Mae Bertha Carter was a foot soldier in the struggle for civil rights in Mississippi. The now deceased Delta sharecropper never sought newspaper headlines or received the notoriety achieved by other civil rights strategists and activists. Rather, Carter’s passion for justice and equality was rooted in a singular dream she shared with her husband, Matthew: to get their 13 children out of the cotton fields.

But more than three decades after she defied “Jim Crow” and sent her seven youngest children to integrate the Drew, Mississippi, school system, the University of Mississippi paid tribute to Carter, one of the unheralded giants of social change, with a photography exhibition in its Center for the Study of Southern Culture.

In January and February, the public viewed Silver Rights: Photographs from the Mississippi Delta in the Barnard Observatory Gallery. The exhibition recalled the triumphant story of the Carters’ struggle to claim their civil rights as seen through the eyes of Knoxville, Tennessee, photographer Ann Curry.

The show--consisting of 31 black-and-white images chosen by Curry from more than 300 she took in the Delta over a five-year period beginning in 1989--chronicled the power of the human spirit to endure trying circumstances. While individual portraits of the Carters at various stages of their lives seem as typical as those in any family photo album, a defining strength is added to the exhibit through juxtaposed images--such as the barn where Emmett Till was thought to have been murdered in 1955, abandoned cotton gins, city scenes, and the high school central to the Carter’s story.

Unlike most exhibitions, where the viewer is often left to read between the lines for meaning and detail, Silver Rights: Photographs from the Mississippi Delta offers the added bonus of being part of a wider, collaborative effort in the form of a book, Silver Rights, on the same subject. The photography project came about as a result of Curry’s traveling to Drew with her sister, Constance Curry, an Atlanta writer and civil rights activist who first met Carter while serving as a field representative for the American Friends Service Committee from 1964 to 1975.

“In 1989, my sister Connie asked me to travel with her to Drew to meet Mrs. Carter,” Ann Curry said in a recent interview. “I went to photograph the town and Mrs. Carter and her family. I didn’t have any project in mind. Over the next five years, I visited the town five times and took photos. We would travel with Mae Bertha Carter. My sister was doing oral histories of the Carter family. She had enough material to put together her book.”

Described as “a powerful antidote to cynicism and a welcome tribute to the power of faith” by Hodding Carter III, the book--which includes photographs of Drew and Sunflower County shot by Ann Curry on her visits to the Delta--takes its title from a passage in a book by novelist Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mother's Gardens.

“Although I value the Civil Rights Movement deeply,” writes Walker, “I have never liked the term itself. It has no music, it has no poetry. It makes one think of the bureaucrats rather than of sweaty faces, eyes bright and big for Freedom!, marching feet. . . . Older black country people did their best to instill what accurate poetry they could into this essentially white civil servants’ term . . . so that what one heard was ’Silver.’”

The Ole Miss exhibition followed an opening in Clarksdale at the Delta Blues Museum and showings in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Asheville, North Carolina. As part of the activities surrounding the opening at the Center, Ann and Connie Curry took part in a noon brown bag lecture January 19 in the Center. The official opening reception took place later the same day, with Carter family members and friends in attendance.

While the public saw “a sprinkling of history” and a view of the Mississippi Delta’s past in scenes like Drew’s now demolished Reno Dance Club, Ann Curry said her hope was that viewers would come away from Silver Rights: Photographs from the Mississippi Delta with another lasting impression. “I hope they get a personal glimpse of what a powerful woman Mrs. Carter was, and how she touched so many people.”

Michael Harrelson

Mae Bertha Carter (left) with her Aunt Bert, Sunflower River
Photograph by Ann Curry