Visual Literacy & The Civil Rights Movement

[Frank W. Baker]

A couple of summers ago, I traveled to Atlanta's High Museum of Art to see the exhibit Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956–1968. I was spellbound by this collection of images from this period in history and I learned more than I ever knew.

I have been including photographs of LIFE Magazine's Charles Moore in my visual literacy  workshops. A passage about him and his photos, in the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Race Beat,  led me to learn more. These stories and photos are powerful reminders of the importance of photojournalism at this critical time in American history.

Now, I've learned another exhibit, “For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights,” is at the Center of International Photography in New York City and was just reviewed in The New York Times.

This companion web site is an online exhibition worth exploring. There is also an accompanying book of the same name. (Don't miss the K-12 educator resource link)  To see other books about civil rights photography go to this page on my visual literacy web site.

Frank Baker, Media Literacy Clearinghouse