Monumental photography collection of Black Southern life comes to UNC

Sixty years ago this summer, more than 200,000 people marched in Washington, D.C. for the right of African Americans to participate fully and equally in American life. This mass movement spurred Roland L. Freeman to pick up a camera.

“I wanted to say something about the times in which I was living, and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since,” said Freeman said in an interview with the National Endowment for the Arts.

In the decades since, his work has spoken volumes. The prolific documentarian traced the lives of Black Americans in urban and rural environments, with a focus on folk traditions throughout the South. Now the photographs that make up much of Freeman’s life work have found a new home at the UNC-Chapel Hill Wilson Special Collections Library’s Southern Folklife Collection.

“The Southern Folklife Collection is deeply honored and excited to preserve and provide access to Roland Freeman’s photographic archive,” said Steve Weiss, curator of the Southern Folklife Collection, in a press release.

Later this year, visitors to the library will be able to take in the nearly 24,000 slides, 10,000 photographic prints, 400,000 negatives, and 9,000 contact sheets, along with published and unpublished writings that make up the archive.

But it’s the way he engaged with people behind the lens that stands out to Glenn Hinson, a longtime collaborator of Freeman and an associate professor in UNC-Chapel Hill’s Department of Anthropology.

“The brilliance of Roland is that, as a photographer, he is absolutely committed to working collaboratively with those whose photographs he’s taking. He would get to know the person and then work to capture representations that are both deep and deeply honest,” said Hinson in the release.

The Kohler Foundation, an arts non-profit, organized and donated the materials to the university and provided a $20,000 grant to help preserve the work.

A selection of the photos will be on display at a free public event at the Wilson Special Collections Library on Thursday, April 27, from 6 to 8 p.m.

This story features a subset of the images from the Roland L. Freeman collection with original captions, courtesy of the Southern Folklife Collection.