Birmingham 1963: Photographers were on the front lines to capture the civil rights movement

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama -- Tommy Langston only had a chance to shoot one picture.

By the next day, though, that photograph would be on the front pages of newspapers around the world, an indelible image that many say finally forced Birmingham to deal with the ugly reality of its racist culture.

A photographer for the Birmingham Post-Herald, Langston went to the Trailways bus depot on Mother's Day in 1961 to capture the arrival of the Freedom Riders into Birmingham.

The small band of civil rights activists was traveling the South to test a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that declared segregation in interstate bus terminals unconstitutional.

In Birmingham, a mob of Ku Klux Klansmen was waiting for them. When Langston arrived at the station at Fourth Avenue North and 19th Street that Sunday afternoon, the Klansmen were already pummeling the Freedom Riders with pipes, chains and their fists.

Instinctively, Langston shot a picture.

Immediately, the Klansmen went after him.

They chased him out into the parking lot, where they smashed his camera and kicked and punched him in the ribs. He recalled being hit in the face with a chain, breaking his glasses.

"He was sent down there on assignment," his wife, Tommie Langston, remembers.  "It was just his duty. He went where he was sent.

"And when the Klansmen saw him taking the picture of them beating up the Freedom Riders, they saw the flash bulb flash and they turned on him and really worked him over."

A bloodied Langston managed to get up off the sidewalk and walk the three blocks back to the Post-Herald newsroom. A copy clerk drove him to University Hospital, where he was treated for bruised ribs and cuts to his face.

His camera, a twin lens Rolleiflex, was destroyed.

But his picture survived.

Because of photojournalists such as Langston - and Tom Self and Ed Jones of The Birmingham News, Charles Moore of Life magazine and many others who documented the struggle for civil rights - those harsh images of burning crosses, snarling police dogs and bombed churches remain a lasting reminder of perhaps the most significant chapter in our city's and our state's history.

For many people who grew up in Birmingham and have spent most of their lives here, those photographs are often taken for granted -- or even greeted with a shrug of the shoulders or a roll of the eyes whenever they are brought back up again in stories such as this one.

For outsiders, though, as well as an entire generation that only knows about the movement through pictures and stories, Langston, Self, Jones, Moore and all those other photographers were, in a sense, foot soldiers, too - serving on the front lines, often unprotected, often fending for themselves.

"I think the presumption at first by a lot of our visitors is that these images were captured by people who were not from here," Laura Anderson, archivist at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, says.

"To find out these were Alabama guys who lived here and understood the culture they were documenting, and this moment of change that was happening, does move people.

"It wasn't all outsiders coming in here taking photos. You talk about Charles Moore. He might have been taking the photos for Life, but he was an Alabama boy who understood the people who were involved in this really epic struggle taking place in front of his eyes."

Moore, who was born in Hackleburg and grew up in Tuscumbia, shot some of the most well-known images of the 1963 Birmingham protests - graphic photos of police dogs and fire hoses that horrified a nation when they appeared in a 11-page spread of Life magazine.

He also paid a physical price for shooting some of them.

While photographing a demonstration at Kelly Ingram Park, Moore was struck by a piece of concrete that Jones, one of The News photographers, says was thrown from the second story of a nearby building.

Jones was standing alongside Moore that day, but managed to get out of the way.

"I don't know if they were throwing at us, but they sure hit Charlie," Jones, 89, recalls. "I swerved and said, 'Watch out, Charlie,' and he tried to swerve, but it was too late."

Moore's ankle, Jones says, quickly swelled to the size of a softball, but he was out on the streets shooting within a few days.

Moore, who died three years ago, was also beaten up in his hotel room in Mississippi, when he went there to cover the enrollment of James Meredith, the first black student at the University of Mississippi.

Somewhere in his basement, the 79-year-old Self still has the construction worker's hard hat he sometimes wore to protect himself when he went out to cover some of the civil rights protests.

"You had to get right up in their face sometimes," Self recalls. "You couldn't shoot that stuff back here (in the distance). You had to be right in there with them.

"I always felt like we were kind of by ourselves," he adds. "The blacks didn't like us. The (white) demonstrators didn't like us. A lot of police didn't like us. So, you know, we just kind of would stick together."

Bill Hudson -- the Associated Press photographer whose May 3, 1963, picture of a police dog attacking defenseless Parker High School student Walter Gadsden appeared on the front page, at the top of the fold, of the next day's New York Times -- had his Volkswagen Beetle vandalized, Self recalls.

"He came in the paper (newsroom) one night, and somebody had shot the back window out in his Volkswagen," Self says. "It didn't hurt him, but it destroyed the back window of his car."

Self was more troubled by the threatening phone calls at his home, some of them when his wife was alone with their two young children.

