Jane Hearn, editor. A Past That Won’t Rest

Looking back on the black freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s, certain images stand out: Birmingham police unleashing their dogs on demonstrating children; marchers attacked by law enforcement officers on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge; the haunting photo of Emmett Till in his coffin. These and other images sent shockwaves across the country, revealing the grim reality of life in the Jim Crow South. Photographers also captured the courage and tenacity of thousands of ordinary people determined to take charge of their destiny. Mississippi was at the center of the civil rights movement, and among the hundreds of “outside agitators” who came to work in the Magnolia State were young photographers affiliated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and other movement organizations. Their work appears in several excellent collections, including Leslie G. Kelen’s edited volume This Light of Ours: Activist Photographers and the Civil Rights Movement (2011), and Matt Herron’s Mississippi Eyes: The Story and Photography of the Southern Documentary Project (2014). Now the University Press of Mississippi has come out with two books of photographs taken by native Mississippians, until now unavailable to the public: A Past That Won’t Rest: Images of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi, with photographs by Jim Lucas and edited by Jane Hearn, and Mississippi Witness: The Photographs of Florence Mars, by historian James T. Campbell and archivist Elaine Owens

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