Birmingham News publishes newly found civil rights era photos

[paineinthearse]

http://www.al.com/newsflash/regional/index.ssf?/base/news-19/114097945638060.xml&storylist=alabamanews

Birmingham News publishes newly found civil rights era photos
2/26/2006, 1:39 p.m. ET
The Associated Press


BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — Previously unpublished photographs from the civil rights era were discovered in an equipment closet at The Birmingham News and appeared for the first time Sunday in a special section of the newspaper. The cardboard box with thousands of negatives, marked "Keep. Do Not Sell," was discovered in November 2004 by a photo intern, Alexander Cohn, who went through the files and interviewed people in the pictures to help produce the eight-page section, "Unseen. Unforgotten."

More than 30 photos appear in the print version, with dozens more available on the newspaper's Web site at http://www.al.com/unseen, and The News recounts its own struggle to cover the civil rights movement in a city and state dominated by segregationist politics. News photographers from the period said the paper did not want to draw attention to the demonstrations and discord in the 1950s and 1960s. "It was difficult for people to see," Horace Huntley, director of oral history at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and professor of history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, told The News. "People were embarrassed by it. The city fathers were embarrassed by it."

The newspaper said that in its centennial edition in 1988, it noted that a New York Times story in 1960 forced the paper and the city's white community to confront the racial conflict. "The story of The Birmingham News' coverage of race relations in the 1960s is one marked at times by mistakes and embarrassment but, in its larger outlines, by growing sensitivity and acceptance of change," the centennial edition said. "The editors thought if you didn't publish it, much of this would go away," said Ed Jones, 81, a photographer at The News from 1942 to 1987. "Associated Press kept on wanting pictures, and The News would be slow on letting them have them, so they flooded the town with photographers. The AP started sending pictures all over, and it mushroomed."

more......
___

Information from: The Birmingham News

-----------

Interesting discussion in the Birmingham newspaper's forum - http://www.al.com/forums/birmingham/ - topic #7685. New Civil Rights Photos

add yours there.

==========================

This is the index, many more phots at http://www.al.com/unseen/

PHOTO GALLERIES


CHALLENGING SEGREGATION
Birth of A Movement
Years after "separate but equal" was struck down, laws in Alabama still kept blacks and whites apart.


FREEDOM RIDERS
The Road to Change
Freedom Riders were met with violence as they challenged the customs of segregation in Alabama.


CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
The World Takes Notice
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. turned to civil disobedience when negotiation with business leaders foundered.


DESEGREGATING THE SCHOOLS
Difficult Lessons
Black students' attempts to enroll at local universities were thwarted and sparked legal battles.


THE FIGHT FOR VOTING RIGHTS
Gaining A Voice
Marchers walked for five days, 54 miles that led not only to Montgomery, but to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

[Selatius]

1. "mistakes and embarrassment" is a fucking offensive understatement

It was a product of hate, not innocent mistakes and embarrassments. Embarrassment is accidentally dropping a glass of wine on the floor at a party. A mistake is mispronouncing a person's name or taking the wrong turn.

This was a concerted campaign to bury the reality of "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever!"

They should've simply shut up and released the photos without comment rather than "embarrass" themselves again by sugar-coating and downplaying one of the ugliest, most shameful chapters of US history.

[DBoon]

2. yes.

40 years from now, when all the Abu Ghraib photos are finally released, they will make the same excuses

[anitar1]

22. I will never forget the civil rights days. I watched it every day

on the news. It was well covered. For me it created a deep distrust of the South.It is an area of the country I avoid.I have traveled through , but have no desire to go back there. Cannot help the impressions I received about some of these people. All of the ugliness exposed for the world to see.Too bad the media changed.

[slor]

3. Thanks for posting n/t

[ThreeCatNight]

4. The REAL faces of American heros...... eom

[eppur_se_muova]

5. Civil Rights photos uncovered, published (CNN/AP)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=530220&mesg_id=530220

[paineinthearse]

6. What a difference a forum makes

Identical information, identical posting time (well, two minutes apart), different forums (LBN & GEN), yet the GEN post is on the greatest page with 15 nominations.

