A hint of that appears in photojournalist Dan Budnik's 1965 portrait of Selma, Alabama, Sheriff James Clark -- one of about two dozen civil rights photographs by Budnik in an exhibition that opens Saturday, January 15, at Tempe's public library.
On Clark's lapel is a small white button that says "Never" -- the white establishment's reply to the day's civil rights choruses of "We Shall Overcome." It meant that Clark and his ilk would never accept the equality of blacks, would never extend to them the constitutional protections of law that whites enjoyed, and would never let them vote.
Several weeks before Budnik made this picture, Clark had showed how far he was willing to go to enforce the word. With a contingent of state troopers and a mounted posse wielding bullwhips, clubs and tear gas, he attacked the ranks of peaceful civil rights marchers at Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge. The confrontation, which became known as "Black" or "Bloody Sunday," drove the issue of voting rights deep into the American conscience. A week later, President Lyndon Johnson addressed Congress about the need to pass a voting rights act. Within two weeks, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and a contingent of about 300 marchers were walking, with the protection of federal troops and marshals, the 54 miles from Selma to Montgomery -- an event that remains one of the watersheds of the civil rights movement.
Budnik was not in Selma for "Bloody Sunday." But he began photographing the tumultuous fallout from it shortly afterward. None of the photographs in this show depicts the violence that took the lives of three civil rights workers that month. Yet they manage to encapsulate the queer mix of tension, tragedy and elation of the days leading up to the completion of the march.
These and other still images of the day represented the last hurrah of the kind of work that made magazines like Life and Look such American staples. The incident at the Pettus bridge exemplified why. The scenes of gas-masked troopers beating demonstrators were broadcast on that evening's televised news, hours before they appeared in the nation's newspapers, and weeks before they hit the magazines.
Still, Budnik's images from the weeks that followed reveal the compelling nature of what photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson once coined "the decisive moment" -- that photographic instant when intellect and intuition merge into a singular picture and point of view.
As with all photojournalism, the intriguing aspect of these works is their bias. Whether one's considering the poignant image of a lone figure carrying an American flag down the road during the Selma to Montgomery march or the silhouette of Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, right arm thrust heavenward, at the pulpit of Selma's Brown Chapel -- an image that became a figure in a Jacob Lawrence painting -- Budnik's pictures were meant to persuade viewers not simply to look, but to feel and ultimately to act.
Like other photojournalists of the day, he used the camera not just as a visual tool, but as a social one.
"I suppose I went into freelance photography because it sort of represented the freedom I thought would be diminishing," he says. "And it was at a time when you could still be an altruistic zealot and make a difference."
Budnik had gone to Alabama early in March 1965 as a freelancer for Life magazine, with the idea of penetrating the world of white segregationists. "I had a grandiose plan of demystifying the Ku Klux Klan -- putting a human face on the savagery," he says.
Budnik had covered the 1963 civil rights march in Washington, D.C., where he snapped the ruminative profile of King that's in the exhibition -- a picture made shortly after his "I have a dream" speech.
But this was his first effort in the South to cover the civil rights struggle. "Basically, I told the editors, 'Let me go down on my own nickel. If I'm successful, then let's do something.'"
He had gone down to Selma the week before "Bloody Sunday" and lucked into an introduction to the late governor George Wallace. "Wallace immediately used me in front of the Daughters of the Confederacy," Budnik recalls. "He said we have an enemy in our midst."
Afterward, says Budnik, the governor said: "I hope you didn't mind me using you in that way."
"I said, 'Governor Wallace, you owe me one.'"
Budnik told Wallace that Life was willing to cover the segregationist world. "I can't be held accountable for what Life will write about you," he told him. "It's their magazine. But I'll stand 100 percent behind my photographs."
As it turned out, Life pulled the plug on the idea after deciding that it had saturated the civil rights issue. But that didn't occur until after Budnik switched from covering the segregationists to capturing the events of the march.
Joanne Bland, who was 11 years old when she joined the march at the Pettus bridge, participated in parts of the Selma to Montgomery walk. She now runs the National Voting Rights Museum in Selma. Bland says that the presence of photographers like Budnik and television cameras reassured marchers that the outside world would get a ringside view of the civil rights effort.
"When all that awful stuff that happened on that bridge was broadcast on the news and in the papers," says Bland, "it became something you couldn't deny anymore. The news people managed to get footage and pictures out and people saw what was going on and they were outraged."
The images passed as a kind of proof of the reality behind the words. For instance, earlier in 1965, when King announced the start of a drive to register black voters in the South, he said that about three million of the five million eligible blacks in the region were not registered. The numbers in the county encompassing Selma were even more startling. Only several hundred of its estimated 15,000 eligible African Americans were registered, compared with more than 9,000 of the 14,000 eligible whites.
The face that Budnik put on the issue, in his image of voters being sworn in in Montgomery, tells the story in a way that only a photograph can. The eight or nine men and women with their hands raised in the picture are not young. Several look to be far beyond child-rearing years. They have never done this before.
His image of King, his wife and Dr. Ralph Abernathy walking past the stares of segregationists outside a church in Montgomery shows people who know the dance all too well. It's an understated portrayal of the old world of defiance meeting the new one of resolve.
Budnik's pictures of children involved in the demonstrations are equally poignant. One -- which became a magazine icon of the march -- depicts the silhouette of a teenage boy carrying a pole with a handmade flag down a road. Another shows young black children in front of the Dallas County courthouse, in Selma, kneeling and praying behind a sign that says "Sheriff Cars Only."
"I was truly struck by the bravery of these children," says Budnik. "Their parents and maybe older brothers and sisters were in jail, and there they were on the sidewalk outside."
Bland recalls that she and her friends didn't think of the bravery as much as they felt the fear. "We were sure afraid, but this was just something we felt we had to do, so we wouldn't be pushed around no more."
She says that after the attack at the Pettus bridge 35 years ago, there were plenty of reasons to want to stay away from the next march. But they didn't. The following Tuesday, she and her friends joined King's symbolic walk across the bridge where they knelt and prayed. Two weeks later, she joined nearly 25,000 others for speeches below the steps of the statehouse in Montgomery, where Jefferson Davis had once been sworn in as president of the Confederacy.
"We walked to the capitol and heard the speeches and had that feeling of accomplishment that we had done something big. In fact, that was my first inclination that there was a possibility of change."
That summer, Congress passed the federal Voting Rights Act. In the first election that followed, Sheriff Clark was voted out of office.
The exhibition of Dan Budnik photographs continues through Wednesday, March 15, at the Tempe Public Library, 3500 South Rural. Budnik will talk about his work at the library on Saturday, January 15, at 3:30 p.m.
Contact Edward Lebow at his online address: [email protected]
