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HATTIESBURG
- Four years after its inaugural exhibition in 1999 at The University
of Southern Mississippi Museum of Art, "Faces of Freedom Summer:
The Photographs of Herbert Randall" makes its way back "home"
Feb. 6 through March 7.
To celebrate
its homecoming, the museum, along with University Archives, has
planned an opening reception Feb. 6 from 4-6 p.m. Also, photographer
Herbert Randall and Freedom Summer volunteer and author Jim Kates
will lead a brown-bag lunch program Feb. 18, from noon to 1:30 p.m.
Both events will be held in the museum and are free to the public.
The exhibition
of photographs – highly touted and widely covered at its original
opening, including by People magazine – has traveled the United
States since 1999 in such venues as the Parrish Art Museum and the
College of Old Westbury in New York. Most recently, it was displayed
at Stanford University in California and at the Georgia College
and State University in Milledgeville.
The exhibition
features more than 100 photographs that chronicle the struggles
and triumphs of civil rights activists and disenfranchised African-American
voters in Hattiesburg in 1964. During that fateful summer, a coalition
of local black residents, students of all races and voting rights
organizers worked together to secure the right to vote for all Americans
in the South.
According to
Bobs Tusa, a retired university archivist and author of a book published
in 2001 on the collection of photographs, Randall – a then-28-year-old
New York native – in 1964 met Sandy Leigh, who was the director
of the Freedom Summer project in Hattiesburg. Randall agreed to
serve as the official photographer for the project. He took 1,759
negatives of events surrounding the project; negatives he eventually
donated to the archives at Southern Miss in 1998.
"We feel
like this is something of a homecoming," said Tony Lewis, director
of the museum. "It has been four years since this important
exhibition has been displayed here. Many of the students on campus
and residents of Hattiesburg have not yet seen this exhibit, which
traces such an integral part of our history."
Prior to Randall's donation and debut exhibition at Southern Miss,
most of his photographs of the project had remained unseen. The
negatives are now carefully stored at the university's McCain Library
and Archives, which also houses a wealth of other materials related
to the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi.
Examples of
Randall's work are found also in the permanent collections of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Library
of Congress and other prominent American museums.
The Museum
of Art at Southern Miss is located in the Fine Arts Building at
the southwest corner of the campus. The hours are Tuesday-Friday,
10 a.m-5 p.m., and Saturday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Admission to the museum
is free and open to the public. School and community group tours
are welcome. For more information, call (601) 266-5200.
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