In Covering Civil Rights, Reporter Enhanced His Words With Film

President Obama missed a final golden moment to award Bob Moses or Medgar Evers the 'Presidential Medal of Freedom.' Sure, who doesn't like Tom Hanks and Ellen DeGeneres but in comparison they are pipsqueaks...big disappointment...sad.

Claude Sitton's pictures and reporting are so impressive a person can only be disheartened by how slow our country is to acknowledge, much less correct, its own evil history. What a great picture of Medgar Evers and how little that brave man is recalled and honored today. Thank you, New York Times, for this perspective. How anyone can accept Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III as our next US Attorney General after reading this small slice of history is beyond me. The shotgun blasts and attack dogs of the 1960s are not far away.

what is truly amazing is, how the USA school system play such a strategic role in maintaining oppression against Black people, they schools with all their white teachers teach to make us unworthy and mostly invisible. invisible things don't matter, so cops and millions of white people prey on Black people as much as possible EVERYDAY; steal our culture and history and make us nomads in comparison to other peoples of the world, take our lands and resources including US, make sure that 95% of the neighborhoods where Black people live are WAR zones thus people cannot sit down and just live and think on how to make us better-everyday is a major crisis to the extinct that Black people run away from the things that benefit us absolutely the most Black Culture (we survive because of super culture ties that nobody can break other than ourselves, hell we made it through the rigorous white patches of Slavery, Colonialism, Gentrification of the entire continent of Africa,Jim Crow and the new Jim Crow solely because of our super strong culture), but we have to let our children know about the destruction of white supremacy to our being inhabitants of the earth, something that many of us have not done for the past 60 years or so, not just in Black history month but all the time--all Black people have to know about our continued struggle to just maintain an existence on this planet and it is because of white supremacy.

Back in my poor black South Side Chicago days if there was no photographic depiction of an event or individual appearing in "Ebony", "Jet" or the "Chicago Defender" then the event did not happen and the person was a non-entity.

this Afro history Ny times should be shared every day, not just one month of the year. but wow, to this. I wish my foster black parents would not have hid this beautiful history from me while growing up. we lived among the anglo saxon while a grew up. although understand why they did, it was disservice.

I am currently reading David Halberstam's The Children, an outstanding book about the young people featured in Claude Sitton's piece. It's like reading in stereo. Thank you to the Times for this incredible look back in time. Voting is so important to the foundation of our democracy and so many people gave their lives or put them at great risk to make sure we have the right to vote. How painful it must be for John Lewis and all the other Children described so beautifully in Halberstam's book to see how few people actually exercise the right for which they fought so bravely.

It is mind-boggling seeing these tools of the reporter's trade, when the typewriter and black-and-white camera film were state of the art in written and visual news communication, transmitted by US Mail or perhaps hand carried to the newsroom by the reporter or a courier. Today, these three items --typewriter, camera, bag of rolls of film-- can fit into a shirt pocket. The news recorded therein can be on the screens of millions of reader/viewers in the time it takes to draw in and exhale a single breath.

But with all this we still have racism, as virulent if not quite as violent, endemic in this country. America remains less a melting pot creating an alloy of enduring and increasing strength with the passage of time than a stewpot filled with ingredients that resist, refuse to associate, mingle or mix, let alone blend with those who don't look like, sound like or dress like "us."

The only difference between 1957 or 1967 and 2017 is, we get to see and hear this "news" only a few ticks of the second hand after its happening, if not in realtime. This is called progress.

The same tools used in the civil rights movement, the pen, the camera and the protest are now used on a massive scale to defend against encroachments on civil rights of all kinds. Let the power of 300 million smart phones with cameras, facebook and twitter accounts shine the light on the roll back of freedom in America.

Claude Sitton was a lion. He hired me at The News & Observer in 1976, and he helped shape me. When he retired in 1990, I commissioned a terrific story of Claude's career by then-NYT reporter Wayne King. Last saw Claude and Eva at a retirement party for another newspaper giant, Pat Stith. I'm struck here by the careful, dispassionate details in Claude's caption memos – of a piece with his steely reporting – and by his beautiful photo of Medgar Evers. Claude admired Evers and regretted that, after the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday was established, America seemed to have room in its memory for only one civil rights hero.

This is how terrorism played out in our Unites States. It was organized terror against Black Americans by violent racist cowards who rode at night, or covered themselves with sheets, and ran roughshod over local communities of color in an effort to intimidate. When intimidation failed, they took to lynching and targeted assassinations. See - Chaney, Goodman, Shwerner, for just one of many other examples. It took decades, if ever, to bring the killers to justice because they were protected by locals.

How brave were the people, who, knowing this, persisted in their fight for the vote - the first step toward a freedom we still cannot attain.

How disappointing now, knowing this background,to have terrorism be addressed as solely the realm of Islamist Extremists, while omitting Timothy McVeigh from the roster of terrorists who attacked America.McVeigh, who brought down a Federal building in which was a daycare center.

The dichotomy persists - the Bundys staged an armed takeover because they didn't want to pay a grazing fee and was left to work it out although they aimed their rifles at Federal Agents, BLM is castigated for protests, although unarmed. Go figure.

Thanks for the article and the pictures and the heartfelt reminiscence. Very timely and poignant as we still are making our way to equity and humanity,

That is a wonderful picture of Medgar Evers. And an honest account of photography when there was a more difficult skill-set involved.

