James Baker was a photographer working with Washington State University’s Division of Industrial Research when he was sent to Selma, Alabama to cover the third civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery organized by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1965. Baker captured rare images of the civil rights movement that have since been displayed throughout the country, including at the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery. (You can read an interview with James Baker in this month’s Smithsonian Magazine.)
Baker’s photographs will be displayed in Karpen Hall at UNC Asheville as part of the university’s Black History Month observance. Baker will also visit the school for a reception on Thursday, Feb. 5.
In conjunction with the exhibit, organized by the university’s Center for Diversity Education, Mandy Carter, co-founder of the National Black Justice Coalition, will give a talk, “From Selma to Stonewall” on Monday, Feb. 23. There will also be a screening of the documentary Freedom Summer on Wednesday, Feb. 25.
Full details are below.
From the University of North Carolina Asheville
Press Release
In observance of the 50th anniversary of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the UNC Asheville Center for Diversity Education will host “Forward Ever, Backward Never,” an exhibition of photographs by James H. Barker of the 1965 voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery.
The exhibition is free and open to the public and will be on view from Feb. 2– 27 in the lobby of Karpen Hall on the UNC Asheville campus. A reception with the photographer will take place at the exhibit from 5:30-7:00 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 5.
In March 1965, the Selma to Montgomery march culminated three weeks — and three events — that were the peak of the 1960s civil rights movement for voting rights. On “Bloody Sunday,” March 7, some 600 civil rights marchers went to the Edmund Pettus Bridge and were brutally attacked by law enforcement. Two days later, Martin Luther King Jr. led a symbolic march to the bridge. Civil rights leaders sought court protection for a final march from Selma to the state capital, and on March 21, the marchers set out for Montgomery under federal protection. Five months later, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
James Barker, a college student at the time, was on hand to document the final march. Fifty years later he recalls, “At the time I was a student photographer on the staff at Washington State University at Pullman, Washington and like so many was appalled at the brutal Alabama state troopers attack on the first attempt, March 7, now called Bloody Sunday. A campus ad hoc committee asked three of us to fly down to Montgomery and participate in the march that is now marked as a political and emotional peak of the American civil rights movement.”
The exhibit features 50 of Barker’s black and white photographs of the historic march, which also are featured in the January 2015 edition of Smithsonian Magazine. The exhibit is open weekdays from 8 a.m. – 9 p.m.
In conjunction with this exhibit, UNC Asheville’s Center for Diversity Education will also present the following free public events on the history of the struggle for civil rights.
Monday, Feb. 23, “From Selma to Stonewall” lecture by Mandy Carter
Carter, a leading African-American lesbian activist, is the co-founder of the National Black Justice Coalition, where she also served as the national coordinator for the Bayard Rustin Commemoration Project. Her talk will discuss the connections between the work of Bayard Rustin, organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, with the fight for equal rights for LGBTQ community and the current condition of voting rights in North Carolina and across the country. 7 p.m. in UNC Asheville’s Karpen Hall, room 038.
Wednesday, Feb. 25, Freedom Summer film screening
This film is part of the series, Created Equal: America’s Civil Rights Struggle, a film project by the National Endowment for the Humanities which documents the summer of 1964 when more than 700 students joined with organizers and local African Americans to bring change to Mississippi despite intense violence from white supremacists. 7 – 9:30 p.m. in UNC Asheville’s Highsmith University Union, Grotto.
For more information, contact Deborah Miles, director of UNC Asheville’s Center for Diversity Education, at 828.232.5024 or dmiles@unca.edu.
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