Civil rights photography project that visited Selma opens new exhibit in Mississippi this week

Photographs documenting Mississippi's Civil Rights Movement will be brought together for the first time in a new exhibition opening this week in Jackson. Like a similar exhibition held in Selma earlier this year, visitors will be invited to help identify the people, places and stories captured in the historic images.

"Proof Positive: A Civil Rights Photography Exhibition" features the work of five photographers who documented the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi between 1963 and 1968: Matt Herron, Jim Marshall, Tamio Wakayama, Bob Fitch and Jim Peppler.

The exhibition is part of A Living Archive, a project working to preserve civil rights history through photographs and the memories of those who experienced the movement firsthand.

A similar exhibition featuring Herron's photographs was presented in Selma during the Foot Soldiers Breakfast at the annual Bridge Crossing Jubilee in March. The photographs captured participants in the voting rights movement, including the historic Selma-to-Montgomery marches.

Michael DiMaggio, co-founder of Proximity Partners and a leader of the Living Archive project, invited Bloody Sunday foot soldiers to examine the photographs, identify themselves and others pictured, and share their memories.

Many of those photographs remain on display on the ground floor of the former Selma Times-Journal building, which served as the office for Foot Soldiers Park.

Now, the project is turning its attention to Mississippi, where the work of all five photographers will be displayed together for the first time in the state.

The exhibition will be held at the Smith Robertson Museum & Cultural Center, 528 Bloom Street in Jackson, as part of the Alabama-Mississippi Quarterly Collaborative, Oct. 22-24.

A welcome reception and exhibition viewing will take place Thursday, Oct. 22, from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. Family members of the photographers are expected to attend.

As with the Selma exhibition, DiMaggio said Proof Positive is designed to do more than display historic photographs. It invites visitors to help document history by identifying people, locations and events captured in the images and original photographic proof sheets.

Visitors who recognize someone or remember an event can share that information with researchers at the exhibition or online at alivingarchive.org.

Participants who provide information about a photograph can also leave their mailing address to receive a printed copy of the image, DiMaggio said.

“They need to see themselves in these photos – they belong to them, not to us,” DiMaggio told the Black Belt News Network.

The photographs include people who marched, registered voters, organized communities and supported the Civil Rights Movement, many of whom may not realize they were photographed.

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DiMaggio hopes civil rights veterans, their families and other community members will recognize those individuals and help add names and firsthand accounts to the historical record.

With additional funding, he hopes to take the photography project to other Mississippi communities, giving more residents an opportunity to examine the proof sheets and identify people they knew.

“We have to meet people where they are,” he said.

The Jackson exhibition is part of a broader effort to connect civil rights history across Alabama and Mississippi. The Alabama-Mississippi Quarterly Collaborative, themed "Advancing Understanding of the Southeast Civil Rights Landscape Through Regional Partnerships," brings together civil rights veterans, historians, preservation advocates and community leaders to discuss ways to document and protect the region's history.

The three-day gathering also includes panel discussions with civil rights veterans and visits to historic sites, including the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument, Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, Canton Freedom House and Tougaloo College.

The full schedule is with this story.

Efforts to identify people in historic civil rights photographs began in Selma years before the Living Archive exhibition arrived. In 2022, Auburn University professors received a National Park Service grant for a project called “Memory and the March: Oral Histories with Selma’s Foot Soldiers.”

The research team visited Selma over several years, asking residents and civil rights veterans to help identify marchers in photographs from Bloody Sunday and preserve their stories.

DiMaggio said that after the Auburn project's grant funding ended, the Living Archive stepped in to continue the work.

Many of the people who participated in the Civil Rights Movement were teenagers at the time. DiMaggio said the photographs filled with young faces help younger generations understand that many of the people who changed history were their own age.

“It is neat that today’s young people look at these photos and see that the movement was made up of people their age,” DiMaggio said, adding his daughter and niece got interested in civil rights as teens during COVID. “There would be no march without people their age there.”

Today, those surviving participants are in their 70s and older, making the effort to document their experiences increasingly urgent as the opportunity to preserve their memories grows shorter.

“There is an urgency right now to get stories out as quick as possible.”