The Photographer Who Changed History

You may not know the name but you know the photographs well.   Charles Moore was a fledgling photographer for the Montgomery Advertiser in the late fifties and early sixties when a fiery young minister named Martin Luther King made the city ground zero in the civil rights movement.  Charles was fearless and ambitious and in a time and place where history was being made.  The son of a minister, himself, he also knew who was on the right side of that history.   

Over a period of years he risked his life countless times to take pictures that changed the way many people viewed race in America.  Those pictures have become iconic and an enduring legacy and they are a tribute to his courage and sense of decency.  Charles was there when Bull Connor unleashed the dogs and the fire hoses and his goons swung the night sticks.  He was with the Federal agents at Ole Miss on the night that several of them were killed.  These were the days before television destroyed the big national magazines and long before every person with a cell phone became a reporter.  LIFE magazine began running his pictures and they–and to a lesser extent, Charles–became famous.

NPR got it right:

Charles Moore put faces on the civil rights movement for a nation to see. His photographs for Life magazine reached half of the nation. Images of snarling police dogs, water cannons, the Ku Klux Klan and Bloody Sunday helped spur the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

I knew Charles well.  When I was editor of a large corporate magazine in the seventies and eighties, I worked with him more often on travel-related pieces than any other photographer.  We spent weeks together traveling and tramping around in Asia, Latin America, Hawaii and elsewhere.  He was a gentleman in the old-fashioned sense of the word.  He was modest and his word was unshakable.  If he said he would do something, it got done.
 
As a location photographer, he was incredibly reliable.  He had the ability to conjure up good pictures when the conditions were all wrong which they usually are in assignments that are on the meter.  He was also lucky.  If a helicopter was flying across a green pineapple field, a red truck would suddenly appear on the dirt road through the center.  Karma.  Some guys have it; some don’t.
 
I had a lot of thoughts about Charles yesterday when I saw his obituary in the New York Times.   He was a throwback to an age when real journalists believed it was their duty to witness and record the truth in order to make America a better and fairer place for everyone.  At a time in history when extremism and ignorance are again rearing their ugly heads, his pictures are an enduring reminder of the fragile line that separates our best and worst instincts as a nation and a poignant argument for civility and decency.  Our political “leaders” would be wise to look at these pictures and think long and hard about what they say and how they say it. 

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