Image: Gordon Parks, self-portrait.  

Photo Collections

Bob Adelman:

• Congress for Racial Equality images. (Click on links for different CORE collections, including of Freedom Rides.)
• Birmingham movement images.
• March on Washington images.
• Selma movement images. 
• Martin Luther King’s funeral.
• Poor People’s Campaign.

Sheila Pree Bright: #1960Now.

W.E.B. Du Bois: African American Photographs Assembled for 1900 Paris Exposition.

Civil Rights Movement Archive:

• Freedom Movement Photo Album. (Tons of photos in many different categories.)
• Movement Photographs of Herbert Randall.

Emory Douglas and Stephen Shames: Power to the People: The Black Panthers in Photographs by Stephen Shames and Graphics by Emory Douglas.

Bob Fitch Photography Archive: Martin Luther King Jr., 1965-1966.

Jill Freedman: Resurrection City, 1968.

The Guardian Picture Essay: Capturing the cry for change: photographers on the BLM protests.

Images of Change. Photos from George Ballis, Matt Herron, Ernest Lowe, Ivan Massar, Art Rogers, and Maria Varela.  

Steven Kasher Gallery: Selma March, 1965.

Charles Moore: Civil Rights and Beyond.

National Museum of African American History and Culture:

• Make Good the Promises: Reconstruction and Its Legacies.
• We Return Fighting: The African American Experience in World War I.

Proclaiming Emancipation.

Steven Shames: The Black Panthers: Vintage Prints by Stephen Shames.

John H. White: The Documerica Project (1971-1977).

James Van Der Zee: Howard Greenberg Gallery Collection.

Books

Bob Adelman: Mine Eyes Have Seen.

Bob Adelman & Charles Johnson: King: A Photobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Devin Allen: A Beautiful Ghetto.

James Baldwin (author) with Steve Schapiro (photographer): The Fire Next Time.

Sheila Pree Bright: #1960Now: Photographs of Civil Rights Activists and Black Lives Matter Protests.

Richard Cahan & Michael Williams: Chicago Exposed: Defining Moments From the Chicago Sun-Times Photo Archive.

Dana Canedy, Damien Cave, Darcy Eveleigh, & Rachel L. Swarns: Unseen: Unpublished Black History from the New York Times Photo Archives.

Julian Cox, Rebekah Jacob, & Monica Karales: Controversy and Hope: The Civil Rights Photographs of James Karales.

Bruce Davidson, John Lewis, & Deborah Willis: Time of Change: Civil Rights Photographs, 1961-1965.

Roy DeCarava: Roy DeCarava: A Retrospective.

Sonny DuBose & Cecil Williams: Orangeburg 1968: A Place and Time Remembered.

Eric Etheridge: Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders.

Matthew Fox-Amato: Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America.

Leonard Freed:

• This Is the Day: The March on Washington.
• Black in White America.

Jill Freedman (photographer) & Stephen Shames (editor): Resurrection City, 1968.

Aston Gonzalez: Visualizing Equality: African American Rights and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century.

Middleton A. Harris & Toni Morrison: The Black Book.

Matt Herron: Mississippi Eyes: The Story and Photography of the Southern Documentary Project.

Kinshasha Holman Conwill & Paul Gardullo: Make Good the Promises: Reclaiming Reconstruction and Its Legacies.

Steven Kasher: The Civil Rights Movement: A Photographic History, 1954-68.

Leslie G. Kelen: This Light of Ours: Activist Photographers of the Civil Rights Movement.

Barbara Krauthamer & Deborah Willis: Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery.

 Dorothea Lange, Richard Cahan, & Michael Williams: River of Blood: American Slavery from the People Who Lived It: Interviews & Photographs of Formerly Enslaved African Americans.

Preston Lauterbach: Bluff City: The Secret Life of Photographer Ernest Withers.

Danny Lyon: Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement by Danny Lyon.

