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Haunted After All These Years
via Firedoglake:
The Birmingham News (of Alabama for you non-U.S. people) recently found photographs that chronicled the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham, Ala., dating from 1950 to 1965. These photographs were taken by the newspaper's photographers, but hidden from sight.
Here's a little background.
What followed was two years of research to get the story behind the story. Photographers, reporters, clergymen, elected officials, civil rights leaders, historians, witnesses, and participants were all interviewed.
The Birmingham News has published some of the photos just this past Sunday, although you can still see the photos online at the Unseen. Unforgotten. website. There are also plans to use some of the images in a special exhibition at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute beginning March 13.
To save my Flist the image overload, I picked four haunting pictures to tempt you into visiting the site:
April 4, 1961: A single, dangling lightbulb and a coal-burning stove show the conditions at some black schools in Jefferson County. Birmingham schools were not integrated until September 1963.
December 1956: During a Birmingham City Council meeting to discuss integrated city buses, half the audience hide their face from the camera, a practice common at the time among Klan members and supporters.
March 6, 1957: Lamar Weaver, an early supporter of civil rights, greets the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and his wife, Ruby, in the whites-only waiting room at Birmingham's train depot, Terminal Station.
March 6, 1957: The Rev. Shuttlesworth is stopped before entering the whites only waiting room at Birmingham's Terminal station. This photo came one day after the Alabama Public Service Commission ruled that the waiting rooms must remain segregated.
I urge everyone to visit Unseen. Unforgotten., especially my countrymen. The illuminating pictures of this period are educational and bring home just what the Civil Rights Movement was up against.
The Birmingham News (of Alabama for you non-U.S. people) recently found photographs that chronicled the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham, Ala., dating from 1950 to 1965. These photographs were taken by the newspaper's photographers, but hidden from sight.
Here's a little background.
Hundreds of photos from that era were lost, sold, stolen or stored in archives. Some of those pictures appear today for the first time in the newspaper, in an eight-page special section titled "Unseen. Unforgotten."
The section is the result of research by Alexander Cohn, a 30-year-old former photo intern at The News. In November 2004, Cohn went through an equipment closet at the newspaper in search of a lens and saw a cardboard box full of negatives marked, "Keep. Do Not Sell."
Cohn, who grew up in Mountain Brook and is a master's candidate at the University of Missouri, researched the images and discovered that many had never been published.
"These images were hidden in plain sight," Cohn said. "When I first started looking through this stuff, I was seeing a lot of images that I'd never seen before. I started going through everything on the subject that I could find to get a fuller picture of what was going on."
[snip, snip]
In all, Cohn said, he found 5,000 images from 1950 to 1965 in the cardboard box. He examined 2,000 and estimated that most had not been published.
Why weren't more of the photos published 40 or 50 years ago?
"It was difficult for people to see," said Horace Huntley, director of oral history at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and professor of history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. "People were embarrassed by it. The city fathers were embarrassed by it."
What followed was two years of research to get the story behind the story. Photographers, reporters, clergymen, elected officials, civil rights leaders, historians, witnesses, and participants were all interviewed.
The Birmingham News has published some of the photos just this past Sunday, although you can still see the photos online at the Unseen. Unforgotten. website. There are also plans to use some of the images in a special exhibition at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute beginning March 13.
To save my Flist the image overload, I picked four haunting pictures to tempt you into visiting the site:
April 4, 1961: A single, dangling lightbulb and a coal-burning stove show the conditions at some black schools in Jefferson County. Birmingham schools were not integrated until September 1963.
December 1956: During a Birmingham City Council meeting to discuss integrated city buses, half the audience hide their face from the camera, a practice common at the time among Klan members and supporters.
March 6, 1957: Lamar Weaver, an early supporter of civil rights, greets the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and his wife, Ruby, in the whites-only waiting room at Birmingham's train depot, Terminal Station.
March 6, 1957: The Rev. Shuttlesworth is stopped before entering the whites only waiting room at Birmingham's Terminal station. This photo came one day after the Alabama Public Service Commission ruled that the waiting rooms must remain segregated.
I urge everyone to visit Unseen. Unforgotten., especially my countrymen. The illuminating pictures of this period are educational and bring home just what the Civil Rights Movement was up against.
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Great photos.
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*sits on her mouth regarding the orgy of racism surrounding NOLA and Katrina*
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Then I think about what went down in NOLA with Katrina and think, "Maybe we haven't made as much progress as we thought."
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Always pleased to serve. I didn't notice anything that might raise issues with parents (i.e., say, a lynching photo). There seem to be a lot of photos from the Freedom Riders, the voter registration marches, the Children's Crusade, and school integration.
I find the pictures to be haunting on a the whole.
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I just recently saw Focus with my parents via their pay-per-view. It's about anti-semitism during World War II and it is...brrr...chilling in that way Arthur Miller can be. There were some words used in the course of casual dialogue that made my eyes pop out of my head because it was like getting wacked with a 2-by-4 and there's my parents going, "Yup. A little before our time, but yup. It was like that."
It's a good flick and definitely a thought-provoking one. Stars William H. Macy and Laura Dern (Check it out! A actor-actress combo where the actress doesn't look like an anorexic 18 year-old!). Meatloaf (who does a great job!) and David Paymer (one of those "Hey! It's that guy!" actors).
I guess seeing that movie about two weeks before seeing this site was a real one-two punch for me.
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there's my parents going, "Yup. A little before our time, but yup. It was like that."
Ha -- my parents are like that, too. They're a little older than most peoples' parents, so my dad was able to detail some of the anti-Asian propaganda posters for me from WWII. Nasty nasty stuff.
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It says something when both my parents say that GWHB is "worse than Nixon, and Nixon tried to kill Massachusetts, so it says something if we're saying it." A lot of federal money "went away" from MA when Nixon was pres. Almost strangled the economy here. (Only state not to vote for the bastard...)
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I would've eaten this up when I was a student. Heck. I eat it up now, but I'm a history geek.
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I didn't grow up in the civil right era so of course I don't have any memories of it. But I do have parents and grandparents who have experienced the things that happened in those photos first hand and I grew up hearing stories from that era. Heart breaking stories that will make you sick to your stomach and wonder how on earth our society could be that cruel and baric but they also shared stories that taught me the importance of equal societies and equal rights.
One story that comes to mind when I see those photo's is a story my Dad use to tell me. My grandfather was helping some people who were black find jobs and my father says he can remember several occasions of the Klu Klux Klan burning crosses in their front yard and throwing bricks and rocks in their windows. Of course my grandfather being the stubborn big hearted preacher that he was told his children not to be scared of the cowards hiding under bed sheets because those men would soon see the day come when they wouldn't have bed sheets to hide under anymore. Anyway my grandfather continued to help in any way he could to those who were in need of jobs or in need of some assistance.
There's more stories like that one that I could go on for hours with. My Dad grew up around Birmingham in that time period so he saw some very rough things as you could imagine. But I wont go into all of that.
Being from Alabama that part of our history is something that still ashamed me but I also think it's important to remind us of our mistakes and to take ownership of them to ensure that they never happen again and to continue to work on any issues we still have today. It's important to stare at these haunting images and learn from them. To continue to learn from them until the problem is no longer in question.
So thanks for posting this link. I had not seen this. I will be sending it to my Dad to take a look because I think he would be really interested in seeing it. He is a history buff especially if the history is something he saw first hand. If my grandfather were still alive today I think he would be proud to see that maybe some of those cowards have been outed from their bed sheets. But we still have a long way to go as well.