The first color photograph was taken by James Clerk Maxwell in 1861. Think about that: Nearly 160 years ago, the color photograph was invented. However, something that I learned on the internet, and not in school, is that nearly every single picture from the civil rights movement is in black and white, despite the fact that it was after the popularization of color photography. After discovering this, I began doing research, and I realized that the timelines don’t make sense. Try it. Google pictures of the Civil Rights Movement in the 70s, and it’s all in black and white. On the contrast, if you type ‘Woodstock’ into google, which took place in 1969, there are plenty readily available color photographs of white “hippies.” Why is this? Take a look at some of these pictures, which were all taken the exact same year:

Color photography became popularized in the 1960s, shortly followed by color film/video in the 70s. So, this inaccurate representation of history may seem innocuous to some, but it is extremely impactful to the experience of black Americans today. Why do our textbooks in the American school system, the reputable sources online, and books in our libraries, reflect a grainy, black and white representation of Black History? This is one of the ways in which our government paints a distorted picture to younger generations, creating the notion that this all happened much longer ago than it really did. It makes it seem like the Civil Rights Movement/ segregation was a lifetime away, when in reality Ruby Bridges was just 5 years old when she desegregated schools only 60 years ago. This vibrant, legendary woman is not even 10 years older than my parents, but somehow there are still so many Americans that choose to believe our country has put racism so far behind us. (Check out her takeover on Selena Gomez’ Instagram for more information on Ruby‘a story.)

In these very rare color photographs of Martin Luther King, Jr. leading the a Chicago Freedom Movement in the mid-1960s, you can see how these pictures reflect so closely what is outside in our streets today.

Rare color photographs by Bernard Kleina, courtesy of Smithsonian Magazine (Collection of the National Museum of African American History & Culture, Gift of Bernard J. Kleina and Susan Keleher Kleina, © Bernard J. Kleina)

If it weren't for the cars and the police uniforms, it would be pretty hard to tell the difference, no? This is one of the only known collection of color photographs taken of the movement. Seeing these photos makes it all the more apparent how large an effect it has on a viewer to look at photographs of a historic event through an accurate lens. To me, one of the pictures that spoke volumes would be the photo of the cops walking alongside the same counter-protestors that just finished attacking the members of the movement. It shows how little has changed over time.

If you think about it, we’re in a very similar transitional period as we were back then. It is common knowledge that in recent years the phone camera has radicalized citizens into having a quick and easy way to record indisputable proof of wrongdoings or violations of which they are victims or witnesses. It’s a way to validate what is going on around them in their life, and give protection to hold people accountable. Similarly, during the civil rights movement, as cameras became popularized so did the opportunity to capture these moments of hate and violence surrounding them. It is also known that during protests and rallies, photography was strictly monitored in order to to give the government control over the way the movement was being perceived, and went on to be perceived for the years to come. Senior Policy Analyst of the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology project, Jay Stanley, called photography “a check against majority power and oppression.” Law enforcement has a long history of suppressing information in order to protect their image. In Stanley’s article, Suppression of Photographers During Civil Rights Movement an Important Reminder for Today, he goes on to mention many specific instances of early police brutality. One, that dates all the way back to 1963, details a story in which footage clearly showed several policemen allow their dog to bite a black Pastor peacefully walking by. When the cops realized a CBS cameraman had recorded them, they seized the film.

Stanley speaks of the famous Selma to Montgomery Marches and says that “As hundreds of peaceful Black marchers were beaten by police and possemen on ‘Bloody Sunday,’ a White man named Dan Doyle was on the sidewalk taking pictures, and the attackers beat him and stole his camera. Photographers were frequent targets of white mobs throughout the civil rights movement.” This sounds very familiar, given the fact that today, counter protestors and police alike both have shown distaste towards being filmed while caught in the act of abusing their power. Not to mention the fear current day protestors face knowing the possibility that they may be monitored in their daily life for standing up for human rights; people fear being followed, they fear facial recognition technology, and it seems that this is not the first time that cops have used these intimidation tactics. In a separate piece written by Stanley about the DC Police, he says that “There’s also a long history of such information being used in abusive ways against Americans peacefully agitating for a better society.” He goes on to acknowledge how the misuse of power and the abuse of body cameras has effected the job of a police officer. He says that “the purpose of body cameras is to serve as a check and balance on the enormous power that society confers on police officers, including the power to use brutal or even deadly force in some circumstances—a power that we all now know has unfortunately been abused all too often. The purpose of body cameras is NOT to serve as an intelligence gathering tool helping police collect information on people exercising their rights.” It’s obvious these issues have been long-standing and unwavering, while the country has done so little to correct this destructive dynamic as time has gone on, and technology allows for new ways around the system. Referring back to Stanley’s other piece, he goes on to sum it up all-too perfectly by saying the following:

“In the end, of course, photography was absolutely critical to the success of the civil rights movement. Without it, outside pressure might never have been brought to bear on southern states intent on continuing to oppress their Black citizens through the omnipresent threat of violence. Images of firehoses, police beatings and dog attacks, bombings, and other examples of that violence put the issue before a larger American public in a way they couldn’t ignore — a public that beforehand had been some mixture of ignorant, supportive, indifferent, and resigned to the treatment of Blacks in the south.”

— Jay Stanley

This, again, reflects back to the current state of the world. For some people who have not been affected this issue, or do not practice empathy regularly, it takes as much seeing videos of police officers brutally murdering an innocent black man in cold blood on their twitter feed while they’re drinking their morning coffee in order to understand that the problem exists. Nonetheless, the camera continues to radicalize people as the movement continues on today.

It may be hard to realize after years of imprinting falsehoods about American history, but many of us who were raised within the American school system developed a belief that racism is a thing of the past, having to do with no more than slavery and segregation. This belief system is much of what has contributed to ending up in nearly the same place. One thing they DID teach in school growing up is that if you don’t learn from history, you are bound to repeat it. So, because the truth has been suppressed for so long, it has bred ignorance & a younger generation of citizens with an altered view of our country's history, Black Americans have been put at a huge disadvantage and their history has been stripped away of all its rich color. We have to be willing to throw away the “American Dream” notion that we were taught that this country is built on; if anything, you could call it the “White American Dream,” because so much of what is going on today traces back to the expansion of suburbia in the 40s. The belief held by some Americans that we have “recovered” from racism after slavery was abolished, or segregation ended, is so misguided when, in fact, the government has just found more clever ways to legally factor a racial divide into almost everything in America.

The 1938 Home Owners’ Loan Corporation map of Brooklyn.Credit...National Archives and Records Administration, Mapping Inequality (courtesy of The NY Times)

Above is a visual representation of the discriminatory practice of “redlining.” If you’re not aware, this was one of the first and most effective, long-lasting ways that the government legally built a racial divide into the American real estate market. This photo is ‘The 1938 Home Owners’ Loan Corporation map of Brooklyn’, which exemplifies the way that appraisers would undervalue properties based on racial population and refuse loans/ funding in order to prevent POC (specifically black people) from owning property. An excerpt from this New York appraisal, which most likely went on to determine the district’s budget said, “Colored infiltration (is) definitely an adverse influence on neighborhood desirability.”

Bank Rate, an NYC-based consumer financial services company, explains on their website how the practice of redlining continues to negatively impact Black homeowners today due to the implicit bias of appraisers and the structural injustices built into our country’s real-estate market. Author and mortgage reporter, Zach Wichter, says that “the legacy of redlining continues to affect housing even now, because segregated communities received fewer municipal resources, which meant property values in those areas rose more slowly over time compared to neighborhoods that started off better-served.” To put it quite simply; lower property values = less home equity. The housing inequality in this country has been facilitated by our government and prolonged through disproportionate undervaluing of homes in predominantly Black neighborhoods, barring the development of public and social resources, and even growth of independent wealth in these communities. Bank Rate quotes Shanta Patton-Golar, VP of the National Association of Real Estate Brokers region 15, saying that “studies have shown a total value gap of around $164,000 between Black-owned homes and similar white-owned ones.” Patton-Golar goes on to explain the unfortunate reality that the only known way for Black homeowners to combat this is sadly to “remove the Black from the home to have it valued as a white household.” The issue lies with the majority of appraisers being white, and the issue will continue as long as this is the case. Wichter concludes by giving readers some solace in knowing that the Appraiser’s Institute is working towards remedying this long-standing issue by enforcing stronger ethics, as well as developing extra sanctions to prevent bias in potential appraisers. While this is a step in the right direction, a lot of responsibility for change falls in the hands of policymakers to radically amend the standing laws and institutions that continue to restrict Black homeowners & their communities.

We must free ourselves from thinking our government/ law enforcement is here to protect citizens, and acknowledge that they have not been held accountable for circumventing/ using certain laws to their advantage to strictly protect, specifically, white citizens. Author Richard Rothstein describes it well by saying, "A narrative of racially discriminatory landlords and bankers—all independent actors—has long served as an explanation for the isolation of African-Americans in certain neighborhoods in large cities. But this pervasive assumption rationalizing residential segregation in the United States ignores the long history of federal, state and local policies that generated the residential segregation found across the country today." In Rothstein’s book, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, he breaks down the history of American policies that have created the divided society of today, rather than accrediting blame only to individual acts of racism. Regarding Rothstein’s works, The Smithsonian Magazine says that “from the first segregated public housing projects of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, to the 1949 Housing Act that encouraged white movement to the suburbs, to unconstitutional racial zoning ordinances enacted by city governments, Rothstein substantiates the argument that the current state of the American city is the direct result of unconstitutional, state-sanctioned racial discrimination.” Below is an excerpt from Smithsonian Magazine’s in-depth interview Rothstein.

“The truth is that segregation in every metropolitan area was imposed by racially explicit federal, state and local policy, without which private actions of prejudice or discrimination would not have been very effective.”

— Richard Rothstein

I believe it is also important to note that this difference in portrayal of history could possibly also be a direct result of this lack of accessibility. If color film was accessible to white people at the time, and not POC, that only speaks more to the discrepancies in the way that access to resources have been distributed throughout the racist class system in this country. From the American education system, to the judicial system, housing, incarceration, employment/ income, health care- all of our government programs are modeled to benefit white citizens and oppress POC. Maybe the issue was the lack of proper wages plus the inflation of color film prices didn’t allow for POC to afford the luxury of this new invention. So, putting this into the context of the expansion of color photography and accurate representation of history, why did white photographers like William Eggleston, for example, easily have the resources to photograph in color throughout the sixties, enough so that he was able to develop such a large profile that later became the first collection of color photography to be shown in a major gallery in 1976 at the Moma? Pictures online from the civil rights movement are still in black and white in 1976, but Joel Meyerowitz became very well-known for his color street photography taken between 1962-1978.

So, why was a white man was able to exhibit nearly two decades of personal work before 1980, while the biggest movement to change he the trajectory of history has approximately one known set of color photos?

No matter how you look at it, this country was built on a foundation that has set up black people, and all POC, for a loss, and until we can dismantle every single system in this country, then we cannot deny the active racism and oppression going on around us. We must educate people, hold people accountable, and do our best to serve as a voice in the name of human rights. Whether you believe it or not, this is not a partisan issue. However, until we have accurate representation of history in schools, accurate representation in media of what the world really looks like around us, a government that protects all people not just white people, and countless more changes to our country and it’s citizens, then we cannot reach equality and the fight will continue.

-Jake Zach Sachs

#BLACKLIVESMATTER #BLM #BLACKHISTORY #JUNETEENTH