Beginning on February 12, 2004, and continuing until the California Supreme Court forced it to stop on March 11, the city of San Francisco issued more than 4,000 marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Five of those couples are presented here and have been together from as few as three to as many as 19 years, and all expressed awe at having participated in such a historical event, the beginning of a civil rights revolution.

While gay and lesbian couples were being married at City Hall, visible changes in most areas of the city were less noticeable. Even in the Castro, signs of the change were subtle. From signs in store windows and window displays to seeing male couples in tuxes and female couples in wedding dresses running to take public transportation to City Hall, it all seemed so natural and unremarkable.

But the important visual impact wrapped around City Hall during those first few days; the impact of that scene is undeniable. Seeing couples joyfully standing in line for hours to do something most Americans take for granted, removed the debate over same-sex marriage from the theoretical; it gave the issue a human face, a diversity of human faces. It also took the second-class status of civil unions out of the equation for a few weeks while straight and gay couples stood side by side and had their relationships deemed legally equal.

Some have compared the prohibition on gay marriage to Jim Crow segregation, and what has happened in San Francisco to the Montgomery bus boycott. But while some similarities exist, I believe the more appropriate parallel is to voting rights. Historical arguments against extending voting rights to males without property, blacks, and women have all hinged on the idea that expanding the voting franchise would somehow diminish those rights for those already in possession of them.

The same arguments of diminishment of quality have been used against extending the franchise of marriage to gays and lesbians, as if many heterosexuals haven’t already done much to demean the institution. Wouldn’t seeing thousands of people scrambling for the rights you take for granted somehow increase your esteem of those rights? Perhaps what social/religious conservatives who oppose same-sex marriage fear most is that the thin veneer of what has passed for truth on this argument will be torn away by reality and is why conservative legal groups fought so stridently to stop San Francisco’s same-sex marriages as quickly as possible. Each day that gay marriages were being performed, opposition was eroding. Hearts and minds were being changed.

February 12 is National Freedom to Marry Day. But on February 12, 2004, unlike prior years, protesters already in wedding garb were welcomed into San Francisco’s City Hall and offered the marriage licenses they had been denied for so long.

Kate and Susan were married on the first day. Kate remarked that: “By the end of the afternoon, it felt like everybody we knew was there getting married. It was like this huge party in addition to a political act in addition to a personal act of commitment.”

Huong and Alison were also married on February 12 with their 17-month-old son, Theryn, in tow. Most couples exchanged rings, jewelry, or other keepsakes. Huong and Alison passed Theryn between them. Mabel Teng, the City Assessor who conducted their ceremony, said she had never seen that before. Alison remembers how she felt that day. “There was just this wonderful overwhelming sense of love and excitement and change, like all of a sudden these people were having their first taste of freedom,” she said.

Zack and Steve, together for three years, were married on Friday, February 13. In talking about the day they were married, Steve exclaimed, “This is a wonderful city!” The pair wanted to be photographed at The Palace of Fine Arts, a special location for them, where they hope to have the reception.

After a quick trip to Tiffany & Co. for wedding bands, Tim and Justin stood in line on Valentine’s Day. They would have to come back the next day to get married, which they did gladly. The couple, who had previously registered as domestic partners, mentioned how different it felt this time. “When we got our domestic partnership, there were actually couples there getting married. It was a very different feel for the couples getting married than it was for us,” one said. But that was not the case this time; this time they were the ones getting married.

Carolyn and Mona, together for 19 years, stood in line for seven hours on February 16 despite Carolyn’s recent surgery. “[The line] was wrapped all around City Hall … People [were] honking and waving and [giving] thumbs up and congratulations and taxis driving around every 10 to 15 minutes saying free rides for newlyweds … and then all the people coming by and giving us food and drink and umbrellas … people coming to help us celebrate. … It was a wonderful, wonderful day,” Carolyn recalls.

Carolyn tells the story of how, while standing in the final hallway leading to the clerk’s office, the high ceilings and marble walls began to reverberate with people singing, “Chapel of Love.” At that moment, a song from the American pop culture dustbin took on a new and poignant significance. “I didn’t realize how meaningful it would be to have the support of community,” Carolyn said.

