Civil Rights and the Promise of Equality

Volume 2 of Double Exposure commemorates the ongoing fight to fulfil the promise of freedom and equality for all American citizens, from the Civil War and Reconstruction to the present. It features powerful images from, for example, Leonard Freed's series, Black in White America, Ernest C. Withers's photographs of the Sanitation Workers' Solidarity March in Nashville, and Charles Moore's documentation of police brutality during the 1963 Birmingham Childrens' Crusade.

Aligned to Common Core Standards

John Lewis is a civil rights leader and has been US Representative for Georgia's 5th congressional district since 1987.

Bryan Stevenson is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative and a professor at NYU School of Law.

John Lewis is an American politician and civil rights leader who has served in the U.S. Congress since 1987. Former Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Lewis helped open Freedom Schools, and the Mississippi Freedom Summer. Lewis is considered an important leader of the civil rights movement and was one of the original 13 Freedom Riders in 1960 who road on a bus from Washington, DC to New Orleans, LA in an integrated fashion to pressure the federal government to reinforce the law that segregating interstate travel was unconstitutional. Lewis has been a staunch supporter and one of the original architects of the bill that helped establish the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Bryan A. Stevenson is Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a private, nonprofit law organization he founded that focuses on social justice and human rights in the context of criminal justice reform in the United States. Stevenson joined the clinical faculty at New York University School of Law as Professor of Clinical Law in 1998. Stevenson’s work has won him national acclaim. In 1995, he was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship Award Prize. He is also a 1989 recipient of the Reebok Human Rights Award, the 1991 ACLU National Medal of Liberty, the 2000 Olaf Palme Prize in Stockholm, Sweden for international human rights. He has published several widely disseminated manuals on capital litigation and written extensively on criminal justice, capital punishment and civil rights issues.