Leonard Freed (1929-2006), a Magnum photographer who put a face on the civil rights movement, went to the nation’s capital on August 28, 1963. He arrived at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom at daybreak, several hours before its official start on the National Mall. Over the course of the day, he moved through the assembled crowd, estimated at 250,000 people, exposing roll after roll of black-and-white film.

Freed’s photographs from that momentous day have been collected in a book, This is the Day: The March on Washington (Getty Publications 2013), with an essay by Michael Eric Dyson, professor of sociology at Georgetown University. On that day, he wrote, [Martin Luther] “King cast aside his prepared speech and offered the world a glimpse of black rhetorical genius. King conjured bits and pieces of other orations to weave the dream metaphor into the tapestry of the nation’s self-image, and in the process he grafted black folk to the heart of American democracy.”

The photographs are a stirring tribute to the democratic ideals expressed in King’s speech, portraying as they do, the rainbow of humanity gathered on the Mall that day. Dawson continues, “Freed’s moving photography offers still images of an America at once frozen in time and marching restlessly to its multicultural and multiracial future through the lens of a visionary artist. Freed’s photographs are…portraits of social possibility set against the backdrop of a nation grappling with the exclusionary obsessions of one race, one gender, one sexuality, one age, one religions, and one region. Freed’s photographs of the day offer instead the expansive possibilities of many races, many genders, many sexualities, many ages, many religions, and many regions gathered on the Mall to call for change.”

Next Wednesday, June 5, at 6 pm, Deborah Willis, chair and professor of Photography and Imaging at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, will moderate a panel that includes writer, media commentator, and professor of sociology at Georgetown University Michael Eric Dyson, scholar and author Paul M. Farber, photographers Eli Reed and Jamel Shabazz, and special guest Brigitte Freed, widow of Leonard Freed. Dyson and Farber are both contributors to the book, which also contains a foreword by civil rights leader and educator Julian Bond. There will be a book signing after the panel. The event takes place at Margaret Liebman Berger Forum, Room 227 (2nd Floor; doors open at 5:30 p.m.), The New York Public Library / Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, 5th Avenue at 42ndStreet, New York, NY. Free/first come, first seated. Information or 917.275.6975. Photo above, from pp. 38-39, This is the Day: The March on Washington, courtesy the J. Paul Getty Trust.

Also by Leonard Freed, Black in White America (Getty Publications), a facsimile reprint of the 1968 publication that looks at African American life during the civil rights era.