Prometheus 6

When Images Galvanized the Nation
By SHAILA DEWAN

ATLANTA — If ever social change was propelled by photographs, it was during the civil rights movement. Burning buses and raised batons, snarling police dogs and blasting hoses, the young black girl in bobby socks and gingham trailed by a group of sneering white girls as she tried to enter high school — the images spurred a national reckoning in a way that words could not.

Behind the pictures are stories of smashed equipment and journalists beaten, of activists drawn south by images, of amateurs who picked up cameras for the first time. “The Race Beat,” a book by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, which won the Pulitzer Prize for history last year, traces the news coverage of the movement in heart-stopping detail. Now the High Museum of Art here has opened a large and popular exhibit that brings to light many new images of the era, along with the struggles of the photographers who made them.

Atlanta, where so many lions of the movement still live (and where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s first grandchild was born in May), seemed like a natural place to build a collection of museum-quality images of the era. When Julian Cox joined the museum as curator of photography in 2005, he found the germ of such a collection, about 25 prints. He has since built it to more than 325 prints.

Somewhat surprisingly, the show, titled “Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement 1956-1968,” is a first for a major museum, said Steven Kasher, a photography dealer and curator in New York and the author of a photographic history of the movement.

“To really survey in depth the photography of the civil rights movement, and do new research, there’s never been anything like it to tell the truth,” Mr. Kasher said.

But even as the show pulls together so many photographs of landmark events like the Selma-to-Montgomery march in Alabama, the police attacks on peaceful demonstrators in Birmingham, Ala., and the Montgomery bus boycott, it highlights how much history has come close to being lost. One series, of a Greyhound bus firebombed outside Anniston, Ala., during the 1961 Freedom Ride, had been kept for decades in the files of a law firm as potential evidence.