The local sheriff, Charles Rainey, told Moore and Durham to get out of town. “You take my goddamn picture, you’ll go to jail or worse,” he told Moore. Still, the two persisted and remained in town when Rainey and Deputy Cecil Price were brought to court in connection with the murders.
“Sheriff Lawrence Rainey was a meanie. That guy was scary. I believe they were out there that night in the woods. I don’t know if he pulled the trigger. When they forced them out into the woods, they tortured them and made them suffer. Imagine the horrible things they did,” Moore said. Price and six others, most members of the Ku Klux Klan, were later found guilty of conspiracy in depriving the victims of their civil rights. Rainey was acquitted of the charges.
Threatened on countless occasions, Moore was never beaten, but once after a sit-in in Jacksonville, Florida he was rescued by a passing television reporter as an angry mob of black teenagers chased him. In eight years of covering the movement, he found it ironic “that it was blacks who attacked us.” After a bomb threat was called in, other journalists evacuated the scene. Moore and Durham were the only ones left as the situation worsened. “They were angry with the police. They were high school kids throwing stones. They turned over our rental car and burned it. We were running away. My 100 millimeter lens was shattered. It was covering my face,” Moore remembers.
Durham was not as lucky, as the youths caught and beat him; the magazine ran a two-page article, explaining what it was like to be beaten by a mob, with a picture of the reporter bandaged up in the hospital. He said later that if he had not found himself separated from Moore as the two ran for safety, he probably would have avoided injury. “Good photojournalists are lucky. Charles had the luck,” Durham said. Moore described himself as being like “one of the careful photographers who lives through wars.” He credits veteran combat photographer Horst Faas with the philosophy that helped him escape injury while covering civil rights. “You have to know when to duck and when to shoot. Or you’ll die.”
Missed opportunities
Moore and Durham were sent on many assignments that never made the magazine. According to Moore, during the 1960s, for every story that got in the magazine, Life covered five more around the world. Constantly on the road, he often would not know if his pictures had been published until picking up the magazine on the newsstand. Durham said that he knew that Life was not interested in an abundance of text but took pleasure in photographers like Moore getting their stories in.
When their work was ignored, the two took consolation in knowing that they were witness to what they believed was an important chain of events. Not getting published “happened so often you just couldn’t let it bother you,” Durham said. “It was the main drawback. If it was The Bay of Pigs, you could accept it. But often it would be a story of less import.”
On August 28, 1963, between 200,000 and 500,000 people gathered for the largest political demonstration in U.S. history to hear Martin Luther King Jr., Charlton Heston, Sammy Davis Jr., Sidney Poitier and others argue for equal rights. Life’s editors thought that there might be trouble. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had lobbied to try to have the Kennedy administration scuttle the march, believing King to be a communist. However, Kennedy was determined that his civil rights legislation could only be helped by such a large demonstration of both black and white supporters.
“They always liked to put me out where there might be some trouble,” Moore said. He was assigned to shoot the crowd in the reflecting pool area near the Washington Monument. But the rally turned out to be a peaceful one as King delivered his epic “I Have A Dream” speech. Although none of Moore’s photos were published, the official memento of the march was a portfolio of five red, white, and blue collages of Life magazine photographs that included the dog and fire hose images from Birmingham. Forty-thousand were sold to the assembled crowd for $1 each.
Bloody Sunday
Moore’s first Life cover was the March 7, 1965, face-off between Alabama state troopers and a mass of marchers demonstrating for voting rights. King had gone to Selma to direct a registration drive in a county where so great was the intimidation, only 3 percent of blacks had registered to vote. Governor George Wallace implored that he would not tolerate such a march and had about 100 state troopers at the ready to block the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Moore and dozens of other newsmen were witnesses as the troopers warned the group that it had two minutes to retreat back to the local Episcopal church. But only a minute later, the guardsmen were told to attack. Moore’s photographs depicted the savagery as troopers, some wearing gas masks, battered the demonstrators to the ground with billy clubs. More than 60marchers were badly injured. One suffered a fractured skull. The incident came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.”
ABC interrupted its broadcast of the Holocaust film, Judgment in Nuremberg, to report live on the beatings. In Congress, more than 50 speeches were delivered deploring the brutality. Life’s coverage reflected the outrage of the nation at large. Besides the cover, the March 19 issue displayed several pages dominated by Moore’s work, including full-page portraits of troopers and the injured.
On April 2, the magazine published five letters that were overwhelmingly critical of the troopers’ violence. Mrs. M. M. Warsaw, of Braintree, Massachusetts, wrote of one of Moore’s photos, “I wonder if the Selma policeman pictured on page 37 of your current issue would have the same defiant attitude and belligerence if he was brought face to face with the Negro Marines bravely going ashore at Da Nang, South Vietnam?” Julie G. Saunders of South Hadley, Massachusetts, wrote, “The whole tragedy greatly upset me, but not until reading your article have I cried about it. After reading your article I see that it is necessary that I become physically involved … Even though I am safe and secure in this Northern school … I am not free until they are.”
