File:Hudson police dogs 1963.jpg: Difference between revisions

Photograph of May 3, 1963 by Bill Hudson (Associated Press) showing a Birmingham Police Department officer holding Walter Gadsden 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. The boy being held was Walter Gadsden, 15, a member of Atlanta's Scott family, publishers of the Atlanta Daily World and Birmingham World. The 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.

The police officer holding Gadsden was Dick Middleton. Some have claimed that the officer was in the midst of trying to control the dog rather than urging it to attack.

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 and is published here under the doctrine of "Fair Use" because of its iconic and irreplaceable nature as a record of a historical event.

References

• 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
• 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