Picturing Resistance

October 15, 2020
Photo expert Melanie Light and photographer Ken Light document the electrifying history of protest in America, from the 1950s to the present. As the title suggests, pictures are indeed the heart of this book. On every page a photograph of protest is paired with a brief description providing its historical context. With the civil rights movement as a springboard, images of protests on behalf of racial equality serve as this volume's backbone, but its photographs also portray activists advocating for peace, gender equality, gay liberation, labor rights, environmental protection, indigenous rights, and more. Together, these pictures of demonstrations catalogue a polyphonic nation united by a commitment, as Melanie Light writes, to march and chant, testify and organize. Alongside iconic photographs of Rosa Parks seated at the front of a Montgomery bus and Jan Rose Kasmir holding a flower in front of a line of bayonet-wielding National Guards, it also covers lesser known organizations and events, including a 1975 protest against police violence organized by Asian Americans for Equal Opportunity in New York's Chinatown. A timely look at an essential American tradition.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)