Freedom Summer
In 1964, Sanford R. Leigh, the Director of Mississippi Freedom Summer's Hattiesburg project, persuaded Randall to photograph the effects of the Civil Rights Movement in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Randall had a Whitney Fellowship for that year, and had been looking for a project. He spent the entire summer photographing solely in Hattiesburg, among the African-American community and among the volunteers in area projects such as the Freedom Schools, Voter Registration, and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party campaign.
Only five of Randall's photographs were published in the summer of 1964. One seen worldwide was the bloodied, concussed Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld, head of a prominent Cleveland congregation and former conscientious objector to World War II. However, most of his photographs sat in a file at the Shinnecock Reservation, on Long Island, New York.
In 1999, Randall donated 1800 negatives to the archives of The University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg. He and Bobs Tusa, the archivist at USM, wrote Faces of Freedom Summer, which was published by the University of Alabama Press in 2001. Faces is the only record of a single town in the midst of the Civil Rights revolution in America. At the time, the Hattiesburg Project was overlooked and unpublicised by the Civil Rights Movement.
Read more about this topic: Herbert Randall
Famous quotes containing the words freedom and/or summer:
“The American adolescent, then, is faced, as are the adolescents of all countries who have entered or are entering the machine age, with the question: freedom from what and at what price? The American feels so rich in his opportunities for free expression that he often no longer knows what it is he is free from. Neither does he know where he is not free; he does not recognize his native autocrats when he sees them.”
—Erik H. Erikson (1904–1994)
“The prairies were dust. Day after day, summer after summer, the scorching winds blew the dust and the sun was brassy in a yellow sky. Crop after crop failed. Again and again the barren land must be mortgaged for taxes and food and next year’s seed. The agony of hope ended when there was not harvest and no more credit, no money to pay interest and taxes; the banker took the land. Then the bank failed.”
—Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968)