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Mongtomery, Ala. “It’s just a photo.”
Mongtomery, Ala. “It’s just a photo.”
It’s just a picture. Just an image on a screen. If we’re precise, it was taken with a Fuji XPro 2, using a 35mm lens. The settings were ISO 200, 1/800th of a second at F7.1. Metadata says it was taken on 3/22/2025. However, those are specs and settings. Like looking at sheet music for Handel’s Water Music, seeing the notes and saying ,”looks good,” without ever hearing it performed.
There’s a woman on the left. “Just a woman on a walk,” someone might say, but her name is Sheyann Webb-Christburg. She was only 9 when she and her teacher were beaten by police at the bottom of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. A few days later she would complete the third march to Montgomery, Ala. with MLK Jr. Hearing she was there, he called her parents to pick her up and he babysat her while they drove to Montgomery. For missing school, she was suspended from her mostly white school.
On the right side, there’s an older man, in his 70s. He walks with the vigor of a 30 year-old. That’s MLK Jr. III. He was only 10 when his father was killed in Memphis. Eventually, Jr. III would graduate from Morehouse College, where his father, grandfather and great-grandfather all graduated from. He would go onto be a Fulton County Commissioner, advisor to President Obama and eventually the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the same organization his father started.
There’s a dome off in the distance. That’s the Alabama State Capitol Building. Mention that and even the modest student of history can almost hear the words echoing through the decades from its steps: ”I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Such were the words of Gov. George Wallace, punctuated by the whooping and hollering of a rebel yell throughout the crowd that January morning in 1963.
There’s a street they’re walking down. That’s Dexter Avenue in downtown Montgomery, the road leading to the Capitol. Not more than a few hundred yards behind them, Rosa Parks was dragged off a bus and put in handcuffs 70 years earlier.
One hundred and sixty years earlier, this street saw the trotting of horses and cheers from ladies waving handkerchiefs, waving at men in sharp gray uniforms marching in step to the cadence from a military band playing Dixie. They were marching in a parade celebrating a Presidential Inauguration, and had finished listening to President Jefferson Davis give a speech where he said the main goal of the Confederacy was ,”…there should be so much of homogeneity that the welfare of every portion shall be the aim of the whole.” His idea of whole, didn’t include sum.
In front of them, five SUVs. Those are bulletproof SUVs provided by the City of Montgomery. Jr. III’s father had countless death threats before he was killed. The son’s life and that of his marching companion that day were no different. Multiple threats had been made toward them, and the event. Behind me when I took that photo were two police bodyguards, King’s bodyguard, and an FBI agent. Sadly, violence against political figures, then and later as we’d find out, is something that hasn’t changed.
It’s only a photo, and without context portrays something banal that happens daily. People walking outside on a beautiful spring day.
Just a photo.
