[ Silence ]
>> From the Library of congress, in Washington D.C.
[ Pause ]
>> [Background talking] Well, good afternoon and welcome
to the Library of Congress.
I'm John Cole; I'm the Director of the Center for the book
in the Library of Congress which is the reading
and book promotion arm of the library.
And we're very pleased to be co-sponsoring this program,
with the library's Prints and Photographs Division.
The Center for the Book was created in 1977, to help the Library
of Congress stimulate public interest in books and reading
and literacy and libraries.
And we are a private public partnership with the Library
of Congress paying our five salaries
but indeed we have raised private money from the beginning
to help support our array of programs and projects.
There are Center for the Books now in every state,
and I know we have a broad audience today and I challenge you to look up
and learn for the Center for the Book in your state which works
at state level in promoting books and reading in libraries.
Here at the Library of Congress,
one of our major projects is the National Book Festival,
which I hope many of you know about.
It's a Library of Congress project involving many parts of the library.
It was in its 14th year coming up, and this year will be held
on the National Mall, September 21st and 22nd.
The Center for the Book also is the administrator
of the First Young Reader Center at the Library of Congress
which is located now in the Jefferson building.
It's the only place that is focuses on the reading interest
of young readers, 16 and under as long
as they are accompanied by an adult.
One of the ways we celebrate is through talks such as this;
this is in our Books and Beyond Author Series.
It's a collaborative effort with other divisions of the library,
to show off books that -- new books that have been published based
on the resources or the projects of the Library of Congress.
And it's a special treat to be working once again with the Prints
and Photographs Division.
And I also would like to hold up to see --
for everyone to see a book that has come from the collections
of the Library of Congress, in ways that you will learn
about in today's program.
Today our program is being filmed, not only by the Library of Congress
for our website, but also by C-Span.
And we're very pleased to be able to share this program
with the entire country both through C-Span and through the Library
of Congress's website which now hosts more than 250
of these books and beyond programs.
Thus, with the filming, I ask you turn off all things electronic.
We will progress from the panel discussion
to if we have time a question and answer session and conclude
with a book signing out in the foyer of the -- of this Mumford room.
So you will have a chance --
if you don't have a chance for a discussion, and a question,
and answer period, you certainly will have
that opportunity at the end.
There also will be a special display in the prints
and photographs division of these photos
between 1 o'clock and 2 o'clock.
So, we have to move along so we can get to all
of these post-event features.
And to get us started, I want to introduce the mastermind
of today's event, Verna Curtis.
Verna is -- I learned today one of four curators of photography
in the Prints and Photographs Division.
I'm sure they're all here, but it is my pleasure now to turn the program
over to Verna Curtis, let's give her a hand.
[ Applause ]   >> Thank you very much, John.

I have to say that we're all in this together;
I'm not the mastermind [chuckle].
Today, we have Bridget Freed who is the widow
of the photographer whose work is featured in the book
"This is the Day, the March
on Washington," which we're celebrating.
And we have the distinguished Dr. Michael Eric Dyson
and we have Paul Farber.
All of them here with us for a special kind of conversation
which is how we billed this.
I will tell you a little bit about each individual quickly,
because time is of the essence.   And I'd like to tell you

