The survey of Civil Rights Era photography called “The Movement” at the NSU Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale is filled with scenes of courage in the face of horrible violence. But one of the most remarkable pictures in the exhibit is about nonviolence.
The image shows a group of volunteers for the Congress of Racial Equality going through simulated beatings in order to practice their response.
“We were opposing an organized system of violence with a pacifist, Gandhian ideal,” says photographer Bob Adelman. “But to have a nonviolent demonstration you had to train people… They had to learn not to fight back.”
On Saturday, the first day of Black History Month, Adelman will discuss this image and approximately 150 others that make up “The Movement: Bob Adelman and Civil Rights Era Photography” during a 2 p.m. lecture at the museum. The exhibit is up through May 17.
The 83-year-old Miami Beach resident is a man of sharp intellect, impressive memory and an easy laugh, who might easily provide 1,000 words for each of the pictures he took across the South from 1963 through 1968. It’s hard to imagine a more evocative and entertaining history lesson.
As a freelance photographer for the Congress of Racial Equality, Adelman had intimate access to a wide range of figures fighting segregation and voting-rights restrictions, from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rep. John Lewis and Malcolm X to James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and Bayard Rustin.
While he may share personal stories of each on Saturday, it is lesser known heroes who still get Adelman emotional, from small-town preachers to the young people who braved fire hoses to help draw world attention to 1963 protests in Birmingham, Ala.
Adelman took a picture of that scene in Birmingham that, he says, galvanized the movement, and was a favorite of King’s.
“I took a photograph, which in the movement was sort of the photo, which is of the demonstrators standing up to the fire hoses,” he says. “They’d been knocked down, and probably 20 years previous, they would have just scattered, but they were not to be intimidated. The terror was no longer intimidating them. They stood back up and held on to each other.”
IF YOU GO
Bob Adelman will speak about “The Movement” at 2 p.m. Saturday at NSU Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale (1 E. Las Olas. Blvd.). Museum admission is $10, $7 seniors and military, $5 students, 12 and younger free. Call 954-525-5500 or go to MOAFL.org.