The Civil Rights Movement: A Photographic History, 1954–68

The first book to tell the story of the civil rights movement through the rousing and often wrenching photographs that recorded, promoted, and protected it.

With a striking selection of images and a lively, informative text, Steven Kasher captures the danger, drama, and bravery of the civil rights movement. After an introduction explaining the significance of photography to the movement, the text in this important book proceeds from the Montgomery bus boycott through the student, local and national movements; the big marches; Freedom summer; Malcolm X; and the death of Martin Luther King.

Each chapter begins with a fast-paced narrative of a crucial event in the movement, complemented by a portfolio of the most effective and evocative photographs of the subject. Ranging from the well known to the rare, these images were shot by such photographers as Richard Avedon, Danny Lyon, Charles Moore, Gordon Parks, Dan Weiner, and more than 50 others. Many of the pictures are accompanied by thought-provoking remembrances and analysis by various photographers and participants.

Steven Kasher is the author of seven books, including The Civil Rights Movement: A Photographic History, 1954–68 (Abbeville) and America and the Tintype. He worked as a visual artist before starting, in 1995, Steven Kasher Gallery, which represents many noted photographers and graphic novelists.

Myrlie Evers Williams is an American civil rights activist and former NAACP chairwoman who worked for over three decades to seek justice for the 1963 murder of her husband and fellow activist Medgar Evers. She recounts her journey as a community leader in her memoir Watch Me Fly: What I Learned on the Way to Becoming the Woman I Was Meant to Be.