Skip to footer

Bob Adelman brought tensions of civil rights movement into US living rooms

Photographer Bob Adelman's work depicted the magnitude of segregation in the Deep South during the civil rights movement.

|
J Pat Carter/AP/File
Bob Adelman sits in his Miami Beach, Fla., home, Jan. 9, 2014. Mr. Adelman volunteered his services as a photographer to the Congress of Racial Equality, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and other civil rights organizations in the 1960s. His work granted him unique access to the movement’s most important events and figures. Adelman died at his Miami Beach home Saturday.

For many white Americans nestled into cozy suburbs of the 1960s, the civil rights movement was something of foreign concept, a far-off conflict waged in distant communities. Freelance photographer Bob Adelman brought those tensions directly into US living rooms with his dispatches from the Deep South. 

The mission to bring the images of the black American struggle into white communities was personal for Mr. Adelman. Born in 1931 and raised in a Jewish community in Queens, N.Y., Adelman could not recall meeting a single black person until he was a teenager, he told Associated Press in a 2014 interview.

When boycotts and mass marches began in the Deep South, he didn't understand why the growing movement wasn't getting America's full attention.

"When the movement started, I was very, very moved by the first people sitting at lunch counters. It wasn't a front-page story, the whole nation wasn't riveted by it," Adelman told AP.

As a volunteer for the Congress of Racial Equality, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and other civil rights organizations, Adelman was able to gain access to some of the most prominent civil rights leaders of the time, including the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Some of his most famous shots were close-ups of Dr. King, including now-iconic shots of King delivering this "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial and marching from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., alongside his wife.

Adelman took a particular interest in depicting the magnitude of segregation, with sweeping shots of large groups of descendants of slaves marching together across landscapes marked by signs telling them where they did and did not belong.

"I thought this using your body to try to change things, whether you tried to vote or went to the bathroom or you were trying to go into a movie theater or whatever — that was inescapable and it was I guess very, very provocative and confrontational," Adelman told AP.

As photographer, he also covered several other social and political issues including the war on poverty, the women's movement, the gay rights movement, and public health issues.

He also covered pop art including the works of popular artists such as, Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, and Roy Lichtenstein. He published more than a dozen books, including one of work by Jacques Lowe, President John F. Kennedy's personal photographer, whose negatives were lost in the collapse of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

Adelman died at his home on Miami Beach Saturday afternoon. His legacy lives on through his historic photographs.

This report contains material from the Associated Press.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Bob Adelman brought tensions of civil rights movement into US living rooms
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2016/0322/Bob-Adelman-brought-tensions-of-civil-rights-movement-into-US-living-rooms
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe