Mainstream Media & Civil Rights History: What's left out of the picture is often most important to the true History !

History from a unique angle
Photographer's collection offers candid look at Dallas during civil rights movement

07:44 AM CST on Monday, January 17, 2005
By MICHAEL E. YOUNG / The Dallas Morning News
In a photo dated January 1963, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. shares an easy moment with three Dallas civil rights leaders, everyone smiling, relaxed and open.
Barely an arm's length away, Marion Butts captured the flash of intimacy on his big, bulky press camera.

FILE 1998/Staff Photo
Marion Butts, who died in 2002, left a legacy of 58,000 photo negatives from his decades of work.
Five years later, on a bright and tragic spring day, Mr. Butts stood on the patchy grass beside a serpentine walkway as hundreds of people walked toward the Bishop College chapel to mourn Dr. King's death.
In his career of almost 60 years, few events of import occurred in Dallas' African-American neighborhoods that Mr. Butts, who died in 2002, didn't photograph. His legacy, 58,000 photo negatives carefully arranged in alphabetical order, shows a different view of the city's history.
"Mr. Butts was covering a side of life the mainstream press in Dallas wasn't covering," said Carol Roark, manager of the Texas/Dallas History and Archives division of the Dallas Public Library.
That alone makes his work, which arrived last week, an invaluable addition to the library's collection, she said.
But Mr. Butts' photos also tie in neatly with the library's collection of pictures from the estate of former City Council member and civil rights leader Juanita Craft.
"Here's a photo Mr. Butts took of Thurgood Marshall [then chief counsel of the NAACP] that meshes nicely with the Juanita Craft collection," Ms. Roark said.
Mostly, though, Mr. Butts' photos stand as skillful depictions of the people and places of black Dallas in a period that seems impossibly long ago yet fell in very recent history. And he had a knack for finding history in the making.
The 1963 photo of Dr. King marked the second of his several visits to Dallas, this time to lend his voice to efforts to overturn the poll tax that prevented many minorities from voting.
Seven months later, outside the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., Dr. King cemented his role as the nation's leading civil rights figure with his "I Have a Dream" speech.
Less than 90 days after that, the country's attention fell on Dallas again, and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
And another of the men in Mr. Butts' 1963 photo would emerge. Rabbi Levi Olan of Temple Emanu-El became known as "the conscience of Dallas" when he stood eight hours after the president's death and spoke of the "shame of a city" that had permitted extremism to fester.
The job of presenting that part of history now falls to library staff.
"Our role now is to sit down and put all of his identifications into a database with numbers so we can easily find photos," Ms. Roark said. "And we've started scanning these into our computer system so people will soon be able to look at them."
But given the collection's size, that will be a big undertaking.
"I bet we'll end up getting 4,000 to 5,000 photos into the online catalog," Ms. Roark said. "I think that'll be a pretty good representation of what's in there."

Marion Butts
Photos that Mr. Butts shot, such as the 1968 memorial for Martin Luther King Jr. at Dallas' Bishop College, were far different from what ran in the city's large newspapers.
For students and scholars, and even for people with a modest interest in history, the collection brings the past to life.
Certainly the big newspapers in town – The Dallas Morning News and the Dallas Times Herald –covered the growing civil rights movement in the 1950s and '60s, Ms. Roark said, but often with a point of view mirroring that of their mostly white readers.
"We've been scanning all of the Morning News microfilm into our system – eventually we'll have everything from 1885 to 1977 – and I looked up the protests against the segregated lunchroom at the H.L. Green department store," Ms. Roark said. "There were a couple of little articles, but no photos.
"Mr. Butts took this," she said, pointing to a scan of a single protester carrying his sign outside the downtown store as the rest of Dallas scurried past.
Eventually, she said, the library hopes to put on a major exhibit of Mr. Butts' work, "to document his career as a major photographer of Dallas."
At the same time, she said, the library hopes to fulfill one of Mr. Butts' dreams by producing a book of his photos.
E-mail myoung@dallasnews.com

source: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/011705dnmetmlkphotos.34489.html