Founded in Montgomery in 1965 by two Harvard journalism students and Freedom Summer veterans, the Southern Courier aimed to fill a void in the coverage of the Civil Rights Movement by providing unfiltered access to the Black freedom struggle in the South. That same year, Pennsylvania native Jim Peppler joined the newspaper as its principal photographer and photo editor for most of its three-year run. Peppler’s work as a photojournalist for the Courier helped document and advance the Black freedom struggle in Alabama. In his photo-essay on Newtown, Peppler tells a story of Black poverty and its desperate need for amelioration.
At the same time, in the Courier’s representation of poverty and in its language of (im)mobility, the paper confirms an observation made by numerous scholars that movement and mobility produce race—“them Newtown people”—and the ways in which the Black experience of the United States has been shaped by the practices and enforcement of immobilities—“a community apart.” By reproducing images of Black immobility, the Southern Courier’s exposé served to entrench a view of Black stasis.
The photographs contained in Peppler’s archive, however, reveal a different image of Newtown. One that offers an alternative to the narrative that made it in to print. These previously unseen images tell us a lot about the intersections of technology, mobility, and Black freedom at the highpoint of the mid-century civil rights movement. No more so than in the photographs of the youthful joy in riding a bicycle.
For the children of Newtown, the bicycle clearly represented freedom and independence. Although the published photo-essay features just one person smiling, the children on bicycles found in the archive make clear a youthful confidence. Despite the physical stasis of a community apart and its entrenched poverty, the bicycle remained a machine that elicited pleasure and joy from its riders. This narrative did not fit with the Newtown presented in the Southern Courier.
To be clear, this is not meant to romanticize nor to deny the crushing poverty and racism faced by children in places like Newtown and across the nation. At the same time, we can recognize that in these unpublished photos there is a joy and also perhaps, in the words of geographers Derek Alderman and Joshua Inwood, a “countermobility” of antiracism at work.