The Black Rural South, 1966: Photographs by Julius Lester
"The Black Rural South, 1966" consists of photographs taken in Mississippi and Alabama by Julius Lester, Professor Emeritus of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies. Born in 1939 in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of a Methodist minister, Lester spent much of his childhood in the South during the 1940s and 1950s where he dealt firsthand with Southern attitudes about race and segregation. In the mid 1960s, he became politically active in the civil rights movement and joined the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) where he served as head of their photo department. "I focused on documenting sights I felt certain were going to disappear," he said. Lester’s photographs were included in an exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution and are part of the permanent photographic collection at Howard University.
Lester recently won the American Library Association’s Coretta Scott King Author Award for Day of Tears: A Novel in Dialogue. The Library will host a reception in his honor on March 2, 2006, from 4:00 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., on the Lower Level of the Du Bois Library. Refreshments will be served.