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Category: African American History

Smiling woman dressed in outdoor winter clothes holds a large, old-style camera

Creating “A Day Like No Other”: New Exhibition for March on Washington

Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson

The following is a guest post by Helena Zinkham, Chief, Prints & Photographs Division. Some 250,000 people, both white and black, crowded onto the National Mall on August 28, 1963, to demand civil rights for African Americans. It was the largest demonstration the city had seen—The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The concluding …

Smiling woman dressed in outdoor winter clothes holds a large, old-style camera

March on Washington, 1963: Many New Photographs Digitized

Posted by: Jeff Bridgers

The following is a guest post by Helena Zinkham, Chief, Prints & Photographs Division. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was a landmark Civil Rights demonstration held on August 28, 1963 in Washington, DC. We have photographs in many collections that document this famous event. But the U.S. News & World Report Collection …

Smiling woman dressed in outdoor winter clothes holds a large, old-style camera

Augustus Washington, Daguerreotypist

Posted by: Jeff Bridgers

Strange as it may appear, whatever may be a colored man’s natural capacity and literary attainments, I believe that, as soon as he leaves the academic halls to mingle in the only society he can find in the United States, unless he be a minister or lecturer, he must and will retrograde. –Augustus Washington, letter …

Smiling woman dressed in outdoor winter clothes holds a large, old-style camera

P&P Snapshot: A Look at On Site Research

Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson

Our online collections support many a research project, but contact with physical photographs and graphic items can be eye-opening and reveal new avenues for investigation. Kya Mangrum, a doctoral candidate in English Language and Literature at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, recently spent several days in the Prints and Photographs Reading Room exploring images of …

Smiling woman dressed in outdoor winter clothes holds a large, old-style camera

Brown v. Board of Education: Getting the Picture One Year Later

Posted by: Jeff Bridgers

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court issued a decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, declaring that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” This decision was pivotal to the struggle for racial desegregation in the United States. A year later, in May 1955, Thomas O’Halloran, on assignment for U.S. News & …

Smiling woman dressed in outdoor winter clothes holds a large, old-style camera

Words About Pictures: More National Book Festival Visitor Comments

Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson

We are still savoring the comments visitors to the National Book Festival offered last fall while viewing sample photographs from our collections.  This visitor’s comments seem particularly apt as we continue to celebrate Women’s History Month. The commenter recognized the well-known subject of the photograph, educator and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune. Bethune served …