Charles Moore

Moore had never planed to photograph the civil rights movement. In September, 1958, he was a 27-year-old photographer for the Montgomery Advertiser, a newspapaer in Alabama. When an argument broke out between Martin Luther King, Jr. and two policemen, Moore was the only photographer on the scene. He took striking pictures of Dr. King's arrest, and were distributed nationwide by the Associated Press, and one was published in Life magazine. Over the next seven years, Moore made some of the most significant pictures of the civil rights movement. As a contract photographer for Life magazine, Moore traveled the South to cover the evolving struggle. His photographs helped bring the reality of the situation to the magazine's huge audience, which at the time comprised over half the adults in the United States. According to former U.S. Senator Jacob Javits, Moore's pictures "helped to spur passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964."