Road to Freedom

 

Road to Freedom

 

Bearing Witness, Part 2
Pictures for the Press


Charles Moore (American, 1931–2010), Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Arrested, Montgomery, Alabama (detail), 1958, gelatin silver print, 9 1/4 x 13 1/2 inches, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from Lucinda W. Bunnen for the Bunnen Collection, 1994.63. © Charles Moore/Black Star, courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery.

The brutal murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, in the summer of 1955, brought reporters to the South in unprecedented numbers. It was also the first time the white-led northern press had responded significantly to a racial story, and the first time they worked alongside their black counterparts and shared the same degree of access and opportunity. Till’s murder was reported extensively in the black press. Working competitively on stories were reporters from Jet, Ebony, the Chicago Defender, The Pittsburgh Courier, Amsterdam News, and the Afro-American newspapers. A freelance photographer from Memphis, Ernest C. Withers, covered the trial extensively for his hometown newspaper, the Tri-State Defender (working alongside reporter Moses Newson), and made important pictures in the courtroom during the trial in Sumner, Mississippi. His colleague, David Jackson, a staffer for Jet and Ebony magazines, made the harrowing close-up portrait of Till’s mutilated face when his open casket was put on view in Chicago. The photograph was published in Jet and sold out the magazine instantly, but few whites saw the image because its circulation was carefully controlled by Johnson Publications. The publication of Till’s photograph in Jet began a tradition in this magazine of reporting in depth on prominent civil rights stories, a commitment that continued unabated through the late 1960s.

The Till murder had an extraordinary impact on a new generation of young blacks, adolescents at the time, who would soon call for justice and freedom in ways hitherto unknown in America. Less than three months later the black community of Montgomery began a groundbreaking boycott of the municipal bus system. It was there in the dark of early morning in December 1956, that Withers boarded a bus alongside reporter L. Alex Wilson to capture Dr. King and Rev. Abernathy’s historic ride on the first desegregated bus to operate after the boycott . This set a pattern for Withers, who was on hand when it counted to make important photographs of the civil rights struggle for more than a decade, concluding with his documentation of the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike in the spring of 1968 (pl. 93).

By the end of World War II, photographs occupied roughly one-third of news space in the average metropolitan newspaper in the United States. Editors understood the photograph’s ability to convey explicit information about a personality or event, as well as its capacity to dramatically increase sales. The growth of independent news agencies such as United Press International (UPI) and the Associated Press (AP) was swift, bringing about a significant shift in the way that photographs were shared and disseminated. In 1935 the Associated Press Wirephoto network was launched, which allowed for the express transmission of news images over telephone lines. Photographs could be exchanged and published with greater speed and ease than ever before.

Wirephoto technology was in its heyday during the civil rights era, and the growing popularity of television helped accelerate the progress of a movement whose time had come. By 1960 roughly 80 percent of American households had television, and low incomes in the South were no obstacle to blacks, who increasingly used television as a means to see news that reflected their reality in a way that the white or mainstream newspapers did not. Despite the growth in numbers of viewers, television had not yet superseded the printed page nationwide as the medium through which most Americans got their news Magazines such as Look, Life, Jet, and Ebony did brisk business and revolutionized the use of photography by publishing dramatic stories that were built around a clutch of carefully edited images.

Fig. 2. James “Spider” Martin (American, 1939–2003), Reporter Al Fox Calling in a Story, Selma to Montgomery March, 1965, gelatin silver print, 10 × 8 inches, Spider Martin Civil Rights Collection. © James “Spider” Martin, courtesy Spider Martin Civil Rights Collection.
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Agencies such as AP and UPI were under intense pressure to deliver newsworthy photographs for the daily newspapers across the nation. In the South, AP had major bureaus in Atlanta, Memphis, and Miami, staffed with reporters, photographers, and photo editors. The personnel were typically white men, who spent much of their time working independently on assignment. When they were sent to small towns or remote rural locations—as was often the case during the civil rights movement—the photographers carried mobile darkroom equipment, allowing them to process the film and make wet prints on location, often in a makeshift studio darkroom set up in a motel. Once developed and processed, the still-moist print was wrapped onto a drum scanner and transmitted by telephone to the nearest bureau. The goal was to get the image—and the story—to New York as soon as possible, where it could be printed and evaluated by editors for publication. For reporters too, being on hand to get the news and send it from the scene and onto the wire was essential to staying ahead of rivals in the field. On the Selma to Montgomery March for Voting Rights in March 1965, the more intrepid reporters adapted to the remoteness of Highway 80 in rural Alabama and rigged up a working telephone by tapping directly into the phone lines along the route (fig. 2). Their stories could be filed on the spot, saving precious travel time to and from a regional bureau.

