152 pages, 10 63/100 x 8 22/25
25 color and 113 b&w photographs
Hardcover
Release Date:04 Feb 2021
ISBN:9781496831620
I AM A MAN
Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1960-1970
By William R. Ferris; Foreword by Lonnie G. Bunch III
University Press of Mississippi
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This is a moving and riveting look at the extraordinary people who came together to shape history.
The photographs in this volume may be from more than fifty years ago, but their impact carries through to the present ,emphasizing the continued need to identify injustice and resist it.
The photographs in I AM A MAN bring to life the strife and strength that breathed through the civil rights movement. These striking images are teeming with life and motion and place the reader inside these vital moments in American history. William R. Ferris’s text provides a path for the reader through each period of the movement and is packed with insightful commentary. Not only is this book beautiful, it may be one of the most important collections on the civil rights movement.
These amazing, powerful, and poignant images remind us of not just the powerful moments like the Ernest Withers shots of Martin Luther King Jr. or the way Spider Martin captured the bravery and the carnage of ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Selma, Alabama, but also the less remembered, smaller acts of bravery and resistance like my dad quietly confronting segregation or the image of the dignified African American woman in the ‘paddy-wagon’ in Birmingham by Bob Adelman. This collection helps us realize how significant actions and more modest, often unacknowledged victories helped to transform a nation.
The pictures themselves are striking and even though many photographs pertaining to the civil rights movement have been published over the last fifty-sixty years, I don’t believe I have seen most, if any, of the ones published in this book before. They offer a different perspective to that time period that will not be lost among the many books and exhibits that have come out recently. William Ferris’s book will garner attention from a wide public, photography enthusiasts, and civil rights advocates.
William Ferris’s collection of civil rights photographs and short essays presents an overview of landmark moments in the civil rights struggle. The straightforward presentation of information in chronological fashion makes this book a good resource for undergraduate history courses as well as for the general, nonacademic reader.
. is the fourteenth secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. He is the first African American and first historian to serve in that role. Bunch served as curator of history and program manager for the California African American Museum in Los Angeles from 1983 to 1989. He is author of A Fool’s Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama, and Trump.