New photographs of Civil Rights icon Rosa Parks, taken during the historic Selma to Montgomery march in 1965, have been made public for the first time, offering a fresh perspective on her enduring legacy beyond her iconic act of civil disobedience. These images, captured by the late Civil Rights photographer Matt Herron, depict Parks participating in the five-day, 54-mile (87-kilometre) trek that is widely credited with building political momentum for the US Voting Rights Act of 1965.
While history often defines Parks by her refusal to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955 – an act that sparked the 381-day Montgomery Bus Boycott and ultimately overturned racial segregation on public transport – these newly released photographs highlight her sustained commitment to activism. Last Friday, participants and descendants of organisers gathered to mark 70 years since that pivotal struggle in Alabama’s capital caught national attention.
Released to the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery, these never-before-seen photos, taken a decade after the boycott, serve as a powerful reminder that her activism predated and extended far beyond her most famous act of defiance, according to Donna Beisel, the museum’s director. “This is showing who Ms Parks was, both as a person and as an activist,” Ms Beisel stated.
Though many of Herron’s photographs from the Selma march, featuring Parks alongside other Civil Rights luminaries, have been widely published, these particular images remained unseen. Throughout his lifetime, Herron’s numerous exhibits and books never featured them. Having moved to Jackson, Mississippi, in 1963 following the assassination of Civil Rights activist Medgar Evers, Herron spent two years documenting the era. His lens often focused not just on leaders, but on the “masses of everyday people” who fuelled the movement for change.
The newly public photos were discovered from a contact sheet housed at Stanford University, according to Herron’s 88-year-old wife, Jeannine Herron. She explained that they were not selected for print at the time, either due to blurriness or because they featured individuals whose names were not widely known. In Parks’ case, the new images show her seated among the crowd, looking away from the camera. Now, Ms Herron is collaborating with historians and surviving Civil Rights activists in Alabama to reconnect these powerful images with the communities they depict. “It’s so important to get that information from history into local people’s understanding of what their families did,” she emphasised.
Beyond the iconic figures, Herron’s work also captured the stories of ordinary individuals, such as Doris Wilson, a 20-year-old from Marion, Alabama, who was a frequent subject during the Selma to Montgomery march. Decades later, Herron expressed a desire to reconnect with her, stating in a 2014 interview: “I would love to find where she is today.”
Herron passed away in 2020, before he could fulfil that wish. However, last Thursday, Ms Wilson joined other residents of Marion at Lincoln Normal School, a college founded by formerly enslaved Black people after the Civil War. There, amidst an auditorium filled with Herron’s black and white photographs, people pointed out familiar faces and backdrops. While some images were known to the 80-year-old Ms Wilson, others, including those featuring her as the subject, she had never seen before.
One particularly poignant photograph depicts Ms Wilson receiving treatment in a medical tent during the march, her feet severely blistered from walking over 10 miles daily. In a remarkable turn of events, Dr June Finer, the physician who tended to her injuries, also flew in from New York to reunite with Ms Wilson for the first time in six decades. “Are you the one who rubbed my feet?” Ms Wilson asked, as the two women shared a laugh and an embrace. Dr Finer, 90, recalled being so focused on the marchers’ safety that she was unaware photos were being taken. Reflecting on the reunion, Ms Wilson later said: “I longed to see her.”
Ms Wilson’s eldest son, Robert E Wilson, 62, who was a young child when his mother completed the march, expressed his astonishment. “I’m so stunned. She always said she was in the march, but I never knew she was strong like that,” he remarked, having never seen the photos of his mother displayed in the very school she once attended.
The newly unveiled collection also brought validation to Cheryl Gardner Davis, who has faint recollections of her family hosting weary marchers on the third night of the 1965 march in rural Lowndes County, Alabama. At just four years old, she remembered “hordes of strangers” erecting tents on their farm and her mother and older sister mopping up mud from people using their landline phone.
It was only as an adult that Ms Davis fully grasped the profound significance of her family’s sacrifice: her mother’s teaching job was threatened, their power was cut off, and a neighbour menaced them with a rifle. For years, she diligently scoured the internet and libraries, searching for photographic evidence of their hardship, or at least an image of their property at the time.
Among the hundreds of photos returned to Alabama in early December were images of the campsite at Ms Davis’s childhood home. Having never seen them before, Ms Davis described the discovery as a vital way to shed light on the often-overlooked individuals of that transformative historical period. “It’s, in a sense, validation. This actually happened, and people were there,” she affirmed.