I'd like to hear more about Mr. Marvin P. Carroll, a 27 year old electronics engineer for the Army who was denied admission to a conference held at the University of Alabama Huntsville on March 25, 1963.

Mr Sitton photographed Mr. Carroll in frame 3 leaving the center after the director Philip M. Mason denied him admission.

The notes do not state explicitly that it was a NASA conference or that the conference center was segregated by race, but the implication is plain.

For what it's worth, Huntsville was always supposed to be the "progressive" part of Alabama. 1963.

The assassin who shot and murdered Medgar Evers was a citizen of Greenwood, Byron de la Beckwith. It took almost fifty years to convict him regardless of his boasting about proudly having done it.

If only we had let the South go during the Civil War..how much better off we would be today..

As a former Life Magaizine picture researcher and current photography teacher, I am heartened to see this series published. There is so much to be learned about the history of our country from imagery and the captions that reporters collect. Especially at this moment of in history, it is vital to respect the work of journalists shining light on difficult situations.

Hats off to so many of the unsung heros and sheros who worked behind the scenes during this ugly era of our country's history. May the stories not be forgotten and shared by enlightened history teachers to ALL of our misinformed students in the classrooms of America!!

Indeed it appears history repeats itself, but this time the 'media' is in the public domain. We have the power to communicate directly with one another and show up on the streets quickly in large numbers. Hate and tyranny cannot win against love when it shows up and stands up for human dignity. So this time we have a chance to stand up, document the fake right wing violent plants in the crowd and really turn history on its head by exposing the haters. This is a different era and we have new tools to share our images without mediation from corporate media. Keep taking pics and video. Speak out, stand up, Instagram, FB Live, Tweet & march as if your life depends on it.

Claude Sitton was one of the greatest journalists this country has known. I was very young in the early 1960s and working at The Times, hoping to join him in covering the South. It didn't work out and we went our separate ways, but I admired him without reservation for the rest of his life, in particular later on for his work at the Raleigh News and Observer. I am glad to see the NYT giving him some due, if belated, recognition.

Jonathan Yardley

Undergirding these photos is racist white TERRORISM being committed against Black people for attempting to exercise their fundamental right to vote 187 years after the Declaration of Independence and 100 years after the signing of the 15th Amendment in America, while the Federal government stood idly by shielding TERRORISTS under the Constitution’s state’s right clauses while they murdered Black people with impunity—men, women, and children.

Part of the reason for “Unpublished Black History” was America’s attempt to hide the TERRORISM and TORTURE committed against Black people inside these borders, many which were committed by the world’s first TERRORIST organization and the one that publicly indorsed Demagogue 45 for president, the Klu Klux Klan.

Black people have experienced TERRORISM and it was not at the hands of the people Demagogue 45 is trying to keep out of the country at this very moment.

“…to create the country called America, a great many crimes were committed.” James Baldwin

I am sharing this on FB for my BFF friends who may not get the Times. Heavens what an awful and historic year. When one reads this one is less surprised in retrospect by the Kennedy assassination. The shock will always remain.

Wow, our very own Claude Sitton of Raleigh News & Observer.

Hello to Rachel L. Swarns and Darcy Eveleigh,
Thank you for these poignant images and for bringing us the work of Claude Sitton. I am wondering if you know of my father, the photo-journalist, Robert Striar. He had his own photo news syndicate, competed with AP and UP, in Washington DC. He published several magazines in the 1950's and '60's of the political and cultural life in DC. His work was on the cover of Life Magazine. He covered the March on Washington. Seeing Claude Sitton's beautiful photo of
Medgar Evers, I went back to look at a very moving photo that my father took of the children of Medgar Evers. He worked all hours of the night, developing his own photos, making sure, each one was perfect before being sent off to one of the nations newspapers or for printing in his Washington Illustrated Magazine. My father took many photos of Martin Luther King Jr. He went on to create art works in photo-lithography, wanting to capture the man who had given hope to millions of people. Thank you to these journalists whose voice we need to hear and whose images speak the difficult truth.

Journalism is an important, critically important, part of our democracy. Thank you Mr. Sitton.

There is something particularly poignant in both the notes and the iconic photographs of Mr. Sitton, not only because they are a testament to an important era in the not too distant past, but because this country once again stands curiously on the brink of repeating the same kind violence, experiencing the same kind of racial discrimination, and fighting for the same voting rights.
If anything, it is also a painful reminder of how far we have come, how far we have to go, and what we risk by going back.

Claude Sitton was one of my all-time heroes. I was a worker for both SNCC (Cambridge, MD) and CORE (Durham and Chapel Hill and Williamston, North Carolina), and along with Gene Roberts and John Herbers, his dispatches were a vital part of bringing the reality of places like Terrell County, Georgia to those who'd never experienced places like that firsthand.

I'd only add one other note: For anyone interested in one of the seminal collections of writings from that early civil rights period, I'd strongly recommend Anthony Lewis's "Portrait of a Decade", a collection of the best reporting from the Times in the years between 1954 and 1964. The original edition is available on Amazon at prices beginning at only $1.10. It contains Sitton's classic dispatch from Sasser, Georgia ("I'm telling you, Cap'n, we're getting a little fed up with this voter registration business") along with scores of others like it. It may be cheap on Amazon, but it's one of the most valuable books for content in any civil rights library.

Looks like we're heading back to those days, with states passing laws that say blocking traffic is a felony, or forcing protestors to pay the costs of policing their demonstration, or allowing a motorist to "inadvertently" run over a demonstrator who is blocking traffic.