"That was probably what bugged you the most,'' he says, "was them calling you at the house and threatening you and scaring you."

On Sept. 15, 1963, Self was one of the first photographers to arrive at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church after the infamous bomb blast that killed four black schoolgirls - Denise McNair, Carole  Robertson, Addie  Mae Collins and Cynthia Wesley - who were preparing for a youth program at the church.

Self, too, had been in church with his wife, Claudette, and their two children at Tarrant First Methodist Church when he heard about the bombing.

"I was in between Sunday school and church, and somebody told me what had happened," he says. "I always kept my camera in my car, so I took off to the church. I got there pretty quick."

The explosion had knocked a gaping hole in the basement wall of the church, shattered some of stained-glass windows, rocked the cars that were parked along the street and blown out the windows of the nearby buildings.

Self shot what would become an iconic photograph of the bombing, a picture taken from inside the church looking out, with loose bricks scattered around a crater that had been caused by the explosion and a hole in the church wall that was big enough to drive a truck through. In the foreground, a dazed Birmingham fireman stared into his camera.

That photograph appeared across four columns of the front page of the next day's editions of The Birmingham News, under a two-deck headline that read "ANGRY POLICE SIFT BLAST CLUES; JUDGE DECRIES MOCKERY OF LAW" in inch-tall, all-cap letters.

But it was the picture that was not published that, to Self, was the most compelling - a photograph of one of the stained-glass windows depicting an image of Jesus Christ. The body of Christ was intact, but the face had been punched out from the explosion.

"One of the first things I see is that window with the face missing," Self recalls. "And we didn't run it. Not then. I don't know why."

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Many of the civil-right pictures that The Birmingham News photographers shot in the late 1950s and early 1960s were not published at the time, Self and Jones say, because Vincent Townsend, the vice president and assistant to the publisher of of The News then, was fighting desperately to protect the image of the city he loved so dearly.

"We would go down there and shoot all of this stuff, and Townsend was putting the quietus on everything," Jones, who retired from The News in 1987, says. "Because he was trying to look out for the way people looked at Birmingham. He was trying to save Birmingham. . . .

"I don't fault him," Jones adds. "He was looking out for Birmingham. He was wanting to take care of Birmingham. The fewer people that knew about it, the better off. He was editor. He could do what he wanted to."

Whatever Townsend's intentions, the consequences of his actions effectively kept Birmingham's citizens in the dark -- shielding them from the truth rather than enlightening them about what was happening.

Townsend, who died in 1978, has been much vilified over the years -- by historians, essayists and authors, who rightly assert that it is a newspaper's fundamental responsibility to report what is happening, not try to hide it.

Mickey Townsend, Townsend's son, says his father has been misunderstood, that he was not intending to cover up anything, but rather, was he just trying to keep the peace.

The younger Townsend, who was a college student at the University of Alabama when many of the events of 1963 took place, says his father would often write "Do Not Publish" on the backs of photographs that he thought the white citizens of Birmingham, and the white readers of The Birmingham News, were not ready to see.

"The best way I would put it, his editorial judgment as an editor, and his life experience, realizing here you are in the middle of South, and here you are in the middle of the Deep South . . . some of those particular photographs that crossed the city desk, or wherever they were going through them, he just thought they were inflammatory, that they could really make things worse," Townsend says.

"Since The News had shot some of those things . . . he would write on the back of the picture, 'Do Not Publish,' and then put his initials on them," Townsend adds. "But not every one of them, for crying out loud."

Specifically, Townsend says, his father was troubled by photographs of white women and black men together during the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery marches.

"I think basically those were primarily the types of things that he was trying to keep from being a problem," he says. "A lot of those people were sleeping out there, on the ground. . . . I think his feeling was that wasn't a good thing to do (to publish the pictures), it's unnecessary.

"Whoever had shot that photograph shouldn't have shot it, so he didn't want it appearing in the paper. But it didn't have anything to do with the people's rights to protest or anything like that."

If they were angry or frustrated that some of their best photographs did not get published at the time, Self and Jones apparently have gotten over it.

"You make the picture, you send it down, and they run what they want to run," Self says. "You never had any say-so over which of the pictures you made got in the paper. And that wasn't just the civil rights stuff. That was anything that we might have covered."

At the time, they say now, they were just doing a job, not necessarily aware that they also were documenting history.

"Whatever shift you were working and whatever happened, you went," Self says. "You might shoot a social job that morning and go downtown that afternoon and shoot something involving the demonstrators."

In February 2006, about 30 of their unpublished photos - including the one Self took of the faceless Christ figure - finally appeared in print for the first time in an eight-page special section of The Birmingham News titled "Unseen, Unforgotten."

