By Patty Henetz

| The Salt Lake Tribune

Ian Whatley is only 9 years old, but he has learned enough about the civil-rights movement in the 1960s American South to know that the struggle for racial equality isn’t over yet.

The Sandy boy, a fourth-grader at Granite Elementary, walked into an exhibit of civil-rights era photographs Friday at The Leonardo and immediately recognized what he was seeing because he had learned about it at school.

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At a glance

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Civil-rights activists’ photos on display

“This Light of Ours: Activist Photographers of the Civil Rights Movement,” a 157-image photo exhibit that examines the role of ordinary Americans confronting racial injustice in the mid-1960s, is on display at The Leonardo, 209 E. 500 South, Salt Lake City.

Admission » $14 adults, $10 children 6 and older.

Hours » Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Friday 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.; Sunday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; closed Tuesday.

The traveling exhibit, produced by the Center for Documentary Expression and Art, features the work of curator Matt Herron and eight other photographers: Maria Varela, David Prince, Tamio Wakayama, the late George Ballis, Herb Randall, Bob Fletcher, Bob Fitch and Bob Adelman. The exhibit continues through May.

Salt Lake City photographer Kent Miles printed and mounted the images from archives that Herron maintains at his San Francisco stock agency. Civil-rights leader Julian Bond, who was in Salt Lake City on Friday to honor local civil-rights activists, narrates the audio tour. Historian Charlie Cobb wrote the captions.

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Salt Lake City civil-rights honorees

Henry Adams, Robert “Archie” Archuleta, Bernice Benns, Irma Branch, Harriet Brewster, Ruffin Bridgeforth, W. F. Burgess, Earline Bonnie Burley, Dannie W. Burnett, Michael J. Clark, Jim Dooley, Mary Dooley, Johnnie Driver, Mickey Duncan, John Florez, Robert Freed, Albert Fritz, Bettye B. Gillespie, James H. Gillespie, Dovie Goodwin, Victor Gordon, Darius A. Gray, James Allen Green, Mary Washington Green, George W. Harts, Alberta Henry, Steven Holbrook, Boyer Jarvis, Roy Jefferson, Alice Kasai, Henry Kasai, Florence Lawrence, Sterling M. McMurrin, Tyrone E. Medley, Jerry Merrill, Edward Miller Sr., Charles Nabors, William “Willie” Price, Mignon Richmond, Bonnie B. Rock, James M. Rock, Ben Roe, Palmer S. Ross, Ruth Connor Ross, Robert E. Sampson, A. Wally Sandack, William “Bill” Hanley Schultz, Raymond Uno, John Wade, John O. Williams

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"They taught me that in those days the black people didn’t have any rights," he said. He figured that meant they couldn’t vote, either, but that changed when people rose up and demanded it. "Martin Luther King, he changed the face of the nation," Ian said. "Some people still don’t like black people. It is sad."

Unfortunately, an eminent civil-rights leader said, students often reach college not knowing much beyond that.

"My students come to me from some of the best high schools in the country, and they know nothing about the movement," said Julian Bond, who teaches civil-rights history at the University of Virginia and American University in Washington, D.C. "I’ve got to tell them in the time I have, one semester, the whole story — what happened then and what’s happening now."

In Salt Lake City on Friday to be a panelist during an event at The Leonardo, which is hosting an exhibit of civil-rights era photography, Bond emphasized the need for voting-rights diligence at a time when Democrats are calling on state legislatures to set aside bills that would change voting laws to make it more difficult for people to cast ballots this year.

Supporters of the laws, mostly Republicans, say they are needed to protect against voter fraud and make sure undocumented immigrants aren’t voting. Democrats, including U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, say the efforts actually are designed to curtail minority political participation.

Utah was among more than a dozen states that passed such a law in 2009; twice that many other states are in the process even as the Justice Department’s civil rights division is investigating the bills with an eye to taking the states to court to block the laws from going into effect.

In the spring of 1960, Bond was among the several hundred student protesters engaged in sit-in demonstrations against lunch-counter segregation who formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee — SNCC, pronounced "snick" — and soon became communications director. Through his years as a Georgia legislator and Democratic Party activist and decades with the NAACP, Bond has worked to keep civil rights and social justice at the forefront of the nation’s moral and political agendas.

Bond said he has spent his time in Salt Lake City reminiscing with photographers Matt Herron and Tamio Wakayama, two of the photographers whose work is included in The Leonardo exhibit, "This Light of Ours: Activist Photographers of the Civil Rights Movement," about their days as idealists when they visited the churches, homes and workplaces of activists in 1963 to 1966, marching with them to assert their rights as U.S. citizens.

Salt Lake City Council Chair Soren Simonsen was to issue an official resolution declaring Jan. 20 as Salt Lake City Civil Rights Activist Recognition Day. The event honored 52 Utahns for their civil-rights work.

A report last year from the Southern Poverty Law Center found that only 2 percent of high school seniors in 2010 could answer a simple question about Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling that invalidated state laws segregating schools by race. Utah is among 35 states to earn failing grades for their curricula related to civil rights. Just three states earned A’s: Alabama, Florida and New York.

Bond said that when his students arrive in his university classes, they know two names and four words: Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and "I have a dream."

They don’t know about Jimmy Travis, Medgar Evers, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenge in 1964, James Meredith, the Meredith March Against Fear, Adam Clayton Powell, Richard Wright, Coretta Scott King, Stokely Carmichael or Black Power.

The Leonardo exhibit chronicles all that history in danger of being forgotten and more, including a KUED documentary, "Utah’s Freedom Riders," about the Salt Lake City activists who were part of the movement in the 1960s, including Betty Sawyer, Stephen Holbrook, Darius Gray, the Rev. France Davis, Archie Archuleta, John Florez and Mary Green.

Utah residents "ought to be encouraged to come see [the exhibit]," Bond said. "It is an eye-opener."