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

Photographer for SNCC

Can you take us back—earlier we had started talking about when you'd first gotten involved with SNCC and you helped their photographers. You mentioned a man—I think his name was Jim?

Jim Forman.

Jim Forman. Can you talk about that now with us?

Yeah.

What was your sense?

Forman was the director, the executive director of SNCC. SNCC had a chairman. At the time, it was John Lewis, now Representative John Lewis. Foreman was a schoolteacher from Chicago who had been born and brought up in Mississippi, who'd come back to head SNCC. He had communication saavy. He understood as no other leader of a civil rights organization did, the importance of communicating what was going on. He was willing to devote from SNCC's scanty resources—we were probably the poorest of all the civil rights organizations—money to create the facilities for photographers. When I first came south, I ended up in Atlanta working with another photographer and getting an enlarger and equipment and putting together a darkroom. Before I even arrived, the year before or two years before, Danny Lyon, a young photographer from New York, had come down and shot the early days of SNCC. I was the one who persuaded Danny to come back in the summer of '64—he was finished with SNCC—and work with me. So there was this tradition of trying to do this.

After we were kicked out of our apartment in Jackson in the summer of '64, we had to have a place to live. Jeaninne and I moved the family to Georgia and found a cottage out in the country near Atlanta. She helped out in the SNCC office administering the darkroom, getting prints made, sending pictures to editors in New York and also doing communications for the Southern Documentary Project. She worked with Julian Bond in the summer of '64 and SNCC communications while I was in Mississippi running my team. I forget the question.

We were just talking about when you were first getting involved with SNCC and you were involved with them. What you were doing, like what your level of involvement was when you first started.

While we were sort of finding our feet, I was very frightened. I can remember buying gas the first time at a white gas station, just trembling. I mean, we got over that, but one never ceased being afraid. There was always the potential for some threat.

What was the scariest thing that you got involved in with the Movement?

Certainly the Selma thing was rather frightening. I was arrested in Jackson for trying to photograph a church integration. That wasn't particularly scary, that was just annoying. It was more the potential that was always there for something awful to happen. You know, people were being killed.

Did you feel like you were risking your life?

Oh sure. We all were. There was a feeling in the early days, particularly in '63 on into '64, among those of us who were in the Movement that it was very much like being on the front lines. We clung to each other. We embraced each other. We sang freedom songs together. We wept together. It was the only time in my life that I lived in what I consider a truly integrated society, where there were no barriers. It was a magical time in that way. So you had the fear, and then you had the community, the bonding, the love that we all felt for one another. That very much sustained us. We couldn't have done it without that, without the singing, without the closeness. That began to evaporate as the Movement got more complicated and more successful. But in the early days it was a beloved community. And I'll never know that again.

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

I jumped right into it. I went back to Birmingham late in the summer of '64 after the church was bombed. We had been in that church two weeks before. We had worshiped in that church. Jeannine had taken my daughter down to the bathroom in the basement where the clan set their bomb and blew four children to their deaths in that same bathroom. That was very real and I was back on a LIFE assignment, covering the aftermath of the bombing.

What was that like? You covered the aftermath. Were you interviewing people or just taking pictures?

LIFE had a big team of people in there. Most of them were partying at the Holiday Inn at the edge of town in the evening. I had elected to stay at the black motel in the center of town, the Gaston Motel, with Frank Dandridge, another LIFE photographer who was the only black photographer on the team. It was pretty interesting. There was a reporter from Mohamed Speaks at the Gaston, Jeremiah X. I was sitting in the coffee shop one afternoon with a bunch of teenagers. There was a meeting, an interracial meeting of teenagers going on at the Gaston very quietly but it was the first interracial group in Birmingham. So I was sitting around with some of these kids and Jeremiah came in and began denouncing me as a white devil. He was quoting the Koran at me. I'd studied the Koran and I couldn't quote the Koran chapter and verse but I knew quite a bit about the Koran. I knew something about the Koran. When he paused for a moment I said, "Well, Mohamed taught that Muslims must respect people of the book," meaning Christians or anyone that had a scripture and a few things like that. He just kind of stormed out of the coffee shop.

That evening I had the trunk of my car open and I was loading film into cameras because there were riots at night. We were using infrared film and infrared flashes because you couldn't see the flash go off unless you were right in front of it. The police were shooting at flash bulbs so we had all changed our technology. I heard a voice behind me say, "Are those Nikons you're using?" And I turned and it was Jeremiah. So we started talking cameras and we began working together and he got me into a couple places that I never could have gotten into to take pictures. It was a nice moment.

Was he photographing?

He wasn't photographing, he was a reporter.

Were you all covering the church bombing?

We were covering the aftermath. There was a section of Birmingham known as Bombingham. There was a lot of mining going on in that section of Alabama. There were a lot of people who were very familiar with explosives, knew how to use them. A lot of them were clan members. There was a section of upper-middle class black housing in Birmingham. There were clan bombings there all the time so they had formed a citizens' committee of defense. They rode around with guns in their cars and I spent quite a lot of time covering that. I don't know what the other guys were doing. I photographed the church. I photographed the funeral of three of the girls. Frank spent a good deal of the time holed up with a woman he'd met there. When he did get out of his motel room, he was talking to the parents of one of the girls who had survived and had been blinded by the explosion. Frank managed to get into the hospital and get a picture of her with the bandages on her head in her hospital bed. That was the only picture LIFE ran. So there were probably six or eight of us working.

This might be jumping ahead, but did you cover any of the Black Power Movement that followed the downfall of SNCC? And the rise of the Black Power Movement?

No, not really. I was, of course, aware of it. I was out of the country part of the time when that was happening. I was in Africa. Then following time in the South, I got involved with Green Peace and I was Navigator and Bridge officer on two of the Greenpeace first anti-whaling voyages. I was moving into another realm at that time.

You were at the funeral photographing. What were people saying there? What was the mood?

I don't know. The funeral was very emotional. People were breaking down and being tended by nurses and that was not at all unusual in a black funeral. King gave the funeral address.

The press was confined to a balcony at the rear and I didn't want to be in that position. I always hated being part of a press pack. So I went to the minister the day before and said "I'm shooting for LIFE and is there a way I can shoot from the front of the church?" So he put me inside the organ. I made the little hole through the black material that sits behind the organ pipes and I shot the funeral with a long lens, from the front of the church. I was not in a position to hear very much there. I did go to the graveyard and photograph the internment of one of the girls later. That was very, very moving and very kind of tough to watch. We were always looking for an advantage, a way to get a picture that was special or was unique.

Did you have access to any of the leaders or the people in SNCC that were organizers? Personal relationships?

Sure, all the time.

Who were they? What kind of interactions did you have?

I suppose we were closest to Bob Moses, who was kind of the leader, the main person who drove the Mississippi movement.

When you say we?

Jeannine and myself. We had a party at our house on Belhaven Street and Bob and a bunch of people came over. We highly upset one of our neighbors who saw these black people getting out of a car in front of our house in a white neighborhood. Bob mentioned to me that we were the only family with children to move South and join the Movement. So there was Bob and there was Casey Hayden and Jane Stembridge. I don't know, I knew a lot of people.