Growing Up in Civil Rights Richmond: A Community Remembers

The exhibition pairs oral histories with photographic portraits of thirty Richmond residents whose lives were altered by their experiences as children and youth in the civil rights movement. 

Their portraits were created by Brian Palmer, a Richmond-based visual journalist, whose work has been published in the New York Times, The Nation, and many other media outlets. The interview excerpts included here derive from much longer conversations conducted over several years by Laura Browder, Tyler and Alice Haynes Professor of American Studies, University of Richmond. Longtime curator Ashley Kistler conceived the project with Browder and has overseen its development.

Despite its wide-ranging impact, civil rights history in Richmond has received far less attention than its merits. As part of a larger, recent, and ongoing effort to preserve this history, the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue present the diverse voices and faces of a group of individuals who lived through and helped shape that era locally. Their personal stories, full of fortitude, resilience, and conviction, offer nuanced and often linked perspectives of a Jim Crow past, that contribute to a fuller, more faithful historical narrative of our city. They also illuminate many of the issues that continue to face our nation today. It is critical that these personal experiences, here and in other communities, continue to be captured and shared. They document a crucial time and place that lives on in memory but rarely in public view.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website