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Matt Herron, Whose Camera Chronicled a Movement, Dies at 89

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As a magazine photojournalist, he immersed himself in the South as a witness to civil rights marches and clashes. He was killed when the glider he was piloting crashed.
Matt Herron, a photojournalist who vividly memorialized the most portentous and promising moments from the front lines of the 1960s civil rights movement in the Deep South, died on Aug.7 when a glider he was piloting crashed in Northern California. He was 89. His wife, Jeannine Hull Herron, said Mr. Herron was flying his new self-launching glider (he had learned to fly at 70) when it crashed about 125 miles northwest of Sacramento after taking off from Lampson Field in Lakeport, on Clear Lake. He died at the scene. The National Transportation Safety Board said the crash was under investigation. A child of the Depression and a protégé of the Dust Bowl documentarian Dorothea Lange, Mr. Herron assembled a team of photographers to capture the clashes between white Southerners and Black protesters, aided by their white Freedom Rider allies, as they sought to claim the rights they had been legally granted a century before. Mr. Herron, who worked for newsmagazines, described himself as a “propagandist” for civil rights organizations, including the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, which gave him rare behind-the-scenes access to its members. His photographs of the civil rights movement appeared in Life, Look, Newsweek and other magazines and in books like “This Light of Ours: Activist Photographers of the Civil Rights Movement” (2012) and “Mississippi Eyes: The Story and Photography of the Southern Documentary Project” (2014). From 1963, when he was arrested at a protest to integrate a Maryland amusement park, to 1965, Mr. Merron immersed himself in the South, living there with his wife and two young children. His daughter went to the 16th street Baptist Church in Birmingham two weeks before a bombing by white supremacists killed four Black girls attending Sunday school there. On one occasion, he recalled, he strapped his cameras on “like armor plate” for protection while being chased by a club-wielding deputy sheriff.

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