In The Fray Contributor

On September 3, 1958, Charles Moore, a young photographer for the Montgomery Advertiser, witnessed an argument between the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and two policemen on the steps of the City Recorders’ Court. Moore’s good fortune that day was in stark contrast with King’s. Moore was the only member of the media to witness King’s subsequent arrest, and his picture of the minister being manhandled during the police booking became one of the most significant photographs of the civil-rights movement. King was taken to the back of the jail where he was frisked, roughed up, and tossed into a cell.

When Life picked up the picture from the Associated Press wire, it would be the first of Moore’s celebrated civil-rights photos to be published in the magazine. Having witnessed many of the most significant events of the era, by 1965, the photographer would grow weary of years of hatred, violence, street battles, and the searing taste of tear gas. After documenting the fight surrounding James Meredith’s bloody admission to the University of Mississippi, the dogs turned on protesters in Birmingham, and the savagery of the civil-rights march at Selma, Moore booked an around-the-world ticket on Pan Am and didn’t return home for eight months.

Through the work of Moore and other heralded photographers such as Flip Schulke and Gordon Parks, Life — along with King’s savvy for spreading his message through the media — is credited with giving national prominence to what had been a regional story until the mid-1950s. During the 1950s and ’60s, the weekly Life was the nation’s most influential media outlet, reaching more citizens than any television program and read by more than half the adult population of the United States.

Although many letters to the editor protested Life’s so-called “liberal bias” in covering civil rights, the magazine was also criticized for its conservatism. When it published eleven pages of Moore’s graphic photos of rioting in Birmingham, Alabama, in May 1963, it described the movement as a “crusade” and used sympathetic headlines such as “The Dogs’ Attack is Negroes’ Reward.” However, the same article criticized King’s non-violent but provocative actions.

The pictures on these eleven pages are frightening. They are frightening because of the brutal methods being used by white policemen in Birmingham, Ala. against Negro demonstrators. They are frightening because the Negro strategy of “nonviolent direct action” invites that very brutality — and welcomes it as a way to promote the Negroes’ cause, which, under the law, is right.

Indeed, the article quoted no blacks at all and followed with a sidebar interviewing 16 Birmingham whites. In the introduction to the interviews, Life said, “The Negroes of Birmingham know what they want and how they want to get it. The white people of the city, shaken by recent events, are perplexed about what to do.”  Moore felt that the magazine’s only bias was in its zeal to right the wrongs of desegregation. Despite being a southern, white male he was sickened by the injustice that he witnessed while covering the civil-rights movement.

In his 1964 book about the violence in Birmingham, Why We Can’t Wait, King’s comments illuminate the drama contained in Moore’s photos and the power of the national media, of which Life was most influential: “The brutality … was caught — as a fugitive from a penitentiary is often caught — in gigantic circling spotlights. It was imprisoned in a luminous glare revealing the naked truth to the whole world.”

Like King, Moore had been the son of a Baptist minister. The photographer was reared in Tuscumbia, Alabama, living in a poor white community as “a real tough little kid who grew up in a community of tough kids.” His father would invite Charles along, as he was sometimes invited to preach in the normally segregated black churches nearby. Although he knew few blacks growing up, he remembers that a kind man once walked him home when he became lost and wandered into a “colored town” when he was six. He credits his father’s insistence that that no racial epithets be uttered in the family’s house for his own tolerance. “Although my Dad had few black friends, he told us never to use the ‘n’’ word,” Moore said.

Moore had not set out to be a news photographer. After a stint in the Marine Corps and training in fashion photography at the Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara, California, he returned home to Alabama and settled for a job photographing in an Olan Mills portrait studio. Although the industrious Moore was soon offered a job as regional manager for the studio chain, he went to Montgomery to see the local newspaper’s chief photographer, Joe Holloway. As the first of Moore’s photographic mentors, Holloway was impressed with the 26-year-old’s knowledge of a Rolleiflex camera and ability to build a rapport with models on the site of a fashion shoot.

