{"id":98475,"date":"2025-11-11T15:25:11","date_gmt":"2025-11-11T22:25:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=98475"},"modified":"2025-11-12T09:26:15","modified_gmt":"2025-11-12T16:26:15","slug":"through-herrons-lens-the-march-that-changed-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/through-herrons-lens-the-march-that-changed-america\/","title":{"rendered":"Through Matt Herron\u2019s Lens: The March That Changed America"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Installation view of I\u2019m Walkin\u2019 For My Freedom<\/em> at The Gallery at Library Square in Salt Lake City.<\/p><\/div>\n

In March of 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led a group of what started as 4,000 Black, working-class people and allies from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in a march that swelled to 22,000 and spurred the passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, granting Black Americans the equal right to vote. The march lasted five days, crossed 54 miles and gathered people from across the country to fight for Black liberation.<\/h4>\n

Matt Herron was there. A young photojournalist trained under Dorothea Lange, Herron moved his family to Mississippi in 1963 to focus his practice on capturing the everyday actions of the unfolding Civil Rights Movement. He founded the Southern Documentary Project in 1964, bringing together a group of six photographers to document the active and unfolding social change in the South, including the famous Selma to Montgomery march.<\/h4>\n

Now on display on the fourth floor of the City Library downtown, I\u2019m Walkin\u2019 For My Freedom<\/em> presents Herron\u2019s black-and-white photographs of those historic days. It chronicles this expansive story with under 30 photographs. It is a microcosm of the show This Light of Ours: Activist Photographers of the Civil Rights Movement<\/em>, featuring over 150 photos from nine photographers documenting the 1960s social change in the South, and which was originally hosted at the late Leonardo Museum in downtown Salt Lake City by the Center for Documentary Expression and Art.\u00a0\u00a0This exhibition unfolds as a visual chronology of the fight for Black enfranchisement through Herron\u2019s frontline lens. Capturing the intensity of individual moments, Herron conveys the struggle, the jubilation and the joy of a movement.<\/h4>\n

\"Dr.<\/a><\/p>\n

The show opens with an image that captures the innocence of the demand for equal representation. In two photographs, eight-year-old Samuel Newhall stands outside the Dallas County Courthouse in Selma holding a sign that reads, \u201cOne Man, One Vote. Freedom. Register Now.\u201d In the second image, the boy remains in focus while police approach to arrest him, blurred in the background\u2014an eerie foreshadowing of the violence to come. (It is reminiscent of one of Herron\u2019s most infamous photographs\u2014not featured here\u2014of a Mississippi highway patrolman, wearing a face of force and brutality, as he holds five-year-old Anthony Quin midair and tries to yank an American flag from his hand).<\/h4>\n

From this prelude, Herron\u2019s photos follow the march itself, placing viewers within the crowd, where we look at the faces of the people we are walking beside, shoulder to shoulder, chanting and singing in unison the freedom songs of ancestors. The sheer mass of the march is caught, yet by photographing individual portraits of marchers, onlookers, leaders and proletariat, Herron also conveys the vigor and vitality of the movement, at an intimate scale. Focusing on one face at a time, whether in the pouring rain or the beating sun, he captures the courage in portraits of leaders like MLK, struggling among the people, or the effects of the grueling 54-mile march on rank-and-file protesters; he shows the solidarity of white allies, and a simple farmer who steps out of the fields to walk alongside his neighbors, symbolizing how the movement reached into the heart of working America.<\/h4>\n

It wouldn\u2019t be the Civil Rights era without the white oppressors flanking the movement. The march moved through the \u201cCradle of the Confederacy\u201d and in two photographs Herron captures onlookers’ reactions of disgust as the protesters walk past their white picket fences and Confederate battle flags, and their hate and bigotry as they vandalize cars.<\/h4>\n
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Images of marcher Dorris Wilson (right) are juxtaposed against two images anti-marchers.<\/p><\/div>\n

Placed in opposition to this display of white supremacy taunting the marchers is a face Herron homes in on repeatedly, that of 20-year-old Dorris Wilson. Through her joyous reactions we feel the positive change coursing through the crowd. In one image, she throws her arms in the air, her genuine smile of joy and laughter reaching ear to ear. In a second photo, directly below, we see her tattered feet, her shoes crumbling in disrepair. The pairing forms a disjointed body through clever placement. It is adjacent to a print of women tending to the marchers’ feet, including Wilson’s, conveying the intensity of what was at stake, while bringing playful levity to the moment.<\/h4>\n

Even though photos are stills, Herron captures movement, arms thrown in the air and dance and marching forward. Even though photos are silent, Herron\u2019s images pulse with sound: guitars, singing, the steady beat of feet on pavement. The viewer can almost hear the chatter, the hymns, the valiant voices of leaders, and the chorus of thousands chanting together.<\/h4>\n

At last, we arrive in Montgomery, where Herron\u2019s lens finds King and Rosa Parks addressing crowds from the steps of the state capitol. The lens then pivots to a sea of faces, the collective action taking place that made this political change possible. On August 6, 1965, just a few months after the march, the Voting Rights Act outlawed post-Civil War discriminatory practices, like literacy tests and poll taxes, which had disproportionately affected rural black voters.<\/h4>\n
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The drive to get Black Americans registered to vote was as important as the march to secure the vote.<\/p><\/div>\n

The show thus moves into the next phase of the movement: getting Black voters registered and to the polls. In one particularly poignant image, a rural older woman ironing in her bedroom expresses disbelief, utter shock, and yet deep satisfaction,\u00a0 at the Black man in front of her, registering her to vote. At the polls, Herron captures Black hands signing registration cards or a man contemplatively staring at his ballot outside the booth\u2019s cubicle. Once again he focuses on the intimate moments, catching the profundity and silence, the breath of relief that something good can actually come when the collective is activated.<\/h4>\n

Tragically, Matt Herron died in 2020, in a hang gliding accident\u2014a hobby he had taken up in his late 70s. Yet his legacy lives on through these images that can inspire new generations to take to the streets, to engage in collective action to effect change, to fight for our rights jeopardized by the one percent. These photos document the power in the collective, what change can be had with organization and leadership\u2014 a book we could certainly take a page from. Today, it has come down to a class war over rights: to clean air, healthcare, food. To survival. The march from Selma to Montgomery was met with flogging, tear gas, and arrests, yet the protesters persisted. So where is our gumption today? These photos remind us of what\u2019s possible when people of color, the working class, and other marginalized groups harness the collective power of the masses.<\/h4>\n


\nMatt Herron: I\u2019m Walkin\u2019 For My Freedom,<\/em> The Gallery at Library Square<\/a>, Salt Lake City, through Dec. 5.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In March of 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led a group of what started as 4,000 Black, working-class people and allies from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in a march that swelled to 22,000 and spurred the passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, granting Black Americans […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1733,"featured_media":98482,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,14],"tags":[916,4772,4757],"class_list":["post-98475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exhibition_reviews","category-visual_arts","tag-gallery-at-library-square","tag-matt-herron","tag-protest"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/walking-for-my-freedom.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-04 12:31:26","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1733"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98475"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98475\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98516,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98475\/revisions\/98516"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/98482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}