What the camera had to do was expose the evils of racism, the evils of poverty, the discrimination and the bigotry, by showing the people who suffered most under it. That was the way it had to be done. . . . The photograph of the black cleaning woman standing in front of the American flag with a broom and a mop expresses [this] more than any other photograph I have taken. It was the first one I took in Washington, D.C.
I thought then, and Roy Stryker eventually proved to me, that you could not photograph a person who turns you away from the motion picture ticket window, or someone who refuses to feed you, or someone who refuses to wait on you in a store. You could not photograph him and say “This is a bigot,” because bigots have a way of looking just like everybody else.
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