Mississippi Eyes

Mississippi Eyes

by Matt Herron

Mississippi Eyes

Lending their eyes to the cause of civil rights during the pivotal summer of 1964, a team of five young photographers attempted to document the process of social change as the segregated South both resisted and reluctantly yielded to forces brought to bear on it by civil rights organizations and the black citizens they served. Mississippi Eyes is a chronicle in words and pictures of the work of the Southern Documentary Project and the events and adventures its photographer encountered as the went about their difficult assignment.

Klan Poster
KuKlux Klan Recruitment Poster

Their story begins in the winter mud of the Mississippi Delta and ends in Atlantic City's convention hall as Mississippi activists challenged the official Mississippi delegates to the national Democratic Convention. Along the way individual photographers were: beaten and nearly killed by a sheriff's posse in Selma, Alabama; received hospitably by the white mayor of a small Mississippi town; photographed a moving service in a sharecropper's church; documented remarkable encounters between Ivy League student teachers and black children in Freedom Schools; and followed the heartbreaking struggle of a young boy to confront the murder of his older brother by Klansmen.

The Southern Documentary Project was the brain child of Matt Herron, a budding photojournalist who had moved with his family to Mississippi in 1963 to work in civil rights and shoot stories for the major picture magazines. Drawing for advice and support on his friendship with the noted documentary photographer Dorothea Lange, Herron pulled together a shoestring budget, recruited photographers with civil rights experience, and completed the summer with a file of striking photographs. It was the first and only time a photo-documentary team had entered the field since the famed Farm Security Administration photo project of the 1930's and 1940's. Mississippi Eyes is also the only book to provide a first-hand account of what it was actually like to photograph for the cause of civil rights in the deep South.

Exerpts

Stokeley Carmichael's Firebombed Car
Stokeley Carmichael's Firebombed Car

Sample Spreads