Portsmouth exhibit displays lesser-known photos from Civil Rights Movement

PORTSMOUTH — When James Meredith looks at the photograph of himself taken in 1962, shortly after he became the first Black student at the University of Mississippi, he does not see just himself.

He’s entering Ole Miss on an autumn day as a student for the first time while surrounded by white faces — reporters, administrators and U.S. Marshals there to protect him from the jeering mob. The crowd blocks out the sun, leaving only a patch of sun on his forehead. Those around him look somber as history unfolds. He is smiling as he talks to a reporter.

In the image, he sees the faces of all Black people who have faced and fought bigotry and discrimination.

“We’re all the same to me,” Meredith, now 89, said, speaking from his home in Jackson, Mississippi, during a phone interview.

“In 1931, there were nine boys in Alabama who some girl accused of rape. Of course, it was not true, and they were punished anyway. Then, you have Emmett Till and George Floyd,” he said. “And, you had a bunch of others killed, and I’m all of them.”

The picture is a prominent piece in the traveling exhibit, “I AM A MAN: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1960-1970,” on display at the Portsmouth Art & Cultural Center through May 27.

The photographs document not only Meredith’s admission to the University of Mississippi but multiple civil rights campaigns, like the sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis from which the exhibit derives its name.

The phrase “I AM A MAN” was the slogan of the strike that lasted from Feb. 12 to April 16, 1968, and began after two Black sanitation workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed in a garbage truck.

“The sense was that their lives didn’t matter, that they were garbage,” said William Ferris, the original curator of the exhibit and the Joel R. Williamson eminent professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. With the slogan, the marchers asserted the dignity and equality of Black men, its wording a stance against their historic degradation by, for example, people calling them “boy.”

Ferris said the decision to use “I AM A MAN” as the title was an effort to connect the display to Martin Luther King Jr.’s tragic death.

In March and April of 1968, King traveled to Memphis. He spoke on April 3 to the protesters. The next evening, he was murdered at the Lorraine Motel.

The exhibition includes photographs from King’s funeral as well as shots of the Selma to Montgomery March in Alabama, and the Poor People’s Campaign and the Mule Train movement, which both called for economic justice in the U.S. and led to demonstrations such as the June 1968 march in Washington, D.C.

Collecting and cataloging the pictures began in 2017 when Ferris received a long-distance call from an old friend.

Gilles Mora, the director of the Pavillon Populaire, a photography exhibition space in Montpellier, France, wanted his help in putting together an exhibit that he hoped to premiere to commemorate the 50th anniversary of King’s death.

“I naively agreed, thinking it’d be not too complicated,” Ferris said. “Well, it’s consumed my life since then.”

Ferris organized a group of students and faculty members from UNC and Duke University and set to work gathering more than 3,000 photos for the international project. Mora and his assistants flew to North Carolina to inspect the images.

The compilation included the work of Ernest Withers, who took more than a million photos of the Civil Rights Movement and music scenes of the 1960s, and Danny Lyon, who documented the sea of signs reading “I AM A MAN” at the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike.

But it was also composed of photographs of lesser known newspaper and amateur photographers, and ultimately, Mora and his staff settled on about 300 pictures for their exhibit.

Ferris and a delegation of 50 Americans including Meredith attended its opening in 2018 when every room in the two-story building was filled with pictures depicting the American Civil Rights Movement.

The city’s mayor and other leaders hosted receptions and dinners for visiting Americans, Ferris remembered. “They rolled out the red carpet.”

The Americans helped to lead a two-day symposium on the Civil Rights Movement that opened with one of Ferris’ students, Mary Williams, singing a gospel song. The exhibit was a hit, he said. More than 40,000 visitors viewed the photographs during its three-month run.

“With the eruption of Black Lives Matter, all of these photographs became increasingly relevant to our lives today,” Ferris said.

He was thrilled when Meredith accepted his invitation to the French premiere. Few living civil rights icons have such a strong connection to the turbulence of the 1960s. In June 1966, Meredith was shot by a white sniper on the second day of what he called his March Against Fear, a solitary protest march of more than 200 miles from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson to encourage Black people to overcome intimidations and register to vote.

While he greatly enjoyed meeting Ferris, Meredith said seeing the exhibit stirred up anger in his soul, as the photos of the past helped to remind him that the same underlying hate and prejudices that existed in the 1960s are still present today.

“Ain’t nothing changed on the Black-white thing,” he said.

In conjunction with the local show, Charles Ford, a history professor at Norfolk State University, will give a free lecture, “Civil Rights in Hampton Roads, VA,” on April 15.

Ford’s research has shown that the Norfolk area was at the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement going back to the 1930s, “which doesn’t get any publicity,” he said.

His lecture will discuss the impact of local Woolworth’s sit-ins and protests, and law firms and lawyers who fought to help end Jim Crow laws. He’ll also present civil rights-era photographs taken in Norfolk and Portsmouth.

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“They will complement the collection,” he said, “not just replicate what they’ve already done.”

Colin Warren-Hicks, 919-818-8139, colin.warrenhicks@virginiamedia.com

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If you go

The exhibit: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays, through May 27. Adults, $3; $2 for older adults, people 2 to 17, military with ID.

The lecture by Charles Ford: 1:30 p.m. April 15. Free.

Where: Portsmouth Art & Cultural Center, 400 High St.

Details: portsmouthartcenter.com, 757-393-8543