CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/18/2021

Celebrate Martin Luther King with 'Leonard Freed: Black in White America'

Featured image is reproduced from Leonard Freed: Black in White America, 1963–1965, Reel Art Press's remarkable and timely expanded reissue of the Magnum photographer's seminal 1968 civil rights photo-essay. "Even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream," Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is quoted from his speech at the 1963 March on Washington. "It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream … that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: ' … that all men are created equal.' I have a dream that one day even in the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. … So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. But not only that. Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside. When we allow freedom to ring … we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old negro spiritual, 'free at last, free at last, great God a-mighty, we are free at last.'"