that Bridget Freed was formerly Bridget Klook
and she met Leonard Freed in Rome in 1956.
They married a year later in Amsterdam where they lived,
deciding to leave for life in the United States
in 1963 just a few months before what would eventually occur
as the March on Washington.
And I don't think they knew it was about to happen when they came
to the states at that time.
Bridget developed and printed Leonard's photographs
for over 20 years, including those in his classic photo books,
"Black in White America."
and "Made in Germany," and the internationally
and claimed exhibition concerned photographer.
In addition she has had independent careers,
as both a clothing designer, and a real estate broker.
She now lives in Garrison, New York, in the Hudson Valley
and works fulltime on Leonard's prints and his legacy.
Bridget was born in Germany, and after living in the United States
for over 40 years, she recently became an American citizen.
[ Applause ]
Dr. Dyson is one of the nation's most influential
and renowned public intellectuals.
He's an essay contributor to the book.
He published over 18 works of scholarly
and cultural influence including, "Race Rules",
"Navigating The Color Line" from 1996, "I May Not Get there
With You", "The True Martin Luther King Junior" in the year 2000,
"Debating Race" in 2007, and April 4th,
1968 "Martin Luther King's Death and How It Changed America" in 2008.
Dyson's pioneering scholarship has had a profound effect
on America ideas.
Dr. Dyson is presently professor of sociology at Georgetown University
and cited as one of the 150 most powerful African-Americans
by Ebony magazine.
Dr. Dyson has been called the ideal public intellectual of our time
by writer Naomi Wolf and, "A Street Fighter in Suite and Tie,"
" by author Nathan Macall, pretty good names I should say.
You may know him by sight from his many guest appearances
on MSNBC as I do.
It has been my pleasure to work with both Bridget and Paul Farber
over the last several years to bring Leonard Freed's photographs
into the library's collections.
Paul M. Farber was Professor Dyson's student, at the University
of Pennsylvania and later his research assistant.
Currently Farber is a lecturer in urban studies at the University
of Pennsylvania and a PHD candidate
to having just completed his dissertation in American culture
at the University of Michigan.
Ferber's work on culture has appeared in the Journal Criticism
and outlets -- and other outlets, Vibe and Blender as well as on NPR.
He was named Turdell's Inaugural Inspire 100 List,
as a world changer, for his use of technology
in empowering social change.
He is working on a biography of Leonard Freed.
Let us welcome these distinguished guests
and learn how Leonard Freed's images of the historic march
in August 1963, changed the ongoing world wide struggle
for civil rights.   [ Applause ]

[ Noises ]
>> "This is the Day", how did this book get started?
You would ask me or many people do
and I say it was President Obama in his first term.
He said, "I am here because you all marched."

Not in America yet 50 years ago we did -- what did I think America was?
It was all things to me, my husband's home country,
my new Jewish family, [inaudible] Freed, Milton and Ruth,
Robert and Benjamin, Leonard's cousins and lots of Americans."
We came here from Amsterdam to photograph the black people.
I have no photo of myself, and of Leonard, of our seven-month stay
in America but sweet pictures of our four-year old daughter,
Erica Susanna, her grandparents, and cousins.
Leonard was very frugal; he needed all film for his project,
"Black and White America."
"Nothing got wasted" he said, I wish I had a picture of myself
and of Leonard at the March in Washington.
I only had my eyes, and these eyes looked, and looked, and looked.
I would say all of these faces
and when Leonard asked me how I liked the day,
I would say, "All these faces."
The Day of the March was America for me and then the speech
of Martin King -- Luther King, "I Have a Dream."
The speech was in the air, it moved like a wave
over the heads of all those people.
The voice was strong, a preacher's voice, it reached everyone.
I had never heard anything like this,
and I know I never will [crying].   [ Applause ]

