New Exhibit Focuses on Civil Rights Movement Images

And protesters being blasted with water in Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham in 1963, taken by Bob Adelman, a freelancer who worked for both magazines and civil rights groups.

JULIAN COX: It's a picture that's so much about the decisive moment in photography with these two echoing gestures of figures with their arms raised. And it has the grandeur and power of some of the great paintings of history.

I think it's one of the great photographs of the 20th century in America. It's pictures like these that really changed the nation.

DORIS DERBY, photographer/activist: I particularly like to have pictures of the children...

JEFFREY BROWN: One person moved to action was a young northerner named Doris Derby.

DORIS DERBY: The power of those photographs, with the fire hoses, the dogs jumping on young people because they were demonstrating, the police with their billy clubs, all of those influenced me to go to Mississippi, when I had just two weeks earlier declined to participate.

JEFFREY BROWN: So those photos really changed your life?

DORIS DERBY: I said, "This is something that I have to do."

JEFFREY BROWN: In Mississippi, Derby took photographs for civil rights organizations while working as an educator and community organizer. Amid the violence and injustice, she focused her lens on programs in which blacks were helping themselves.

DORIS DERBY: I was documenting not only the political side, but the economic, the educational, and the artistic side that complemented the political. And I wanted to make sure that the self-empowerment activities that the communities were involved in were documented.

We had so many leaders developing. The average person was looking for a chance for a change.

JULIAN COX: And then this is very unusual, as well.

Hunt's father, at the time a detective for the Birmingham Police Department, took numerous pictures, including some from that same day in 1963 when the water hoses were turned on young people in Kelly Ingram Park.

Hunt herself knew nothing of the photos and wasn't sure what to make of them when her father showed them to her shortly before he died.

VICKI WILSON HUNT: I knew they were historic. I knew that my father thought that they were extremely important. They were wrapped in envelopes; they were very well taken care of. They were almost private to him.

JEFFREY BROWN: As a girl, Hunt says, she, like many of her white friends, knew very little of the turmoil around her. The photos and then this exhibition opened up her world.

VICKI WILSON HUNT: I went through room after room -- we were invited to the preview with other photographers, and then we came upstairs, and looked at the exhibit, and went from room to room -- I read every single thing that's beside every single picture.

And the museum had to come and ask us, tell us that the museum was closed and would we please leave, because it was closed. But I couldn't leave, because I was just fascinated with this story that I had missed.

JEFFREY BROWN: The photographs get a different kind of homage in a companion exhibition at the High Museum called "After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy." Seven artists were sent copies of the photos and commissioned to come up with a new work.

Nadine Robinson created a giant sculpture made of stereo speakers, with a variety of references to the civil rights era. A shape based on the facade of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, megaphones suggesting those used by protesters, and, most of all, a mix of sounds from gospel music to protest speeches to water hoses being sprayed.

NADINE ROBINSON, "After 1968" Artist: I wanted to take these photos and give them voice, give them a sort of life, a life force, re-envisioning them in which they are not subjugated, but uplifted.

JEFFREY BROWN: That's this part of the piece, but then at other times you hear the water being sprayed. I mean, you sort of feel the pain, as well.

NADINE ROBINSON: This is sort of like a give-and-take, that you kind of remember where you're coming from, but also have the hope of moving forward.

JEFFREY BROWN: Viewers and listeners have a chance to experience the new, while, says Julian Cox, savoring the depths of history and emotion contained in the old photographs.

JULIAN COX: They're moved by the images because they have the capacity to unleash powerful personal memories and qualities of personal association in the way that not all photography can do, but this subject matter seems to be able to really connect to people in that kind of powerful, direct way.

JEFFREY BROWN: The "Road to Freedom" exhibition is in Atlanta through October 5th, before moving to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., in November.