This month, we celebrate the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington, officially titled the March for Jobs and Freedom of August 28, 1963. We include here images of some members of the Williamston Freedom Movement in North Carolina who traveled to Washington that day to be part of this historic moment. We also show you our new landing page for our continuously growing Farmworker Movement Collection. And finally, we let you know how happy we are that Richard Cross’s images of Palenque de San Basilio got the attention of scholars and community members participating in the planning of the new Museo Afro de Colombia—the second Latin American country—after Brazil—committed to establishing a museum exclusively devoted to preserving, promoting, and disseminating the history, art, and culture of Black people.
60th Anniversary of the March on Washington
By José Luis Benavides
The march is well documented and widely remembered by the famous “I Have a Dream” speech by Dr. Martin Luther King. Photographer John Kouns—who defined himself as a “kind of a marcher” because he participated in other important marches: Selma to Montgomery and Delano to Sacramento—traveled independently to document the event. Kouns decided to focus his camera on the people at the march trying to capture the emotions he saw reflected on the people’s faces, body language, and actions. In our work at the Bradley Center, historical images can help us tell unknown stories that are significant and Kouns’s approach fits well for this storytelling purpose of capturing the history of the people who formed part of the Black Freedom Movement of the 1960s. His photos of Jackie Bond Shropshire, Ella Mae Ormond, and Golden Frinks are good examples of how images can become a projective device to highlight the stories of individuals who were part of the Williamston Freedom Movement in North Carolina.
At 15 years of age, Jackie Bond had a reputation for fearlessness and was already a participant in the Williamston Freedom Movement in North Carolina. She and her brother had already been arrested for participating in a sit-in to desegregate a diner. They also entered a “Whites Only” coin laundromat as a nonviolent civil disobedience action, and later she would be injured in the stomach with an electric cattle prod by a deputy sheriff during a march to desegregate a school. Bond was in jail when she heard about the March on Washington. She persuaded her father, a grocery store owner, to sponsor one of the three charter buses that traveled to the event. Ella Mae Ormond—the executive director of the local SCLC chapter, owner of a café, and part owner of a club—helped fundraising efforts for two buses for members of the movement and chaperoned the group so that young adults could attend. This image by John Kouns was used on the cover of The Williamston Freedom Movement, a book written by history teacher Amanda Hilliard Smith and highly recommended to learn about this amazing group of freedom fighters.
Perhaps the most famous image of Jackie Bond is one captured by Magnum’s photographer Leonard Freed and preserved by the Library of Congress, where she is seen singing next to North Carolina’s civil rights leader Golden Frinks during the march. John Kouns was there as well and he captured a series of images with both Bond and Frinks, including this one.
Golden Asron Frinks became known as “The Great Agitator” in North Carolina. Frinks worked in the Navy, fought in the Army during World War II, and participated in civil rights desegregation activities in Washington, DC. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, as a secretary of the NAACP in Edenton, North Carolina, Frinks organized young people and successfully desegregated the courthouse, library, and a white high school. In June 1963, he became the SCLC’s field secretary and was chosen to lead the Williamston Freedom Movement. On June 30, Frinks and the local civil rights organizer Sarah Small lead the first protest march to town hall. For 29 consecutive days, people continued protesting to dismantle segregation in a local theatre, a drug store, a diner, a hospital, the library, etc. On July 29, the KKK responded by burning a 94-foot cross outside Williamston—the biggest burn cross in the state’s history. The local police and the state national guard were also used to repress the movement. But this didn’t deter people like Frinks, Small, Ormond, and Bond. By 1965, the movement already had some gains and turned its attention to voter registration.
Landing Page: Farmworker Movement Collection
Although they told us this is not its final destination and format, our colleagues at the CSUN University Library created a beautifully designed landing page so readers have a home page from which they can access the thousands of images that will form the Farmworker Movement Collection. We included new portraits of the two photographers that we found while digitizing this collection. Unfortunately, Emmon Clarke passed away last year in September but we had a chance to talk to him and his wife Judith. We know he and his family were aware of this educational digital project that involved the work that Emmon Clarke did for the Farmworker Movement. Today, we have in the library database most of Clarke’s images we selected for this project. You can access them from our landing page here:
Colombia’s Museo Afro and Richard Cross
Starting in 2022, Colombia has embarked on the creation of the Museo Afro de Colombia to be built in Cali, a city with half a million Afro-Colombians. Colombia—with 4.7 million of Afro-Colombians—has the third largest Black population in Latin America, after Brazil and Haiti. With support from the NEH, the Bradley Center recently digitized and created metadata for 4,000 images of life in the Afro-Colombian community of San Basilio de Palenque during the 1970s captured by Richard Cross as part of a study conducted by Colombian anthropologist Nina S. de Friedemann. We are about to engage with a group of museum scholars and community members from San Basilio to help them research Cross’s digital collection and incorporate his images into a larger goal of telling the history of this and other Afro-Colombian communities. Richard’s and Nina’s work was done with the participation of the community and we are excited by the opportunity to make Richard’s work part of the history of a country he loved deeply. Here we share some images of Richard and Nina with people in the community.