ABSTRACT
Movement historians insist that human rights and economic justice lay at the heart and center of King and Southern Christian Leadership Conference's agenda. Resurrection City is a living theater. It is the disciple of truth about the genocide, the racism, and other sicknesses of the American Society. But the problems are not in Resurrection City, because the city is only the theater and the actors portray how they and others live around our country. Jill Freedman's photographs of the shantytown appropriate, combine, and interweave various iconographic "conventions, traditions, and repertoires", creating a complex photographic narrative that visualizes the dire living conditions of the poor and at the same time depicts their creative strategies of empowerment. The photobook presents an interpretation of the actual protest performance, designed and choreographed from the perspective of participant. In the context of the post-war civil rights movement, many protesters strategically deployed techniques of black respectability to refute deeply entrenched stereotypes that, by de-humanizing African Americans.
