Jill Freedman on the Poor People’s Campaign

Resurrection City, Washington D.C., 1968, Vintage gelatin silver print, printed ca. 1968 10h x 8w in JF229, Signed by artist verso © Jill Freedman/Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Hands like Shawls, Poor Peoples Campaign, Washington, D.C., 1968, Vintage gelatin silver print, printed ca. 1968, 11h x 14w in JF133, Signed by photographer recto; Signed, titled, dated and stamped by photographer verso © Jill Freedman/Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Policeman with Baton Facing Demonstrators, Poor Peoples Campaign, Washington, D.C., 1968, Vintage gelatin silver print, printed ca. 1968, 11h x 14w in JF136, Stamped by photographer verso © Jill Freedman/Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Poor Peoples Campaign, Washington, D.C., 1968. Vintage gelatin silver print, printed ca. 1968, 14h x 11w in JF057, Captioned, dated and stamped by photographer verso © Jill Freedman/Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Resurrection City, Washington D.C., 1968, Vintage gelatin silver print, printed ca. 1968, 8h x 10w in JF237, Signed by artist verso © Jill Freedman/Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Resurrection City, Washington D.C., 1968, Vintage gelatin silver print, printed ca. 1968, 8 7/8h x 11 3/4w in JF291, Signed, stamped and annotations by artist verso © Jill Freedman/Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Resurrection City, Poor People's Campaign, Washington D.C., 1968, Vintage gelatin silver print, printed ca. 1968, 10h x 8w in JF228, Signed and stamped by artist verso © Jill Freedman/Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Jill Freedman and Demonstrator, Poor Peoples Campaign, Washington, D.C., 1968, Vintage gelatin silver print, printed ca. 1968, 10h x 8w in JF130 © Jill Freedman/Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Resurrection City, Poor People's Campaign, Washington D.C., 1968, Vintage gelatin silver print, printed ca. 1968, 14h x 11w in JF279, Signed and stamped by artist verso © Jill Freedman/Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Resurrection City, Washington, D.C., 1968, Vintage gelatin silver print, printed ca. 1968, 14h x 11w in JF205, Signed, stamped and annotations by artist verso © Jill Freedman/Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Resurrection City, Washington D.C., 1968, Vintage gelatin silver print, printed ca. 1968, 14h x 11w in JF241, Signed and stamped by artist verso © Jill Freedman/Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Demonstrator, Poor Peoples Campaign, Washington, D.C., 1968, Vintage gelatin silver print, printed ca. 1968 14h x 11w in JF139, Signed and stamped by photographer verso © Jill Freedman/Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Jill Freedman was a young advertising copywriter with a serious interest in photography when, in 1968, she quit her job to join the Poor People’s Campaign. Before his assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had launched the Campaign to address American poverty and had asked poor people of all races and ethnicities, from all over the United States, to descend on Washington D.C. to demand that elected leaders support better jobs and opportunities. In April 1968, just weeks before the action was to begin, King was assassinated. Freedman’s grief drove her to join and document the PPC in Washington, as historian John Edwin Mason notes in his essay in Resurrection City, 1968, the new book of Freedman’s images from that period.

For seven weeks that spring, thousands of Americans lived in makeshift shacks on the Washington Mall in what became known as Resurrection City. Freedman was there the whole time, as participant and unofficial photographer. Mason points out that Freedman’s photographs “stand out from those of all the others” who photographed the encampment and protests because she stayed for the duration and built relationships that allowed her to show regular folks and real life, not just the leaders or the expected pictures captured by news photographers who spent hours, not days and weeks, in Resurrection City.

Her images and texts are frank and unromantic—“There were people there who’d give you the shirt off their backs, and others who’d kill you for yours. And every type in between,” she writes—but they show heroism and pride and defiance.

In another of the book’s essays, Aaron Bryant, photography curator of the National Museum of African American History, points out that Freedman “privileges a ‘Womanist’ point of view as a recurring theme throughout her series of images.” By documenting women’s leadership, she brings an important perspective to the history of the campaign. In one image, for instance, a woman burns a draft card, risking a hefty fine and imprisonment.

Freedman published her first book of this work in 1971. This new edition marks the 50th anniversary of the PPC. It finds American society cosmetically altered, but fundamentally similar. As Freedman notes in her foreword, “Always have been poor people, still are, always will be. Because governments are run by ambitious men of no imagination. Whose priorities are so twisted that they burn food while people starve. And we let them. So that history doesn’t change much but the names.”

—Conor Risch

Resurrection City, 1968
By Jill Freedman
Essays by John Edwin Mason, Aaron Bryant
Damiani
176 pages, 141 b&w images
$45