File:Hudson police dogs 1963.jpg

Photograph of May 3, 1963 by Bill Hudson (Associated Press) showing a Birmingham Police Department officer holding an African American youth by the collar while a police dog lunges. Images like this of police dogs and firehoses became emblems of the brutishness of resistance to the Civil rights movement in Birmingham. Hudson was able to get close to the action by keeping his cameras concealed under his jacket.

According to most sources, the boy being held was Walter Gadsden (or Gaston), 15, a student at Ullman High School. He was related to the publishers of the Atlanta Daily World and Birmingham World. Those newspapers both disdained the direct action being undertaken by Martin Luther King, Jr's SCLC and Fred Shuttlesworth's ACMHR, and tended to cover the movement's activities even less than the white press at the time. Gadsden and his family were astonished to find that he had become a "cover boy" for the movement and he later claimed in an interview for Jet magazine that the attack made him understand that he had been hanging around with the wrong sort of people and should have avoided the marches altogether. In 1988 Gadsden was interviewed for a British documentary and then said he was glad he went to the park that day and that Hudson had been lucky enough to capture the moment of the attack.

State Representative Demetrius Newton, however, claims that the boy in the photograph is a former Sunday School student of his, Walter Lee Fowlkes.

The police officer gripping the boy's sweater was Dick Middleton, and the police dog was named "Leo". Some have claimed that the officer was in the midst of trying to control the dog rather than urging it to attack. Others have noted that the apparently acquiescent youth is actually in the act of defending himself by thrusting his knee into the dog's chest and gripping the police officer's wrist.

The other officer in the photo, with his back turned, has been identified as C. R. "Bunny" Boyd. His dog was named "Major".

The photo was taken on 6th Avenue North, on the northern edge of Kelly Ingram Park, near 16th Street North. The Jockey Boy Restaurant, since demolished, is visible in the background.

The image is copyrighted to Hudson and the Associated Press.

References

• Adams, Alvin (October 10, 1963) "Picture Seen Around World Changed Boy's Drop-Out Plan" Jet, Vol. 24, No. 25, p. 26
• McWhorter, Diane (May 2, 1993) "The Moment That Made a Movement" The Washington Post
• McWhorter, Diane (2001) Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution. New York, New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0743226488
• Roberts, Gene and Hank Klibanoff (2007) The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation. Random House. ISBN 0679735658, p. 318
• Monteith, Sharon (2009) American Culture in the 1960s. Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 074861947X, pp. 194-5
• Garrison, Greg (May 3, 2013) "Civil rights hero fraud: Are imposters stealing credit from real heroes?." The Birmingham News