In revisiting the civil rights photographs, scholars have largely treated them as historical documents, focusing attention more on the events they record than on the pictures themselves. In those instances when scholars have attended to the photographs themselves, the one issue they have stressed has been their efficacy. This is the issue that first brought civil rights photographs to the attention of historians, who were quick to grasp the dependence of the movement on the media and the fact that publicity and photographs in particular were an indispensable element of the protest strategy of direct action. As early as 1966, Arthur I. Waskow claimed that Bill Hudson's photograph of a police dog attacking a demonstrator in Birmingham marked the moment when the "1960s generation of 'new Negroes' can be said to have turned into a major social force." Immediately after that picture appeared, he noted, there was increased pressure on the Kennedy administration for action on civil rights and increased financial and political support for civil rights organizations.2
As these photographs have reappeared in recent publications, writers have continued to emphasize the theme of efficacy.3 They have described the images as powerful documents that had a visceral clout at the time of their making, sufficient to sway the course of the history of which they were a part. Alternatively, or in conjunction with this approach, they have emphasized the potency of the photographs in the present, treating them as direct emotional conduits to the past that stir the memories of those who were there, illuminate the historical imaginations of those who were not, and inspire us all to revive the vision and goals of the movement they represent.4 In sum, there is a consensus that these images have lodged in the American psyche, have helped to change the nation, and that they still contain enough historical, moral, and emotional voltage to command our continued attention.
I wholeheartedly concur with this point of view, but it is my contention that there is still much more to be said about these photographs, especially the ones that are most memorable and most emblematic of their time. The scholars who have dealt with these pictures have said too little about exactly what they depict and almost nothing about their visual structure or, of even more importance, the way they operate allusively and symbolically.
When we attend to these photographs closely, we see in each one a moment of historical reality that has great richness of detail and subtlety of flavor, a moment that requires more than a caption or passing description to comprehend. We also see specifically visual subject matter, by which I mean such things as expressions on faces, figures' postures, a compositional structure, and other formal characteristics, all of which we respond to emotionally as well as intellectually. These photographs act on us in their entirety as both documents of external reality and as constructed images, and it is through their status as both that they gain interest and power and take on symbolic meanings.
Some of the most famous and potent civil rights photographs are those made by Charles Moore, depicting the fire-hosings and police-dog attacks against demonstrators in Birmingham in 1963. When Moore made these pictures, he was not trying to make the emblematic images of the era; he was simply doing his job as a journalist. And yet, as a photographer, Moore was consistently drawn to moments of high drama and often violence, moments he described with great eloquence. The most powerful of Moore's pictures, whether he intended it or not, evoke abiding themes in the history of American race relations and resonate with motifs from the broader realm of American and Western visual culture.
Moore began his career as a photojournalist on the staff of the Montgomery, Alabama, Advertiser. From time to time, he covered civil rights stories there, and he made some significant images, such as a series of the Montgomery police arresting and manhandling Martin Luther King, Jr. Moore says of himself that before he made these pictures, he had not been particularly aware of the civil rights movement. Even when he made them, he was not yet deeply engaged with the issues the movement raised. According to a friend, the civil rights photographer Flip Schulke, Moore thought only of doing his job as a professional journalist. White people were doing these things to black people, and Moore felt that he "should document whatever goes on, bad or good."5 Not until 1962, when he covered the riot that accompanied James Meredith's enrollment at Ole Miss, did Moore truly begin to understand the scope and moral depth of what he was involved with.
When the situation in Birmingham exploded, Moore was elsewhere on an assignment for Life. He and the reporter who was with him repeatedly heard news on the car radio about events brewing in Birmingham. Sensing that something of tremendous importance was developing there, they decided to take off for that city without even informing their home office.6 Moore made his famous images of the fire hosings only minutes after he arrived in town.
Moore's most famous hose attack photograph, depicting firemen spraying demonstrators at close range as the latter sat on a Birmingham sidewalk, documents what I have always considered one of the more imaginative and bizarre techniques used by segregationist forces to assault black protesters.7 This is not to say that the segregationists were the first to think of this method of control and punishment. Fire-hosing was used in the 1920s in labor confrontations, one of the more notable episodes occurring in January 1929 when about 25,000 men showed up at the gates of the Ford plant at River Rouge, looking for what turned out to be only 600 jobs. When the employment office opened, the crowd panicked, and the hoses were turned on. In the bitter cold, the water froze on the men's clothing. The "water cure" was also used in the twenties in prisons and mental asylums. A person judged to be unruly was put naked into a small tile chamber and then fire-hosed directly from a distance of ten feet.8
The peculiarity of this kind of assault lies in its misleading appearance of humaneness: water is presumed less violent than other substances. The intensity of water hosings, however, is easily underestimated. Moore himself understood this misleading aspect of hosing, commenting that he knew the hoses hurt people, but somehow one did not see them getting hurt that badly, especially in comparison to the visible viciousness of a dog attack.9 Appearances notwithstanding, the Birmingham firemen's monitor guns, which forced water from two hoses through one nozzle, are customarily described as having had the power to rip the bark off trees at one hundred feet.
