Co-organized by the Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture, University of Maryland Baltimore County & the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution

Curator: Maurice Berger, Senior Research Scholar, CADVC

For All The World To See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights is the first exhibition to explore the role played by visual images in shaping, influencing, and transforming the fight for civil rights in the United States. The struggle for racial justice in the United States was fought as assuredly on television, in movies, magazines, and newspapers, and through the artifacts and images of everyday life as it was on the streets of Montgomery, Little Rock or Watts. The movement produced myriad images in multiple formats and sensibilities and in various contexts, from the modest newsletters of local black churches to televised news reports on the state of American race relations. The exhibition looks at images in a range of venues and forms, tracking the ways they represented race in order to perpetuate the status quo, stimulate dialogue, or change prevailing beliefs and attitudes.

The visual culture is particularly relevant to the modern civil rights movement, a struggle coextensive with the birth of television, the increasing popularity of color photography, and the blossoming of picture magazines and other forms of mass media. It was in this period that powerful visual images infiltrated the culture at large—locally and nationally—against a backdrop of extraordinary events: segregationist bombings and the lynching of black people; race riots, sit-ins, marches, and boycotts; turbulent political campaigns; ground-breaking US Supreme Court rulings on segregation, voting rights, and miscegenation; the unending campaign of white resistance, exemplified by the activities of the Ku Klux Klan, John Birch Society, and States Rights movement; the murder of anti-racist activists and the assassination of civil rights leaders; the stubbornness of de-facto segregation; the rise of the black power movement; and the slow, fitful cycle of African-American enfranchisement and achievement.

In building a case for Brown v. Board of Education, future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall—then chief counsel to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund—argued that constitutional law was as much about "morale and legitimacy" as it was about winning individual cases. Marshall's observation speaks to the heart of Color Pictures, for it was not just through political or legal writing, but also through compelling images, that the civil rights movement was able to alter perceptions about race, and thus to advance the case of African-American legitimacy within white America and bolster morale within black communities across the nation. It is the purpose of this exhibition to explore this connection through vivid and moving examples of some of the most important visual images created during the period of the modern civil rights movement.

For All The World To See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights will open at the International Center of Photography in New York City. The exhibition runs from May 12, 2010 through September 5, 2010.

The exhibition and catalog are funded, in part, by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Trellis Fund, National Endowment for the Arts, St. Paul Travelers Corporation, Communities Foundation of Texas, and the Maryland State Arts Council.

Additionally, For All The World To See was designated a NEH “We the People” project by the Endowment. The goal of the “We the People” initiative is to “encourage and strengthen the teaching, study, and understanding of American history and culture through the support of projects that explore significant events and themes in our nation’s history and culture and that advance knowledge of the principles that define America.”

Top Photo: For All The World To See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights