Herbert Randall, Untitled (Hattiesburg, Mississippi, Freedom Summer), 1964

Narrator: In the summer of 1964, Herb Randall received a fellowship to take pictures in the South. He ended up in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, during the Freedom Summer, a voter registration campaign organized by SNCC, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. 

In this photograph, he focused on one of the Freedom Schools set up by SNCC. These schools offered a six-week program of reading, writing, math, history, and civics. This program was intended to counter the failed educational system, and the systematic disenfranchisement of African Americans. 

Herb Randall: It was a rainy, rainy day, and the Freedom Schools generally were held in the churches. And it was hot. This is Mississippi in the summer, there was no air conditioning, and so you would try to have classes on the outside of the churches and things. But because of the rain, the classes had to come inside into the church basement. It was a fairly large basement. However, with the amount of children, the kids were very respectful, and so they weren't really too loud, but it was kind of noisy there in the basement with all of the kids, with different classes going on.

And I just saw this young boy sitting on these steps.

And he was just there, involved in learning something or ingesting something. It was just a total difference between the group and him that impressed me, and I was just curious as to what he might be thinking about this whole thing.

Then I saw the pattern of the stairs and whatever and whatever, and I took the photograph. But just the boy sitting there in the position that he was, was the initial thing that I was interested in.