CAIRO, Ill. --To look at the new documentary photo book "Let
My People Go," you'd swear the civil rights photos came straight from Selma,
Ala.-not southern Illinois.
Among the images: American Nazi Party members parade swastika-covered signs to protest racial integration. A uniformed fireman sneers and gestures obscenely at black civil rights marchers. And a white city councilman dukes it out with a black man during a boycott of white-owned businesses.
Preston Ewing Jr., a black activist and self-taught photojournalist, shot the pictures. They document the long and relatively late civil rights struggle in his hometown-Cairo (pronounced CARE-oh), Ill.-a Midwest stronghold of segregation.
The Southern Illinois University Press on Carbondale's campus will release the book this month. The work encompasses 100 black-and-white photographs, essays, a chronology of local events and interviews with six of Cairo's black activists. Together, the threads weave a story of discrimination, poverty and hope.
The goal of the book, Ewing says, is not to open old wounds but to fill a gap in local history and help ease modern racial tensions.
"I hope readers see the intenseness of the conflict...and choose to make positive contributions to race relations today. I hope we-black and white-never have to go through something like this again," Ewing says.
He snapped more than 3,000 photos between 1967 and 1973. At the time, he presided over the Cairo chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and also filed stories and photos on Cairo in the East St. Louis Monitor.
"Part of photography...is being in certain places where...certain things are taking place," Ewing acknowledges.
Things like the suspicious jailhouse hanging of a black soldier home on leave, the formation of the vigilante White Hats, 150 nights of gunfire between police and blacks, KKK cross burnings, and rallies that brought black supporters to town by the bus full.
The town of 4,846, is located near the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers at Illinois' southernmost tip.
Years after the news deadlines, Ewing's photos languished in boxes. When SIUC photo history teacher Jan Peterson Roddy got wind of them, she convinced the modest Ewing to give them a wider showing.
"African-Americans are a traditionally marginalized community and have not had access to this kind of public history of themselves. I was interested in bringing to light images of this community.
"It became apparent very quickly that Preston Ewing had just an amazing store of negatives and documents on the civil rights period," recalls Roddy, who edited the book and is an associate professor of cinema-photography at SIU.
She and Ewing joined forces and called in SIU sociology professor Kathryn B. Ward to help. Ward guided SIU students who collected oral histories of a half-dozen blacks active in Cairo's civil rights struggles. Their recollections-carefully recorded to preserve vernacular-are sprinkled throughout the book.
More than two decades later, some still blame the movement for Cairo's decline.
Ewing believes otherwise.
"Cairo was already a community in rapid decline population-wise. Having a rich history...can be a barrier to the future. So many people here remember the way things used to be. They see the way things are now, and they go into this hopelessness.
"The challenge here is that so many things need to happen concurrently. We've lost population, housing stock, jobs and tax base. Our best hope is to stabilize the population and become a good residential community," explains Ewing, who now works on city economic development projects.
Despite the problems, Cairo is a better place to live than it was in the '60s, Ewing says.
"On the level of human dignity there's been an improvement. Blacks hold jobs they once could not get. And blacks participate more now in decision-making bodies," he says.
"I'm happy the book is being published. The history is now packaged under one cover to make it easy for people to develop an understanding," he adds.
Ewing hopes to create a Cairo museum next year where he'll display his photographs and other documents on the region's African-American history.
