Photographs of civil rights activist Rosa Parks were recently made public after they were discovered in the archives of Stanford University Libraries. Taken during the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, the images reveal a side of Parks rarely shown to the public.
After taking the photos, late photographer Matt Herron transferred the negatives to contact sheets, but they were never printed. Decades later, the sheets landed in a collection of Herron’s work at Stanford.
Rosa Parks attends a demonstration in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965. | Matt Herron Source: Stanford Report
“These photos are a chance to go deeper into the civil rights movement and see images Herron took that weren’t selected for print, and therefore reveal stories we didn’t know about,” said Ben Stone, curator for American and British history at Stanford University Libraries.
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For decades, Stanford has collected and archived images, documents, and other materials related to the civil rights movement. Matt Herron’s collection contains works spanning his career from the 1950s through 1990s. They include prints, negatives, contact sheets, and files pertaining to his publications, correspondence, and work with photography organizations.
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“What’s great about a library having an entire archive is that you get all that background material, like photo negatives, that can add new and exciting dimensions to a story, like that of the civil rights movement or the life of Rosa Parks,” Stone said. “There’s a lot to be discovered in 20th-century photography archives like this, and that’s what we’re trying to facilitate at Stanford University Libraries.”
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