[ Noises ]
>> What a powerful testimony to the multiple means
by which people contribute to history.
There is no picture of Bridget and Leonard Freed,
because they sacrificed every moment on film
for the betterment of this nation.
That is more than an anecdote, that is part and parcel perhaps even wolf
and war of the very fabric, of American conscience
that King wove a golden thread into.
His majestic oratory that day as Ms. Fried has indicated, is powerful
and luminous testimony to the ability of words to move us
of speech to redeem us and of rhetoric,
to call us to higher purposes, deeds done in the name of ideals
for which we are willing to sacrifice.
How appropriate then, that Bridget Freed testifies
about the magnanimity of spirit
of her fallen husband whose shutter bug, whose eye,
whose aesthetic glory has given us visual testimony
to the majestic sweep of the human soul when it seeks to be free.
Freed from its constraints, freed from the narrow obligation
of hatred, freed to see --
Leonard Freed even in his name gives us the powerful emblem of freedom
that we all seek at the end of the day.
I'm honored to be here with Ms. Freed,
and of course my student Paul Farber who called me into this project,
because when he was my assistant, he was my boss [audience laughter].
And he is one of the most thoroughly organized young people I have ever
met and I am as proud as a papa
to have my Jewish son [audience laughter] oy-vey -- right here.
[ Applause ]
And he has sprung from not only the loins of his family,
but from the powerful collective imagination of people whose love
and dedication mark his life, as well.
The Reverend Marcia Dyson, my wife, his mother is here rhetorically
and symbolically his mother [audience laughter].
I don't want to get into no baby mama drama [audience laughter]
here today.
These photographs are not only the emblem of the calm dignity
and the quiet beauty of black people and their allies who were in quest
for the basic, fundamental, dignity of voting or existing
without the artificial constraints of segregation.
That day when we listened, when they listened to the majestic words
of Martin Luther King Junior, echoing from that mighty mall
in Washington D.C., who knew that encamped five years later,
he would lose his life in Memphis that on that day this soon
to be martyr at the sun lit some of hope
and expectation would conjure the norms, ideals and beliefs
which were the foundation of American democracy.
He was reminding America of what it should be.
He gave America a blue print of what it could be,
and he called into vision the sweet and powerful romance
that the American people have always had, with the ideals
that nurture us, but which we have not always perfectly obtained.
And so Leonard Freed offers photographic testimony
to these people's dignity, to their quest for decency.
They were dressed in their,
"Sunday go to meeting best," at least in 1963.
In a nation that frowned upon their lack of humanity, that quarreled
with them as to the legitimacy of their claims
to be fully human these noble souls, marched to Washington D.C
to tell the nation that despite the repudiation
of their fundamental dignity, that they were indeed dignified,
that they were blessed with a beauty of moral purpose
that could never be exhausted by the infernal and hateful resistance
of Bull Conner, of Clarke, the sheriff in Alabama,
those in Georgia, those across the nation and indeed the south
who did not understand that what these people possessed was mightier
than money, was deeper than the rivers
that flowed beneath this nation at its founding.
They tapped into an eternal spirit a vigilant resistance in the name
of spirit, and of faith, and of family,
and of the quiet dignity of the American dream.
Martin Luther King Junior colored that dream powerfully that day.
His sweet cadence gave voice to a people who knew that at our best,
we belonged shoulder to shoulder, with the great figures
in American society that despite the refusal to acknowledge who we are
and indeed then were as people,
that our rhetoric would appeal to the nation.
Even a president one soon dead, another rising
from the heated center of the south to become our advocate
because the president was not in control of Providence
but there was a God who spoke from Washington D.C. Now
for all the blather of our Christian experience, for all of the rhetoric
of our religious roots when we rejected every little bit
of that evidence by our own behavior, that ashamed any God
that we could claim to be our own, these people remind us,
that ultimately the cosmic sense of purpose
into which they tapped would be enough to see them forward,
to force political, and social, and economic transformation.
And Leonard Freed both in '63 and in '83 has captured that resistance,
that relentless spirit, that edifying power, that can never be
if you will, put out by the forces of men and women
who failed to see the light.
I'm proud to be associated with this project and I'm proud to be
with Bridget Freed and Paul Farber to remind us of Leonard Freed,
who freed us from this memory and who has now documented
with ecstatic glory, the beautiful, calm dignity and the wise purpose,
of human beings when they are in search of freedom.