[eppur_se_muova]

27. Well, the important thing is that more people see it.

I nom'd their thread, hope they'll nom mine. The more recs and the more posts, the more attention it gets.

Only older Americans can remember these events, and a couple of generations later there's the danger that too many details will fade from memory. "Those that do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." Maybe these photos will inspire a book or documentary (or three), and forgetfulness can be staved off a while longer.

[Judi Lynn]

7. Ala. Paper Publishes Civil Rights Photos

Ala. Paper Publishes Civil Rights Photos
By Associated Press
February 27, 2006, 10:02 PM EST

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. -- Dozens of never before released photos from the civil rights era came to light this weekend after an intern discovered them buried in an equipment closet at the Birmingham News.

The photos had been in a box marked: "Keep. Do Not Sell." But at the time they were taken, the newspaper didn't want to draw attention to the racial discord of the 1950s and 1960s, news photographers from the period said.

"The editors thought if you didn't publish it, much of this would go away," said Ed Jones, 81, a photographer at The News from 1942 to 1987. "Associated Press kept on wanting pictures, and The News would be slow on letting them have them, so they flooded the town with photographers."
(snip)

Several photos vividly show the segregation in the South at the time, including the disparity among school buildings and the different lines for blacks and whites, even at the jail as the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth posts bail after an arrest.

Others show confrontations: a police officer shoving a demonstrator, black children hit with the spray of a firehose, crowds heckling demonstrators on their knees, Freedom Riders being arrested, and whites throwing bricks at cars and blocking blacks from entering "whites-only" areas.
(snip/...)

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-forgotten-photos,0,3493508.story?coll=sns-ap-nationworld-headlines

Here is their link to the historically important photos they've just discovered:

http://www.al.com/unseen/

[beam me up scottie]

8. Incredible.

Take my word for it, DUers, you have to see these to believe them.

The images are still powerful enough to take my breath away, some forty years later.

In particular, the gallery named The Right to Vote, and the pictures taken on Bloody Sunday.

http://www.al.com/unseen/photos/gallery.ssf?cgi-bin/view_gallery.cgi/bama/view_gallery.ata?g_id=1368



Recommended.

[uppityperson]

14. Quite something.

and another recommendation. We are all people, people.

[beam me up scottie]

16. They blew me away.

I work with people every day who still have this mindset.

We have to teach the kids.

Education, and with it, tolerance.

That's the only hope we have.

[GoddessOfGuinness]

9. Darn...I can't see the pics.

Any suggestions?

[uppityperson]

10. Descriptions, should look at the picts if possible.

http://www.al.com/unseen/photos/gallery.ssf?cgi-bin/view_gallery.cgi/bama/view_gallery.ata?g_id=1368
Description then what it says. bl=black, w=white

1. 3 men in a boat in the water (1 bl, 1?, 1 sheriff): June 27, 1964, Neshoba County, MS: Law enforcement officials search for three missing civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Miss. The bodies of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were found Aug 4 buried 15 ft beneath an earthen dam

2. Edgar Ray Killen

3. 3 men (b,b,w) with a flag draped over 1 (black):March 1965: Thousands of marchers walk 54 miles from Selma to Montgomery to bring attention to the low numbers of black registered voters in the South. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee workers had been trying to register more voters.

4. MLK Jr with microphones and other people: Jan. 18, 1965: The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr, center, kicks off a voter registration drive at the Dallas Co. Courthouse in Selma. With King are the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, left; the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, right; and the Rev. Andrew Young, far right.

5. Line of black adults and elderly with hands in air: February 1965: Johnnie Carr, right, of the Montgomery Improvement Association registers to vote along with several other city residents. The MIA was formed in 1955, after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus.

6. 3 men in from of a church: June 11, 1964: From left, the Rev. James Bevel, the Rev. Richard Boone, and the Rev. Harold Middebrooks stand outside Bailey's Tabernacle Church after meeting to plan demonstrations against segregation, which were later called off.

7. Bunch of w people in hardhats, 1 bl man with hands in air being frisked (?): June 11 1964: Tuscaloosa Police Chief William Marable stops Rev. Richard Boone outside Bailey's Tabernacle Church.

