A Past That Won't Rest: Images of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi
By Jim Lucas
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About this ebook
A Past That Won't Rest: Images of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi collects never-before-published photographs taken by Jim Lucas (1944-1980), an exceptional documentary photographer. His black-and-white images, taken during 1964 through 1968, depict events from the civil rights movement including the search for the missing civil rights workers in Neshoba County, the Meredith March Against Fear, Senator Robert F. Kennedy's visit to the Mississippi Delta, and more. The photographs exemplify Lucas's technical skill and reveal the essential truth in his subjects and the circumstances surrounding them.
Lucas had a gift for telling a visual story, an instinctive eye for framing his shots, and a keen human sensibility as a photojournalist. A college student in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1964, he was on his way to becoming a professional photojournalist when Freedom Summer exploded. Lucas found himself in the middle of events that would command the attention of the whole world. He cultivated his contacts and honed his craft behind the camera as a stringer for Time and Life magazines as well as the Associated Press. Lucas tragically lost his life in a car accident in 1980, but his photographs have survived and preserve a powerful visual legacy for Mississippi. Over one hundred gorgeously sharp photographs are paired with definitive essays by scholars of the events depicted, thereby adding insight and historical context to the book. Charles L. Overby, a fellow Jacksonian and young journalist at the time, provides a foreword about growing up in that tumultuous era.
Jim Lucas
Jim Lucas (1944-1980) started photographing for the Jackson Daily News while he was still in high school. A student at Millsaps College when the nation was focused on Mississippi and the search for three missing civil rights workers, Lucas met and assisted film cameramen from CBS News that summer of 1964. He continued to cover local marches, pickets, planning meetings, and bombings until 1968. Serving in Vietnam in the Army Signal Corps, he was named Military Newsfilm Motion Picture Photographer of the Year in 1969. Returning to Mississippi, he pursued freelance film work and work in motion picture feature films.
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Book preview
A Past That Won't Rest - Jim Lucas
A PAST THAT WON’T REST
A PAST THAT WON’T REST
Images of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi
PHOTOGRAPHS BY JIM LUCAS EDITED BY JANE HEARN
FOREWORD BY
Charles L. Overby
WITH CONTRIBUTIONS BY
Howard Ball
Aram Goudsouzian
Stanley Nelson
Ellen B. Meacham
Peter Edelman
Robert E. Luckett Jr.
UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI / JACKSON
www.upress.state.ms.us
Designed by Peter D. Halverson
Photographic restoration by Red Morgan
The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the
Association of American University Presses.
Page ii–iii photograph: Demonstration. Star. December 22, 1966.
Copyright © 2018 by Jane Hearn
Photographs copyright James Lucas Estate
All rights reserved
Manufactured in China
First printing 2018
∞
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
ISBN 978-1-4968-1651-1 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4968-1652-8 (epub single)
ISBN 978-1-4968-1653-5 (epub institutional)
ISBN 978-1-4968-1654-2 (pdf single)
ISBN 978-1-4968-1655-9 (pdf institutional)
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
FOR JIM LUCAS
(1944–1980)
A LEGACY FINALLY REVEALED
CONTENTS
Foreword
CHARLES L. OVERBY
CHAPTER ONE
Freedom Summer, Neshoba County, 1964
HOWARD BALL
CHAPTER TWO
The Meredith March Against Fear, Yazoo County, 1966
ARAM GOUDSOUZIAN
CHAPTER THREE
Murder in Natchez, 1967
STANLEY NELSON
CHAPTER FOUR
US Senate Hearings on Poverty and Robert F. Kennedy’s Visit to the Mississippi Delta, 1967
ELLEN B. MEACHAM WITH A COMMENT BY PETER EDELMAN
CHAPTER FIVE
Conflict and Change, Bombs and Boycotts
ROBERT E. LUCKETT JR.
Editor’s Note
Further Reading
About the Contributors
FOREWORD
CHARLES L. OVERBY
LOOKING BACK ON THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT IN THE 1960S, WE CAN see clearly that America’s second civil war was taking place. The first Civil War may have freed the slaves, but it took the second conflict to make African Americans truly free citizens.
Not everybody, especially not young white Mississippians, realized history was unfolding in the 1960s, but somehow Jim Lucas did. His love of photography and his early desire to become a professional photojournalist attracted him to big events. He didn’t just witness the history of the civil rights movement in Mississippi, he photographed it. His photographs in this book take us to many of the seminal events in Mississippi, a state that was determined to keep its Jim Crow
institutions intact despite recent federal laws that forbade discrimination in public access, employment, education, and voter registration (based upon race, color, religion, sex, or national origin). Mississippi in 1964 was defiant of these federal interventions
that were designed to end two centuries of racial disenfranchisement and protect the southern way of life.
The white and black water fountains, the back-of-the-bus seating, the segregated public schools seemed normal to young white people growing up in a status-quo bubble in Jackson.
For a young white man like Jim Lucas to be anywhere near the controversial civil rights movement was unusual in the segregated South. I know because at the time I was also a teenager in Jackson. Although I did not know Jim Lucas, like him I had an intense propensity for journalism, an interest that would foretell my future. I also covered a few of the events featured in this book when I worked summers for the Jackson Daily News as a general assignment reporter. Jim was several years older than me, and he had begun taking photographs for the Jackson Daily News at the early age of fourteen.
That was a great time to work for the Jackson newspapers, because if you had the time and the interest you could find the opportunity. Jim and I were a lot alike in that we wanted to do a lot, and we were given assignments to go to events that very few young, inexperienced journalists could expect to cover.
I covered an organizational rally at a black church one night in Jackson. As the only member of the press there, I took a seat in one of the pews as there was no separate press area. As the rally got going, the congregation linked arms and began singing, We Shall Overcome.
I wasn’t a rally participant, so I declined to link arms and sing. This was not viewed favorably by the crowd, especially since I was representing the Jackson Daily News with its racist reputation. I was unceremoniously ushered from the church with the crowd cheering my ouster.
We didn’t know it then, at least I didn’t, but we were at the right place at the right time to gain opportunities of a lifetime. Unlike Jim, I did not have the immediate self-awareness that history was taking place in front of us. He recognized that these events were national news and that his photographs had the potential to make a wider influence. In 1964, with the Mississippi Summer Project beginning, and with the disappearance of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, the nation turned its eyes toward Mississippi and national networks, newspapers, and media services poured into the area. Hundreds of people (outside agitators,
according to the Clarion-Ledger and Jackson Daily News) began to come to Mississippi to register blacks to vote, to open Freedom Schools,
and to protest discrimination.