[ Applause ]
>> It's as much of a challenge, to be on a stage with people
who you deeply respect, who have been your teachers
in one form of another.
And to be here is just that in itself is a great honor
and it also sets up a challenge.
How do you follow Freed and Dyson [audience laughter]?
And I think about at the March in Washington in '63 when Rabbi Prince
of American Jewish Congress was getting up to speak
and he was following the great folk singer Odetta,
who sang, "Oh freedom".
And he starts before his written remarks;
he says quite simply "I wish I could sing."
So I summon him here and say thank you deeply.
Good day and I want to share a few perspectives
on Leonard Freed's work, and a bit about the history in memory
of the march as we're now
in the 50th anniversary year of this great gathering.
And before I do it, I want to make sure to extend deep gratitude
to a few individuals here.
Absolutely to Verna Curtis, who has been such a great supporter
of this project here at the Library of Congress, as well as,
her colleagues at the Center for the Book, and the curators
and the Prints and Photographs Division, thank you so much.
Diana Berlin, from Getty publications was the editor
of this book and had such a creative and kind hand
and brilliant hand in shaping this.
And I want to make sure to name her and though he's no longer
with Getty publications Greg Breton, who was there first crme
of the project and set us on our way, so deep thank you's,
and certainly to Bridget Freed.
You know, shared so much with me in terms of your wisdom,
allowing me to try to do my part to carry forward Leonard's legacy
and I thank you deeply for this opportunity.
So Leonard Freed's 1963 March
on Washington photographs are among his most elegant and animated
of a large body of civil rights era photography,
which fueled Freed's 1967-'68 photo text, "Black and White America."
This work as a whole captures the prevalence
of racial division in America.
The decade following the 1954 legal mandate to end segregation,
leading up to and through the landmark civil rights legislation


Four of the photographs from the March on Washington were included
in this book, including this one on the slide.
But the March was just one story
or a specific photo shoot amongst dozens of others
that included protests, parades, beauty pageants.
To understand the under pinning's the drive of this work,
is to re-explore some of its greater contexts.
I want to draw our attention to several anchoring images
to see this March, for Freed and for all of us
as not just an isolated event.
Instead we go through Freed; we live through Freed
to understand what led him to the March
and what ways it brought him forward in his work.
Freed was born in 1929 in Brooklyn to Russian-Jewish immigrants.
By 1960, he had been living in Europe on and off for a decade
and it was there he learned his craft as a documentary photographer
and wrestled with his identity as an ex-patriot American Jew.
During the time Fried was working on a book of photographs --
on a book of photographs focused on Jews living in Germany
and the traces and traumas of the Holocaust, he ventured to Berlin
in the August of 1961 to check out the scene where there was word
that a wall was cutting through the middle of the city.
With citizens of both sides fearing the brink of World War Three,
Freed wandered close to the boundary of the divided city.
Neither on assignment nor with a pre-determined vision,
who he ended out -- ended up finding and seeing the most
through his camera were American G.I's.
But here at the wall
in its [inaudible] days Freed snapped a photograph
of an unnamed black soldier standing at the edge of the American sector.
Freed's contact sheets from this trip;
confirm that this image was powerfully a single shot.
Taken at a middle distance in black and white,
Freed stands with his subject between a set of trolley tracks
that culminate into the imposed boundary of the wall behind them.
This encounter haunted Freed; it set him off course
and beckoned his return from exile to come back to America
to confront segregation and racism.
This image would end up being the first photograph in,
"Black and White America."
And as a notation in the book, Freed sets this
out as its point of departure.
He writes "We, he and I two Americans,
we meet silently and we part silently.
Impregnable and as deadly as the wall behind him is another wall,
its there on the Charlie traps that crawls the cobble stones,
across the frontiers and oceans, reaching back home,
back into our lives and deep
into our hearts dividing us wherever we meet.
I am white and he is black."
Setting out from this point, Freed aimed to represent
and encroach upon America's racial buffers
because after this opening image with its multiple boundaries,
Freed would vary his own perspective.
Perspective being that measured distance between a photographer
and a subject, to approach and acknowledge their humanity
and their shared existence.
He photographed many African-American subjects
in his project and also whites too,
embedded within one inter-connected system of race.
And he does so by capturing and representing his subject's fields
of vision, what they see, how they see each other
to make visible the terms and conditions
of a segregated color line society.
In the summer of '63, Freed and his family ventured back to America.
He photographed in the Boroughs of New York City and when you look back
through the contact sheets of this period,
the traces of the March begin to emerge and you see the button
with the hand shaking, closely in there
as the March's headquarters were centered in New York.
Leonard and Bridget Freed marked off several days for the event.
On August 27th, they drove down and camped outside the city.
On August 28th, they arrived in Washington D.C at dawn.
Freed began his day on a periphery of the National Mall,
capturing scenes on his handheld like a camera.
He walked from the base of the Washington monument,
to the boundaries outside of the White House,
and to the street surrounding Ford's Theatre.
Several blocks from the epi-center of the march, Fried captured some
of the first photographs of the day under a sign that read,
"House where Lincoln Died."   >> Wow.

>> Freed made photographs of passers by as they crossed
on another's paths, he envisioned this foot traffic as a prelude
to the later gathering at the Lincoln Memorial because on
that day, Freed was tapping into the deeper currents of historical memory
through on the spot studies
of inter-personal geometry and geography.

Freed saw images in which he could bring the marchers and the layers
of their social landscape in architecture into a shared frame.
To see this day from the panoramic perspective was also the ability
to pay attention to a crowd of individuals, with faces and really
to walk alongside and amongst them.
The day offered Freed a spectacle not to marvel from a far
or at a fixed distance,
but to explore the March at its ground level.
Freed meandered through multitudes on the mall
and the resulting images attest to his thoughtful photographic eye
as well as his active footwork throughout the day.
But if we've returned to thinking about the role of Lincoln
and how Freed invoked him, 100 years in eight months
after the Emancipation Proclamation, we see one of the only full shots
of the statue of the former president included, in this work.
It happens to be the same frame which is the only photograph
of the day's keynote speaker, Dr. Martin Luther King.
Much of the March on Washington's iconography features King either
up close at the podium or with a faceless crowd behind him.
But here, the leader and the former president, from a far,
can both be seen in a distance atmospheric and collective shop.
As King speaks, Freed also pivots capturing both front and back shots
of the crowd, with thousands of marchers separating Freed
and King with Lincoln behind him.
This image serves as a complex and collective portrait of the March
on Washington at the Lincoln memorial.

Within a year, Freed crossed paths with King,
as he photographed the leader
in a Baltimore street parade on October 31st, 1964.
Freed had gone back to Europe and then returned again,
and King himself had just gotten back from Europe.
And on this trip it was announced
that he would receive the Nobel Peace Prize
and this was the first public gathering in his honor.
Freed devoted a full day to photographing King in Baltimore,
including at a parade honoring him
and then a speech in a local synagogue.
This photograph from the parade is included in,
"Black and White America," and has taken on prominent status
in of itself, a crop diversion of King's hand,
with the parade goers nearby as the cover
of [inaudible] branches, pillars of fire.
King is definitely the center piece of this photograph,
but like with the March images, we need to think
about how Freed accounts for the crowd around the man, and again,
Freed's potential place within this crowd.
We can consider where Freed was standing, was he close enough
to reach out and touch the car or touch King,
or as you see an arm reaching around King, touch Bayard Rustin,
who in another frame is pictured to King's left.

But when we consider the deliberate inclusion of a blurred face
on the right had side of this image, we have to take a step back
and really consider whether Leonard was close, what his perspective was,
and if we think of them as part of the scene or being in its way.
This was deliberate of course, Freed fully believed in printing
and accounting for photographs all the way
to the frame with no cropping.
And unlike the black soldier in Berlin, this is not a single shot
but shows him out of several frames in perspectives.
Freed is part of this scene and in the way,
he reminds us of the photographs power to mark social distances
between Freed and King, between King and collectives around him
but to represent these divisions, to challenge them and to remind us
of the persuasive power of co-existence.
There's more to say about Freed's approach to photographing King
in 1965 as he follows into Alabama
and especially after his assassination.
We can think about King as being an on-going subject of Freed's work.
And this is a shot, included in this is the day
of the Commemorative 20th Anniversary March.
And here we get a sense of a call to galvanize around King's image
who we also had, his absence truly marked again.

