This Light of Ours — a photographic flashback to the fight for civil rights
... Florida Holocaust Museum, 55 5th St. S., St. Petersburg ...
... Blow, like many in the media, was succinct in his dismissal of one right-wing Christian columnist’s comparison of Davis to Rosa Parks. “No one who has ever even breathed on a history book would say so,” he told the crowd at Eckerd. The line was a hit. Then, during the Q&A, the largely white audience asked, essentially, “How can we help?” to improve race relations. Blow elaborated that understanding the relationship between civil rights history and enduring inequities is a start.
... In the pictures, the threat of violence is constant. Take Matt Herron’s 1964 photograph of two men, a white SNCC volunteer and a black resident armed with a shotgun, seated between shelves of books. Facing away from the photographer and toward a window framing pitch black night sky, the two men guard a library — a library — for one of the Freedom Schools set up in Mississippi by the group during Freedom Summer, which local white residents had threatened to bomb. A portrait by Bob Fitch shows an Alabama man, young, handsome and gazing steadily at the photographer, with a horrific laceration cut into the top of his head from a beating by the Ku Klux Klan; photographer Herbert Randall captures a white rabbi (a movement volunteer) spattered with his own blood after an attack by a white supremacist ...
A second display on the theme of civil rights, Beaches, Benches and Boycotts: The Civil Rights Movement in Tampa Bay, brings the question home, but unfortunately not through photographic prints of the kind you’d expect in an exhibition. Situated on FHM’s third floor, the display consists of didactic panels printed with archival Tampa Bay Times photographs and text. The content is striking — even more immediate and jarring than the more regional story told downstairs, in some ways — but after the beautiful prints of This Light of Ours, Beaches feels like a disappointment ...
Still, it’s worth cozying up to the panels for a glimpse of lunch counter sit-ins and public pool and beach swim-ins that local residents staged in their battle against Jim Crow. Of particular poignancy is a 1960 photograph of a lunch counter sit-in at the S.H. Kress in St. Petersburg, where two tight-lipped waitresses hastily close the counter as a black employee looks on. (By the end of the year, the lunch counter served both black and white customers.) ...
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