Freedom: A Photographic History of the African American Struggle

"It might be slightly unusual to pick a photographic book but this really is a striking book. What makes it work so well is that the early decades of photography in America overlap with the last years of slavery. So starting in the 1840s it charts the experiences of African-Americans from them being regarded as property to their rise out of slavery, Jim Crow and oppression. The genius of this book, in my view, is that it intersperses positive pictures of the long struggle for civil rights and equality with really shocking images. It never allows you to escape from the brutality of the American racial system. The story of lynching is one of the most important and central stories of the African-American experience in the years after 1865 and the end of slavery. And there are repeated pictures of lynchings – those ‘strange fruit’ images of black men hanging from trees. They are truly shocking partly because you keep thinking, as you move through the book and get into the 1920s and 1930s, surely we’re past that, yet you turn a page and there is another photo of a lynching. It shows just how organised, vicious and concerted the terror ranged against African-Americans was during that century in the darkness from the end of slavery in the 1860s to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. To me this book, more than any other, captures what it was that African-Americans were struggling against."