CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/11/2020

Honoring Veterans and all those who have fought for American civil rights

In 1961, while on assignment in Berlin, Magnum photographer Leonard Freed snapped this photograph of a Black American soldier—sent to Germany to defend his country, its alliances and its values—in front of the Berlin Wall. It was not lost on Freed that back at home, Black Americans were fighting, strenuously and visibly, to uphold their most basic civil rights. This realization would define the rest of the course of his career, and he returned home in 1963 to document what it was like to be Black in White America. His caption for this image: "We, he and I, two Americans. We meet silently and part silently. Between us, impregnable and as deadly as the wall behind him, is another wall. It is there on the trolley tracks, it crawls along the cobblestones, across frontiers and oceans, reaching back home, back into our lives and deep into our hearts: dividing us, whenever we meet. I am white and he is Black."