History or story behind a particular photograph

February 17, 2021 8:11 AM

Here's a photo of a black woman smoking a cigarette in from what looks like a protest in the 1960s in America. Can anyone point me to a link that describes that situation occurring in the photo and the woman's name?
posted by Brandon Blatcher to Media & Arts (5 answers total)

Louisa Jenkins, according to that Instagram post (and a reverse Google image search).
posted by jabes at 8:18 AM on February 17, 2021 [1 favorite]

The woman is Louisa Jenkins, at a protest in 1957. Known as Louisa Meriweather, she’s a writer and activist.
posted by Ideefixe at 8:27 AM on February 17, 2021 [4 favorites]

Here's her wikipedia page with lots of links.
posted by mareli at 11:31 AM on February 17, 2021

Response by poster: Are we sure that Louisa Jenkins Meriweather is the woman in the photo posted? I'm not finding many explicit links between that photo and her. Apologies if I've missed something obvioius.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 12:09 PM on February 17, 2021 [1 favorite]

Essence's 'Black Women Unbothered:' Filmmaker Highlights Black Women Standing Up To Injustice In Brilliant Tweet (Feb. 21, 2017) identifies Ieshia Evans (initial upper left photo, Baton Rouge, 2016) and Gloria Richardson Dandridge (lower photos, Cambridge, Md., 1963) in the two-days-earlier Cherry Twitter collage, and notes that the "second photo is of an unidentified woman smoking while police approach her in what appears to be the 1960s." I think if the woman was later discovered to be Meriwether, definitively, the piece would have been updated. [Meriwether worked with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Louisiana, in 1965, in case that's a lead.]
posted by Iris Gambol at 6:43 PM on February 17, 2021 [1 favorite]