Roland L. Freeman (born 1936) was an American photographer devoted to recording the lives of rural and urban African Americans. His photographs comprised a social history beginning with the era of the civil rights movement.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1936, Roland L. Freeman was sent from the streets of an urban environment to a southern Maryland tobacco farm at age 13 by a loving mother who foresaw disaster for him if he did not get away from the city. In 1954, as a member of the U.S. Air Force, he took his first pictures with a Brownie Hawkeye camera. However, he did not stick with photography at that point. Later, in 1963, he decided that photography would be his medium, and he had his first one-man show six years later.

Freeman's emphasis on documenting the African American urban and rural experience began with the March on Washington on August 28, 1963. On that...