Injustice in Focus

The Civil Rights Photography of Cecil Williams

Claudia Smith Brinson

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2024
• ISBN:
  9781643364384
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: History

The powerful life story and photography of an esteemed Black photojournalist

Cecil Williams is one of the few Southern Black photojournalists of the civil rights movement. Born and raised in Orangeburg, South Carolina, Williams worked at the center of emerging twentieth-century civil rights activism in the state, and his assignments often exposed him to violence perpetrated by White law officials and ordinary citizens. Williams's story is the story of the civil rights era.

Author and award-winning journalist Claudia Smith Brinson and photographer Williams combine forces in Injustice in Focus: The Civil Rights Photography of Cecil Williams. Together they document civil rights activism in the 1940s through the 1960s in South Carolina. Williams was there, in South Carolina, to witness and document pivotal movements such as then-NAACP legal counsel Thurgood Marshall's arrival in Charleston to argue the landmark case Briggs v. Elliott and the aftermath of the infamous Orangeburg Massacre.

With author Brinson's rich research, interviews, and prose, and eighty stunning photographs from Williams's collection, Injustice in Focus offers a firsthand account of South Carolina's fight for civil rights and describes Williams's life behind the camera as a documentarian of the civil rights movement