'Silver Rights' photographer to be featured in Brown Bag

University news

Knoxville photographer Ann Curry, whose Silver Rights: Photographs of the Mississippi Delta recently opened at Ole Miss will present a Brown Bag lecture today in Barnard Observatory.

The noon lecture is sponsored by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture.

The lecture also will feature an appearance by Connie Curry, author of the book Silver Rights. The book and the exhibit detail the struggle of the late Mae Bertha Carter and the Carter children, who integrated the school system in Drew, Miss., beginning in 1965.

"In 1989, my sister Connie asked me to travel with her to Drew to meet Mrs. Carter," Ann Curry said in a recent interview. "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."

The book -- which includes photographs of Drew and Sunflower County shot by Curry -- 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 Brown Bag Luncheon Series takes place each Wednesday at noon in the Barnard Observatory lecture hall during the regular academic year. The lectures are free and open to the public.