Charles Moore & Michael S. Durham: Powerful Days: The Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore.

NAACP & The Crisis: NAACP: Celebrating a Century 100 Years in Pictures.

National Museum of African American History and Culture: Through the African American Lens: Double Exposure.

Gordon Parks:

• Gordon Parks: The New Tide: Early Work 1940–1950.
• Gordon Parks: Muhammad Ali.
• Gordon Parks: Segregation Story.
• Invisible Man: Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison in Harlem.

Marc Perrusquia: A Spy in Canaan: How the FBI Used a Famous Photographer to Infiltrate the Civil Rights Movement.

Herbert Randall: Faces of Freedom Summer.

Bobby Seale & Stephen Shames: Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers.

Stephen Shames & Charles E. Jones: The Black Panthers – Photographs by Stephen Shames.

Shawn Michelle Smith:

• Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture.
• Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography.

Shawn Michelle Smith & Maurice O. Wallace (editors): Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity.

Mark Speltz: North of Dixie: Civil Rights Photography Beyond the South.

Ron Wilkins: Crook’s Lens; A Photographic Journey Through the Black Liberation Struggle.

Deborah Willis: The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship.

Ernest C. Withers, Richard Cahan, & Michael Williams: Revolution in Black and White: Photographs of the Civil Rights Era by Ernest Withers.

Articles

BBC News: Moneta Sleet: The great black photographer you’ve never heard of.

Alex Begin: Capturing the Black Lives Matter Movement.

Katharina Fackler: Rosa Parks and the Image of Respectability.

Bobby Fletcher: See this movement photographer’s bio and further links at his SNCC profile.

Ibram X. Kendi: North of Dixie: A New Book on Civil Rights Photography Beyond the South.

Nyasha Laing: How Black Photographers Are Shaping the Movement for Black Lives.

Amanda Martin-Hardin: ‘Sharp and Subversive’ Scenes of Integrated 1940s Summer Camps: Gordon Parks’s Photos of Black and White Kids at Play Resisted Segregation in Nature and Beyond by Presenting a Vision of America as He Hoped It Could Be.

Allison Meier: Why Frederick Douglass Was the Most Photographed 19th-Century American: In a lifelong battle against racist imagery, Frederick Douglass had over 160 portraits taken, which he hoped would create a public acknowledgment of his humanity.

Mary Niall Mitchell:

• The Visual Documentation of Racist Violence in America.
• The History of African American Visual Culture.

Sean Murphy: Pulitzer Prize Photography and the African-American Experience: For Black History Month, look back at the work of Pulitzer-winning African-American photojournalists, and prize-winning images documenting pivotal moments in race relations.

NPR: As Black Photographers Document Protests, They Tell Their ‘Own History In Real Time’.

David Silkenat: “A Typical Negro”: Gordon, Peter, Vincent Colyer, and the Story behind Slavery’s Most Famous Photograph.

Matthew Teutsch: Documenting Racial Violence Through Photography.

Deborah Vankin: Photographer Gordon Parks inspired a new generation of artists. Here are some of their stories.

Maria Varela: See this movement photographer’s bio and further links at her SNCC and Civil Rights Movement Veterans profiles, as well as this oral history interview. 

Vermont Public Radio: ‘I’m The Conduit’: Pulitzer Prize-Winning Photojournalist John White On His Life’s Work.

Vice: The Story Behind the Black Lives Matter Photo Seen Around the World: Jonathan Bachman’s photo of protester Ieshia Evans being arrested in Baton Rouge has become instantly iconic.

Tamio Wakayama: See this movement photographer’s SNCC profile and commemoration, as well as his bio at East Wind.  

E. James West: Highways, High-Rises and Food Deserts.

Wikipedia: List of photographers of the civil rights movement.

David Zax: The Scurlock Studio: Picture of Prosperity: For more than half a century the Scurlock Studio chronicled the rise of Washington’s black middle class.