Powerful Days: The Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore.

Photographs by Charles Moore. Text by Michael S. Durham. Introduction by Andrew Young. 208 pages. 188 duotone photographs. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, in cooperation with the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, 2002. $29.95 paper.

   Charles Moore’s Powerful Days, originally published in1991, is an important book, and the University of Alabama Press has done us all a favor by reissuing it. Anyone curious about the civil rights movement, the American South, or postwar America in general will find the photographs on its pages full of essential facts about the struggle for civil rights during the 1950s and 1960s. Even after four decades, the images are compelling. They still possess the power to shock, despite the fact that we’ve seen many of them before. In addition to its visual appeal, Powerful Days will also interest those who care about the way photographs record, reflect, and sometimes help create the historical moments that set the course for how the past will be understood in the future. 
Charles Moore was born in 1931 and raised in a small town in northern Alabama. Matters of race rarely crossed his mind while he was growing up. Blacks and whites “looked different and lived separately,” he recalls, and that was simply the way things were. As a fledgling photographer for the Montgomery Advertiser during the late 1950s, though, he began seeing the world a bit differently. His job at the paper had him taking pictures of anything and everything in Montgomery, and sprinkled among the football games, car wrecks, and “grip-and-grin” handshakes were occasional assignments to photograph activities in the city’s African American community. These included organizational meetings at black churches, several small protest rallies (including one at which he photographed a white man beating a black female demonstrator with a baseball bat), and police roughing up a young, then unknown, clergyman named Martin Luther King Jr. after his arrest for “loitering.” The more Charles Moore witnessed such events, the clearer it became to him that Alabama’s racial status quo would have to change.
As the struggle for racial equality in the South emerged as a national issue, wire services started picking up some of Moore’s photographs from Montgomery and publishing them nationwide. Several appeared in Life, the pinnacle of photojournalistic achievement at the time. Buoyed by these successes, Moore left the Advertiser in 1962 to work freelance. After two bleak months in New York, though, he returned to Alabama. His big break came that fall, when he traveled to Mississippi to cover the court-ordered enrollment of James Meredith at Ole Miss. Pretending to be ill and in need of a restroom, he talked his way into the Lyceum, where the U.S. marshals, on campus to protect Meredith from angry segregationists, had set up their command post. Thus, when the mob attacked the marshals that evening, Moore was inside the Lyceum. He was the only photographer there, and the pictures he made comprise a powerful record of the marshals’ long night of desperation, frustration, and fatigue, as well as their determination to stand up to the rioters. Life bought all his film and ran a number of his photographs as part of its lead news story that week. 
Before long, Moore was the photographer Life would send to the South’s most racially troubled places, especially if violence seemed likely. Many of the pictures he made during this time have become part of our collective cultural memory: the exhausted U.S. Marshals holed up in the Lyceum at Ole Miss, protestors attacked by police dogs or bowled over by jets of water from high-pressure fire hoses in Birmingham, helmeted state troopers beating marchers on Selma’s Edmund Pettis Bridge. These are photographs that have come to define the civil rights movement, especially for people too young to remember those times. As such, they not only describe the events they depict but are part of them, fundamental building blocks of America’s history. Powerful Days gathers these images together and appends Moore’s account (as told to Michael S. Durham) of making some of them. These are things to be thankful for. 

David Wharton