American Memory






















Bear Butte in South Dakota is where the Sioux and Cheyenne tribes received their creation myth, and is still a religious site of great importance, despite being only a few miles from the biker bars and rallies of Sturgis.

I’ve always believed that the first step towards healing a deep wound is acknowledgement. Without that, it is impossible to move forward. That has been, and remains, the guiding motivation behind both the photographs I’ve already taken and those I’ve yet to find.
For two years now, I have been traveling, working on a series of landscape photographs of important historical sites across America. As a nation, what we choose to forget and ignore is often more interesting to me than what we’ve chosen to honor and celebrate. I’ve not been to the Delaware River to find the exact spot where George Washington crossed with the fleeing Continental Army. Instead, the photographs I’ve taken, and continue to search for, are as much about what is here now, in the 21st Century, as they are about an elusive past. I’m interested in a history of violence and conquest, and the struggle for freedom and equality, because I see these themes as very much still with us today. As a photographer, artist, journalist, and history teacher, I want to look for places where the present and the past intersect, overlap, and collide.
Where has this journey taken me so far?
To the banks of the Sand Creek River, just outside of a railroad crossing in the desolate plains of Eastern Colorado named Chivington, where every Thanksgiving Cheyenne youth begin a 180-mile run to commemorate the 1863 massacre of a peaceful Indian camp, which was attacked by a drunken militia led by Colonel Chivington.
To Galveston, Texas, where every year, on June 19th, the Emancipation Proclamation is still read out loud, in memory of the day, two years after it was written, that the slaves of Texas were finally informed that they were free.
To the home of Jimmy Weekly, the last resident of Pigeon Roost Holler, who refuses to sell his small parcel of land to the coal company that is strip mining above his home on Blair Mountain, where an historic, four day pitched battle occurred between union coal miners and the National Guard in 1923.
To downtown Montgomery, Alabama, where the Southern Heritage Movement staged a recent Confederate Flag rally in honor of the 150th anniversary of the inauguration of Jefferson Davies, the last “President of a Free Republic”. While waiting to begin the rally, a group of women dressed in period costume sat on a bench at the exact bus stop where Rosa Parks began her fateful ride in 1955.
It has not been easy, but from Colorado to Texas, from West Virginia to Alabama, I have managed to find, and photograph, Americans who, for better and worse, still have a direct connection to their own history.
I want the images themselves to speak for me. I have been to a boxing gym in Patterson, New Jersey, where Hurricane Carter’s trainer still coaches young men trying to fight their way out of the ghetto. I’ve visited Bear Butte, a hilltop soaring above the high plains of South Dakota, which is covered in prayer flags left by the Sioux and Cheyenne, visiting from the impoverished Bantustans to the east. I’ve found an abandoned church in East Money, Mississippi where Emmett Till’s incredibly brave great uncle, Mose Wright, once preached. There are only wasp nests there now. After some bushwhacking, I located Cabin Pond in Virginia’s Southampton County, where Nat Turner received his vision and plotted his slave rebellion. The pond, really a small swamp, remains unmarked and hidden behind oak scrub off of a rural dirt road, a legacy of a history purposefully erased.
There is so much more to look for.
I want to find the plantation in South Carolina where Harriet Tubmann led a Union army on a raid to free hundreds of slaves. And visit a series of decaying, lesser-known interment camps in the Arizona desert, built to hold Japanese Americans during the Second World War. Travel to Flint, Michigan, where the United Auto Workers’ locals that created the CIO during the 1936-37 sit-down strike against General Motors, 651 and 659, now look like old age homes, so many active union members are retirees. Then back to Mississippi, where history has a way of hovering over the landscape like a low lying mist, to the Homochiito National Forest, where Charles Moore and Henry Dee, two young black men, were murdered by the Klu Klux Klan while the rest of the world was looking for Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. And back again, to the River, to Sunflower County, where the memories of the arch-segregationist James Eastland and the state-sterilized sharecropper Fannie Lou Hammer, who lived only miles apart, are still entwined, locked in battle even in death.
Ideas are not the problem with this series of images: A day spent with the Memphis Sanitation Department, collecting the city’s trash in memory of Martin Luther King, in the fields with a hoe squad of prisoners at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, a former slave plantation owned by the largest slave trader in the country, touring the faded industrial towns of the rustbelt, Morewood, Homestead, Latimer, in memory of the brutal labor conflicts of the 1880’s and 1890’s, winter in Yellowstone with the last wild buffalo herd, descendants of only 23 survivors that were not slaughtered, the farm fields of Delano, California, where Cesar Chavez’s name is memorialized on the roads, schools and hospitals but migrant laborers still bring in the crops without union representation, to Rosewood, Florida, Elaine, Arkansas, and Tulia, Oklahoma, all black communities destroyed in spasms of racial violence...and the list goes on.


