A Birmingham News photo intern, Alexander Cohn, has uncover 5,000 photos from 1950 - 1965. This photos were taken by numerous photographers from the Birmingham newspaper and Associated Press. This are not the typical Civil Rights Movement photos. These are photos that hopefully will encourage the reader to research the movement in more detail. Please read the below story about Alexander Cohn's discovery, then click on the attached link to view the photos. Of course, you will not be able to access the entire photo collection because there are plans to create some form of exhibit in Birmingham.
Written by COWBOY4EVER
From Negatives to Positives
Discovery in News archives leads to publication of unseen photographs tracing progress of civil rights movement through Birmingham.
Sunday, February 26, 2006
By BARNETT WRIGHT
News staff writer
Minutes after the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was bombed on Sept. 15, 1963, Tom Self was on the scene taking pictures.
The photographs, published in The Birmingham News, were among hundreds that appeared in print during the civil rights struggle in Alabama. Self, who retired as chief photographer in 1998, remembers many of those images.
He also recalls many not published. One is a picture from inside the Sixteenth Street church moments after explosives blew the face of Jesus Christ from a stained-glass window and killed four little girls.
"I shot a picture of Jesus, and everything was intact except his face; his face was blown out," Self remembered. "It was an eerie feeling to look up there and see the whole frame of the window and just the face was gone."
Hundreds of photos from that era were lost, sold, stolen or stored in archives. Some of those pictures appear today for the first time in the newspaper, in an eight-page special section titled "Unseen. Unforgotten."
The section is the result of research by Alexander Cohn, a 30-year-old former photo intern at The News. In November 2004, Cohn went through an equipment closet at the newspaper in search of a lens and saw a cardboard box full of negatives marked, "Keep. Do Not Sell."
Cohn, who grew up in Mountain Brook and is a master's candidate at the University of Missouri, researched the images and discovered that many had never been published.
"These images were hidden in plain sight," Cohn said. "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."
With the cooperation of The News, Cohn interviewed dozens of photographers, clergymen, elected officials, civil rights movement participants, historians and other witnesses to the events. More than 30 photos appear in today's special section, and dozens more are available on the newspaper's Web site at www.al.com/unseen.
Some of the images will appear in a special exhibition at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute beginning March 13.
Multimedia presentations featuring more pictures and interviews with the photographers and participants in the civil rights movement are also online.
In all, Cohn said, he found 5,000 images from 1950 to 1965 in the cardboard box. He examined 2,000 and estimated that most had not been published.
Why weren't more of the photos published 40 or 50 years ago?
"It was difficult for people to see," said Horace Huntley, director of oral history at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and professor of history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. "People were embarrassed by it. The city fathers were embarrassed by it."
Eighteen years ago, in a centennial edition, The News made this observation about its coverage of the civil rights movement: "The story of The Birmingham News' coverage of race relations in the 1960s is one marked at times by mistakes and embarrassment but, in its larger outlines, by growing sensitivity and acceptance of change."
Organizations outside the state told Birmingham's story before the local media, Huntley and others said.
"More than anyone else, New York Times reporter Harrison Salisbury forced The News and the entire Birmingham white community to confront the reality of the racial conflict," according to The News' centennial special published March 13, 1988. Salisbury's profile of the city appeared in The Times on April 12, 1960, under the headline, "Fear and Hatred Grip Birmingham."
"The editors thought if you didn't publish it, much of this would go away," said Ed Jones, 81, a photographer at The News from 1942 to 1987. "Associated Press kept on wanting pictures, and The News would be slow on letting them have them, so they flooded the town with photographers. The AP started sending pictures all over, and it mushroomed."
Robert Adams, 84, a photographer who joined the newspaper in 1940 and retired in 1985, said, "I think The News as an institution did not try to inflame the situation by use of photographs or stories."
Covering the turmoil meant facing many dangers, the photographers recalled.
"Being a photographer back then wasn't the safest thing to do," said Self, 71, who joined the newspaper in 1952. "An AP photographer was up here covering the protests, and somebody shot the back window of his Volkswagen with him in it. I've had people who were on trial threaten me."
Concrete bricks would sometimes get tossed at the photographers, Jones said.
"Down by Ingram Park, people were up on the second floor of a hotel, and they started throwing half of concrete blocks at us," he said. "I was standing by another photographer and I saw it coming and I hollered, 'Watch out!' And it hit him: It fell right between us and hit him on his right ankle. His ankle was swollen twice as big as it should be in five minutes."
All of the photographers said they didn't see special significance in their photos when they were taken.
"It's an honest record," Adams said. "There were no attempts at bias. It was a record of what happened while I was there."
Catherine Burks Brooks, a Birmingham resident who was part of a group of student Freedom Riders when she attended Tennessee State University, is among those who appear in the previously unpublished photographs.
"I was very, very thrilled to see that we do have them," said Brooks, 66, a substitute teacher in the Birmingham City Schools. "I assumed that there were pictures because reporters and photographers were around. I knew the pictures had to exist, but they were being kept somewhere."
UNSEEN PHOTOS:
http://www.al.com/unseen//
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