USM Art Gallery to host Exhibit Featuring Civil Rights Movement Photographer Herbert Randall’s Documentation of Freedom Summer in Hattiesburg
Wed, 01/10/2024 - 11:32am | By: David Tisdale
Images of the history made in Hattiesburg during Freedom Summer – a critical juncture in the American Civil Rights Movement – will be on display later this month and in early February when The University of Southern Mississippi (USM) Gallery of Art and Design on the Hattiesburg campus hosts an exhibit of the work of noted photographer Herbert Randall.
Admission is free and the exhibit is available from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Jan. 22-26 and Jan. 29-31; and Feb.1, 2, and 5; the Gallery of Art and Design is located in the George Hurst Building. This event is being held in commemoration of 2024 being the 60th anniversary of the events marking Freedom Summer, when state residents, college students, and voting rights organizers from across the country came to Hattiesburg and across the state during that fateful summer to work together to secure voting rights for African Americans in Mississippi.
The exhibition will feature 102 of nearly 2,000 photographs taken by Randall, then in his late 20s, who was recruited from New York to chronicle the struggles and triumphs of those Civil Rights activists and disenfranchised African American voters in Hattiesburg.
According to USM Museum of Art/Gallery of Art and Design Director Mark Rigsby, the exhibit’s gelatin silver prints (black and white photographs) were originally curated as a traveling exhibition and organized in 2001 by The USM Museum of Art in association with USM University Libraries, and with important research initiatives and contributions by then USM Archivist Dr. Bobs Tusa. The effort was funded then in part through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities administered by the Mississippi Humanities Council.
Randall generously donated 1,759 negatives of the images he took that summer to USM’s
McCain Library and Archives’ Special Collections unit in 1998, which holds a wealth
of other materials related to the Civil Rights Movement. The extensive Freedom Summer
collection documents Freedom Schools, voter registration drives, Mississippi Freedom
Democratic Party meetings, volunteers and recreational.
“Most of these photographs had never been seen until Randall donated them to USM,”
Rigsby said.
Other examples of Randall’s work are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Library of Congress, and other prominent American museums.
“One of the strengths of USM Special Collections is its extensive material on the civil rights movement,” said Lorraine Stuart, professor and head of Special Collections. “More than 100 collections document some aspect of the movement. Among them, Herbert Randall’s photographs are some of the most frequently used. Rarely does a month go by that we do not receive a request to use one of his photos in an article, textbook, exhibition, or documentary. I attribute their appeal to the artistry with which Mr. Randall captured the mood of the time - the tension and determination in the air as well as the camaraderie.”
Stuart said that an additional gift of 50 photographs from Randall’s personal collection document minority communities around the country.
“Herbert Randall’s photographs of Freedom Summer are some of the best and most iconic of the Civil Rights Movement,” said USM Associate Professor of History Dr. Rebecca Tuuri, a nationally recognized expert on the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. “We are so lucky that such a talented photographer was recruited by Freedom Summer leader Sandy Leigh to come to Hattiesburg in the summer of 1964.
“Randall documented not only the violence that locals and visiting activists faced while challenging Jim Crow, but also their inspiring courage and day-to-day living. He showed them as everyday heroes doing something extraordinary as they put their lives on the line to make real change in our state.”
Visit USM’s Museum of Art/Gallery of Art and Design for more information.