Still Dreaming (Swiss Stories 2014, by Simon Tanner) - Swiss Press Award

Die Wochenzeitung WOZ

Simon Tanner

Since the mid-1950s, the US civil rights movement fought against public racial segregation in the Southern states and for the integration of Black people as equal citizens. It pursued its goals through forms of passive resistance, including sit-ins and demonstration marches through cities like Birmingham, Alabama, whose authorities and police representatives were notorious for their racism. Nonviolence in the face of white mobs ready to lynch and brutal police violence against these protest marches was considered its highest principle. While the world is remembering Martin Luther King Jr., who brought the protests to the center of white power with the "March on Washington" and his "I Have a Dream" speech on August 28, 1963, the Swiss photographer Simon Tanner uses his images to remind us that, alongside the iconic figure of King, thousands of dedicated civil rights activists risked their lives every day. Annie Pearl Avery was one of these "Foot Soldiers," as were Rose Sanders and Paulette K. Roby, who, as a thirteen-year-old, began participating in the protest marches with other children at the forefront. The police, meanwhile, did not hesitate to set their dogs on teenagers and to wipe children off their feet with water cannons. Roby lost four of her friends in a bomb attack on a Black church in Birmingham. Tanner traveled through the southern United States to document how the civil rights movement has become etched in public memory. This includes a photograph of the motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on whose balcony King was assassinated on April 4, 1968—from the same perspective from which the cameras captured King's collapse. Today, the motel is part of the National Civil Rights Museum. Like many other local focal points of the civil rights movement—including churches and public parks—it has been converted into memorials. But even though Tanner's images demonstrate that visiting these places of remembrance is a mandatory part of many school classes, it is primarily "foot soldiers" like Rose Sanders who are committed to preventing these memories from being forgotten.