When he began working at the paper in 1957, Moore had no knowledge of the national story that had occurred in Montgomery just a year before: Rosa Parks, a local seamstress, had refused to ride in the back of a city bus, as was the rule in the South, touching off a massive boycott. “To be honest, I was a young kid. I didn’t know what was going on in the world. I had no interest. My head was into camping, wildlife and fashion. I wanted to photograph beauty,” he said. He had no idea that his pictures to come would do far more than help publicize King’s efforts; they would also lead to national outrage culminating in President Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. By that time, Moore’s dramatic Life photos were given credit for helping to influence the legislation’s passage.

Fueling the movement

Before King was arrested on the courthouse steps, Moore had met him briefly on a routine assignment at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church just a few blocks down from the paper.  As a typical southern newspaper of its time, the Advertiser relegated “Negro news” to a separate section. Still, the paper did not ignore the growing national prominence of its local minister and Moore soon began to realize the importance of the role he was playing:

When I met Dr. King, I was just at the beginning of my career. I never knew black people on a personal level because there was segregation. I had been to his church meetings and didn’t have to go to many to be absolutely fascinated by this man. When I went down to meet him, I shot him at the pulpit with a cross behind his head. I got down low to get the power of this man. I have to say, ‘Yeah, I was on my knees to King.’  I became fascinated [by the] the power of his oratory. From then on I wanted to cover him. I wanted every assignment I could get.

In September 1958, King attempted to enter a crowded courtroom for a hearing involving his fellow pastor and key aide, Ralph Abernathy. Moore had heard that King might be there, and on his own initiative decided to drop by. “The police were telling him he couldn’t go in and were giving him a hard time. He said, ‘I’ll just stay here [on the courthouse steps]’ and refused to leave,” Moore said.

Moore recalls that the two inexperienced officers suddenly decided to arrest King, unaware of who he was. His wife, Coretta, protested but was told, “Just nod your head and you’ll go to jail, too.” Although King was not being pushed, one officer twisted the minister’s arm as the three walked a block and a half to the police booking area. “I saw an opening on the other side of the counter. I ran there real quickly. Nobody stopped me and I quickly took a few frames from behind the counter,” Moore said.

When the picture went out on the wire, two Life staffers appeared in town the next day, photographer Gary Villete and “a guy who later became managing editor.” They got in touch with Moore, who invited them to his home for dinner, his first meeting with the magazine.

At the time, Moore did not understand the significance of his picture, but many others did. During the next two days, the national press corps poured into town. Rather than pay a fine for loitering, King was intent on serving his 14-day jail sentence. To diffuse further publicity, Police Commissioner Clyde Sellers released him, saying that he was merely saving the taxpayers money by paying King’s $10 fine. “King was a master at using the media. The significance was that the whole world was aware that Martin Luther King had been put in jail,” Moore later realized.

When the picture was published in Life twelve days later, Moore was pleased but wished the magazine could have published his eight-picture sequence of the incident instead of just a single photo. Once before, Life had published a full-page fire picture of Moore’s but editors chose not to give prominent play to King’s arrest. The photograph occupied one-sixth of a page and was used with three other pictures accompanying a story about “mostly quiet” civil-rights integration. Stories given far more dominant play in the same issue included “Chinese ‘Reds’ impose a blockade on Quemoy” and an article about fixing charges on television quiz shows. A prominent story on race riots in Britain also dwarfed the coverage of unrest at home.

Even with the understated play in Life, the photo’s publication in the influential magazine triggered further outrage and a rush of financial aide for King’s Montgomery Improvement Association. Although he had once been asked to appear on television’s Meet the Press, King was now even better-known on a national level; his influence would soon grow to a fevered pitch. By the next time King was photographed by Moore during an arrest, the photographer would be on assignment for Life.

Moore makes his mark as a freelancer

By 1962, Moore had been his newspaper’s chief photographer for four years after Holloway had moved on to a career at United Press International. He was ready for a change and decided to take a room in the French Quarter of New Orleans for a 10-day shooting vacation. He met the wife of local district attorney Jim Garrison, who would later rise to prominence with his controversial views on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Garrison helped Moore gain access to the late-night world of jazz bars, musicians and stripper — subjects that were otherwise off-limits to outsiders. “When I got back to the paper, I knew I wanted to travel more and reach out to a new audience,” Moore said. He gave two weeks’ notice and moved to New York, anticipating a lucrative freelance career there.

