Charles L. Moore

Charles Moore, at the age of 16, could not have known how valuable his training as a Golden Gloves boxer would be. At about the same time, Moore developed an interest in art and in photography and became skilled enough, at age 17, to be admitted into the United States Marine Corps school for combat photography. Moore would, in the course of his career, see a lot of combat, most of it here in America, on the streets of Oxford, Miss. and Montgomery, Birmingham and Selma.

After the Marine Corps, Moore briefly trained to photograph fashion models, but this, fortunately for the Civil Rights Movement, was not to be. In 1957 Moore returned to Alabama, to work at the Montgomery Advertiser. He had had no real exposure to the Movement, but that was to change, and fast.

Moore began what was to be the most important work of his career covering Dr. Martin Luther King and SCLC meetings, and arrests, in Montgomery. It was his photo that depicted King being booked at the Montgomery Police Station on Sept. 3, 1958. Leaving the paper to work as a southern photojournalist for the Black Star photo agency, later under contract to “Life” magazine, Moore would document and show to the world what was happening in the South, from Ole Miss to Selma and beyond. As Rep. John Lewis put it, Moore had “an unbelievable eye.” He was able “to capture the essence of what the Movement was all about. . . . It took people like Charles Moore to make it real.”

At the Ole Miss riots, with only a limited supply of film, and shooting with a gas mask on, Moore took the photos that showed how violent the resistance to the Civil Rights Movement was likely to become. Rep. Lewis, himself a profile in courage, praises Moore’s “raw courage.” Lewis points out that “During those days, it was very dangerous to have a camera.” Reporters as well as activists were targets.

The Marine-trained combat photographer would gain world-wide acclaim with his photographs of the confrontations on the streets of Birmingham and Selma. Television news also told the Birmingham story, but it was Moore who took the shots seen round the world: men and women and children being assaulted by billy clubs, then fire hoses, then German shepherd police dogs. These images are now iconic, a word that should be used sparingly but certainly may be used here. The best of his photos are collected in “Powerful Days: The Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore.”

The historian Arthur Schlesinger said, “The photographs of Bull Connor’s police dogs lunging at the marchers in Birmingham did as much as anything to transform the national mood . . . .” New York Sen. Jacob Javits has said that Moore’s pictures “helped to spur passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

Moore, now residing in Florence, also would cover conflicts in places such as the Dominican Republic and Vietnam.