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Transcription below by: Noemi Teppang (2010 adult workshop). Edited transcription by: Judy Minton (volunteer). Please report errors to: info@tellingstories.org

Photograph of Anthony Quinn, Summer '65

I have a quick question. We know that you took a picture of a policeman beating on a small child, correct? Can you tell us about the experience of shooting that, and the experience of what that photo might have done to viewers of it?

That photo was taken in the summer of 1965 when I was back in Mississippi. COFO, the Council of Civil Rights Organizations, was trying to break the back of segregation in Jackson in that summer by filling the jails. They had filled the jails and the Jackson police had then opened the cattle stockades at the fairground. They were incarcerating people under the blazing sun in the cattle stockades. The Movement had gotten to the point where they were running out of people, out of bodies to go to jail. So they changed tactics. The tactic would be non-violently you would announce what you were going to do to the police and where you were going to do it. You would arrive and before you could do your demonstration, they would bring up the paddy wagon and arrest everybody and take them off. Now they stopped announcing. Instead of doing big demonstrations, they were doing little guerrilla groups unannounced around the city, demonstrations that the police had no idea about. They would rush there and arrest people and then there would be another one here. So there was a lot of press in town. It was a kind of press pack. The press didn't know where these were occurring either because if they did know, somebody would have leaked it to the cops. So we'd hear on a scanner that this is happening here and everyone would rush there. Usually they got there after it was all finished and then everyone would sit on a curb and wait for the next one.

So I'm sitting on the curb there and I'm thinking, "Now, I don't know where the next demonstration is, but I do know one thing, it's not going to be here where I am right now. So I may not find the next one, but I'm sure as hell not going to find it here. So I'm better off moving." So I got up and I began walking toward Capitol Street, which is the main street of Jackson. As I was walking down the sidewalk past the governor's mansion, out of the corner of my eye, I saw this flurry of activity. It was a mother and her three children—Mrs.Eileen Quinn of McComb, Mississippi. She was a civil rights leader, a local person from there, whose house had been firebombed the month before by the Klan. She had two daughters and a son with her. The fourth person was June Finer, an M.D. from the Medical Committee for Human Rights, who'd tried to enter the fairgrounds to give medical aid to people who were suffering out in the sun and been refused by the Jackson police. She decided the way to get in was to take her medical bag and get arrested. And then there she would be. They were sitting on the side steps of the governor's mansion with a sign saying, "Protesting the fact that Mississippi senators had been elected without black representation."

I ran down the sidewalk and arrived there. The police had just come in and they were in the process of arresting Mrs. Quinn and her children, including five year old Anthony Quinn. The kids held little American flags. The flags were an important symbol in the South. An American flag said very simply, "I would like the laws of the United States to be enforced in Mississippi." If you had a Confederate flag on your pickup truck, it said, "We like things the way they are." So people were pulled from cars and beaten on the highways in Mississippi because they had an American flag decal on their license plate frame. So carrying an American flag was an act of rebellion. The policeman, in the process of arresting little Anthony, tried to take the flag away from him. Mrs. Quinn said, "Anthony, don't let that man take your flag!" And Anthony, with all his five year bravery, Anthony held onto the flag. The ceiling had collapsed on him when the firebomb came through the front porch so he was already a civil rights veteran at five. The policeman undoubtedly had never experienced resistance from a small black child before. This was not in his lexicon and he reacted by yanking, by trying to yank the flag out of Anthony's hands. Anthony hung onto it and he was lifted off the sidewalk.

I was in close with a 24 mm lens. One thing I learned early on was you can't photograph action standing back with a telephoto lens. It doesn't look like anything. You've got to be right on top of it with the widest angle lens you've got. And then the action just flows around you and you get these very dynamic shots. So I was as close to them as I could possibly get and frame it, working totally on instinct, just winding film through the camera. This whole thing was like that. Nobody saw me. Everybody was so focused on what was going on and that was typical in these events. You were, at least for moments, you were almost invisible. At the end of it, it turned out a reporter from the Times and the LA Times were there. Almost in a whisper, they said to me, "Did you get it?" And I said, "I think I did." So we made a deal on the spot to transmit the image for front page publication in the LA Times and the NY Times the next morning.

Transcription below by: Greg Armstrong (2010 adult workshop). Edited transcription by: Judy Minton (volunteer). Please report errors to: info@tellingstories.org

The way you did that in those days was by the wire, by the A.P. wire. The A.P. wire lived in the offices of the Jackson Daily News, an arch-segregationist newspaper in Jackson. So they made the arrangement to shut the wire down at three a.m. when the day's transmissions were finished and do a special transmission to New York and L.A. They said "Well, give the film to the darkroom guy at the news and he'll develop it." I said "No way is he going to get this film. There will be an accident and it will be unfortunately exposed by pure accident."

So I went out to Tougaloo, to a SNCC darkroom and I souped the film. I saw this great picture, which later won the World Press photo contest for 1954 [he meant 1965]. So I made three or four prints. I showed up in the office of the Jackson Daily News at two a.m. or something and threw the pictures out on the table. These reporters would wander by and they'd look at 'em and you could see they hated the picture but as a newsman they appreciated how good it was. They'd say, "Uh, that sure is a fine picture, yup. Uh, that's a good picture," and drop it like it was hot. In the process of waiting for the wire to open, the copy boy came through with the morning edition and handed it out to everybody including me. I glanced at the front page and learned, without any surprise at all, that the most important activity of the previous day had been a meeting of the Magnolia Garden Club. No mention of any demonstration at all. This was quite typical.

So the picture was transmitted and I went home. I got a phone call at six the next morning from Ed King. He said, "Well I see you made the Jackson Daily News." I said, "Well, you know Ed, normally I would rush out and buy a paper but I know better than you. I was in the news office at three in the morning and I saw the paper." He said, "Well I think you'd better go buy a copy." So I went out and bought a copy of the news. The editor of the news had realized that he could not go to press with that newspaper based on the fact that I had made that picture which is going to appear in the national. He had stopped the presses, pulled the front page off the presses and remade it up with a very posed, static photograph that I guess their photographer had taken of the scene. The big, long caption said "An unfortunate incident in our fair city" or something like that, and the fact that a Yankee photographer had got this picture when a policeman, apparently acting on reflex, had inadvertently pulled this child off the ground. The next day the local columnist took me to task in another column. But that picture followed that policeman the rest of his life. It was mentioned in his obituary years later when he died in Jackson. How much he regretted that moment and what had happened, and I understand his feelings. But he was there. I was there and that's what happened. So that's the story of that picture.