On October 25, 2008 the world lost photography legend, Alexander (Alex) Rivera. A Northa Carolina native and World War II veteran, Rivera spent 30 years photographing segregation/integration, lynchings, wrongful persecutions and the daily life of Southern African Americans.

Although Rivera described his history-making work as “just another day on the job”, he endured persecutions of his own – like the time in 1948 when he was jailed for photographing the three separate entrances to a movie theater, one for whites, one for blacks and one for Indians.

This year the North Carolina Museum of History, held a retrospective of Rivera’s work titled Bearing Witness: Civil Rights Photographs of Alexander Rivera.