"The Some People of that Place: 1960s Holmes County, Mississippi — The Local People & Their Civil Rights Movement" will be on display all of June/July 2004 (for the 40th anniversary of Freedom Summer) in Jackson MS at the Old Capitol Museum.
The museum is administered by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. I never would have thought, even three years ago, that I'd be so delighted with having a Mississippi state agency connected to my work. But times or I or both have changed.
I was seeking a central, preferably Jackson, venue for the time when many out-of-state folks might be in for celebrations/reunions. Not only is the Old Capitol perfect for location, but it's doubly perfect because my one jailing in my five Mississippi years was for marching in June 1965 (in support of the FDP challenge) at this very same Old Capitol Building!
I started looking for a Mississippi showplace in January, fairly late for a summer show. But it wasn't until the U. of Wisconsin-Superior scheduled the exhibit for Black History and Women's History Months 2004 that it got back on the road and available for Mississippi. It's been in crates at Georgetown U. in DC since 2002.
So I am pleased and excited that those who come in June and July this year will have an opportunity to see and read the 60 photos and more than 40 documents and text pieces that tell some of the story of the Holmes Movement people. It was in Mississippi in 2001, — a month at Tougaloo and nine months in Holmes.
The Some People exhibit was created in 1999 from negatives I'd shot in 1968-69 to illustrate the book my husband Henry and I planned to someday write. I'd never printed, certainly never enlarged to exhibit size, the images that were to document the incredible organizing achievement of the Holmes people.
We didn't even get to open the Holmes boxes before Henry died in 1982, though I started reading and working with them after that, fitting Holmes around my day job and raising our nine-year-old son. By the time he was in college in the '90s, I finally cleared enough space in my life to focus more fully on my 1960s writing and photos, our collection of papers and documents.
The 1999 photography exhibit, produced by the art museum at the U. of Minnesota Duluth, diverted me from book-writing, but opened great new visual possibilities: smaller variations on the Holmes show, a commission by a nonprofit that trains organizers, and this expanded touring exhibit.
Now in 2004, I'm finally writing almost equally with photography work. I've completed about one-third of a first-draft book manuscript, "LISTENING: THE LOCAL PEOPLE SPEAK ON THE MOVEMENT AND THEIR LIVES--Turnbow, Carnegie, Hayes & the First Fourteen: Getting Organized in Holmes Co., Mississippi, 1963-1967."
My first sales brochure — The Documentaries of Sue (Lorenzi) Sojourner — announces availability of prints, posters, postcards, and illustrated exhibit brochures of images from The Some People of 1960s Holmes County, from the Fannie Lou Hamer Series, and from Nature, explaining that I "focus on people and Movements whose struggle for social change requires noting and honoring and that I view nature as a Being similarly needing to be documented."
— Sue (Lorenzi) Sojourner
Copyright © 2004
Last Modified: March 13, 2004.
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