Spring 2025: Black in White America
Leonard Freed
New York: Grossman Publishers, 1968.
First Edition. Quarto, publisher’s stiff printed paper wraps.
An expanded edition, edited by Michael Shulman and Tony Nourmand, with a Foreword by Eli Reed, was published by Reel Art Press in 2020.
From its stark white title on black cover to its final text predicting riots in Washington, D.C., Leonard Freed’s 1968 photo book Black in White America is a blistering and prescient vision of race in America. Compiled at the height of racial tension and civil rights demonstrations, bracketed by Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington in 1963 and his assassination in 1968, Freed’s volume is a penetrating journey in words and images through a vast terra incognita for white folks, on the other sides of the tracks, from Harlem to New Orleans to the Gullah Sea Islands of South Carolina. As a young white New Yorker who had mostly been living in Europe for the past decade, Freed traveled the byways of race in America like a foreigner, with an air of skepticism or disbelief and a skilled photojournalist’s eye for telling details.
Black in White America, written and designed by Freed (1929-2006), will be featured in CPW’s summer exhibition Flashpoint!: Protest Photography in Print, 1950-Present. It is a dark study, a surprising montage of small photographs clustered six or eight to a spread, interspersed with randomly placed bursts of prose that serve more as commentary than captions. There are brightly described encounters, faithfully transcribed snatches of conversations, bits of sermons, and verses of spirituals heard in rural churches alongside lush black-and-white photographs. A sensitive observer, Freed makes no attempt to speak for the African Americans he meets, though he notes and understands their silent contempt for what he calls “white America.” He transcribes their daily trials with great fidelity, in precise and poetic texts and he enters the locales where they feel most comfortable confessing to him their fears, their anger, and their strategies for getting over in s social situation so overwhelmingly stacked against them.
