Powerful Days: Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore

Through the lens of truth, a movement comes alive. 

Charles Moore's photographs are among the most moving and iconic images from the American Civil Rights Movement. Decades after they first astonished the world, his images remain internationally known icons―vivid, searing portraits of pivotal moments in the struggle for racial equality in the American South. 

This chronological collection of Moore's most compelling and dramatic images, taken as the movement progressed through Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Georgia, highlights activity from 1958 to 1965. Included are the iconic scenes of: 

     • black protestors huddled in a doorway to escape the crippling blasts of fire hoses in Birmingham; 

     • a white bigot swinging a baseball bat at the head of a black woman during the desegregation of the Capitol Cafeteria in Montgomery; 

     • a young and stunned Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. pinned to the counter of a police precinct, his arm twisted behind his back; 

     • the devastating aftermath of "Bloody Sunday" on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma; 

     • Bull Connor's ferocious police dogs attacking a protestor in downtown Birmingham. 

Celebrity protestors including writer James Baldwin, comedian Dick Gregory, poet Galway Kinnell, singers Joan Baez, Mary Travers, Pete Seeger, and Harry Bellafonte, and actor Pernell Roberts, are captured alongside the many nameless but committed participants and the recognized major leaders of the movement.

Most of Charles Moore’s civil rights photography originally appeared in the weekly Life magazine, for which he freelanced from 1962 to 1972. In 1989, Moore, an Alabama native, received the first Kodak Crystal Eagle Award for Impact Photojournalism in recognition of his coverage of the civil rights struggle. 

Michael S. Durham was a Life reporter and editor from 1961 to 1972. He is the former editor of Americana magazine and author of two volumes of The Smithsonian Guide to Historic America. 

Andrew Young worked as a top aide to Martin Luther King Jr. during the 1960s. He has served two terms in the U.S. Congress, was U.S. ambassador to the U.N., and was mayor of Atlanta from 1981 to 1989.