Dozens more photographs, along with some of the stories behind them, are available online at

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The negatives of those pictures were discovered in November 2004 by Alexander Cohn, a News intern who found them stored in an equipment closet in a box marked, "Keep. Do Not Sell."

"Those images were hidden in plain sight," Cohn said in an interview at the time  the photos were published. "When I first started looking through this stuff, I was seeing a lot of images that I'd never seen before. I started going through everything on the subject that I could find to get a fuller picture of what was going on."

The "Unseen, Unforgotten" photographs were put on display in an exhibit at the Birmingham Public Library in 2006, and they have been reinstalled in the library's first-floor gallery for this year's 50th anniversary commemoration of the civil rights events of 1963.

At the time of their first public display, Georgia State University history professor Glenn Eskew, author of "But for Birmingham - The Local and the National Movement in the Civil Rights Struggle," wrote a scathing essay condemning The News for not publishing the photographs when the movement was happening but also commending the newspaper for finally sharing them.

"Regrettably, The Birmingham News failed to publish these images with accompanying stories at the time they were taken, and consequently, local people have remained woefully ignorant of what actually happened in their streets and, perhaps more importantly, of why the demonstrations took place at all," Eskew wrote.

"Still, it is important that today The News has recognized the need to make the photographs accessible to the public," his essay continued. "Through this exhibit, The News begins to recognize its role in defending the segregated social structure.

"Perhaps now all of Birmingham can reflect on what happens to the body politic when the print media deliberately keeps the public ignorant and misinformed."

Four years ago, Self, Jones and 10 other photographers who covered the civil rights movement for The Birmingham News in the 1950s and '60s were recognized for their collective work from that era by the Anti-Defamation League at the group's annual Concert Against Hate at the John F. Kennedy for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

"The photographs that Tom (Self) and his colleagues shot were not always pretty," actor Liev Schreiber, who narrated the presentation, said at the Anti-Defamation League event. "The events they covered were not often pretty. But for those of us who weren't there, these black and white photographs are as close as we will ever be."

In the basement of his Center Point home, alongside his photographs of Paul "Bear" Bryant and John F. Kennedy, Self has a framed front page of The Birmingham News from Sept. 16, 1963, the day after the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing.

If he didn't realize the significance of his front-page picture then, he surely does now.

"That's history," Self, who retired from The News in 1998, says. "It will be mentioned every year from now on. Birmingham will never live that down. I don't care how progressive we get.

"Every year on that anniversary, it's going to come up, and I want my grandkids to know I was part of it. And I think they do."

Tommy Langston was a part of that history, too, maybe more than he ever wanted to be.

His photograph of the attack on the Freedom Riders had immediate repercussions in Birmingham and around the world, appearing in a Tokyo newspaper while a group of Birmingham businessmen was there for an International Rotary Club convention.

Embarrassed on a worldwide stage, Birmingham's city leaders were forced to address the racial violence that had stained the city's image.

"So clear was the picture that readers could easily identify the members of the mob who looked up in the camera's lens," Eskew, the Georgia State professor, wrote in his essay. "For white people, the shot conjured the uncomfortable sense of their own reflections supporting segregation."

After he recovered from the injuries he sustained in the beating at the bus station, Langston returned to work at the Post-Herald and resumed shooting the civil rights movement, his wife says.

For a while, though, Langston always looked over his shoulder.

Langston and his wife, who was seven months pregnant at the time of the incident, briefly left their Southside apartment and went to live with her parents in Shelby County.

"It was kind of a scary time," his wife remembers. "We stayed with them out of concern for our safety."

At the suggestion of a policeman friend, Langston also armed himself with a. 38 pistol.

"He got one, but I don't think he ever carried it anywhere," his wife says. "He got rid of it after a while."

Langston retired from the Post-Herald in 1989, after a newspaper career that spanned four decades.

Now 88, he is under hospice care, and because of his declining health, his wife says  he is not in condition to be interviewed for this story.

For many years, in fact, Langston declined other requests to talk about what happened at the Trailways station that Mother's Day afternoon in 1961, saying he did not see the need to revisit the past.

In 1997, though, Langston did agree to an interview with his former newspaper, the Post-Herald, and in it, he said he also blamed the Freedom Riders for stirring the pot that was already boiling over by the time they arrived in Alabama.

"The Klan was wrong," he said, "but those people weren't too right, either."

The photograph he shot that pivotal day hangs opposite some family pictures in a hallway in the Langstons' Shelby County home.

His nurses often ask about it, and so do other visitors.

"It's not anything that we've ever regretted -- that the picture was taken," his wife says. "A lot of people that have come to see us have wanted to see the picture.

"We proudly show it."