The episode in Moore's photograph occurred a month after the demonstrations in Birmingham had begun. In early April 1963, King and his associates in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had launched what they called Project C (C for confrontation) with lunch-counter sit-ins and then protest marches. Their aim was to fill the Birmingham jails, but the campaign got off to a slow start with few arrests and little media attention. Even King's and Ralph Abernathy's defiance of a court injunction against demonstrations and their arrest and jailing on Good Friday failed to get Project C rolling.
In late April, after King and Abernathy had been released on bail, James Bevel of SCLC suggested using children for mass demonstrations, arguing that young people could just as effectively fill the jails as adults and that they would be less reluctant to go to jail than would their parents, having less to lose economically. In addition, the sight of children being arrested would be exceptionally dramatic in the news media.10 King agreed to this strategy, controversial as it was, and on May 2, the first children's march was held. About 600 young people were jailed that day. Fire hoses were brought out but were not used.11 The next day, about 1,000 young black people gathered at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church to organize for their march while a large group of black adults collected in Kelly Ingram Park across the street. The police arrived with school buses to transport prisoners, but the jails were already full from the day before, so their preferred strategy was to disperse the demonstrators without making arrests before they could reach the downtown area where their presence would be embarrassing and disruptive to the white-owned businesses. The fire hoses were the prime tool in this strategy of dispersal.
When the first group of sixty young marchers emerged from the Sixteenth Street church, they were warned to disperse and then doused only with fogging nozzles. But it soon became clear that about ten of the demonstrators had held their ground. The firemen advanced, the marchers sat on the sidewalk for stability, and the firemen directed the full intensity of the hose against them from close range. This is the moment at which Moore arrived on the scene and took his photograph.12
We can see that the young demonstrators in this picture have been trained in nonviolence in one of the workshops set up by James Bevel and Diane Nash. This is apparent from their disciplined, self-protective postures as they remain seated with their hands behind their heads. From the size of the demonstrators, we see that they are probably high school students. Bevel first recruited students in the high schools, although much younger children soon joined the demonstrations.
Moore photographed the fire-hosing from very close range. In part, this was a result of his courage and determination to "get a feeling of what it was like to be involved." He had a moderate telephoto lens with him, 105mm, but he says that he shot everything with his wide-angle lenses "to be where I could feel it, so I could sense it all around me."13 His proximity to the action was also a consequence of the fact that he is a white photographer and, more particularly, a Southern journalist whom the Birmingham authorities knew. Those authorities assumed he was still working for the Montgomery paper, which, as a Southern paper, would not publish photographs that reflected badly on the power structure, so the authorities did not see Moore as the threat they would have perceived had they known he was working for Life. They allowed him to be close to the action -- at least for a time.14 Moore's view is both intimate and inclusive. Unlike most other pictures of the hosings, this one shows the firemen, the demonstrators, and onlookers. We are almost looking over the firemen's shoulders. This adds mightily to the emotional power of the image. We are right there, and we see everything.
One important aspect of what we see is the cluster of onlookers in the background, despite the fact that they are a small and obscure portion of the photograph. Onlookers within an image echo the position of the viewer, raising the question of our own emotional reactions to the events depicted and the hypothetical question of what we would have done had we been there. The people in Moore's photograph appear to be African American adults, and they witness the assault on these children in a variety of concerned stances. The man at left fully faces the action but stands with absolutely rigid legs. Although very little of this figure is readable, he projects an air of utter astonishment and frustrated immobility. The two men behind and to the right of him are turned obliquely to the action as if uncertain whether to stay or retreat. Perhaps the second of these men is turning and advancing. The man to their right, wearing a suit and tie (not uncommon attire for onlookers or demonstrators, but attire that is incongruous with the violence) clearly is advancing slowly with concern. One wonders who he is and what he did in the next moments.
Part of what I think is so moving about this image is that it is a perversion of other familiar images. If we were to look only at the left side of this picture, we would see a familiar, cooperative, and heroic image of firemen leaning into a hose, an image that resonates with other heroic visions of common purpose such as that quintessential emblem of American patriotism, Joe Rosenthal's photograph of Marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima. But here, the image of cooperation and heroism is perverted by the target. The firemen are not fighting a destructive fire but are hurting teenagers. If we were to look only at the right side of the image, the splash of water on young people in a city street might remind us for a moment of the many photographs of city children playing in fire hydrants on a hot summer day. But this image, too, is quickly dispelled by the force of the spray and defensive positions of the teens. When we bring the two sides of the photograph together, we see that its formal structure of opposing halves, a simple but effective structure, echoes fundamental social dichotomies: blacks and whites, attackers and victims, authorities and dissenters.15
One symbolic reading of this image is suggested in passing by Taylor Branch who says of the hosing episode, "It was a moment of baptism for the civil rights movement, and Birmingham's last effort to wash away the stain of dissent against segregation."16 Branch's reference to baptism is not so much a reference to the washing of sin on the part of the demonstrators as it is to their sudden immersion in the hatred and violence of whites, a baptism of fire represented here as an inundation by firemen's water. The effort to wash away the stain of dissent that Branch refers to might be understood more specifically and profoundly as an effort to wash away the presence of black people from within the boundaries of white daily life. This invokes the fantasy of dirt, a fantasy that runs throughout the history of American racism, and indeed European racial thought of the eighteenth century. European travelers of that era who had contact with dark-skinned tribal people commonly associated them with filth and stench.17
According to Joel Kovel, the fantasy of dirt is the cornerstone of what he has defined as aversive racism. In his book, White Racism, Kovel distinguishes between dominative racism, the racism of complete control of the bodies of black people, which was practiced during slavery, and aversive racism, the racism characteristic of the North where white people may go so far as to act in sympathy with black causes, in terms of giving money or casting votes, but otherwise avoid any but the most formal and fleeting contact with blacks.18
The Jim Crow South was situated between these two forms. Segregation was both an act of extreme aversion and an effort to dominate the very smallest details of black people's daily lives.19 Violent outbursts toward blacks, such as we see here, were obviously efforts at physical domination, but they were also carried out with the disgust of aversion.
