A Man Can't Ride Your Back Unless It Is Bent

The Civil Rights movement melts me to my honest core whenever some form of its media looks me square in the eyes.  I could listen to MLK's "I Have Been to the Mountaintop" speech consequtively until the second I die and never tire of the passion, inspiration, and imminent danger associated with a group of individuals with their sights irrevocably directed toward progress. 

I am in awe.



Ernest Withers; March in Birmingham, Alabama, 1963.

Ernest Withers ignited this very same Civil Rights movement with personal and confrontational photographs documenting reality.  This picture changed America.  Published in 1963, the photo documents police brutality towards a group of boys - children - who marched unarmed in nonviolent support of civil rights.  The police men forced trained attack dogs and high-pressured waterhoses on these unwavering youths to break up the peaceful rally.

And for the first time, priveledged Northerners saw on a personal level the disgrace with which Southern officals treated those human beings engaged in a basic struggle for human dignity.  In droves, supporters began traveling from their safe homes in the North to organize freedom rides, boycottss, marches, and rallies.  White united with black to show their allegiance and joint passion for human rights.  

In that favorite speech of mine, King discusses that march in Birmingham with hope and power citing protestors strength of character:

"And Bull Connor would tell them to send the dogs forth, and they did come; but we just went before the dogs singing, "Ain't gonna let nobody turn me around."

Bull Connor next would say, "Turn the fire hoses on." And as I said to you the other night, Bull Connor didn't know history. He knew a kind of physics that somehow didn't relate to the transphysics that we knew about. And that was the fact that there was a certain kind of fire that no water could put out."

 

King exemplifies the strength and courage of the movement, but for the first time, Ernest Withers showed the strenght and courage of our human brothers and sisters in the face of one of the riskiest forms of adversity.  And a volcano of support erupted.  Because when a person distills and purifies a divided issue to its honest core, to its human core, the struggle becomes a fight for life, a fight for the overall good of humanity.  When Ernest Withers took that photo of the calm, erect schoolboy, he made the battle for Civil Rights more than a squabble over tradition, "health," or economics, he made it a personal fight for the human soul and a war for the overall goodness of humanity.