History in the details

Contrary to quick-sketch scholarship, African Americans “with their minds on freedom” had been fighting the fight, on scales large and small, much earlier than the ‘60s -- the decade of freedom marches, the freedom summer and the resolute mantra of “free at last.”

That’s what anthropologist Leith Mullings and historian Manning Marable underscore in their comprehensive photo history “Freedom” (Phaidon Press), which charts the history of African Americans in the United States and the ensuing relationship to the variegated concept of freedom.

“Freedom,” they suggest, “has meant different things at different times to different people” -- for the Founding Fathers it was the quest for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. For African Americans, the struggle has emphasized collective approaches to freedom, group justice -- the freedoms to work and receive funds for one’s labor, have families, build institutions. It is one that continues today.

The book, a meticulous graphic history, is the outgrowth of a series of college courses addressing identity, equality and power that Mullings and Marable taught jointly at City University of New York and Columbia University, respectively. “When we started, we were looking for texts about the making of black America but those that told the history from within,” says Marable. “We preferred texts that underscored ... the capacity of an oppressed people to remake themselves.”

It was just that work, its unconventional retelling and point of view, that interested editors at Phaidon, who were looking to assemble a comprehensive photo history of the American civil rights movement comparable to their best-selling coffee-table tome “Century.” “We actually convinced them to think about the freedom struggle as going back to when the first Africans were captured and taking it up to present day,” says Mullings.

Working with photo editor Sophie Spencer-Wood, Mullings and Marable stipulated that they wanted a broad range of images depicting a full range of African American experience and participation. “We wanted not just the iconic figures but ordinary people,” says Mullings. “I’m an anthropologist, so to me it is important to talk about the people who enact as well as the leaders to lead it.”

Marable, the political historian, weighing in from another angle, was interested in images that showed the dramatic nature of the political struggle. “Iconic figures, like Martin Luther King, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Jesse Jackson, right alongside ordinary men and women who built political institutions to assert their human voice of resistance.... African American people have been denied democratic life. But they are the ones who believed in the principles the most,” Marable says. “That’s the irony. And that’s evocative in the photos.”

Spencer-Wood collected photos from private homes, libraries, newspaper archives, private and public institutions to assemble documentation from as many points of view as possible: There is one of a black Union soldier staring into middle distance, his Colt pocket revolver across his heart, from the 1860s. There is a young A. Philip Randolph and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters convening in Harlem in 1925. Some images -- like Jackie Robinson hitting a home run for the Dodgers in 1947, or Elizabeth Eckford , one of the “Little Rock Nine,” crossing the threshold of Little Rock Central High School in 1957 -- that have been widely glimpsed, but in this context acquire more power. Other more obscure images -- like the 1919 lynching of an Omaha man or a Montgomery, Ala., woman during the bus boycott, walking home, her belongings in a box balanced on her head -- allow for a deeper understanding of what freedom, and the struggle for it, means in not just words but deeds.

Considering some of the more painful images, whether explicitly violent or simply poetically poignant, was very difficult at times, Mullings says. “I personally had to stop for a little while. We tried to have a balance,” she says, including in the mix “people who were fighting oppression and people who were trying to live their lives. And you had to say: How did people do it? How did people survive this?

“The struggle for freedom ... was from within and without. When Africans were captured and enslaved from the very first time they set foot in the New World, in a few short generations, they become a voice -- what democracy is about.”

That is why images are so important, says Mullings. They are not just a record, but a reminder -- a mirror. “Our greatest struggle is to reclaim memory and identity: who and what we are in our own voice. What is our history and what is our destiny,” says Marable. “That’s true for oppressed people throughout the world, not just black and white.”

Stereotyping is imposed on a person, Marable says, and then that person no longer sees himself, but sees only the stereotype. “It’s what is imposed on you instead of who you are,” Marable says. “The photographs tell the story from within, how people assert: I am a person. I have a human story to tell.”