In the summer of 1964, Mississippi’s Canton Freedom House teemed with activists. Some were registering voters, others organizing protests.

The modest wood-framed home was the local headquarters of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and a refuge for civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and James Meredith. But segregationists targeted the home relentlessly, hurling Molotov cocktails and even firing gunshots at it. The unending attacks had forced the activists to fasten chicken wire over the home’s window panes. Volunteers often spent nights in the fields behind the house, fearful for their lives. Then, in the early hours of a June morning, a bomb thrown from a car at the house tore through the front of the building, shattering its windows. But the house held. 

Nearly 50 years later, that same modest structure—the last standing Freedom House in Mississippi used by CORE—became a museum, its red-walled interiors plastered with ephemera and texts documenting the story of activists who challenged and altered the course of this country’s racial history.  

Earlier this year, New Orleans–based photographer Brandon Holland documented Freedom House Canton and five other Mississippi Freedom Houses, recording through his images the legacy of these buildings, their place in contemporary American culture, and how, unlike bronze statues that are nearly impervious to decay, these structures record the toll of time and the elements.

Seated at his desk, surrounded by books and light from a midsummer afternoon sun, Brandon spoke with Mellon about his experience visiting these homes and how their precarity shaped the images he took. 

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Each of the Mississippi Freedom Houses you photographed was a critical site in the civil rights struggle, yet many are now neglected or forgotten. What story do they tell, and why is it important that we continue to pay attention to them—especially as questions around monuments and memory take on new urgency in this country? 

Brandon Holland: I think it’s about what we choose to focus on—not just on a national level, but also on a town level. These houses represent incredibly important history for the places they’re in. With these images, the homes feel less abstract. It's not something you have to conceptualize—it’s something you can now experience and see. It’s very precarious—you can forget about them very quickly—but if these places are protected, then you don’t forget. 

Cleveland, Mississippi

Amzie Moore House

What was it like to walk through and capture the Amzie Moore House—which, from your images, appears to be the most well preserved of all the houses you visited, with interior spaces that almost look like a contemporary art gallery with site-specific exhibitions? 

It is like a living museum at this point. It also felt the most like a part of the community of all the houses we visited. When we were photographing outside, most of the passersby stopped to ask what we were doing, at first in a protective way, but they opened up after we explained ourselves. It seems like the neighborhood really looks after the property. Also, everyone has some experience either with the house, Amzie’s son [who cares for the site], or was in the house at some point when they were a kid. It’s a very tangible piece of history. Amzie was someone who loomed large in the town, and people have not forgotten him. He still feels very present within this place.  

One of the most captivating images in the series on the Amzie Moore House is the picture of a typewriter, teetering atop an enormous stack of papers. Why do you think that sculpture is so impactful?  

This is supposed to be a visual representation of the amount of paperwork that was needed to register a person to vote. It's a surreal amount of paper to see. When looking at something like this, you understand this is like a war of manpower. How many people can you organize to fill out this paperwork, versus the opposition, which is trying to overwhelm people with the sheer volume of it? I realized that during that era, a lot of these organizers' held experience in the military, which directly affected their ability to organize on a massive scale in high-pressure situations. Walking through this space, it feels easier to connect those two life events and how they would've influenced the organizing. 

Indianola, Mississippi

Indianola Freedom House

Indianola Freedom House is the most abandoned of the homes—all its windows were boarded up with weathered plywood, wires were exposed—and yet there is a kind of moment you captured, with the light, that emphasizes a sense of divinity.  

It did have a mystery about it. It had started to rain, yet the sun was still out. I think this picture feels very spiritual in that light; the light guided the photo. It also felt, in that moment, so hopeful. It was as if the house bent in this way, making it look almost like a boat.  

You grew up in the South, but what did you learn about the region through this assignment—did anything surprise you or shift your perspective?

Even though it's next door, I don't have much history in Mississippi—I mean, our family has a fear of Mississippi. Like, that’s the state you don't make a stop in if you're driving on a road trip. I also think that the role that civil rights leaders from Mississippi played has been downplayed. People don't realize how much organizing was going on there and how important it was to civil rights. Though these places have had such grotesque histories of racial violence—and the violence is what looms in your head—there's a lot of Black people here, a lot of Black history, and there are a lot of places that you would feel very at home, very safe and connected to. And that's something that I had never experienced for myself firsthand before this assignment.   

Mayersville, Mississippi

Unita Blackwell Home and Cabin

A lot of these photos, particularly the ones taken at Unita Blackwell’s home and cabin, seem to take the subject of time as the theme; there's an emphasis on dust and cracks, wood, rot, plant overgrowth. Did you find a metaphor or sense of poignancy you were intentionally trying to capture? 

