Every
Sunday in February, we will feature and explore previously unpublished
photographs from The New York Times’s archives, with a special focus on
the 1960s. Revisit last year’s Unpublished Black History project, sign up for our Race/Related newsletter and share your own experiences with black history in the comments.
The
copper-jacketed bullet tore through a civil rights worker’s shoulder,
stopping within an inch of his spine. The shotgun blast shattered the
car windows of four voting rights activists and gouged the wall of a
nearby home.
And
a fire destroyed voter registration equipment and materials outside the
city’s Voter Registration Headquarters, leaving the street strewn with
rubble.
It
was 1963 in Greenwood, Miss., a major battleground in the fight for
civil rights, and white officials were playing down and ignoring a
series of attacks intended to discourage thousands of African-Americans
from registering to vote.
Claude
Sitton, the renowned New York Times correspondent, shot photos and took
meticulous notes, exposing the racial violence with his pen and with
his lens.
Unpublished Black History
Articles in this series will explore images of black history drawn from The New York Times’s archives.
Mr. Sitton is best known for his words.
But the typewritten letters that he sent, along with his film, to John
Dugan, a Times photo editor, reveal that he was also determined to
capture history with his camera.
He
carried a Leica, according to one of his sons, and wrote about light
and shadows and underexposed frames. He lamented the gloom inside a
crowded black church and the time constraints he faced as he scrambled
to report the news and illustrate it at the same time.
“I
didn’t have very much time,” Mr. Sitton wrote apologetically, “and will
try to give you a better selection the next time I offer something.”
Yet
there is power in Mr. Sitton’s plain-spoken letters and in the
black-and-white images he captured on Tri-X film in March of 1963. Shown
together here for the first time — as part of a weekly series running
throughout the month — they offer a firsthand glimpse of life on the
front lines of the civil rights movement.
In
one frame, Robert P. Moses, the field secretary of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, clipboard in hand, pointed to the
holes left by the shotgun blast in the wall of a weathered home. In
another, the charred detritus of the fire — set by a person or persons
unknown — littered the street outside the old voting headquarters.
Medgar Evers,
the state field secretary of the N.A.A.C.P., addressed a packed voter
registration rally at the local African Methodist Episcopal church in
what may well be the only photograph taken of Evers by The Times.
In
another series of images, black women took their seats in a citizenship
training school intended to train volunteers to help register black
voters, and another woman stacked cans of food in the Sunday school room
of a local church. The food was collected in Chicago for hungry black
farm workers in Greenwood, who had been denied federal food assistance
by white county officials in retaliation for their voter registration
efforts.
African-Americans
accounted for 61 percent of the county’s population. Yet only 1.9
percent of blacks of voting age were registered, compared with 95.5
percent of whites. The Justice Department, contending that whites were
disenfranchising blacks with discriminatory voting laws, filed suit.
Justice
Department officials also sought a federal court order to prevent the
city and county from denying blacks the right to protest, after the
police unleashed a German shepherd dog on peaceful marchers and jailed
voting rights activists.
It was the first time that federal officials had taken such a step, Mr. Sitton noted in his article
about Greenwood, which was published in April of 1963. (Only three of
the many photographs that he took during his time in Greenwood were
published with this article.)
But
with every step forward, it seemed, there were several steps back. Two
months later, on June 12, 1963, an assassin killed Evers in Jackson,
Miss.
That
afternoon, hundreds of African-Americans took to the streets in
protest. And Mr. Sitton was there with his pen, his notebook and his
camera.
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