New exhibition in Atlanta documents Civil Rights Movement through photos and virtual reality

For decades, Black protestors have chanted “No justice, no peace” in demonstrations against police brutality. This slogan is also the title of a new exhibition on view at Hammonds House Museum, “No Justice, No Peace: Protest Photography from 1967 through 2022.” Among the featured artists is photographer Jim Alexander, who has been capturing the raw emotion of protestors since the 1960s. He joined “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes via Zoom with film director and producer Adam Davis McGee, whose virtual film series “In Protest: Grassroots Stories from the Front Lines” is showing concurrently at Hammonds House.

The evolution of a photojournalist in the Civil Rights Movement: 

“I was going to the New York Institute of Photography. I started documenting all the civil rights stuff that was happening in the North, African Liberation Days and of course the anti-war stuff, and I really got into that stuff. So that’s how I really got into documentary photography,” said Alexander. “In 1968 when Dr. King was assassinated, I said to Gordon [Parks] one day, ‘Gordon, the media is talking about, you know, we’re free at last, free at last and all of that. It doesn’t seem like it to me.’”