Author Topic: Civil Rights Movement...A Look Back (Read 294 times)

SOB · « **on:** February 27, 2006, 08:48:24 PM »

Amazing...buried in a closet for all these years!

Link to the photos...
http://www.al.com/unseen/

Quote

Story Link

Feb 27, 7:57 PM EST

Ala. Paper Publishes Civil Rights Photos

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) -- Dozens of never before released photos from the civil rights era came to light this weekend after an intern discovered them buried in an equipment closet at the Birmingham News.

The photos had been in a box marked: "Keep. Do Not Sell." But at the time they were taken, the newspaper didn't want to draw attention to the racial discord of the 1950s and 1960s, news photographers from the period said.

"The editors thought if you didn't publish it, much of this would go away," said Ed Jones, 81, a photographer at The News from 1942 to 1987. "Associated Press kept on wanting pictures, and The News would be slow on letting them have them, so they flooded the town with photographers."

On Sunday, the photos finally went to print in a special eight-page section called "Unseen. Unforgotten." Others are on the newspaper's Web site at http://www.al.com/unseen .

Several photos vividly show the segregation in the South at the time, including the disparity among school buildings and the different lines for blacks and whites, even at the jail as the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth posts bail after an arrest.

Others show confrontations: a police officer shoving a demonstrator, black children hit with the spray of a firehose, crowds heckling demonstrators on their knees, Freedom Riders being arrested, and whites throwing bricks at cars and blocking blacks from entering "whites-only" areas.

One photo shows a Ku Klux Klan rally with men wearing hoods but their faces uncovered. Others show National Guardsmen with their guns drawn, protecting a bus in one and rounding up rioters protesting a black student's enrollment at the University of Mississippi.

Catherine Burks Brooks, 66, a Birmingham teacher who was part of a group of Freedom Riders while a student at Tennessee State University, was among those photographed. "I was very, very thrilled to see that we do have them," she said after learning about the newly found photos. "I knew the pictures had to exist, but they were being kept somewhere."

Robert Adams, 84, a photographer who joined the newspaper in 1940 and retired in 1985, said The News didn't want to inflame the situation.

It was also dangerous, said Tom Self, 71, who joined the newspaper in 1952. He described how one photographer's car window was shot out while the photographer was inside.

In the News' centennial edition in 1988, the newspaper said a New York Times story in 1960 forced the paper and the city's white community to confront the racial conflict: "The story of The Birmingham News' coverage of race relations in the 1960s is one marked at times by mistakes and embarrassment but, in its larger outlines, by growing sensitivity and acceptance of change."

Ripsnort · « **Reply #1 on:** February 28, 2006, 07:51:43 AM »

Damn southern democrats!

Makes me very angry at them looking at those pictures.

lazs2 · « **Reply #2 on:** February 28, 2006, 08:39:46 AM »

some of us were around in the south in the late 50's there was segregation but it would have went away on it's own. It was on it's way out...

Not sure that forcing it as we did has made us all get along better.

lazs

Ripsnort · « **Reply #3 on:** February 28, 2006, 08:47:14 AM »

Well, at least a Texan made things right for civil rights, the southern democrats had their heads up their you-know-what. Racist bastiges.

Toad · « **Reply #4 on:** February 28, 2006, 08:59:53 AM »

Reel in, Rip. This hole's fished out and, anyway, I think your license has expired.

Ripsnort · « **Reply #5 on:** February 28, 2006, 09:09:19 AM »

Quote

Originally posted by Toad
Reel in, Rip. This hole's fished out and, anyway, I think your license has expired.

No fishing here, Toad. Southern democrats were some of the most racists SOB's this country has ever seen during that era. It just pisses me off to no end.

Sandman · « **Reply #6 on:** February 28, 2006, 09:58:19 AM »

Quote

Originally posted by Ripsnort
Damn southern democrats! Makes me very angry at them looking at those pictures.

Does it make you angry because most of those "southern democrats" are republican today?

Ripsnort · « **Reply #7 on:** February 28, 2006, 10:08:49 AM »

Quote

Originally posted by Sandman
Does it make you angry because most of those "southern democrats" are republican today?

They are? Last time I checked, the elected officials in those hot spot states were still democrat today....hmm.

Sandman · « **Reply #8 on:** February 28, 2006, 10:25:28 AM »

Who said anything about elected officials?

Gunslinger · « **Reply #9 on:** February 28, 2006, 11:27:18 AM »

you two actually bring up a political conundrum. Yes it's true that SOME "dixicrats" of old are now a rebulican base in the south.....BUT, many southerners simply don't like the rebulican party STILL because of animosity towards rebulican lead reconstruction after the civil war.

Now neither party is the same as it was 100 years ago otherwise it would be the republicans that freed the slaves and the democrats that oppressed the south. Yet the opposite isn't true with many because many southern whites WONT vote republican because of what I said previously.

It's kinda interesting when you think about it.

midnight Target · « **Reply #10 on:** February 28, 2006, 11:29:13 AM »

Since your "not fishing" I'll be happy to educate you.

"The term Dixiecrat is a portmanteau of Dixie, referring to the Southern United States, and Democrat, referring to the United States Democratic Party. Initially, it referred to a 1948 splinter from the party: for over a century, white Southerners had overwhelmingly been Democrats, but that year many bolted the party and supported Strom Thurmond's third-party candidacy for president of the United States. Over the next several decades, as the white South slowly re-aligned from the Democrats to the Republicans, the term came to have a broader usage, including, for example, with reference to the members of the Electoral College who in the election of 1960 voted for Harry Flood Byrd rather than John F. Kennedy, or the white Southern voters and electors who in 1968 supported Wallace.

The term has also been used to refer to conservative white Southerners who remain within the Democratic Party, and those who were formerly Democrats but now identify as Republicans."

Gunslinger · « **Reply #11 on:** February 28, 2006, 11:41:09 AM »

Quote

Originally posted by midnight Target

The term has also been used to refer to conservative white Southerners who remain within the Democratic Party, and those who were formerly Democrats but now identify as Republicans."

Thank you for the edumacation. It's that last sentence that I find interesting. The catagory of conservitive white southern democrats seems like a contradiction.

PS I don't want to take away from the thread topic. Thanks for the post SOB those are some powerfull images of Americans fighting for their rights.

midnight Target · « **Reply #12 on:** February 28, 2006, 11:45:03 AM »

Actually I think conservative white southern democrats are becoming an endangered species.

Sandman · « **Reply #13 on:** February 28, 2006, 11:48:22 AM »

Quote

Originally posted by Gunslinger
you two actually bring up a political conundrum. Yes it's true that SOME "dixicrats" of old are now a rebulican base in the south.....BUT, many southerners simply don't like the rebulican party STILL because of animosity towards rebulican lead reconstruction after the civil war.

Now neither party is the same as it was 100 years ago otherwise it would be the republicans that freed the slaves and the democrats that oppressed the south. Yet the opposite isn't true with many because many southern whites WONT vote republican because of what I said previously.

It's kinda interesting when you think about it.

Platforms change. By today's yardstick, Nixon was a Democrat.