Notes on Civil Rights Exhibit

[By Rickiah Wingfield Kim McClurg]

On Saturday, we visited For All the World to See, an exhibit on Civil Rights and Visual Culture at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan. The exhibit gave us the opportunity to witness certain aspects of the Civil Rights Movement. This was the first time some of us had seen video footage of Malcolm X speak and clips from the Amos and Andy Show. Those clips were only two small portions of what the exhibit offered.

Of the many exhibits on display, one in particular, captured a moment of history in a space of time that transported the viewer back to the Civil Rights Movement. The Death of Emmitt Till, at the age of fourteen by two white men, portrayed the length the South would go to in order to maintain their Jim Crow way of life; assumedly, Till had whistled at a white woman. The visual pictures of his face and body at his open-casketed funeral make the viewer catch their breath and cry for the lost child.
To hear of the travesties and horrors that occurred in the Civil Rights Movement is one part of a complicated dichotomy. To view it through the eyes of the media on television and to see it lived out in photography brings it to life. This unique real-life space in history will never be forgotten and reminds us not only of how far we have come, but how far we still have to go.

The photography museum revealed how one picture could start a movement and serve as a window to the past. –Cassaundra Sampson

The exhibits at the photography museum were extremely thought-provoking. –Jeanie Hollingsworth

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