Oh Freedom Over Me

August 16–November 7, 2004
Juanita Kreps Gallery

A multimedia exhibition marking the fortieth anniversary of Freedom Summer and celebrating American voting rights and responsibilities. Including photographs by members of the Southern Documentary Project: Matt Herron, George Ballis, and David Prince.


Public Events

Thursday, September 9, 7 p.m.
Film Screening
Freedom on My Mind

Thursday, September 23, 6-9 p.m.
Exhibition Reception and Slide Lecture
Matt Herron, founder of the Southern Documentary Project

Tuesday, October 5, 7 p.m.
Film Screening
Freedom on My Mind

Tuesday, October 19, 7 p.m.
Panel Discussion
"Contemporary Struggles in Voting Rights: Issues of Race, Immigrants, and Incarceration." Panelists include Victoria DeFrancesco and Monique Lyle, political science graduate students at Duke University, and Ricardo Velasquez, president of the Hispanic Democrats of North Carolina.


Installation Views



Preview Exhibition



The Southern Documentary Project

The images in the Farm Security Administration–Office of War Information Collection (1935-1945) at the Library of Congress are among the most famous documentary photographs ever produced. Directed by Roy Emerson Stryker and created by a group of U.S. government–commissioned photographers, including Dorothea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott, and Walker Evans, these images recorded aspects of American lives in every part of the nation. In the early years, the project emphasized rural life and the negative impact of the Great Depression, farm mechanization, and the Dust Bowl. For many Americans of later generations, these images epitomize the Depression.

Inspired by the work of the Farm Security Administration photographers, Matt Herron sought to create a similar record of the Civil Rights Movement, in which he was active. Though he was admonished by Lange that he might have a problem with objectivity, in the summer of 1964 he organized a team of eight photographers, called the Southern Documentary Project, in an attempt to record the rapid social change taking place in Mississippi and other parts of the South as civil rights organizations brought non-southern college students to work in voter registration and education. Many photographers were doing work in and around the movement at this time—some as independent documentarians, some as photojournalists on assignment for media organizations, some as part of their work for the movement. Danny Lyon, for example, who became part of the Southern Documentary Project, was the official photographer from 1962 to 1964 for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which helped to organize the action that came to be known as Freedom Summer. With varying degrees of success and with financial support from Life magazine and Black Star Photo Agency, Herron, Lyon, George Ballis, Dave Prince, and others created one of the more important bodies of documentary images from the Civil Rights era.


Freedom Summer

The Freedom Summer campaign of 1964, the climax of voter registration activities that started in the South three years earlier, targeted Mississippi, where black voter registration was the lowest in the country. Organized by a coalition called the Mississippi Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), which included SNCC as a primary partner as well as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the campaign also sought to organize a legally constituted Freedom Democratic Party that would challenge the whites-only Democratic Party in Mississippi; to establish “freedom schools” to teach reading, math, and African American history to black children; and to open community centers where indigent black Mississippians could obtain legal and medical assistance. Hundreds of out-of-state students, most of them white and many from well-to-do families, joined with local black residents in doing this work. Student volunteers were required to bring $500 for bail and money for living expenses, medical bills, and transportation home. They lived among local residents and were prepared for violence, and perhaps even death. Two of the white students, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, both from New York, and a local black worker, James Chaney, were murdered that summer, their badly beaten bodies undiscovered for six weeks. These events kept national attention focused on Freedom Summer, yet it was the masses of determined local people who put their bodies on the line, in order to change the conditions of their lives, who defined and perpetuated the struggle.

At the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, the Freedom Democratic Party drew national attention to Freedom Summer efforts once more with its efforts to unseat the regular Democrats from Mississippi by demonstrating that black voters in the state had been systematically excluded from participation. The response of President Lyndon Johnson and national Democratic Party leaders, who were unsupportive of seating the full Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party contingent and worked to keep the appearance of party unity at the fore during the convention, marked a turning point in the black struggle.

In retrospect Freedom Summer was not just about voting rights and education. It was about young, middle-class Americans acknowledging their privilege and using it to fight for their fellow Americans’ rights to equal benefits of full citizenship, basic constitutional rights, and quality of life. It was about ordinary people standing up, speaking out against injustice, and risking everything to participate in their own governance. Democracy in action. Democracy is action.

It’s been forty years since Freedom Summer. In November 2004, Americans will have the opportunity to exercise one of their greatest privileges and responsibilities, the election of the nation’s president. Are we informed? Are we prepared? Are we all equally able to access these rights of citizenship?


Radio Broadcast

An American Radio Works audio documentary by John Biewen

Film Screening, Freedom On My Mind

Nominated for an Academy Award and winner of both the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians awards for best documentary, this landmark film tells the story of the Mississippi freedom movement in the early 1960s when a handful of young activists changed history.

When Bob Moses, a young Harvard student filled with gentle determination, came to Mississippi in 1961 to head up the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee's voter registration drive, all African Americans were denied the right to vote. The first man to accompany Moses to the courthouse to register, a farmer named Herbert Lee, was later shot dead by a state legislator. In this film, we witness the growing confidence and courage of poverty-stricken sharecroppers, maids, and day laborers as they confront jail, beatings, and even murder for the simple right to vote.

In 1964 organizers, fearing for their lives and hoping to attract the attention of the nation and federal government, recruited hundreds of mostly white college students from across the country to join them for Freedom Summer. Volunteers recall the culture clash between the largely white middle-class outsiders and the poor black residents whose homes and dinner tables they shared.

Although three students were murdered, the drive signed up 80,000 members for the insurgent Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and sent an optimistic delegation to the 1964 Democratic Convention. We share their crushing betrayal by President Johnson and Hubert Humphrey, which, Moses argues, led a generation of disillusioned young black people to reject "the system." Yet Freedom Summer helped to transform political power in the South forever, leading to passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Those who participated in the struggle took away a profound sense of possibility and a deepened  commitment to justice. So too will viewers of this film.

banner image:

Partial view of the Lyndhurst Gallery, one of four exhibition spaces at CDS. Photograph by Christoper Sims.


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