60
Sometimes the most effective mirror is a photograph.
In the summer of 1963, Birmingham was boiling over as
black residents and their allies in the civil rights movement
repeatedly clashed with a white power structure intent on
maintaining segregation—and willing to do whatever that
took. A photographer for the Montgomery Advertiser and
life, Charles Moore was a native Alabaman and son of
a Baptist preacher appalled by the violence inflicted on
African Americans in the name of law and order. Though
he photographed many other seminal moments of the
movement, it was Moore’s image of a police dog tearing
into a black protester’s pants that captured the routine,
even casual, brutality of segregation. When the picture was
published in life, it quickly became apparent to the rest of
the world what Moore had long known: ending segregation
was not about eroding culture but about restoring human-
ity. Hesitant politicians soon took up the cause and passed
the Civil Rights Act of 1964 nearly a year later.