#civil-rights-movement

#civil-rights-movement

On March 16, 1965, a thirty-nine-year-old woman named Viola Liuzzo got into a late-model Oldsmobile and drove eight hundred miles from her home in Detroit, Michigan, to Selma, Alabama. Days earlier, following the Bloody Sunday protests, where voting-rights demonstrators had been tear-gassed and beaten, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had issued an appeal to people of conscience across the country to come to Alabama and participate in what had already become one of the most consequential theatres in the movement for equality.

It was 70 years ago when four African Americans were sitting in the fifth row of a bus in Montgomery. As one white man had to stand towards the front, the driver asked the four to get up and move towards the back of the bus. Three did; one did not the rest is history. Or so many American kids might think when they first read the story of Rosa Parks in school.

While Derby's photograph of a child dreaming of play is resonant for its tender simplicity, this era was marked by very different images of life in Mississippi, from the indelible photos of the open-casket funeral of Emmett Till in Chicago in 1955 to the iconic images of the 1963 lunch counter sit-ins in Jackson. Photojournalistic images spanning more than a decade covering protests, demonstrations, and demands for justice became trenchant reminders of the social and political tumult of the time.

Chief Justice John Roberts declared that racism was dead in America, justifying the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act and dismissing the ongoing discrimination that still exists.