Freedom: a Photographic History of the African Struggle. (eye).

Text by Manning Marable and
Leith Mullings
Pictures edited by Sophie Spencer-Wood
Phaidon Press, October 2002
$59.95, ISBN 0-714-84270-2

Freedom is elusive, in concept and reality. But the road to liberation chronicled in Freedom: A Photographic History of the African Struggle, which includes 600 black-and-white images, serves as a pictorial documentation of the journey. That history is told through images of slaves, and later as laborers, educators, soldiers, activists, athletes, writers, artists and performers.

The scope of the project is monumental, beginning with the earliest photographs of pre-Civil War slavery to the present day. The book includes painful images of holding pens in Virginia where slaves were kept before auctions, photographs of blacks toiling in the fields, and the nude, disfigured back of a former slave from Louisiana.

Alongside tortured images of slavery are images of a segregated America, including African-American students at Tuskegee and Hampton, and of black business owners standing proudly in front of their shops.

Freedom documents the horrifying images of black victims of the Ku Klux Klan--with graphic photos of beatings and lynchings--juxtaposed with portraits of leaders like W.E.B. Du Bois working in his offices at the NAACP, of Mary McLeod Bethune meeting with Eleanor Roosevelt, and of Marcus Garvey parading proudly through Harlem.

There are moments of joyful celebration in photos of performers Josephine Baker, Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald and tap dancer Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, looking dapper on stage at the Howard Theater in Washington, D.C. There are images of sport that chronicle the black struggle: Joe Louis and Max Schmeling in 1938 before Louis' famous victory, and Jackie Robinson hitting a home run for the Dodgers.

In addition, there are wonderful glimpses into the lives of everyday folk hanging out at the barbershop and beauty salon, or smiling in their finery as they danced at the Savoy, as well as formal portraits of the black bourgeois in the parlors of their Striver's Row brownstones.

For those familiar with this territory, Freedom doesn't offer any visual revelations. Instead, it captures an expansive collection of images edited by Sophie Spencer-Wood with thoughtful and informative narrative captions from Manning Marable, Columbia University's founding director for Research in African American Studies, and Leith Mullings, presidential professor of anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

--Suzanne Rust is a freelance writer living in New York City.