Capturing the South by Matthews Scott L.;
Author:Matthews, Scott L.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Danny Lyon, Eddie Brown, Albany, Georgia, 1962. © Danny Lyon/Magnum Photos.
In Lyonâs eyes, the courage and conviction of SNCC workers like Brown, their willingness to march downtown and face jail at the hands of Albany police chief Laurie Pritchett, or even walk up the steps to the courthouse to register to vote meant that âevery person in the ranks of the movement had already achieved a revolution.â Tom Hayden also emphasized the transformative effects social activism could have on the individual, which educated, middle-class whites who felt estranged from their true selves amid the materialism of modern America found appealing. âOn a theoretical level, you can say that we believed in wanting to make history and achieve civil rights,â Hayden later remembered. âBut there was something else: the middle-class emptiness of alienation that people talk about, and then suddenly confronting commitment. The whole emotion of defining not only yourself, but also your life by risking your life, and testing whether youâre willing to die for your beliefs, was the powerful motive, I believe.â When viewed in this context, Lyonâs photograph of Brown communicated an image of a personal, as much as a political, revolution that many young idealists like Lyon and Hayden found appealing. It was appealing not only for its setting in the Deep South, far from the âemptinessâ one felt back home in the cities or suburbs, but also because it involved an outsider in American society, a young black man putting âhis body on the line,â whose race, social commitment, and geographic origins made him the antithesis of the sources of white middle-class malaise. SNCC activists like Brown thus became mythological figures, and the Deep South a mythological place, for whites such as Lyon and Hayden and the college students who viewed Lyonâs photograph in their newspapers.20
Lyon spent the remainder of 1962 attending college and traveling back to the South to photograph for SNCC. The Friends of SNCC (FOS) group in Chicago had begun using his photographs from Cairo and Albany for fundraising and recruitment. Lyon also exhibited his photographs from the South in the lobby of a University of Chicago dorm. It was his first exhibit. âI think it made me a kind of local hero, so I got a lot of support in the environment I came out of,â he later recalled. About this time, a SNCC worker and friend of Lyonâs named Paul Brooks contacted Harry Belafonte, a key financial supporter of SNCC, and asked him to fund another field trip for Lyon so he could photograph the work of Bob Moses in Mississippi. Belafonte donated $300, which Lyon used to buy a plane ticket to Jackson. He then got on a bus and traveled 120 miles north to Cleveland, the middle of the Mississippi Delta.21
During his time in Mississippi, Lyon continued to create a romantic mythology around SNCC activists like Bob Moses who worked, organized, and lived there. âIâve run around after them, driven cars for them, taking their pictures, trying to make them more famous and more mythological,â Lyon remembered.
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