Roland L. Freeman

Roland Leon Freeman was born on the twenty-seventh of July 1936 at Baltimore, Maryland, the son of Roland Brown Freeman — a Baltimore railroad worker — and Geneva Brown Freeman. He was raised in the segregated Black community of mid-twentieth-century Baltimore.

He served in the United States Air Force from 1956 to 1959 in the Strategic Air Command at the principal Westover Air Force Base at Massachusetts — and worked across the early 1960s as a photographic technician at the Baltimore studio of the white commercial photographer Otto F. Hagel.

He was hired in 1968 as principal documentary photographer of the Poor People's Campaign of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference — at the conclusion of the principal post-Martin-Luther-King-assassination Poor People's Campaign of the spring and summer of 1968. He produced across the campaign the principal documentary record of the Resurrection City encampment at the National Mall at Washington, D.C.

He founded in 1968 the principal Group for Cultural Documentation at Washington, D.C. — the principal Black documentary-photography institution of the principal post-civil-rights period focused on the principal African American folk and craft traditions of the principal Black American South and the principal Black American urban-North migration communities.

He produced across the next four decades the principal documentary photographic record of the principal African American craft and folk traditions — including the principal Baltimore arabber community of horse-cart fruit-and-vegetable vendors, the principal African American quilting tradition of the Black American South, the principal African American basket-weaving tradition of the South Carolina Lowcountry, and the principal African American foodways traditions of the post-Reconstruction South.

He published the principal documentary monographs of the principal late-twentieth-century African American folk and craft traditions — including A Communion of the Spirits of 1996 on the African American quilting tradition, and The Mule of 1974 on the Baltimore arabber community.

He was named in 2009 a National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts — the highest national honour for the principal American folk-cultural-practitioner community.

His principal archive — approximately one hundred thousand surviving negatives — was donated to the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian Institution in 2018.

He died at Baltimore on the twenty-fourth of July 2020 of complications of cancer, at eighty-three.

He is honored here as the principal folkloric photographer of the African American craft tradition.