Oh, Freedom!
The Birmingham News of Alabama has released previously unpublished photographs of the civil rights movement. A few are from demonstrations and other events in areas outside of Birmingham or Alabama; a few are even outside the key time period of the movement from the late Fifties through the Sixties (there is even a photo from the Scottsboro case of the Thirties). But most are of local significance to Birmingham. Fred Shuttlesworth's courageous and often lonely fights in the late Fifties are here, including an attempt (years before the Freedom Rides) to desegregate the waiting rooms of interstate transportation facilities.
The Freedom Rides are here as well, and of course the high tide of the Movement in Birmingham in 1963, with the child marchers being attacked with high-pressure water hoses and arrested. Most disturbing, though, are the photographs of whites -- not the heroic few who risked their lives to stand with people like Shuttlesworth, but the segregationist mobs, including high school students mobilized to defend segregation as the first black students enrolled at their school. Some of these photos leave no doubt as to why they went unpublished until now: so many of the murderers and enablers of murder among the whites deliberately hide their faces from the camera, as if at some level they knew even then that what they were doing was evil.