After several years since first speaking, Shallotte fine art photographer, David Pickett, met with Civil Rights photographer, Cecil Williams of Orangeburg, SC. Williams was the keynote speaker at the opening ceremony of The Gullah Geechee Festival in Atlantic Beach, SC on June 23.
According to Pickett, he and Mr. Williams connected by phone in 2016. Asked to describe Williams, Pickett said, he is truly a renaissance man: photographer, publisher, community leader, historian, author, writer, inventor, and humanitarian.
A South Carolina native, “Williams began photographing the origin of the civil rights movement in Clarendon County, and Orangeburg, South Carolina; and at eleven years old, beginning with Thurgood Marshall, arriving by train in Charleston, South Carolina to argue the Briggs v. Elliott case”.
Some of the most notable events and persons Williams has photographed include: the Briggs v. Elliott petitioners, the Elloree School Teachers, Evangelist Billy Graham’s 1957 New York Crusade at Madison Square Garden, former Charlotte NC mayor Harvey Gantt being the first African American student admitted to Clemson University, John F. Kennedy’s presidential announcement, and the devastating Orangeburg Massacre.
Williams’ photograph of Coretta Scott King’s involvement in the Charleston Hospital Workers Strike was featured on the front cover of JET. Some of his other photographs have appeared in Newsweek, TIME, and the Associated Press.
In 2015, Mr. Williams invented the film scanning tool called the Film Toaster. The very fast camera scanning instrument allows him to rapidly scan his nearly one million film images. In addition, he and Mrs. Williams are founders and operators of The Cecil Williams South Carolina Civil Rights Museum in Orangeburg, SC.
