Photographers During The Civil Rights Movement Essay

The Role of Photographers During the Civil Rights Movement The Civil Rights Movement took place from 1954 to 1968 in the southern states of the United States and was a struggle by African Americans to achieve Civil Rights equal to those of whites, including equal opportunity in employment, housing, education, the right to vote, equal access to public facilities, and be free of racial discrimination. Compared to the existence of humankind in the world, the Civil Rights Movement is a microscopic era in history but has impacted a massive amount of people. Photographers are the essential factor for remembering this inhumane portion of history. Photos captured during the Civil Rights Movement show the shocking events that happened during the Civil Rights Movement and the photojournalists role was to publish the appalling images for the whole world to see through magazine and newspaper articles.
Role of Photographers
Photographers have had a role of unleashing the truth to people around the world during the Civil Rights Movement and other times in history. The photos taken during the time period show all of America and the world what discrimination was happening, how it affected the African Americans, and how they were treated so poorly (PBS, 2017). According to Frank’s 2016 article, Gordon Parks, a …show more content…
David Kordalski of PBS News claimed, “I think that a photographer’s role is to take people where they can’t go, but in this particular case there is a large part of Americans that just didn’t know. [The Civil Rights Movement has] never really been covered before in such a way and to get there and to have a front row seat to history brought there in the power of as still frame is just an absolute remarkable feat.” The photos taken during the Civil Rights Movement become a world wide message and show the undeniable human brutality that many people believed never