And as Dr. Dyson has brilliantly
and powerfully written how April 4th 1968 truly changed America,
we get a sense of that day cascading forward and Freed reminds us
to think about King and think about his collectives.

As we close, I want to think about and put forward some of my hopes
for this is the day and to do a small part
to carry forward the history and memory of the March on Washington
to summon a few significant names that we want present here with us.
While King's dream is extensively excerpt and echoed and envisioned
and properly so, it serves as the iconic memory of the March.
But I also hope Leonard Freed's photographs remind us
to revisit the full message that King put forth...
>> Yeah.
>> ...and to seek out more of the stories
of the 250,000 plus marchers, these veterans
of the civil rights movement, and all those in their home towns
who they impacted, and all those inspired from that point
to fully understand the March on Washington
as the greatest gathering towards democracy on American soil
and to understand it as a noble blue print of social change
that we still have with us.
In other words, to see the day of the March on Washington August 28th,
1963 as a living archive and to see this book as one
of many potential tools of thought.   There are many names to name,

more I hope as we approach the 50th anniversary this August
but I offer a few now.
I say Carol Corson, my first and second grade teacher in Philadelphia
who attended the March on Washington.
Ms. Corson was a white Quaker woman and she shared stories
with us about her time there.
And what she put forth to all of us had to do
with understanding what your convictions are
and being not just present with them, but being present
with other people in sharing them.
Of course, we say the name Dr. Martin Luther King our American
genius and prophet whose words and action deserve on-going illumination
and critical exploration in complex consideration.
Julian Bond, a young leader and participant in the March
who has carried forward the spirit of this gathering
and brought forward the mantle
of the civil rights movement along lines of race, class, gender,
sexual orientation and it stays
as a moral compass and [inaudible] for us.
Though this day was triumphant, there after remain the reality
of systematic forms of racial hate and violence.
So this year as we happily mark the 50th anniversary of the March,
a month later we'll also mourn five decades since the brutal bombing
of the 16th Street Baptist church in Birmingham,
where children Addie May Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carol Robertson
and Denise Mcnaire were murdered.
They too deserve our commemorative consideration this year.
And our hearts are still heavy with the loss last month
of Hadea Pennington, another young woman of color from Chicago
who was gunned down as another victim in the city's epidemic
of violence, just days after returning from marching here in D.C
for an inaugural parade for the inauguration of Barrack Obama.
We bring Hadea forward because even as a National Mall is the space
of healing, the symbolic justice granted for those of us go
to it can only be guaranteed further with greater forms
of actions beyond the maps -- beyond the Mall's map boundaries.
To carry us forward through tragedy and toward transformation,
we say the names of Dr. Michael Eric Dyson and Reverend Marcia Dyson.
Scholars and leaders like them, they have taught me and so many others
so much about intellectual inquiry that flows through the head
and the heart and always between peoples.
To the 250,000 attendees
of the March whose names we don't know well enough,
we hope to know more of you.
We want to hear your stories and we want to be able to both record them
and speak them out ourselves, as they'll nourish both our history,
as well as our path wades forward.   And finally Leonard Freed...

>> Right.
>> ...whose photographs from the March
on Washington affirm the profound beauty and historical significance
of the gathering as they frame collective action
and democratic transformation.
In Leonard's memory and with his photographs once in the past
and informing our futures, we say his name, Leonard Freed
and express our gratitude for all of his contributions.
"This is the day".   Thank you.

[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.   [ Silence ]