Fig. 3. Morton Broffman (American, 1928–1992), Montgomery, Alabama, 1965, gelatin silver print, 9 9⁄16 × 7 3⁄8 inches, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of the Broffman family, 2007.63. © Morton Broffman.
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Associated Press photographers routinely wrote their own captions for the photographs, and this information became an integral element in the evaluation of the image for publication by newsroom editors. Although many news photographers had been trained to use a Graflex Speed Graphic—a 4-×-5-inch format camera that was commonplace equipment for news photographers from around 1930 onward—by 1960 they increasingly worked with 35mm cameras. This reduction in the size of their equipment improved mobility and allowed them to be less obtrusive while in the field. It was common for photographers to carry as many as two or three cameras, each fitted with slightly different lenses to be deployed as circumstances demanded (fig. 3). Establishing and then maintaining contact with movement leaders was a key to landing a good story, as was knowing how and when to disappear when danger loomed. Kathryn Johnson, an Associated Press reporter based in Atlanta, recalled a lucky escape in Montgomery, Alabama, while trying to file a story on the Freedom Rides in May 1961: “I was phoning the Atlanta AP office from an outside phone booth when several angry white men spotted me dictating. They ran over, grabbed the phone booth, yanked it off its moorings, and rattled it vigorously with me inside. I was rescued by AP photographer Horace Cort, who drove close by, threw open his car door, and yelled, ‘Katy! Get in.’”

Fig. 4. Horace Cort (American, active 1940s–1970s), Lester Maddox Escorts Albert Dunn from the Parking Lot of His Pickrick Restaurant, Atlanta, July 3, 1964, gelatin silver print, 9 1/8 × 11 3/8 inches, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from Sandra Anderson Baccus in loving memory of Lloyd Tevis Baccus, M.D., 2007.99. © Horace Cort and Associated Press/Wide World Photos.
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Horace Cort, whose intercession proved timely for his colleague, was a veteran photojournalist based out of Atlanta’s AP bureau who had a knack for getting the picture that told the story. He supplied his editors with images that spoke in a familiar visual language while resonating with the public on both cultural and emotional levels. On July 3, 1964, he photographed the outcome when three young black students from the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta—Albert Dunn, George Willis, and Woodrow Lewis—tried to enter the Pickrick Restaurant, owned and operated by the notorious segregationist Lester Maddox, on Hemphill Avenue in downtown Atlanta. They were there to test the muscle of the Civil Rights Act, which President Johnson had signed into law the day before, on July 2. Lester Maddox barred their entry and insisted that they would not be welcome anytime. The young men informed him that they would return at 5:30 that afternoon. Maddox was there to meet them, along with a crowd of approximately 200 axe-wielding supporters. He promptly escorted them from his premises at gunpoint. Horace Cort tracked the action carefully, and waited for the optimal moment to produce a picture that would effectively represent the story (fig. 4). His photograph shows Maddox, pistol in hand, with his son, Lester Jr., brandishing an axe handle, escorting Albert Dunn across the parking lot and off his property. The picture is tactical and deliberate and has a staged quality, with the presence, at right, of the outstretched, truncated limbs of three reporters, one wielding a notebook and pen and the others microphones. Part showman and part thug, Maddox was a master manipulator of the media and frequently choreographed such stunts in order to promote himself and his business. To those familiar with Maddox and his antics (he was nicknamed “the Cracker Don Quixote”), this episode—deeply disturbing though it was—was not surprising.

Cort’s photograph was reproduced the following day in the New York Times and subsequently on several occasions when updates on the story ran in that newspaper and in the Atlanta Journal.As with many press photographs, the verso of this print is marked with the caption, ink stamps, inscriptions, and editorial notations that show how and when it was used. These markings give the picture the well-worn quality of a frequently handled object (fig. 5). The blurred forms, harsh contrasts, and grainy quality of many press photographs also directly reveal the conditions under which they were made. They increase the credibility of the photographs as documents—as unmediated records of a visceral experience. Notwithstanding their subjective underpinnings, news photographs are widely perceived as objective—because they allow viewers to see, verify, and interpret occurrences with their own eyes.

