Jill Freedman. Sock It To Me. A woman sits next to graffiti on a shelter reading ‘Sock It To Me, Black Power’ in Resurrection City, a three thousand person tent city on the Washington Mall set up as part of the Poor People’s Campaign protest, Washington DC, May 1968.

Just before Jill Freedman died last October, she concocted a plan to have her home health aid meet her at her apartment at 10 in the morning. “I’m getting out of here,” Freedman said over the phone, before wheeling herself towards the exit of the rehabilitation facility. She was stopped by security, who sent her back to her room, then posted her photograph to warn staff an escapee was on the premises. It was a fitting metaphor for Freedman’s entire life.

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Born in 1939 in Pittsburgh, Freedman remembered being a child and looking through picture magazines that published some of the earliest photographs of the Holocaust. Recalling the moment brought her to tears, her empathy for victims of injustice becoming a defining factor in her work as an artist.

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Freedman arrived in New York in 1964 to work as an advertising copywriter. After Dr Martin Luther King Jr was killed in 1968, she quit her job to attend the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C. Two years later she published her first book, Old News: Resurrection City, documenting life at the makeshift camps that housed some 3,000 protesters on the Mall until the police bulldozed them on June 24.

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Jill Freedman. Resurrection City Residents. A police officer watches the residents of Resurrection City, a three thousand person tent city on the Washington Mall set up as part of the Poor People’s Campaign protest, Washington DC, May 1968.
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