After many years on the bloody front lines of the civil-rights movement, Moore had seen enough. “I had been involved in so much ugliness, and I realized that I needed to do something else.” Turning his attention toward other types of assignments after the brutal Selma beatings, in years to come he would photograph travel stories, do corporate portraiture and occasionally return to hard news. After Moore became so determined to get away from covering violence, Life’s editors later convinced him to spend two months shooting an essay on B-52 air raids in Vietnam.
Despite covering most of the major civil-rights stories of the era, Moore missed the biggest one of all. When King was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968, Moore was in Palo Alto, California doing a sex-education assignment for the Saturday Evening Post. “We had it on the radio and heard the flash. I just pulled the car over to the side, listened to the news and cried. After all I’d done, I felt bad I couldn’t be there on that day in Memphis in 1968. I knew him and he knew me.”
Epilogue
Charles Moore is a freelance photographer based in Alabama. He is a frequent lecturer about the civil rights era at universities and workshops. In 1965, after vowing to get away from the violence, Moore had one other Life cover about Mary Martin’s performance in the musical, Hello Dolly. He has preferred to continue freelancing throughout his career rather than joining the staff of Life full-time. Moore continues to be represented by Black Star and has had more than 100 covers for a variety of magazines including the Saturday Evening Post and Newsweek. In 1989, Howard Chapnick decided to enter Moore’s work in the first annual Kodak Crystal Eagle Award for Impact in Photojournalism, regarded as one of the most prestigious honors in the industry. Moore was named the winner and the resulting publicity sparked renewed interest in his landmark work from the civil-rights movement. In the foreword to Moore’s 1991 book, Powerful Days, The Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore, Andrew Young, the civil rights leader and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, wrote, “The photographs of Charles Moore presented in this brilliant chronicle offer more than simple, visual accounts of the civil rights years … For those of us who remember the pictured events from personal experience, this book is a means by which to sharpen memories, to relive and revisit some of the most meaningful, terrifying and rewarding moments of our lives.”
Michael Durham had the opportunity to hire Charles Moore for several freelance assignments when he later became editor of a magazine published by American Heritage. The two also collaborated on other topics for Life besides civil-rights coverage, and he wrote the text for Powerful Days. While doing the editing for the book, Durham says, “It was amazing to go back through all those old contact sheets. It was like reliving things.” Now doing freelance writing and living in Delancey, New York, he remembers the heady days of covering civil rights. “Every once in a while I think it would be great to rush off to the airport.”
Howard Chapnick passed away shortly after his 1994 book, Truth Needs No Ally, was published. Of Moore’s work he wrote, “The lesson here for aspiring photojournalists is that one has to recognize great turning points in social history, to seize the opportunity to bear witness to them, and to remember that what is in you backyard may be the stepping stone to your success.” His wife, Jeanette Chapnick, was Black Star’s bookkeeper for several decades and continues Chapnick’s work on behalf of documentary photography as a trustee of the W. Eugene Smith grant program and the Howard Chapnick Grant for the advancement of photojournalism.
Carolyn McKinstry met Charles Moore more than two decades after he took his famous photo depicting her being sprayed by a fireman’s hose in Birmingham, when both appeared on a television special about the events there. McKinstry has also appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show and played herself in a recent Spike Lee film about four of her friends who were killed in a church bombing just months after the Birmingham riots. She frequently lectures about the civil-rights movement at schools and works as an informational-technology trainer for Bell South. Of Birmingham, where she still lives, McKinstry says, “It’s become a really nice place to live.”
The writer’s interview subjects:
(All interviews were conducted in 1998.)
Jeanette Chapnick
Michael Durham
Yukiko Launois
Carolyn McKinstry
Charles Moore
STORY INDEX
MARKETPLACE >
A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by Kris Shepard and Clayborne Carson
URL: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0446678090/inthefraycomThe Civil Rights Movement: An Eyewitness History by Stanford Wexler (1993)
URL: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/081602748X/inthefraycomThe Civil Rights Movement: A Photographic History, 1954-68 by Stephen Kasher
URL: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0789206560/inthefraycomOrigins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change by Aldon D. Morris
URL: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0029221307/inthefraycomPowerful Days: The Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore by Michael S. Durham and Charles Moore
URL: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0817311521/inthefraycomTruth Needs No Ally: Inside Photojournalism By Howard Chapnick
URL: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0826209556/inthefraycomWhy We Can’t Wait by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
URL: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0451527534/inthefraycom
Life articles >
“In the U.S., Mostly Quiet,” Life, September 15, 1958, 30.
“Selma: Beatings Start The Savage Season,” Life, March 19, 1965.
“They Fight A Fire That Won’t Go Out,” Life, May 17, 1963, 26-36.
“With The Besieged Marshals As The Wild Mob Attacks,” Life, October 12, 1962, 37.
Life, June 7, 1963, 21.
Life, November 2, 1958, 21.
ORGANIZATIONS >
Birmingham Civil Rights Institute
URL: http://www.bcri.org/index.html
PHOTOS >
Charles Moore’s photographs featured on Kodak’s website
URL: http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/features/moore/mooreIndex.shtmlDear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
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