8. People behind bars, crowded in and yelling excitedly: June 11, 1964: Some of the 210 demonstrators jailed after protesting in the streets of Tuscaloosa two days earlier, wave from their cell.

More in next posting

[Judi Lynn]

11. You went to this page, right? http://www.al.com/unseen/

You can click on either the title of each grouping, Birth of A Movement, The Road to Change, The World Takes Notice, etc., or you can click on the years indicated under each one, as in: 1956-1961 - See the photos, 1961 - See the photos, etc.

If you click and there's a blank image immediately, it may be the site is very busy. I got a blank one on the first photo of the first three sections, myself. You can just click "next" and eventually you'll come back to the first one which should be available then.

I hope this helps. They are great photos.

[TaleWgnDg]

12. here are the "photo galleries" . . .

1.) http://www.al.com/unseen/photos/gallery.ssf?cgi-bin/view_gallery.cgi/bama/view_gallery.ata?g_id=1365
(1956-1961, CHALLENGING SEGREGATION, Birth of A Movement
Years after "separate but equal" was struck down, laws in Alabama still kept blacks and whites apart.)

2.) http://www.al.com/unseen/photos/gallery.ssf?cgi-bin/view_gallery.cgi/bama/view_gallery.ata?g_id=1366
(1961, FREEDOM RIDERS, The Road to Change
Freedom Riders were met with violence as they challenged the customs of segregation in Alabama.)

3.) http://www.al.com/unseen/photos/gallery.ssf?cgi-bin/view_gallery.cgi/bama/view_gallery.ata?g_id=1367
(1963, CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE, The World Takes Notice
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. turned to civil disobedience when negotiation with business leaders foundered.)

4.) http://www.al.com/unseen/photos/gallery.ssf?cgi-bin/view_gallery.cgi/bama/view_gallery.ata?g_id=1368
(1964-1965, THE FIGHT FOR VOTING RIGHTS, Gaining A Voice
Marchers walked for five days, 54 miles that led not only to Montgomery, but to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.)

5.) http://www.al.com/unseen/photos/gallery.ssf?cgi-bin/view_gallery.cgi/bama/view_gallery.ata?g_id=1369
(1962-1963, DESEGREGATING THE SCHOOLS, Difficult Lessons
Black students' attempts to enroll at local universities were thwarted and sparked legal battles.)

[uppityperson]

13. rest of descriptions.

http://www.al.com/unseen/photos/gallery.ssf?cgi-bin/view_gallery.cgi/bama/view_gallery.ata?g_id=1368
Again bl=black, wh=white since race is the factor here

9. Line of bl people marching: March 7, 1965: John Lewis, center, leads marchers with fellow activist Hosea Williams across Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge hoping to march to the capitol in Montgomery. Troopers and deputies used tear gas and clubs to stop the march moments later.

10. Line of wh guys in uniforms, caps, holding flags with X (X has stars in it), sitting in a row: March 25, 1965: Mississippi Highway Patrolmen watch marchers arrive in Montgomery from Selma.

11. Background bridge, then small group of people, then police cars, up close someone in gas mask, white gas floating in mid-range: March 7, 1965, Selma: Using batons and tear gas, Alabama state troopers break up the march from Selma to Montgomery at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The clash became known as "Bloody Sunday."

12. March 7, 1965: Marchers move Amelia Boynton, after she was beaten by police outside of Selma on "Bloody Sunday."

13. Wh trooper in gas mask: March 7, 1965: An Alabama State Trooper adjusts his gas mask on "Bloody Sunday."

14. Thin bl man shaking hands of people on a porch of business it looks like: June 6, 1966: James Meredith shaking hands in Hernando, Miss. one day into his "March Against Fear," from Memphis to Jackson, Miss. Shortly after this photo was taken a gunman injured Meredith with a shotgun blast.

15. Lower legs and ft (bl)walking on grass by pavement: June 10, 1966: Demonstrators walk alongside the highway near Senatobia, Miss. during the "March Against Fear" from Memphis to Jackson, Miss.

16. Bunch of people (bl) around a building, 1 laying on grass, others walking or in small group: June 1966: Demonstratorss take a rest during the "March Against Fear" from Memphis to Jackson, Miss.

