David S. Johnson was an important Bay Area photographer best known for documenting the Black community of San Francisco’s Fillmore district and activists for civil rights. Johnson, who recently died at age ninety-seven, is steadily beginning to receive the recognition his work merits, and this gift marks the first work by Johnson to enter the Fine Arts Museums’ collection. In 1946 he enrolled in Ansel Adams’s new photography program at the California School of Fine Arts (later the San Francisco Art Institute), becoming Adams’s first Black student at the school, and eventually established himself as a leading chronicler of Black urban life in the Bay Area.

This work is one of a gift of fifteen works by various artists coming to the Museums from the collection of photographer Irene Poon, an activist for Asian American art who built an important photography collection of work by her contemporaries. This photograph is important both artistically and as a historical record of its time. Johnson’s photograph captures the strength and determination of the civil-rights protesters, and at the same time it places Black women at the heart of the movement and emphasizes their role as organizers and change-makers. The central figure is surrounded by other women, and the words on the pamphlet in her hand–“We Demand”–capture the sense of urgency and frustration that fueled the protests of the 1960s. The presence of a television camera in the background is also historically significant. The protests of the civil-rights movement not only played out on the streets of the American South but also on television screens across the nation.