“Shout Freedom!” was a celebratory musical about the American Revolution. Rosalie Gwathmey captures the irony of the advertisement for black citizens in the Jim Crow South. She herself was familiar with civil-rights problems; her husband, the painter Robert Gwathmey, was subjected to surveillance and harassment by the FBI for his political activism. The blacklisting of the League in 1951 was the last straw: she destroyed many of her negatives and stopped making photographs.
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