17. Group of people (bl & wh!) walking together: June 1966: Demonstrators marching in Mississippi during the "March Against Fear" from Memphis to Jackson, Miss.

18. KKK on back of a sign: June 1966: A message directed at demonstrators during the "The March Against Fear" from Memphis to Jackson, Miss.

19. Several people (bl) looking at a map: June 1966: The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. looks at a road map with other participants during "The March Against Fear" from Memphis to Jackson, Miss

[uppityperson]

15. Thank you for posting this link. These are incredible.

[Judi Lynn]

18. The deck was really stacked against the first people who worked for change

When you see how determined and how hostile those faces were, you would almost think it looked like an impossible task.
It seems almost overwhelming this much later.

I was a very young person who visited Birmingham a few years after my grandparents had moved down there due to a job situation, and went out one night in a car with my uncle and his new "bride" who grew up there. I learned the hard way just how racist he had become in a short time when he turned his car to drive along a street and point out to me a nice house out my window, and gibbered that what I was seeing was the house where the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth lived.

I had never heard of this man at that time, so it was a big mystery to me why these two "adults" were hopping mad about it. They did mention he was a black man. I guess the very idea of someone black having a nice house was more than they could stand.

In all the years later I had to wonder if the man who lived in there was aware that right-wing idiots were driving past his house after dark and waving their bony, or pudgey fingers at his house, gibbering about "The Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth."

Enough to make the saints weep.

[OneBlueSky]

17. these are some great photos . . . highly recommended . . . n/t

.

[TaleWgnDg]

19. Can you imagine another attorney like Thurgood Marshall . . .

.
Can you imagine another attorney like Thurgood Marshall being nominated and seated on the U.S. Supreme Court bench, today?

Here is Thurgood Marshall when he was an attorney for the NAACP representing a black college woman in 1956 trying to get into college graduate school in the all white University of Alabama, a public state university. BTW, the K-12 public school desegregation case was in 1954, Brown v. Board of Education (Marshall as attorney for the NAACP represented the black school kids in that case too).



Feb 29, 1956: The legal team representing Autherine Lucy
leave federal courthouse in downtown Birmingham.
From left, Lucy, NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall,
Birmingham lawyer Arthur Shores. Behind Shores is
NAACP lawyer Constance Baker Motley.
On September 23, 1961, President John F. Kennedy nominated Thurgood Marshall for appointment to the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Four years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him Solicitor General of the United States. President Johnson nominated Marshall to the Supreme Court of the United States on June 13, 1967. The Senate confirmed the appointment on August 30, 1967. Marshall served twenty-three years on the Supreme Court, retiring on June 17, 1991, at the age of eighty-two. Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall was America's first black SCOTUS justice.

Imagine. Justice Clarence Thomas is now seated in Justice Thurgood Marshall's U.S. Supreme Court seat!! Unreal. What an insult!

.

[beam me up scottie]

20. I was thinking the same thing.

And how far would the repukes be willing to go to besmirch his good name?

What a sad period in history this is.

[Judi Lynn]

23. The very first photo I saw was astonishing.

">~~~~ link ~~~~

I had no idea Nat King Cole had ever been assaulted and beaten up by four idiots. Hardly a "manly" decision on their parts. What a shabby culture they were/are.

[Canuckistanian]

21. I saw these earlier from a HuffPo link..

And they are quite powerful. They'll have a strong connection even with the present generation of blacks.

I especially liked the picture of Medgar Evans. I really should learn more about him.

[annabanana]

24. What they were up against:

To me this picture shows most clearly how an abuse of power plays out on the street.

[entanglement]

25. That picture should put to a rest any lies about

the Confederate flag as a mere "symbol of heritage" or whatever they claim it stands for :eyes:

[July]

28. This picture and several others in the collection tell me all I want to

know about the use of the Confederate flag. Whatever it may have once meant (and am I correct that this wasn't even the Confederacy's official flag but was a battle flag?), whoever died for it, IN OUR LIFETIMES it has been used repeatedly as a symbol of hatred toward black Americans and of opposition to Civil Rights. The only "heritage" it represents to me is the heritage of bigotry shown here.