“It didn’t work. I spent three months and was hanging out in the West Village. I hated New York and my money was going.” Before heading back to Alabama, Moore befriended Milt Freir, a representative from Leica who urged him to go see Howard Chapnick, the influential founder of the Black Star picture agency. In his book, Truth Needs No Ally, Chapnick described Moore as disenchanted. “He had come to New York to make his way into photojournalism and after three months had found a cold, unyielding and professionally unrewarding city.”

Chapnick decided to give Moore a small weekly guarantee. “We talked and Howard liked the idea I was giving up New York. ‘I think you can do some really good work down there,’ he told me,” Moore remembers. Chapnick would later credit Moore with documenting the important events that defined the movement.

Rather than encourage Charles Moore to stay in New York to pursue his career, I told him I felt one of the great stories in American history was unfolding in the South. He came from the South and understood it. Going back to Alabama to document the events taking place there would provide the chance for Charles to do work he was uniquely qualified for.

Still, upon his return to Montgomery, Moore faced another two months of frustration. He missed the newspaper and had little to do. “I felt like a stranger in hell back in Montgomery. I was struggling,” he said.  But Moore had a sudden turn of luck when he ran into Life‘s Miami bureau chief, Dick Billings, in Oxford, Mississippi.

Black student James Meredith had attempted to register at the University of Mississippi and the state’s defiant governor, Ross Barnett, ignored a federal court order by declaring himself the university’s emergency registrar, personally and physically barring Meredith. The governor was seen as a folk hero in his state and hated what he saw as Life’s liberal bias, refusing to be photographed or interviewed. Moore’s contacts from five years of covering state government paid off as he assured Billings that he could get a picture.

After being granted exclusive access to photograph Barnett, Moore says that he did not dare mention the word ‘Life.” The editor was thrilled with the pictures. “After today, you’re working for us,” he was told. At the time, a mob of more than 2,000 was descending on the college town, intent on blocking Meredith at any cost.

Moore’s ascent to the ranks of Life photographers could not have come at a more dangerous time. U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy sent 200 federal marshals down to protect Meredith and each other. Several other Life shooters were on the scene, some with combat experience. With two days to go before federal marshals would attempt to escort Meredith to his first class, Moore knew that it would be a violent weekend.

Word got out that he was working for the magazine. A pack of enraged white students shoved their way into Moore’s hotel room, shouting and cursing. One began to choke him before the former Golden Gloves boxer pushed him away. “I’ve never seen such hate in anyone’s face before. It was like I were vermin … To him I was worse than ‘a nigger,’  I was a white nigger. And worse than that I was a white Life magazine nigger.”

On the street, the mob waved confederate flags. Some even loaded guns as they waited for Meredith’s arrival, not knowing he had already been hidden at a campus dormitory. Local law enforcement, urged on by the governor, was defiant of the federal authorities as well, intent on preventing the enrollment of the first black student there. One of Moore’s most chilling photographs showed local plain-clothes policemen chuckling while one practiced a swing with a billy club before the start of the inevitable rioting. “They were talking about what they’re going to do to Bobby Kennedy and the U.S. Marshals, laughing and showing how they would take care of them,” Moore said.

Moore had to make some quick decisions. The marshals had blocked the campus, forbidding the press to go in. Readily identifiable as a news photographer, he was threatened again. “I was told, ‘You nigger lovers had better go home’ … and that this guy and his brother were out with their shotguns looking for me.” After buying a gas mask at a local Army-Navy store, Moore sneaked onto the campus with the help of a brave student who he remembers only as ‘John.’ The student drove a VW beetle and Moore stashed his cameras in the vehicle’s trunk. “The cops searched the car but didn’t search the trunk, which was up front. That’s how I got in,” he said.

