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Charles Moore: Witness to Change
- The University of Alabama Press
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Charles Moore WITNESS TO CHANGE I profiled Charles Moore in 2001. When I saw him again in 2005 he was too busy to talk. On Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, for the fortieth anniversary of the civil rights march, he was hurriedly, passionately, snapping photos of the Reverend Joseph Lowery, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Congressman John Lewis, and Coretta Scott King. Moore passed away in 2010. Florence Pictures can and do make a difference. Strong images of historical events do have an impact on our society. Charles Moore, — from the preface of Powerful Days: The Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore N early forty years have passed since Charles Moore slung his Nikon camera over his shoulder and headed to Oxford, Mississippi, to chronicle for the nation what would be, by today’s standards, a mundane event—the enrollment, in the University of Mississippi, of a young black man named James Meredith. A storm was brewing at Ole Miss—Mississippi governor Ross Barnett had sworn defiance of desegregation—and Charles Moore was heading into that storm. Moore, an Alabama photojournalist on assignment for Life magazine, had already experienced the turbulence of the early civil rights movement as chief photographer for the Montgomery Advertiser. He had snapped dramatic im- 16 THE MAKERS ages of Martin Luther King Jr. and memorable, sometimes harrowing street scenes. One of the most unnerving, taken in 1960 in Montgomery the day after black students tried to desegregate the capitol cafeteria, showed a white man about to crack a baseball bat over the head of a black woman—a split-second of rage captured forever by Moore’s shutter. Moore says he made the picture The cover of Powerful Days, a collection of Moore’s photographs from the civil rights movement. [107.23.157.16] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:52 GMT) CHARLES MOORE 17 in the midst of running down the street, which tilted the angle of the shot. The image created a sense of a moral universe turned on its side, dislocated from normal time and space. Moore had also put himself, physically, on the line. He had been pushed, yanked, cursed at, and threatened with his life for the simple reason that his camera would not tell a lie. The weekend of confrontations over James Meredith began not in Oxford, but in Jackson, Mississippi, during a rally downtown for the Ole Miss Rebels football team. An Ole Miss game was scheduled for that afternoon at Jackson’s big stadium. As Moore remembers it, there were young men on the street waving Rebel flags and cheering on Ole Miss. But those chants soon changed to “Roll With Ross,” an expression of support for the Mississippi governor. When Moore had started taking photographs of the fans, one man with a flag had told him to stop. He then, according to Moore, began to jab Moore with the pole of the flag. Moore knocked the pole out of the young man’s hand. The man swore revenge. That afternoon, while Moore was gathered with colleagues in a Jackson hotel room, the door burst open and the same young man, followed by his friends, came storming in. The man who earlier had stuck Moore with the flagpole now grabbed him by the throat. “I ain’t got nothin’ against the niggers,” he spat. “Every white man should own ten of them!” Moore, now 69, trembles with anger as he recounts the story. “He gripped me with his left hand so I could reach up like this”—he demonstrates for a visitor—“and grab hold of his left thumb. You can hurt a guy pretty bad if you turn back his thumb.” But Moore, who had learned self-defense as a combat photographer with the U.S. Marines, wanted to stay calm. “I knew if I took a swing at him we’d have chaos in that room . . . My right arm was free. It was like a coiled spring. Oh, I wanted so badly to let loose with that spring!” He shakes his head. Moore had faced down bullies before while growing up in small-town Alabama , and he sensed the right strategy. “I told him, ‘It’s me you want! Forget about the rest of them. Send everybody out of the room—and it’ll be just you and me.’” The bully did not budge. Then he let go and backed away. “He’d lost face,” Moore says. 18 THE MAKERS Moore’s...