For All the World to Hear, organized by the Center for Art, Design & Visual Culture, UMBC, is a dynamic humanities project in which a dozen senior citizens from the Baltimore area tell, write, perform, and digitally publish personal stories of their involvement in the struggle for civil rights.

The first part of the project brings seniors from inter-racial and inter-faith backgrounds together for a series of oral history interview meetings. With guidance from oral historian, dramaturge, and performance director, Harriet Lynn, their written accounts will result in a script that the participants will perform before intergenerational audiences in the Baltimore area.

Following each live performance there will be mediated, interactive audience discussions. Performances will be held at sites including museums, libraries, and college campuses. CADVC’s long-standing K-14 outreach program will activate connections with schools in proximity to performances resulting in a rich, first person history lesson for Baltimore area school children.

Performance Schedule*

Thursday, November 15, (Preview) 12 pm

UMBC, The Commons  (UMBC Directions & Parking)

Wednesday, December 12, 10:30 am

Reginald F. Lewis Museum of African American History and Culture

Sunday, February 10, 2 pm

Jewish Museum of Maryland

Tuesday, February 12, 6 pm

Maryland Historical Society

Friday, February 15, 10:30 am

UMBC, Recital Hall, Fine Arts Building

Saturday, February 23, 2 pm

Enoch Pratt Free Library, Main Branch

Friday, February TBA, 12 pm

Baltimore's City Hall for the Baltimore National Heritage area's

It's More Than History! Brown Bag Lecture Series

*Check back at this website for venue updates and weather cancellations. Info on directions and parking is available at each venues' website, which is linked above.

The second half of the program involves the same group of seniors with a digital storytelling component. Each senior will work with a UMBC student to realize his or her story in digital video format, which will be published to the Internet at UMBC’s digital story site, (umbc.edu/stories). The digital stories will ultimately be introduced and distributed via iTunes U to K-16 schools throughout Maryland and beyond.

A documentary film will chronicle the entire process of developing this community of practice among the seniors and students, beginning with their first meeting in September 2012 and ending in spring of 2013 with the web launch and screening of their digital stories.

For All the World to Hear: Stories from the Struggle for Civil Rights is a community outreach program of the Center for Art, Design & Visual Culture, UMBC. It is organized by Sandra Abbott, CADVC’s curator of collections and outreach in collaboration with Harriet Lynn, producer/artistic director of Heritage Theatre Artists’ Consortium. The program is supported in part by the Maryland Humanities Council. Program partners include the St. Francis Neighborhood Center, Stoop Storytelling Series, Howard Peters Rawlings Conservatory & Botanic Gardens, Druid Hill Park and the Senior Citizen Division of Baltimore City Recreation and Parks. Media partners include Beacon Press and WYPR. Learn more about the project including updates on venues at foralltheworldtohear.org.

The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture is a non-profit organization dedicated to organizing comprehensive exhibitions, the publication of catalogs, CDs, DVDs, and books on the arts, and educational and community outreach projects.

For All the World to See:  Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights

For All the World to See is the first comprehensive museum exhibition to explore the historic role played by visual images in shaping, influencing, and transforming the fight for civil rights in the United States.

For All the World to See is the first comprehensive museum exhibition to explore the historic role played by visual images in shaping, influencing, and transforming the fight for civil rights in the United States.

Organizing Institutions: Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, Baltimore County and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C.

Curator: Maurice Berger, Research Professor, Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, UMBC

In September 1955, shortly after Emmett Till was murdered by white supremacists in Money, Mississippi, his grieving mother, Mamie Till Bradley, distributed to newspapers and magazines a gruesome black-and-white photograph of his mutilated corpse. Asked why she would do this, Mrs. Bradley explained that by witnessing, with their own eyes, the brutality of segregation and racism, Americans would be more likely to support the cause of racial justice and equality. “Let the world see what I’ve seen,” was her reply. The publication of the photograph transformed the modern civil rights movement, inspiring a new generation of activists to join the cause.

Despite this extraordinary episode, visual culture is rarely included in the history of the modern civil rights movement. For All the World to See is the first comprehensive museum exhibition to explore the historical role played by visual images in shaping, influencing, and transforming the fight for civil rights in the United States. The exhibition is comprised of over 250 objects, including posters, photographs, graphic art, magazines, newspapers, books, pamphlets, political buttons, comic books, toys, postcards, and clips from film, newsreels, and television. Maurice Berger, cultural historian and Research Professor, Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, Baltimore County is the curator of the exhibition.

For All the World to See looks at images in a range of cultural outlets and forms, tracking the ways they represented race in order to alter beliefs and attitudes. The exhibition examines the extent to which the rise of the modern civil rights movement paralleled the birth of television and the popularity of picture magazines and other forms of visual mass media. Images of the civil rights era were ever-present and diverse: the startling footage of southern white aggression and black suffering that appeared night after night on television news programs; the photographs of black achievers and martyrs in Negro periodicals, which roused pride or activism in the African-American community; the humble snapshot, no less powerful in its ability to edify and motivate. In each case, the war against racism and segregation was waged—by civil rights leaders, activists, and ordinary people alike—not with bricks or flesh or words but with pictures. By including a compendium of iconic objects, motion pictures, and intimate portraits of black life, For All the World to See attempts to reach museum visitors on a deeply personal and moving level as it offers important insights into the way visual images forever changed the cultural and social landscape of the United States.

For All the World to See is co-organized by the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, UMBC and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C. A comprehensive, richly illustrated companion book written by Maurice Berger with a foreword by the celebrated essayist, novelist, and librettist Thulani Davis was published by Yale University Press in May 2010. A comprehensive website launched in May 2010 at www.foralltheworldtosee.org, and will include an online version of the exhibition, online film festival, and educational materials.

The exhibition traveled to these venues: International Center of Photography in New York (21 May to 12 September 2010); National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution in the galleries dedicated for use by the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (June 9, to Nov. 28, 2011); and the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel, Memphis, TN. It will appear at the organizing institution, Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture, UMBC from November 15, 2012 to March 10, 2013, and will continue on, traveling to the Addison Gallery of American Art in 2013.

Funding for the exhibition has come from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Trellis Fund, National Endowment for the Arts, St. Paul Travelers Corporation, the Texas Foundation, and the Maryland State Arts Council. Additional support has come from CBS News Archives, Ed Sullivan/SOFA Entertainment, Sullmark Corporation, and Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Photos on left: (details) Sanitation Workers Assemble in Front of Clayborn Temple for a Solidarity March, Memphis, TN, March 28, 1968, Gelatin silver print, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Museum Purchase, (c) Ernest C. Withers., Courtesy Panopticon Gallery, Boston, MA 
Photo on right: I AM A MAN, 1968, offset lithography on paper, Collection of Civil Rights Archive/CADVC-UMBC, Baltimore, MD, (c) Emerson Graphics