It was Sunday evening and as darkness fell, the rioting began. The mob had surrounded the school’s administration building, the Lyceum, and started slashing tires and throwing rocks. Soon it was a siege. Earlier, Moore had decided to bluff his way into the building, where 200 unarmed marshals were holed up. Accompanied by a freelance writer who was also working for Life, Moore banged on the door, telling the guard that he was desperately ill and had to go to the toilet. The ruse worked and the two were forgotten about in the ensuing chaos. Outside, cars were set on fire, and when a lead pipe knocked a marshal unconscious, the lawmen began to fire tear gas into the mob. Moore darted outside for a short time but again talked his way back in. “If you stayed outside and used a flash, you would die. Molotov cocktails were being thrown all over,”  he said.

It was no safer inside. As soon as marshals fired the gas into the crowd, it would drift back inside, filling the building. Moore wore a gas mask through the evening as he photographed the wounded marshals, several shot and bleeding. After hearing about the melee, then-President John F. Kennedy decided to send in federal troops but they would not arrive until the next day. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach was trapped inside the building, and Moore overheard him pleading on the telephone with Bobby Kennedy:

‘They’ve got guns out there, Bobby, they’ve got guns. Our men are being shot . . .’ He was trying to convince Kennedy to let them have weapons to protect themselves and Kennedy said no. They had billy clubs, that’s all. The marshals were shooting tear gas to keep the crowd from rushing them. They even stole a bulldozer and were attacking the building with it.

When it was over, twenty-eight marshals had been shot and 160 were injured. Moore had been the only photographer inside and had exclusive shots of the wounded. Later he learned that a French reporter and a local repairman had been killed in the night-long battle. “We put our lives on the line. I was just sitting on a trash can in front of the building, surrounded by smashed TV cameras and tear gas canisters. We were totally wiped out,” Moore said.

The magazine’s reporters and photographers were ordered to rest up in a Memphis hotel room. One of the correspondents made up a mock press card, called a ‘SCREW’ card, standing for ‘Southern Correspondents Reporting Equality Wars.’ For his bravery, Moore was issued the first one. “I’m real proud of that because I have card No. 1,” he said. He received a phone call from Black Star telling him that Life was overwhelmed with his work. For the next three years, he would earn the reputation as the photographer most able to gain uncanny access to the front lines of the civil-rights cause.

A 13-page layout in the October 12 issue was dominated by Moore’s work. But some of the letters to the editor that were published on October 26 and November 2 were critical of both the magazine and the federal involvement in the university’s affairs. One letter complained about stereotyping when the magazine wrote, “A blood-covered red-neck is propelled in the door, guided by two angry marshals.” Carolyn P. Nemrow, of Boston, wrote, “President Kennedy has enough of the nation’s journalistic sheep jumping to give its condemnation of Ole Miss Affairs. When will people realize that the issue is not Meredith, it is state sovereignty versus ever-growing federal intervention.”

Of barking dogs and walls of water

Moore soon moved to Miami, and after considering a job with the Miami Herald, was promised steady work with Life by Billings. He was often teamed with reporter Michael Durham and in April 1963, the two were assigned to cover rising tensions in Mississippi and Alabama. After William Moore, a mailman, was shot and killed while walking to protest segregation, Moore photographed protesters along “The Freedom March” that followed a path through three states.

At nearly the same time, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested for organizing protests by school children and from jail would write his famous treatise outlining his philosophy of civil disobedience. Although a state injunction had been issued against King’s protests, he responded by saying, “We’ve got an injunction from heaven.” Moore had a strong picture of King and Abernathy walking toward their inevitable arrest along with a series from the march. However, neither story was published in the magazine. One of the biggest American news stories of the century, the Bay of Pigs — the failed, U.S.-led attack on Cuba — pushed civil rights out of the pages of Life for a time.

The most influential pictures of Moore’s career were taken over five days beginning on May 3. Birmingham was considered the nation’s most segregated city, and the photographer had a hunch that he and Durham should go to the city after hearing reports on the radio about escalating tensions there. Five minutes after the journalists arrived in Kelly Ingram Park, the scene of anti-segregation demonstrations, firemen had been ordered by Police Commissioner Bull Connor to bring out their hoses to contain the swelling crowd.

Moore crawled on the pavement and took a position between the firemen and the protesters, who were being pummeled by a virtual wall of water. The scene disgusted Moore but he felt a responsibility to keep shooting. One of the firemen told him later, “We’re supposed to fight fires, not people.”

