Art & Culture: We Will Be Heard by Bud and Ruth Schultz

For more than a quarter century, Bud and Ruth Schultz have been collecting American stories, taking people’s pictures, all on a single theme: repression in America. In We Will Be Heard: Voices in the Struggle for Constitutional Rights Past and Present (Merrell) the couple present us with 90 stories -- each one accompanied by a photographic study of the subject.

In the Preface, the work is explained:

It has been more than twenty-five years, now, since we first began to interview and photograph those for whom the promise of American democracy – freedom of expression, freedom of association – has been denied. Seeking people targeted by government for their political beliefs and activities, we, of necessity, focused on those advocating the right to unionize, an end to racial segregation, and an end to war, movements that helped define and transform the twentieth century.

For the most part, you won’t recognize their faces. You won’t know their names. (Ring Lardner Jr. is an obvious -- and deeply interesting -- exception.)

We Will Be Heard will make you wonder; make you think; perhaps even make you cry. It will not, however, leave you untouched.