This month, PHS will display an exhibit featuring Religious News Service photographs during Religion News Service’s 90th Anniversary Symposium and Gala
by Kristen Gaydos | Presbyterian Historical Society
Members of the National Council of Churches delegation attend the March on Washington, August 28, 1963. (Photo from the Religious News Service Photograph Collection at the Presbyterian Historical Society).
In January, Presbyterian Historical Society received a planning grant from Lilly Endowment Inc., which funded the design and fabrication of an exhibit prototype, “Faith & Justice in the 1960s: Religious News Service Covers Civil Rights.”
The photographs selected for display document moments of joy and cooperation, as well as violence and struggle, as grassroots and interdenominational groups battled racial discrimination. The images also shine a light on the ways Black Americans and their allies — impelled by their faith — protested, prayed, defied unjust laws, and crossed racial and religious lines to strive for equality and a better society.
“Faith & Justice in the 1960s: Religious News Service Covers Civil Rights,” will be displayed at Religion News Service’s inaugural symposium and gala, a landmark event dedicated to fostering understanding and dialogue around the role of religion in today’s world.
If additional funding is awarded by Lilly Endowment Inc.’s Religion and Cultural Institutions Initiative in 2025, PHS hopes the prototype exhibit will serve as a template to develop larger traveling exhibits that tell the story of religion news reporting in the 20th century. Future exhibits would continue to feature images and documents from the Religious News Service Collection, to be displayed across the country at large museums and smaller academic institutions, churches, and other religious centers across faith communities in furtherance of the original mission of the news service: to increase understanding, appreciation, and fellowship across religions and the secular world.
PHS is home to over 60,000 photographs of the Religious News Service Collection. Founded in 1934, the news service was an independent, nonprofit affiliate of the National Conference of Christians and Jews. From the start, it was dedicated to providing fair, balanced, nonsectarian news about religion to the secular and religious press. In 1983, the service was acquired by the United Methodist Reporter and continued to operate as an independent news agency. In 1994, Newhouse News Service, a major publisher of daily newspapers and magazines, purchased the service and changed its name to Religion News Service (RNS). RNS continues today as a non-profit news organization operated by the Religion News Foundation.
In 2023, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded PHS a Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Implementation grant to digitize 22,500 images, newspaper clippings, and related documents from the Religious News Service Collection. These images are being added to Pearl Digital Collections through December 2025.
Learn more about the Religious News Service Photograph Collection.
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