(photo credit: Paul Schutzer/Courtesy of LIFE.com; for larger version click photo; description below)
What appears above and below are never before seen images illustrating two major Martin Luther King Jr. events — the 1957 “Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom,” in which King delivered the “Give Us the Ballot” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial as well as the “Freedom Rides of 1961” (specifically the leg from Montgomery, Alabama, to Jackson, Mississippi).
Photographer Paul Schutzer covered both these major civil rights events for features that appeared in LIFE, but these photos were “left on the cutting room floor”.
These photos are reprinted at The Washington Note with permission from LIFE.com. The full gallery is available here.
GALLERY INTRODUCTION
It is the spring of 1961, and in the kitchen of a safe house in Montgomery, Alabama, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. looks tense, perhaps worried. As a volunteer bends his ear, the 32-year-old civil rights leader glances toward one of the 17 students hunkered down with him — fresh-faced college kids who, moved by King’s message of racial equality, have risked their very lives.
The past two weeks have been harrowing for these young people — the “Freedom Riders,” they are called — as they inch across the state on integrated buses, their numbers reduced at every stop in the face of arrests, bloody mob beatings, fire-bombings. There to capture the mood in the room as the group plans its next brave move — a ride into Jackson, Mississippi — is LIFE photographer Paul Schutzer, who covered the “Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom” four years earlier and had seen firsthand the kind of courage and determination King could inspire in his followers.
Now, nearly 50 years after these Freedom Rides and in celebration of King’s birthday, LIFE.com presents never-seen photos taken by Schutzer, tracking King and the nation-changing movement he led, from the monuments of Washington to the streets of the Deep South.
(here and at top of post) Photo of King in a kitchen, with student in foreground: “In May 1961, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King speaks to a volunteer inside a safe house in Montgomery, Alabama, that is providing temporary shelter for the Freedom Riders during the arduous trip through the Deep South. By this point in the Rides, the volunteers — young men and women, black and white — had faced brutal beatings, a fire bombing, and hospitals turning them away for medical treatment. Still, they remained determined to push into Jackson, Mississippi, with the mentoring of King and other leaders of the movement.”
(photo below) White men pointing towards bus: “LIFE‘s Paul Schutzer captures Southerners peering into the bus during a stop on the National Guard-protected ride between Montgomery and Jackson.”
(photo credit: Paul Schutzer/Courtesy of LIFE.com; for larger version click photo)
(photo below) Inside bus, girl sleeping: “As a Freedom Rider sleeps on the bus, a guardsman is armed and alert.”
(photo credit: Paul Schutzer/Courtesy of LIFE.com; for larger version click photo)
One wonders forty years from now what never before seen iPhone photos will appear from some of history’s pivotal moments.
— Steve Clemons
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