Dozens of photographs capturing a pivotal event in the civil rights movement — the 1965 march from Selma, Ala., to the state capital in Montgomery — will be exhibited at the New-York Historical Society early next year.
In time to mark the 50th anniversary of the march, “Freedom Journey 1965: Photographs of the Selma to Montgomery March by Stephen Somerstein,” will be on view from January 16 through April 19. Mr. Somerstein, then a 24-year-old City College student in New York, took roughly 400 photographs of the march during five days, March 21 to March 25, 1965. Fifty-five of his photographs are in the exhibition, including the famous and the unknown, capturing whites taunting the marchers and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speaking to the crowd in Montgomery, among other images.
“When Dr. King called on Americans to join him in a massive protest march to Montgomery, I knew that important, nation-changing history was unfolding and I wanted to capture its power and its meaning with my camera,” Mr. Somerstein said in a statement. Mr. Somerstein, who was the managing editor and the picture editor of his college newspaper, went on to a career in physics.
The march was a turning point in the civil rights movement. The 54-mile journey from Selma to the State Capitol in Montgomery drew international attention to black efforts to attain voting rights. The first effort at the march, on March 7, drew 600 people, some of whom were brutally beaten by law enforcement officers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. The highly publicized incident became known as “Bloody Sunday.”
King’s call for marchers to assemble in Alabama for the march later that month drew 25,000 people at its peak, including Joan Baez, James Baldwin and Rosa Parks.
The Voting Rights Act was signed into law on August 6, 1965.
In a program related to the exhibition on Feb. 11, Randall Kennedy, a Harvard Law School professor, will discuss the ramifications of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.