Andrew Lichtenstein, a native of New York City, is a documentary photographer, journalist, and teacher who works on long term stories of social concern. Over the last decade he has concentrated on photographing in America.
As a working photographer and journalist, Andrew’s work on a wide variety of subjects has appeared in newspapers, magazines, web sites, and books. His photographs have been exhibited around the world, including shows in the UAE, China, Italy, France, and Germany.
He has helped produce multimedia stories for MSNBC, NPR, and Slate.
A partial list of publications he has worked for on editorial assignment would include Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, Die Zeit, Stern, Geo, Mother Jones, Atlantic Monthly, Life, Rolling Stone, The Source, Vibe, Texas Monthly, the New York Times, and the Village Voice.
Foundation and advertising clients have included the Opens Society Institute, Human Rights Watch, the Ford Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Sarah Lawrence College, the AFL-CIO, AFSCME, and the UMWA.
In 2007, Charta published his first book, Never Coming Home.
American Memory Lesson Plan
Acknowledgment is the first step towards healing.
This is the theme that underlies the project, “American Memory,” by Andrew Lichtenstein, who won the 2012 Aftermath Project photography grant, and whose work is featured in our book, “War is Only Half the Story, Vol 6.” It’s a simple premise – yet one that seems all too elusive in the case of so many past conflicts.
I still remember the moment I first saw Andrew’s work, during the judging for the 2012 grant. I was sitting in a back room at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, with photo curator Anne Tucker, and Stephen Mayes, then managing director of VII and now the executive director of the Tim Hetherington Trust, who were both on the judging panel with me that year. All three of us were taken with Andrew’s quirky photo of three women in Confederate dress (Civil War re-enactors) taking a break on a park bench in Montgomery, Alabama – and then taken aback by the caption, which informed us that the bench the women were sitting on was at the bus stop where Rosa Parks boarded the city bus she was arrested on in 1955 and helped launch the Civil Rights movement.
As we reviewed Andrew’s work, we were struck again and again by his ability to make a strong contemporary photograph on the site of a past conflict – and to make us think twice about what had happened, as well as what had, or had not, been acknowledged. It’s a powerful way to consider aftermath, and all its implications for who we are today – and what we can and should become.
These lesson plans, by Fran Sterling, Senior Research and Development Associate at Facing History and Ourselves, capture the essence of Andrew’s project and expands on it. The lessons are meant to engage students in critical thinking skills – and equally important, in visual literacy skills. This kind of learning is at the heart of The Aftermath Project – it’s as important as our mission to broaden the public’s understanding of the true cost of war and the real price of peace. Visual literacy is a kind of redemption from the shallow depth, hyper-speed of the Internet age. It engages us in moments, invites us to deep reflection, attention to detail, and connections from the heart. It reminds us of our humanity. And we need that, every day.
We hope you make great use of these lessons, and also of the other lesson plans on our website. We welcome your fruitage and your feedback.
Sara Terry
Founder/Artistic Director, The Aftermath Project