The photo-minded among you may have seen obituaries for the civil rights era photojournalist Charles Moore, who died last week in Florida. Moore photographed King getting arrested in Montgomery in 1958. The photo, interestingly, doesn't figure much in general visual retrospectives of the era but has dominated Moore's obituaries this week. He photographed Bull Connor's dogs and firehoses attacking demonstrators in Birmingham in 1963 (rhetorical critic Davi Johnson has a fantastic article on these images as they were reproduced in LIFE magazine). He was at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965. And he photographed these men above, 7 Mississippi sheriffs who gathered in Oxford, Mississippi in 1962 during the integration of Ole Miss by James Meredith.
Take a good long look at this picture. If it seems as though a book could be written about it, you're right: in 2003 Paul Hendrickson published the amazing Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy. Read it; you won't be disappointed.
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