Mar 25, 2021 - Sale 2562

Sale 2562 - Lot 322

Price Realized: $ 2,500
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,500 - $ 3,500
(PHOTOGRAPHY.) Roland L. Freeman. The Mule Train of the Poor People's Campaign as it crosses into Alabama. Silver print, 8 x 10 inches; photographer's recent signature on verso. Lowndes County, MS, image June 1968, printed circa 1990

Additional Details

Baltimore native Roland L. Freeman (born 1936) began his career as a photographer during the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, and has continued documenting Black folkways through a variety of projects through the present. Eight books of his work have been published, in addition to countless photo essays and magazine work, and touring exhibitions. He is the founder of the Group for Cultural Documentation. He has been a research fellow at the Smithsonian Institution's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, was in 1970 the first photographer to be awarded a Young Humanist Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and in 1994 received the Living Legend Award for Distinguished Achievement in Photography from the National Black Arts Festival. In 2007 he received the Beth Lomax Howes Award from the National Endowment for the Arts in recognition of his career of documentary photography and exhibition work. These two lots are, so far as we know, the first of his prints to appear at auction.

On 31 March 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. launched the Poor People's Campaign with a speech in poverty-stricken Marks, Mississippi. He was assassinated the next week, but the campaign continued in his memory. One of the signature actions was a caravan of mule-drawn wagons travelling from Marks to Washington, evoking the legacy of sharecropping, poverty and institutional racism. Roland Freeman accompanied the Mule Train as a photographer, as documented in his 1998 book, "The Mule Train: A Journey of Hope Remembered." Here he captures a wagon as it crosses the line from Lowndes County, Mississippi toward the town of Reform, Alabama.