One of Moore’s most remarkable photographs showed three students forced against a brick wall by a fierce spray of water propelled at 100 pounds per square inch. Fourteen-year-old Carolyn McKinstry was unaware at the time that she was being photographed. “After getting hit with the hose, that was the last thing on my mind. Dr. King had had motivational meetings with us. He had never mentioned the water hose but said there might be dogs and they might even spit on you,” she said in a 1998 interview.

When she saw her picture in Life two weeks after the demonstrations, McKinstry had no special feeling about seeing herself in a national magazine, saying that she was still fearful and angry from the experience. However, a teenager at the time, she did remember being displeased at seeing her hair in disarray. Later, McKinstry would become appreciative of the sensitivity in Moore’s graphic photographs. Before the Birmingham unrest, she had said, “The black community had lost any trust that there could be a fair portrayal by the photographers. We were always portrayed in a negative light.”

The protests continued for five days as King urged the demonstrators, many of them children, to return to the park. Some of the scores of angry onlookers were not schooled in the preacher’s philosophy of passive resistance; Moore was struck in the ankle by a large chunk of concrete. Despite searing pain and an injury to his tendons, he continued to work for the next three days after treatment by a black doctor. “He did that story half-crippled,” Durham said.

When the demonstrations did not abate, Connor ordered police dogs into the crowd and urged the officers to allow whites to view the demonstrations. “I want them to see the dogs work,” he said. Along with the fire hose images, the pictures of dogs snarling and ripping at the pants of protesters would be among the most dramatic of Moore’s career. Despite knowing that he was making meaningful photographs, Moore felt revulsion. “Attack dogs — that was repulsive,” he said.

As the demonstrations spread, Moore and Durham disobeyed a police order not to go outside the park and were arrested as they attempted to document a woman being knocked down by the water from the hoses. Locked up in a cell for four hours with Durham and about a dozen menacing white men, Moore, known as a fearless photographer, faced one of the most frightening experiences of his career. “We could have been beaten very badly if they would have known we were from Life.” Another reporter from the magazine bailed them out. Facing the possibility of a six-month jail term in an unsympathetic city, Life’s lawyers advised Moore and Durham to skip town immediately and fly to New York. The charges were later dropped but for a year, Moore was a fugitive from justice in his own state, having to sneak home once to see his own children in Dothan.

At Life, Moore was given the rare opportunity to supervise the 11-page layout, and the magazine’s editors decided to give him his first byline. His photos inspired seven letters published in the June 7 issue — three critical and four sympathetic to the civil rights cause. Francis Pharr Jones, of Austin, Texas, wrote, “We assume the guilt of the white supremacist when we allow this persecution … I shall never forget those tragic faces.” Grady Franklin, of Crawfordsville, Indiana, wrote, “Charles Moore’s photographs on the racial troubles in Birmingham were superb and bone-chilling — surely a candidate for the Pulitzer Prize in news photography.”

The photos of the dog attacks and fire hoses have been among the best-selling of all time at Black Star, reprinted time and again in books and magazines. Picture editor Yukiko Launois recalled that there were many photographers working in the South at the time, but “I remember Charles’ photos, particularly of Birmingham, as the most memorable and distinguished.” Several others had also photographed the violent confrontation between police dogs and protesters. “Somehow, Charles’ image was better. Only Charles’ became a classic. From the beginning, Charles Moore was identified with that image.”

Politicians noticed as well. John F. Kennedy said that the situation in Birmingham had sickened him and mentioned the riots there in a speech the next month in which he asked Congress to initiate civil-rights legislation. Militant black leader Malcolm X mentioned the dog attacks in a speech that he gave in Africa. Senator Jacob Javits of New York later credited Moore’s Birmingham photographs with helping to quicken passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. later said that the police-dog photographs transformed the national mood and made the legislation not just necessary, but possible. A year after Moore’s classic photos were first published in Life, Martin Luther King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Even artist Andy Warhol noticed Moore’s best-known photo of a snarling dog reared up on its hind legs while another bit the buttocks of a protester. One morning in 1964, Howard Chapnick and his wife, Jeanette, were eating breakfast when the Black Star chief noticed a Time magazine article about Warhol’s latest work. Chapnick immediately recognized that one of the featured paintings, Red Race Riot, was a slightly altered silkscreen of Moore’s photograph. “Howard has eagle eyes. He might not remember what he had for breakfast but never forgets a picture,” said Jeanette Chapnick.