[eppur_se_muova]

33. Yes, that's the battle flag. "Stars and Bars" was the nat'l flag.

The choice of the BATTLE flag was clearly deliberate -- meant to show belligerence, hostility.

[entanglement]

26. Nominated

[cap]

29. The editors thought if you didn't publish it, much of this would go away,"

this quote is very much a lesson for our time and the way the bush administration hides information

[trof]

30. I was there.

And it's still embarrassing to me today how little attention I paid.
I remember seeing some of it on our local television news. It was pretty slanted against the blacks and in favor of the white power structure.

I grew up in Birmingham. During what were then called "the race riots" of 1963 I was 22 years old.
In March a buddy and I had joined the Alabama Air National Guard, pre-approved for Air Force pilot training. I was then assigned to a year long Undergraduate Pilot Training Class beginning late in August at Vance AFB in Enid, Oklahoma.

We really had no duties in the guard prior to our departure for pilot training. We got permission to skip the monthly week end drills that summer. In late May, my buddy and I decided to spend the summer in Myrtle beach for a last, long beach blast before Uncle Sam got ahold of us. We got jobs as lifeguards and it was truly a memorable summer. ;-)

In mid June, partly due to Gov. George Wallace's "stand in the schoolhouse door" at the University of Alabama, and partly because of the worsening situation in Birmingham, President John F. Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard.

We learned about this a week later when a Western Union delivery boy brought identical telegrams out to our lifeguard stand on the beach. We were now AWOL from the United States Air Force.

We beat it back to Birmingham and reported to our commanding general. After giving us a little good natured ribbing, he changed our status to Absent With Leave saying that he "thought maybe they'd be able to survive this crisis without our help".

The following November, Kennedy was assassinated.

I was not to become politically active until 10 years later. I guess I owe my "awakening" to Richard Milhouse Nixon. He sure got my attention.

I still look back in shame and amazement at how air-headed and uninvolved I was for almost the first half of my life.

[DoctorMyEyes]

32. It's really great of you to step up

It can't be an easy thing to reflect back on. I know that some of my own "failings" can still make me wince when I think about them.

But, I appreciate your posting from a contemporary perspective. Even your not being very aware or involved is an interesting aspect of the times. It helps to complete the picture. I don't think you should be too hard on yourself about it. You were no doubt in the majority.

I'm a few years younger than you, I guess, and from the northeast. I had my "political awakening" during the Nixon administration too. I was just a kid and didn't know or care too much about anything that happened beyond my own little world. That is until my favorite babysitter went off to college and then I saw on the news that Nixon sent our soldiers to shoot students on a campus. It only "hit home" to me because I imagined that someone that I loved very much was put in danger by the president. I was too young to be able to rationalize it, and just old enough to be profoundly impacted. That's when I started "growing up", and real quick.

Had Kent State not happened, or had I not just had a babysitter go to college that year who knows how long I could have gone on in my own little world.

[Up2Late]

31. Historic pictures of US civil rights struggle published after 40 years

(Other than the "Birmingham News," did any other American Newspapers bother publishing these?)

Historic pictures of US civil rights struggle published after 40 years

Tuesday February 28, 2006
The Guardian

Dozens of never-before-released photos from the US civil rights era came to light at the weekend after an intern discovered them buried in an equipment cupboard at the Birmingham News in Alabama.

The photos had been in a box marked: "Keep. Do Not Sell." At the time they were taken, the newspaper did not want to draw attention to the racial discord of the 1950s and 60s, photographers from the period said. "The editors thought if you didn't publish it, much of this would go away," said Ed Jones, 81, a photographer at the News from 1942 to 1987.

On Sunday, the photos finally went to print in a special eight-page section called "Unseen. Unforgotten." Others are on the newspaper's website at <http://www.al.com/unseen>. Several photos vividly show the segregation in the south at the time, including the disparity among school buildings and the different lines for black and white people, even at the jail.

Other photographs show confrontations: a police officer shoving a demonstrator, black children hit with the spray of a firehose, crowds heckling demonstrators on their knees, Freedom Riders being arrested, and white people throwing bricks at cars and blocking black people from entering "whites-only" areas.

(more at link below)

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1719573,00.html?gusrc=rss>