Fig. 5. Verso of fig. 4.
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Despite Maddox’s aggressive and illogical actions, he was able to report that business was brisk—up 40 percent—as a result of his gun-toting antics. He had significant support from Atlanta’s white community and was acquitted on two counts of “pointing a pistol at another” in Fulton County Court. He also had friends in neighboring Alabama who fell right in line behind his cause. At a rally at Lakewood Park, a white working-class neighborhood in Atlanta, Governor George Wallace lauded Maddox’s actions and denounced the Civil Rights Act as a sham and a hoax. Maddox, however, was fighting a losing battle. The three men who tried to enter his restaurant on July 3 filed suit against him, and on July 7, 1964, he was bound over to the Fulton County Criminal Court. The NAACP took up the suit two days later. While Maddox remained openly defiant and calculated in his resistance to the Civil Rights Act, his approach lacked sophistication and was legally flawed. Rather than adhere to federal law and desegregate, Maddox ultimately sold his restaurant in February 1965, saying: “I have given up my business rather than obey the Federal government orders to serve Negroes. To have done any less would have made me less than an American.” He believed in his right to serve whomever he pleased, and that did not include blacks.

Early in the spring of 1961 the Supreme Court in the case of Boynton v. Commonwealth of Virginia held that discrimination against interstate travelers in bus terminal restaurants was illegal. To gauge the effects of this ruling the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) mobilized interracial groups of passengers to test the compliance of the southern states with the new federal interstate transportation laws. On May 14, 1961, a quiet Mother’s Day throughout most of Alabama, an episode of extreme violence catapulted the Freedom Rides into the national consciousness. A Greyhound bus traveling from Atlanta to Birmingham, carrying fourteen passengers (including reporter Moses Newson, covering the Freedom Rides for the Baltimore Afro-American), pulled in to the terminal at Anniston, Alabama, where the station doors had been locked shut. The bus was immediately set upon by a mob led by a local Klansman named William Chappell, its tires slashed and windows smashed. There were no police in sight. When law enforcement finally arrived (after approximately twenty minutes), they gave the bus a cursory inspection for damage and ordered the driver, O. T. Jones of Birmingham, to leave the terminal, escorting him to the town limits, where the vehicle was left to the mercy of the following mob. The bus limped along the highway for about six miles before being forced off the road on the outskirts of Bynum by a convoy of cars and trucks that had grown to forty or fifty in number. The bus was stormed by the mob, the passengers were trapped inside, and the bus was firebombed. It was a scene of carnage.

Fig. 6. Joseph Postiglione (American, born Italy, 1922–1995), Passengers outside a Burning Greyhound Bus, Anniston, Alabama, 1961, gelatin silver print, 6 1/2 × 8 1/2 inches, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from Sandra Anderson Baccus in loving memory of Lloyd Tevis Baccus, M.D., 2007.95. © Joseph Postiglione and United Press International/Corbis-Bettmann.
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Tracking the entire episode was Joe Postiglione, a freelance photographer who worked for the commercial photography chain Hollywood Studio and contributed his pictures to the local newspaper, the Anniston Star. Postiglione more than likely was tipped off about the planned attack, because he was at the Anniston terminal when the bus arrived and he followed it out onto the highway with the mob. He captured the drama in a shocking series of pictures that until recently was known only through a handful of photographs that he made available to the news services. Two pictures were sold to AP and UPI (fig. 6), and seven were reproduced the following day in the Anniston Star. The photographs were cropped quite radically by the news services, but at least three of them ran closer to full frame in the local newspaper. Postiglione appears to have made the pictures with a 21⁄4-inch medium format camera. His credit line under the photographs reads “Little Joe”—which is how he preferred to be known, both on account of his diminutive size (he was barely five feet tall) and because he surmised that readers in Alabama would have trouble pronouncing his last name. Amazingly, none of the passengers was killed, but all fourteen suffered from smoke inhalation, and several were beaten when they finally exited the bus. A local girl, twelve-year-old Janie Miller, provided the choking victims with water in the face of taunts and abuse from Klansmen. Subsequently threatened and ostracized for this act of kindness, she and her family were forced to leave their community in the aftermath of the bombing. The riders’ nightmare did not end there. Medics at the local hospital, Anniston Memorial, refused to admit the black passengers, submitting to pressure from the Klan, who threatened to burn down the building. They were eventually rescued in the dead of night by a squadron of cars sent by Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, pastor of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, who was informed of the danger they were in and knew well the perils of racism in Alabama’s black belt. They were whisked away to the relative safety of Birmingham, lucky to be alive.

Citation

Cox, Julian. “Bearing Witness: Photography and the Civil Rights Movement.” In Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956–1968, edited by Julian Cox, 19–47. Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 2008. https://link.roadtofreedom.high.org/essay/bearing-witness-part-2-pictures-for-the-press/.