50 Years Later, Herbert Randall's Photos Put a Face on Freedom Summer By Jordyn Grzelewski If you ask Herbert Randall, 77, about his work, he’ll tell you he was just doing his job. He’ll tell you that he was just there to document the events of Freedom Summer, and that he didn’t put much thought into the story that he was telling. He’ll also tell you that after he took those photographs, he didn’t look at them again for another 35 years. If you talk to people who have looked at and studied his photographs, however, they will tell you that his work is unique and hugely important in telling the story Freedom Summer. “It was the simplicity of it, that has the strongest impact...It wasn’t in your face or huge,” said Emily Potten, a student at Miami University who has studied Randall’s work and who is producing a documentary about Freedom Summer and Randall. “He had no idea it would have such a large impact on our age group.” Freedom School library, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, 1964. Photo by Herbert Randall In 1964, Randall got a call from Sandy Leigh, a project director for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), asking Randall to go to Hattiesburg, Miss., to document the Freedom Summer events of that summer. As a black man from Long Island, New York, going to Mississippi was one of the last things that Randall had ever wanted to do. “There was enough segregation in the North,” said Randall. “And I didn’t need any more segregation. So why would I go South, to sit on a back of a bus, or to be spit on, or to go to segregated bathrooms?” Despite growing up in the North, Randall experienced his fair share of racism. Born in Riverhead, Long Island, in 1936, he moved with his family to New York City a few years later and spent the rest of his childhood and adolescence in the South Bronx. He recalled one instance of the more subtle racism that pervaded northern society that he experienced when he was 6 or 7 years old. “My aunt was a maid for whites on Park Avenue...So my aunt took me to her job one day. I was young enough that she held me by my hand, and we were walking down the street, down Park Avenue,” said Randall. His aunt pointed out the building she worked in, and Randall remembered seeing people walking in and out of the building. “I assumed...that is where we were going, into the place where people were going in and out. She kind of pulled my hand, and I wondered why because I thought we were going inside the place where she worked. She said, 'No Herbert. We don’t go in that way.' ” Instead, his aunt led him into an alley, where they went in through a side entrance and took a service elevator up to the apartment. “That’s one of my first memories of being treated less equal,” recalled Randall. “I had some respect for Southerners because they were more direct. You knew exactly how they felt. In the North, they had to disguise...what they felt,” he said. Despite his aversion to the South, Randall decided to take Leigh up on his offer to go Mississippi in the summer of 1964. So he made the journey to Oxford, Ohio, for the training sessions at the Western College for Women, and from there to Hattiesburg. Unlike many of the other volunteers and SNCC workers who descended upon Mississippi that summer, Randall was not ignited by a passion for civil rights; he was there to do a job, to document the events, and also to do work for a fellowship for which he had been approved. From his recollections about that summer, one feeling seemed to permeate his memories more than any other: fear. For the entire summer, Randall never ventured farther than two blocks from his office on Mobile Street if he was by himself. “People would shoot at you, and people would beat you...The local white community thought that we had invaded their state. And they were totally opposed to what we were doing in Mississippi. And all we were doing was...teaching people their rights as citizens of these United States,” said Randall. Before they even left for Mississippi, the group of volunteers training in Oxford were gripped with fear because of what happened on the very first day of the second week of training. “The day that I arrived in Oxford, Bob Moses told us in an auditorium that three people were missing and they were probably dead,” said Randall. “I expected, before I made the decision to go to Mississippi, that people were going to be killed. So no, I didn’t have a second thought.” And so by the end of his summer in Hattiesburg, Randall had seen things he would never forget and suffered from an emotional trauma that even today haunts him. “Mississippi took such a toll on me, that I wasn’t able to do much of anything for at least a year,” he said. “When you go through a daily fear...is this the day I’m going to be blown up? Is this the day I’m going to be shot? Is this the day someone is going to injure me in any kind of way? That has to take a toll on you.” Traumatized and bruised from what he witnessed that summer in Hattiesburg, Randall tried his best to move on with his life. Tried and failed to get someone to publish his photographs. Did not stay active in the civil rights movement. Got married. Had a child. Worked for the New York City Board of Education. Continued his work as a photographer. And for all of that time, nothing happened with those photographs. “The media at large, when the bloodshed is over, when the dogs stop biting...they’re not interested,” said Randall. One of Randall's most famous photos, of Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld from Cleveland, who was beaten with a tire iron. Photo by Herbert Randall And then, 35 years after that summer in Mississippi, someone from the University of Southern Mississippi contacted him about his photographs from Hattiesburg. Since then, Randall’s work has increasingly gained recognition for its unique simplicity and intimacy. It was the subject of Faces of Freedom Summer, and has been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, and the Parrish Art Museum. In September, his work will be exhibited at Miami's Art Museum as part of the university’s commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer. Randall also visisted Miami in the spring of 2014, where he talked about Freedom Summer and his photography. During those decades before his work gained recognition, Randall lived and worked in New York. He and his wife live on a Native American reservation in South Hampton, New York. He has a son who lives in Massachusetts. He served as Coordinator of Photography for the New York City Board of Education and as a photographic consultant to the National Media Center Foundation. He worked in photography in some way the entire time, and continues to work on projects even now. “One of the things that I find with his works, there’s a little bit more of an intimacy between the subject matter, the figures, the people in the photos, and himself,” said Jason Shaiman, the curator of exhibitions at the Miami University Art Museum. “And I think it’s very different because he was here during the second training week. So he got to know a lot of these volunteers on a personal level, whereas other photographers were coming in simply to document.” This simple style of work is also what drew Potten to Randall’s images. “His [work] is more simple and kind of sweet. He does a lot of photography just of people, daily life, people doing work there. It wasn’t violent stuff a lot of the time...it was just life in Hattiesburg and the training sessions in Oxford,” she said. “The media really didn’t document that. It was rare to see a black person and a white person in the same photograph. His work was unique in that way.” Potten recalled one image in particular that stands out in her mind, of a group of volunteers sitting together outside of Peabody Hall during one of the training sessions in Oxford. “They are so great to me, [because] it really just showed they’re equal, they’re people, and they were taken as people hanging out, rather than as black and white...He was brave and progressive,” she said. Photo by Herbert Randall During the exhibition at Miami, Randall will talk about his photos at the Art Museum on the weekend of Oct. 10 as part of his involvement in the Freedom Summer Conference that is taking place at the university. “I think it’s an opportunity. People will be able to gain insight on a personal level from him. It’s one thing to have a curator or historian write about a work of art or a photo,” said Shaiman. “But to have the photographer weigh in and give their feelings of what it was like at that moment, that’s really hard for anyone else to express. I think it will be a unique chance.”.