunities, or with poverty. And with each tragic police killing, or college protest, or racial incident, there would be a score of images that would filter through the news and the social networks, and they – they’re going to become a part of our visual lexicon of the era.

[slide with four photos from protests from Ferguson, Missouri over the Michael Brown killing in 2014]

And none of these photos up here are got to be iconic, but the gesture, hands up, certainly became well known overnight. And just as these photographs, you know, circulate from our phones to our computers and into print, that gesture and hashtags continue to build to the next protest.

And I think that the ability of modern technology to spread the word to publicize an issue, to call attention to a particular incident in a city, you know, that is so much larger than any Civil Rights organization in the 1960s could have ever imagined. They needed to develop the film. They needed to send prints to all their news programs, all of their print contacts, and hope that they would run it.

In this particular case, the groups can get their own image, their own message out there in the way that they want it to be received; the way that they want it to be seen. So, it doesn’t go through a filtered news format, like the nightly news –

[Mark Speltz]

– would in the 60s, or the major newspapers. So, the technology is an incredible resource. And I think that it’s also overwhelming to all of us. Right? You see an action take place. You can even see something live, video feeds, Facebook Live. You can see things filter across the media, and you see it used in so many different places you begin to be overwhelmed. What will become iconic? What will we remember?

I was thinking about this and the role of technology when I was writing the the epilogue to the book, and I wanted to look both backwards to how – phot-photography inspired activists, and still does, and forwards to how they were using it now. And DeRay Mckesson –

[return to the four photos from Ferguson, Missouri by DeRay McKesson]

– is a very visible Black Lives Matter activist that went from Minneapolis to Ferguson and shot little pictures like this but included little sayings and little statements. And he was on the ground providing real, live coverage, if you will. And he built an incredible platform of followers. He had about 8,000 when he got there, and he now has over 800,000 followers. When I reached out to him to use that photo in the book, he said, Absolutely. At that point he had 300,000 followers. Hes since – He has since met with Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton. He’s helped provide a platform to amplify other issues beyond Ferguson, and beyond just African American rights.

[Mark Speltz]

So, I think technology plays an interesting role.

The last bit I want to say about it is we’re all, you know, overwhelmed with the amount of social media out there, the amount of pictures come across our devices. The piece that worries me most is will these images last? What will happen to DeRay’s tweets? Where were all the activist images, where are they going to go? Will they disappear? Will the cloud, you know, disappear? So, in 50 years, will the images from the activist’s point of view even exist? So, would a photograph book like mine, covering their angle, their perspectives be possible? So, that’s the thought that I want to end on.

There is a hopeful note, I’ll add. Certain organizations are working towards preserving digital media like this. In Ferguson at the St. Louis University, they have a digital archive where you can send your photographs or your media from Ferguson to preserve it. There’s one in Baltimore, as well. So, there is hope that those photographs will last.

So, just before we go to questions here, this one photograph I love to talk about –

[slide with a photo of a N.A.A.C.P. march in Detroit in 1963 and information about the book North of Dixie]

– is taken in Detroit in 1963. This march in June featured 125,000 marchers. It was the largest Civil Rights demonstration before the March on Washington, which took place just a couple months later, which had 250,000. So, it eclipsed this one, but don’t tell that to the woman in the glasses. She is so excited; I don’t want to ruin her excitement.

[applause]