Young demonstrator evading policeman, Birmingham,

May 7, 1963

On assignment for <em>Life</em> magazine, Moore documented the Birmingham protests of 1963, the culmination of months of anti-segregation actions organized by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He captured the four-day period when peaceful protesters, including students, were attacked by police dogs and pummeled with fire hoses. Transcending the local, eliciting sympathetic activism, and giving photographic form to racism, Moore’s photographs gripped the nation. Despite the importance of these images in chronicling police brutality in the context of the civil rights movement, it has been argued that the mainstream media’s focus on moments of spectacular violence reduced the complexity of the fight for racial justice to a narrative of white-on-black violence.