Definitely. When I look at this, I see history, but it also feels a little more tangible and palpable—like it’s the immediate past, because here’s her car with her custom license plate. I think she was a firecracker—I mean, you had to be; she was the first Black mayor in this town. Throughout the house, as it goes through these cycles of decay and rebuilding, that car shows time. 

I also feel a little bit of her in that image. With images of the overgrowth, it feels a lot more distant—but it’s also beautiful. We didn’t speak to anyone here, and I think that's a part of what you feel immediately in the houses that are more dilapidated, where we weren’t speaking to people: that nature is overtaking the house. 

In another image of her home there is a large pool of water overtaking the landscape—why did you home in on that?  

I'm thinking of the precarity of these neighborhoods. The existential looming of probably failing infrastructure, and metaphorically, whether this place will continue to exist. Well, not metaphorically, literally.

Canton, Mississippi

Canton Freedom House

Most of the photos are devoid of human presence—not just people, but footprints, even in the background. Did you consider the idea that these photographs act as a form of record-keeping and could transform how people interact with the Freedom Houses? 

Absolutely. I feel that most strongly about the Canton House. Glen Cotton, the grandchild of the owners, is primarily responsible for keeping the house from sinking into disrepair and also for building the museum. He's the one who collected these records and printed these photos. And he is running it on his own. It’s not very heavily visited—he is putting up his own money to pay the bills for this house, basically funding a community museum. This is the building where I felt the most strongly that more people should be here. More people should know that this exists. 

Another interest you have is in texts—you are bringing in language by photographing addresses, signs, wall labels—particularly at Canton. What do you think happens when a viewer is asked to both read and observe—how does that dual attention shape the experience of the work?  

I’m hoping you feel what it's like to be in this room. Outside of that, it gives you context and hopefully shows the labor that has gone into preserving this. This was also a really striking place to enter. I had no idea what it was gonna look like. And when you open the door, it’s just like this bright red, and there are things everywhere. It’s incredible. And it feels like a secret. I don’t think many people have even been in here. You also see that, wow, this is a lot; there’s a lot of history, a lot of people, and a lot to be said about who they were and what they’ve done.  

McComb, Mississippi

C.C. and Emogene Bryant House

Even though the C.C. and Emogene Bryant House looks well maintained in one of your pictures, upon closer inspection, you start to see signs of erosion—broken stairs, a collapsing roof, and a decaying shack with moss overtaking the structure. What was it like to photograph this home?  

This was the hardest place for me. We didn’t have anyone there. Even the sign itself feels a little bit like it’s far from the house. I didn’t get as much of a sense of the place, and no one came by—we didn’t have any interactions with people in the neighborhood.   

You shot most of this on film. What kind of camera did you use? 

Almost all of it was shot on a 4 x 5 camera. This is the kind of work that is incredibly important to me personally. These cameras allow me to work slowly. And this is a very thoughtful story that we're trying to tell. Having a film negative, it feels significant, and I wanted there to be a physical archive of the images. It's a tool that makes it easy for me to show reverence, to really sit with what I'm looking at, and slowly set it up, being very deliberate. 

Gulfport, Mississippi

Dr. Felix Dunn Office

The idea of light as a metaphor for spirituality and the sublime has long been used in art. I've noticed that many of your photographs also draw on this theme. Were you consciously exploring it—meditations on light coming through windows, illuminating darkened spaces, reflecting off surfaces, even forming a kind of veil over a person’s face, as in the image in Dr. Felix Dunn’s office with his daughter, Deidra? 

Yes, absolutely. I would say it's definitely a spiritual thing. It's less of me trying to determine how to depict this place and more about being shown how it should be depicted and how it wants to be depicted. It can be so fleeting, but it gives such gravity to something. Even with the portrait, I wasn't sure how we were going to photograph her, but then this happened, and it was like, ‘This is the answer.’ She’s such a captivating person and really lively. But when we made the portraits, there was a quiet kind of melancholy side to her that came out, which was beautiful. 

The sign in this part of the series, unlike others we have seen, is not as well kept; it’s broken and on the ground. So the choice of photographing it feels like it is telling a different story—what did you want that to be? 

This is about Dr. Dunn, and this is a sign that was defaced—it became separated from the pole it was on. Now it’s at Deidra's house. I think it’s like a metaphor for the home in general; it’s not in the best shape, but it’s still very important and close to her. It’s really beautiful. The house is falling apart, but she loves him dearly and cares deeply about this. She was speaking about who he was as a person. I think he was a character—super loud and funny. And it seems like he delivered every baby in this town.

Some of these houses may not be here in 10 years, but your photographs will. How does it feel that your images could become the official record of these places? 

It feels like the least I could do. It’s hard for me not to go immediately into something deeply personal. I’m from New Orleans, and I’ve lived in other places, but there are times I’ve felt a real urgency to photograph New Orleans, because I do have a fear that it won’t always be around. I’m not a pessimistic person, but you need to remember these places—because if you can’t, you can get lost.