Symbolically, dirt is anything that can pass out of the body and should not pass back in or even touch the body. The central symbol of dirt, of course, is feces. In the context of racism, the fantasy of dirt is based on white people's association of brown feces with brown people.20 This takes many indirect forms in racist culture, such as the contention that blacks have a distinctive and unpleasant smell, or that food they have touched is unfit for a white person to eat, or that it is unpleasant to touch a black person's body because their "dirt" may rub off. And of course, if a white person goes so far as to "mix blood" with a black person, the children of such a relationship are irrevocably "stained." In Moore's photograph, in the crude and hate-filled terms of the fantasy of dirt, the white firemen are hosing shit off the sidewalk.
Their hose is baldly phallic. Fantasies of sexuality are as important, if not more important, than fantasies of dirt in American racism, and the fear of the black phallus is paramount. To many segregationists, the ultimate goal and inevitable outcome of the civil rights movement could only be sexual relations between black men and white women. Here, the phallus in the hands of the white firemen is an image of white sexual aggression meant to keep the black phallus at bay. This is an image of dominant sexual display and punishment, and an expression of contempt and repulsion; it is symbolic urination on a vulnerable enemy.
Another symbolic reading of the image suggests that the firemen are attempting to douse the demonstrators' spirits. This is the symbolism Life turned to when it first published the photograph in 1963. The headline beneath it read, "they fight a fire that won't go out."21 Life possibly based this headline on a comment James Bevel had made that was published in Jet about a month before the Life article appeared. During a demonstration in Greenwood, Mississippi, voter registration marchers were confronted by a fire truck parked across the route to the courthouse. When the marchers hesitated, Bevel approached the fire chief and declared, "There's a fire going on inside of us, baby, but you can't put it out."22 Bevel was speaking of the fire of aspiration, a fire that might have become the fire of retribution that James Baldwin was warning of in The Fire Next Time (1963), but which turned, only a year later, to the fire of desperation and self-destruction as rioting broke out in Harlem and then across the nation. In the Birmingham spring of 1963, this fire was still contained, focused, and burning with purpose.
The image of burning coals coexists in Moore's photograph with an image of rocklike endurance. The young people sit steadfastly, enduring the force of white hatred. Having deliberately called forth the viciousness of the whites -- those helpless puppets of their own fear and anger -- the demonstrators are withstanding the onslaught of that viciousness with discipline, patience, and determination. Their humane comportment is underlined by the wonderful gesture of the young man taking the direct force of the hose while protectively embracing the young woman next to him. These young people are demonstrating their acceptance of King's belief in the redemptive quality of unearned suffering and his vision of the messianic role of black people in American history. In Stride toward Freedom, King had written, "The Negro may be God's appeal to this age -- an age drifting rapidly to its doom."23 And he quoted Gandhi: "'Things of fundamental importance to people are not secured by reason alone, but have to be purchased with their sufferingÉ. Suffering is infinitely more powerful than the law of the jungle for converting the opponent and opening his ears which are otherwise shut to the voice of reason.'" In the same passage, King said, "Suffering, the nonviolent resister realizes, has tremendous educational and transforming possibilities."24 The young people in Moore's photograph are acting on King's words.
By bringing the issue of nonviolence before us in such powerful terms, this photograph asks us to reconsider the grounds on which we continue to honor King and the nonviolent heroes of the civil rights movement. As a nation, we now officially celebrate King, but how much do we truly understand or admire the nonviolent philosophy out of which he and the young people in this picture acted? Is nonviolence confined in its usefulness to the historical moment from which this picture arises, or does it have continuing value? Was and is nonviolence simply foolish?
In raising such questions, in suggesting an array of enduring themes and symbols of racial struggle in this culture, in the perversity of what it represents, in touching our nerves and our guts, Moore's photograph has multiple sources of potency. It gives us, in a simple but effective formal structure, an intimate and comprehensive representation of a peak moment of a gripping historical drama, and at the same time, it comes to us as an artifact with symbolic resonance. It allows us to confront the past and to confront the issues of the past as they exist in the present. All of this is enough to earn the photograph its reputation for efficacy and to ensure its continued value as an image.