The painting was a clear copyright violation without credit to either Moore or the agency. Chapnick insisted that Moore go personally to Warhol’s studio to confront him. Not comfortable with negotiating with the flamboyant artist and his assistant, Moore settled for two flower prints and Warhol’s promise that he would be credited whenever the painting was reproduced (Later it was found that the flower series had itself been appropriated from a photograph in a Burpee seed catalog). In the years to come, Warhol failed to follow through on his promise of crediting the photograph and both Black Star and Moore sold their flower prints soon after obtaining them. The Warhol watercolor was not considered an appropriate match for the famous news photos adorning the walls at Black Star. “It had no place hanging with the photography. We sold it and had a lot of trouble getting rid of it. I think we got $250 for it,” said Jeanette Chapnick.

Knowing when to duck and when to shoot

Moore and Durham traveled together frequently through the South, covering the dangerous skirmishes that defined the black struggle for equality.  When they first met in a Tennessee airport to cover the 1963 Freedom March, Life’s editors had thought it wise to team a Southerner with a Northerner. Moore’s Alabama drawl blended in but when he heard Durham’s Yankee accent, the reporter recalled Moore’s first words to him. “‘At least you look like a redneck. But when we’re together, don’t say anything.’ That’s a funny thing to say to a reporter but it was definitely good advice. It was best the rednecks didn’t know who you were in those years,” Durham said.

The two quickly became friends and looked out for each other during the many urban battles they covered. In order not to miss crucial pictures during fast-breaking riots, a system was worked out where Moore would run backwards at full speed as he photographed, led by the collar through the crowd by Durham.

Chapnick told Moore that he could not believe that in Birmingham, the photographer’s longest telephoto lens was a modest 100 millimeters. Often, the reporter would help out by carrying a lens or even Moore’s camera bag during tense events. In June 1963, in Jackson, Mississippi, a riot broke out as the two covered the funeral of Medgar Evers, the first black civil-rights leader to be assassinated. Durham remembers the event as the only time that the usually kind and soft-spoken Moore ever spoke harshly to him.

It was in the heat of action. He turned and said to me, ‘Give me the lens!’ ‘What do you mean,’ ‘Give me the lens?’ I replied. He said, ‘I gave it to you.’ I said, ‘No, you did not.’ We went back down the street and saw a red-haired kid standing there holding the lens. Charles asked him, ‘How did you get the lens?’ This kid turned and said to Charles, ‘‘You told me, Here. Hold this.’ All the time Charles thought it was me.

In June 1964, Moore and Durham were assigned to cover the disappearance of three white Northern college students who came to the South to help register black voters. After being jailed in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the three vanished shortly after their release. Later they were found murdered and the Life team found themselves working in their most hostile environment yet.

“All the journalists will tell you that Philadelphia, Mississippi was the most frightening place of all,” Moore said. Because they had rented a car and taken a hotel room, word spread quickly among townspeople that outsider reporters were there to cover the murders. As Moore photographed the search for the bodies, a local man tried to knock a camera out of his hand. “As we were driving the back roads, our bumper got bumped.” For protection, “in the motel, we put a chair in front of the door.”

Go to part two

In The Fray Contributor

Go to part one

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/inthefraycom

The Civil Rights Movement: An Eyewitness History by Stanford Wexler (1993)
URL: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/081602748X/inthefraycom

The Civil Rights Movement: A Photographic History, 1954-68 by Stephen Kasher
URL: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0789206560/inthefraycom

Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change by Aldon D. Morris
URL: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0029221307/inthefraycom

Powerful Days: The Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore by Michael S. Durham and Charles Moore
URL: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0817311521/inthefraycom

Truth Needs No Ally: Inside Photojournalism By Howard Chapnick
URL: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0826209556/inthefraycom

Why 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.shtml

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