HOUSTON, TX.- The Menil Collection presents The Whole World Was Watching, a selection of works from an extraordinary gift of more than 200 Civil Rights-era photographs from Edmund Carpenter and Adelaide de Menil.

The exhibition will be on view for nearly seven months, from March 5 through September 25, at two venues: the Menil and the African-American Library at the Gregory School in Houston’s historic Freedman’s Town.

Through the work of renowned photographers Bob Adelman, Dan Budnik, Bruce Davidson, Elliott Erwitt, Leonard Freed, and Danny Lyon, the exhibition revisits the profound social and political changes that swept the United States in the 1950s and 60s. These images document the nation’s struggle for racial equality, while also demonstrating the power of photography to raise consciousness and mobilize social movements.

In the media-saturated landscape of post-WWII America, “the whole world is watching” became a rallying cry that propelled leftist activist groups to use the power of the press to disseminate images and information about social injustice. Television, news magazines and daily newspapers disseminated shocking images of violence and racial injustice, including hostile confrontations at sit-ins and other protests for civil rights organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

Organized by Menil associate curator Michelle White and Danielle Burns, curator at the Houston Museum of African American History and the African American Library at the Gregory School, The Whole World Was Watching includes a wide variety of striking images that deal with race and politics: marchers on the road from Selma to Montgomery, Dr. Martin Luther King on the Washington Mall, voters at polling places, cotton workers in the Mississippi Delta, confrontations with the Ku Klux Klan, and everyday evidence of segregation.

These photographs record not only triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement such as King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, but also the lesser-known conditions from which the struggle was borne.

Extraordinary works of art in their own right, these photographs create a complex portrait of an era and its actions and activists.

To supplement the exhibition professor Gerald O’Grady, fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University, and founder of the Rice University Media Center, will organize a summer film series of important films of the Civil Rights era. He will also give a lecture on how the then-new forms of film and photography in the 1960s served as such critical tools for advocating social change.