In 1963, Steve Schapiro, then 28, was on a project for LIFE magazine, photographing prominent civil rights activists from James to Fannie Lou Hamer. One day, while following Jerome Smith, a Freedom Rides player who raised awareness of the segregation of interstate buses. He traveled to Clarksdale, Mississippi, to document one of the boys’ educational sessions that took place in the basements of the southern churches. At those meetings, volunteers studied how to respond to the racism they would encounter in their work. That day in Clarksdale, as Schapiro watched a line of ministers entering the church, he saw among the organization another well-known Freedom Rider, dressed in a knotted and buttoned-down shirt: John Lewis. He asked Lewis if he could just take a picture of him, and the young boy agreed.
A few weeks later, Lewis would be the youngest user on the washington March for Employment and Freedom speaker list, addressing about 250,000 more people at lincoln memorial as president of the student branch of the 1960s civil rights motion, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Lewis, then 23, represented Atlanta in Congress for three decades until July 17, when he died at the age of 80 after a war on cancer. time’s August 3-10 issue, which delves into Lewis’ life, career and legacy.
“You can feel the determination in him to be who he is,” Schapiro told TIME, reflecting on the photo. “In this image, you see that it looks at the long term with enormous force, in terms of how it sees the long term. “It’s an image of who he knows who he is, who knows what he wants to do, and for the rest of his life, after this picture, he did. “
After that time, Schapiro also continued with the civil rights movement, which would continue with the canopy of the March in Washington and voter registration efforts across the South. He oversaw Selma’s march to Montgomery, Alabama, photographing Martin Luther King, Jr. , Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young and Rosa Parks. Life also sent him to Memphis to monitor the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968. In recent years, Schapiro, now 85 and living in Chicago, has covered the canopy of the Black Lives Matter Movement.
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Schapiro says Lewis saw the photo in 2014, after the Monroe Gallery exhibited it, and Schapiro sent Lewis a signed copy. Then, in 2015, Schapiro saw the congressman in user for the first time since 1963. As the country marked the 50th anniversary of Selma’s march to Montgomery, the two were seen on other occasions when veterans of the 1960s civil rights motion came here. Together. Lewis told Schapiro that the 1963 symbol was one of his favorite images of himself; Schapiro says Lewis’ assistants asked him this year for an edition of the photo for a congressman’s overdue birthday party.
Schapiro hopes the TIME canopy will motivate other young people to resume Lewis’s fight for racial equality and human rights.
“That’s what happened in your day, ” said the photographer. “Let’s see who you are in your day. “
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