Carnegie's Black Photojournalism Exhibition
Celebrating and Supporting African American History
We feature our trip to Pittsburgh for the opening of the exhibition Black Photojournalism at the Carnegie Museum of Art. Besides being thrilled that the exhibition included work by photographers from the collections of the Tom and Ethel Bradley Center, we had the opportunity to connect with amazing people preserving and promoting Black photography and photojournalism. Also, we start a series of articles by Dr. Keith Rice, who traveled to the U.S. South to celebrate and support African American History. In his first installment, he writes about his visits to Memphis’s National Civil Rights Museum, the Clayborn Temple, the Stax Records Museum, and Aretha Franklin’s birth home. Finally, after the performance of the play August 29 at CSUN, we had a conversation about the origins of this play with José Luis Valenzuela, Artistic Director of the Latino Theatre Company, and Ramiro Segovia, the play’s director.
Black Photojournalism at the Carnegie
By José Luis Benavides
Last September 12 and 13, my colleague Keith Rice and I traveled to Pittsburgh for the opening of the exhibition Black Photojournalism at the Carnegie Museum of Art, featuring the work of 60 photographers, including Charles Williams, Guy Crowder, Bob Douglas, and Harry Adams. To my knowledge, this is the first national exhibition focused exclusively on the work of African American photojournalists. As Deborah Willis points out in the foreword to the beautiful and comprehensive book that accompanies the exhibition, she and others have curated exhibitions that included photographers featured in the current exhibition. In that regard, several photographers have been shown in major exhibitions, and a few, including Gordon Parks, for example, have become part of the American canon in photojournalism.
What makes the current exhibition so special is the emphasis on highlighting what the external gaze to African American communities across the country couldn’t show—Black life to the fullest. Willis writes: “One of the most persistently powerful means of resistance that Black photographers have employed is to simply show us as we are, in our full humanity as families, workers, friends, lovers, artists, and leaders.” And this is exactly what this exhibition accomplishes—it helps viewers reframe and expand their visual understanding of the full humanity of Black communities, rejecting the narrow set of images in the dominant visual repertoire of outsiders, especially in moments in history when these communities were engaged in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements.
The exhibition required commendable work by curators Dan Leers and Charleene Foggie-Barnet, whose efforts in identifying the few, but we hope, growing number of places interested in preserving Black photography are essential to highlight the need for a comprehensive and accurate visual representation of Black communities. Libraries, archives, museums, and personal collections, such as the AFRO-American Newspapers Archive, the Ernest C. Whiters House Museum, the Gordon Parks Foundation, Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and, of course, CSUN’s Tom and Ethel Bradley Center. Here is a gallery of images of the opening, with archivists and curators serving as guides to the photographs in their collections.
African American History in the South (Part 1)
By Keith Rice
This past July, I planned on returning to the Arles Les Rencontres De La Photographie international photography festival in France to gain more knowledge in the field/profession/ art of photography. But in considering some of the events that began in January 2025, which financially impact how museums, historians, archivists, and filmmakers contribute to telling the true history of the United States, I decided to travel through the American South to support museums and visit significant locations in the history of African Americans in the South. American history, like many other countries, is not always pretty. As a matter of fact, it is quite messy. Some people in this country want to erase, whitewash, or rewrite this messy and violent history. But no matter how much some people try to whitewash American history, institutions like the ones I visited will survive and continue to share the truth.
I started with a very ambitious itinerary of places to visit. The list included the International African American Museum in Charleston, SC, and the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, neither of which I made it to. Before I landed in Memphis, Tennessee, on July 5, I realized this tour of Southern museums and landmarks would have to take place over two visits. With that in mind, I made time to visit friends in Atlanta before returning to Los Angeles. On day one, I rented a car and drove to the National Civil Rights Museum, located at the Lorraine Motel, the site of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The Museum is not just a collection of exhibits focused only on Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement. It is a two-to-three-hour interactive journey through a crucial period of black history in the United States. It is a museum that everyone in this country should visit at least once in their lifetime.
Like many cities whose church members participated in the civil rights struggle, Memphis had its participants, too. Clayborn Temple is on the National Register of Historic Places due to its role in the Sanitation Workers’ Strike of 1968. During the 1960s, Clayborn Temple became the city’s staging ground for the civil rights movement, including the Memphis sanitation strike. The church fell into disrepair after the congregation moved. The church was in the process of being restored when it was destroyed by fire on April 28, 2025.
Stax Museum and Aretha Franklin Birth Home
Visiting museums on the civil rights movement can be emotionally overwhelming, so I always try to balance those visits by also finding museums with lighter themes. In addition to its civil rights history, Memphis has a strong music history. Stax Records Museum is in Memphis, Graceland is in Memphis, and so is Graceland. So, on day two, July 6, I made it to Stax and Beal Street. A list of Memphis landmarks at the hotel revealed that the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, was born in a house not far from Stax Records. Being a Detroiter like Aretha Franklin and a fan of hers, I had to go see the house. In Memphis, it is difficult for a historian to remove Stax Records and Aretha Franklin from the Civil Rights. In 1965, Stax/Volt recording artist Otis Redding wrote and recorded the song “Respect.” In 1967, Aretha Franklin released her version of “Respect” with great success. Her version is often associated with the black freedom struggle and/or women’s liberation. Other artists on Stax Records included Sam and Dave, Carla Thomas, Booker T. & the M.G.’s, Eddie Floyd, Isaac Hayes, and Albert King.
August 29 by the Latino Theatre Company
Last month, the Latino Theatre Company performed the play August 29, directed by Ramiro Segovia, with a cast of Community College student-actors. The play is a powerful exploration of Chicano identity, anchored by the legacy of journalist Rubén Salazar. More than 400 people attended this powerful performance, sponsored by the Mike Curb College of Arts, Media & Communication, Departments of Journalism, Theater, Chicano/a Studies, Criminology and Justice Studies, The Tom & Ethel Bradley Center, University Student Union, Associated Students, and the Division of Student Affairs. CSUN professors Doug Kaback, Sam Golzari, and José Luis Benavides had a Zoom conversation about the origins of the play with José Luis Valenzuela, Artistic Director of the Latino Theatre Company and co-creator of August 29, and Ramiro Segovia, director of the play and Theatre professor at Los Angeles Community College. You can watch the video here.
