And I Said No Lord: A Twenty-One-Year-Old in Mississippi in 1964

Afterword

164 afterword 165 whom I mention in the introduction, I will always be especially grateful. The leaders of the civil rights movement, and the students who participated in Freedom Summer, and all those, in the North and South, who supported them, have my thanks and deserve the thanks of the nation. Their like has not been seen in many decades. Back in New Haven, I had two official advisers and three informal ones. The former were Herbert Matter in design and Roger B. Salomon, in the English department, in writing. Herbert’s contribution was more inspirational and by example. Roger was the perfect critic: involved, patient, helpful, and encouraging. Without my knowledge he entered the project in competition for the Strong Prize in American Literature, which it won. I have always worked in a visual field, all of which are often misunderstood and underappreciated in our culture. For that reason, the Strong Prize, and my honorary life membership in the International Pediatric Nephrology Association for work I did in 1980, are two of my two most appreciated honors, along with the Rome Prize. My informal advisers were the great Walker Evans and two second-year graduate students in graphic design, Frank Glickman and Israel Charney. Walker was kind enough to look at my photographs as I selected them; in his early sixties at the time, he was mellow, understanding, and supportive. Frank Any project that has stretched over fifty years, even if forty-eight of them were dormant, inevitably involves a lot of people. I am reminded of film credits—there is a Mississippi crew, a New Haven crew, a Philadelphia crew, an Alabama crew. I am grateful to Yale for having had a Scholars of the House program, recognizing that there are individuals that cannot be satisfied, and valid and worthwhile ideas that cannot be expressed within the structure, however flexible, of a normal academic program. To the committee that accepted me, and to the program’s director, Paul Pickrel, my thanks. Yale was blessed in the ’60s with two fine chaplains it was my privilege to know: Rev. William Sloane Coffin, chaplain of the university and minister of the Church of Christ at Yale; and Rabbi Richard J. Israel of Hillel. They both supported me with their enthusiasm and with a loan. The last time I saw Bill, shortly before his death, he made certain to ask me if I had repaid it (I had). The Apicella brothers of Fair Haven Camera, where I loyally traded, lent me the 135mm lens I took to Mississippi. In Mississippi, I cannot reiterate enough my gratitude to the many people, white and black, who shared their feelings, their lives, their homes, and their time with me. I may have forgotten their names, but I will always remember their generosity and their courage. To the late Frank Hains, 166 accomplished what I had set out to do, the alternative vision I had tried to realize, and the mutually reinforcing value of implicitly rather than explicitly related images and text. Charles and Tom got it; as I read their reviews, the years fell away. The long history of efforts and rejections (at least fifteen times by commercial publishers, even with the help of an agent; three times each by the University Press of Mississippi and Yale). Under contract to the University of Georgia Press in 1995, I withdrew it when they would not print it at an acceptablec standard of photographic quality. In late 2011, when I was out of the country, a sewage backup in the basement of my office, where I kept my slides and negatives, resulted in these negatives —in a fire-safe filing cabinet with my important papers—being accidentally discarded. All my other slides and negatives , and all my contact sheets, were spared. It is not difficult to replace birth certificates and social security cards; negatives are impossible. By this time, six student interns, beginning in 2007, had scanned and retouched 117 of the original 3,000 negatives. Ironically, it was this event that catalyzed my contacting, once more, the University Press of Mississippi , and the University of Alabama Press, my last, desperate attempt before confronting the terror of self-publishing. To my surprise, Dan Waterman responded, and a deeply satisfying process began, and Israel were enormously patient in helping me with the original layout and shared their thoughts about pacing and scale that I still...