Civil Rights Photographer Charles Moore Dies at 79 March 16, 2010
Martin Luther King Jr. being arrested in 1958. Photo © Charles Moore
Charles Moore, a photographer whose work during the civil rights movement of the 1960s helped force the public to see the inequality and brutality of segregation, has died of natural causes. He was 79.
Born in Alabama in 1931, Moore served three years in the Marines and then attended the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, California. When he returned home he found himself right in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement.
Moore’s most notable photographs — the fire-hosing of protesters in the streets, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. being arrested and shoved into a courthouse desk, white police and civilians beating black demonstrators bloody — are some of the most iconic images from the Civil Rights Era. Distributed by the Associated Press and Life Magazine, his work was extremely important in changing the country’s outlook on racial discrimination: U.S. Senator Jacob Javits said Moore’s photography “helped to spur passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
Moore’ simple use of a short lens showed he was willing to go to the very center of danger to get the necessary shot. And whether it was on the streets for a civil rights protest or later when he would cover conflicts in the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Haiti and the Vietnam War, Moore knew photography had the power to enact change.
“In Birmingham when I saw the dogs I don’t think anything appalled me more, and I’ve been to Vietnam,” Moore told the New York times decades later.
“I photographed it, and the world rushed in. I realized the power of even one image.”
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