Photographs of the Southern Freedom Movement in the Alan Lomax Collection

Ever since the Civil Rights History Project Act was passed in 2009, archivists at the American Folklife Center have kept their eyes and ears open for items related to the Southern Freedom Movement as they process collections. Todd Harvey, curator of the Alan Lomax Collection (AFC 2004/004), recently noticed a folder of twenty-one photographs in the collection that were sent in a package from Guy Carawan of the Highlander Research and Education Center to folklorist Alan Lomax in 1992.

Carawan wrote to Lomax, “I’m sending you a packet of materials in which you are very much present. I especially wanted you to have the photographs from the workshop you helped with in Mississippi in 1965…. I hope you will enjoy them.” He also gave Lomax a copy of the flyer for the event. This three-day festival and workshop, titled “Sing for Freedom: Festival of Negro Folk Music and Freedom Songs,” was held at the former Mount Beulah plantation in Edwards, Mississippi, on May 7-9, 1965. Several civil rights organizations held training sessions at this location, which had also been the home of the Southern Christian Institute, a school for African Americans. The Delta Ministry of the National Council of Churches and the Highlander Folk School sponsored the event and invited “resource people” including Alan Lomax, the Georgia Sea Island Singers, the Moving Star Hall Singers, Doc Reese, Mississippi’s Ed Young and his fife and drum corps, blues singers, and Southern freedom singers. Participants learned folk songs and discussed how to keep African American traditions alive and incorporate them into the freedom struggle. In his letter, Carawan didn’t indicate who the photographer was and the reverse sides of them are blank. Here are three of them:

Note the recording equipment in the photos. This festival was recorded and the six or possibly seven audio reels are now held in the Guy and Candie Carawan Collection as part of the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina’s Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library.

One photograph in the folder was captioned by Carawan, “Mississippi SNCC workers at conference at Tougaloo College, 1965. Jim Foreman [sic] in foreground.” Many former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) members have come to the Library of Congress recently to participate in our Civil Rights History Project public programs series, “Many Paths to Freedom: Looking Back, Looking Ahead at the Long Civil Rights Movement.” We asked one of our speakers, Charlie Cobb, and Tim Jenkins, another long-time activist, to identify individuals in the photograph. They were able to identify everyone in it (including Cobb himself), except the woman directly behind Hollis Watkins. (If you know who that person is, please drop us a line!)

From left to right, they are: Curtis (Hayes) Muhammad, James Jones, Jesse Harris, Wazir (Willie B.) Peacock, Charles McLaurin, Jimmie Travis, Samuel Block, MacArthur Cotton, Hollis Watkins, Dorie Ladner, and Charlie Cobb. James Forman kneels in the foreground.

We don’t know much about this conference at Tougaloo College, but like other SNCC meetings and training sessions, music was an important part of it. Like the other photographs, you can see an audio reel on the table, so it is likely the conference was recorded and may also be in the Guy and Candie Carawan Collection at the University of North Carolina.

The video of Charlie Cobbs’s talk at the Library of Congress on his recently published book, This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible is now available on the C-SPAN website. The Civil Rights History Project video oral history interview with Guy and Candie Carawan is also available online on the Library of Congress website.