Black and White in America: Photography of the Civil Rights Era

In the long history of the African-American struggle for social justice and equal rights, the decades of the 1950s and 1960s were of pivotal importance.

It was also in this period that American photography came to a new maturity and cultural significance.
The 33 photographs presented in this exhibition were made for the purposes of both art and journalism, and thus operate on both a poetic and a factual basis. Rather than a “history” of the civil rights movement, this exhibition featured the work of notable photographers of the era, including Irving Penn, Gordon Parks and Roy DeCarava, who were informed—in widely varying ways—by ideas of racial identity and injustice.

The photographs were drawn from the holdings of the Hallmark Photographic Collection and the Hall Family Foundation, Kansas City, MO.