Covering a riot

Washington DC in 1971

An American nightmare

The morning sky was dark with heavy clouds and a chill nipped at my neck as I watched the police ready for a battle that I knew would come. Over 10,000 students had descended on Washington DC in 1971 with the stated objective of shutting the city down. Anti-war protest had grown in intensity as the Vietnam War had groaned on.

I had suffered a broken collarbone covering the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968 and had watched white American students become more radicalized in the intervening years. There had been a time when the Black Panthers and the Black Muslims had been America’s most radical voices. Now it was young white groups that led the list of America radicalism that was sweeping the country.            

I had arrived in Washington three days earlier. I had been covering protest stories back to back from New York to California. Along the way I had met three different women whom I thought would change my life and didn’t. I was in need of companionship, a head on a soft pillow and someone to talk to. Now I was faced with covering a demonstration that I knew would be filled with violence.  With both sides on edge I would again put myself in the middle as I tried to broker a good story.

The day started with a ritual I always followed when covering a demonstration. I put a small bottle of vinegar and cotton in my shirt pocket-- my tear gas protection— and a mouth guard between my teeth. I had sports finders on my cameras so that it would be easy to see through them if the tear gas was bad. I put a blanket under my shirt to protect my body from the blows I knew were coming, and in my back pocket, a small flask of bourbon to steel my courage.           

It was just after 9am when the long line of protesters I had joined started their face off with the police. I had spent the previous night with the chief of police and he had told me that he had pledged to the attorney general that he would keep the city open at all cost.

It was the perfect storm of a protest. White and black radicals had come together to fight the government over the war. They were well organized and backing down from the cops was out of the question. I was in the front row and to my left and right were two young women, both holding small flowers in their hands. As I watched, they held them forward as a peace offering to the line of police officers that was moving toward us in a slow and deadly march, their helmeted faces covered with gas masks. Over a loudspeaker I could hear the words “Disperse now or you will be arrested.”

 A cry went up from the protesters, “Kill the pigs,” as we moved forward. It was during moments like this that I always wondered to myself why I was doing this. I started to shoot pictures, my cameras my only defense as the police drew closer.

The police were launching tear gas into the crowd now and everyone around me was struggling to move forward. Reaching into my top pocket I pulled the cotton from the bottle and shoved it into my nose. My eyes burned but I could see well enough to shoot.

The police line was now only ten feet from where I stood. A young cop who couldn’t have been more than 20 swung his nightstick at me, catching the camera I was holding to my eye, smashing it to the ground. He pulled at my press tags and hit me hard on my blanketed shoulder, then on my legs and hands, dislocating my thumb. I buckled but didn’t go down. On my left shoulder I had a camera with a 300mm lens, and using it as a club, I swung wildly and the built in lens shade caught the young cop on his left cheek, causing him to stumbled backward. I pushed forward past him, somehow evading his grasp. Up ahead I could see the police command post. It was ten feet off the ground—the perfect spot to shoot.

On the police stand I saw a number of other photographers and they thankfully waved me up. It was like a life raft for a drowning man; the relief I felt made my heart skip about 50 beats. From there I had a great view of the action and was away from the grasp of the now-crazed police that had turned on the protesters with a vengeance.  

The protest lasted for another three days. In all, 2,500 protesters were arrested, 800 injured and four were killed.

 The image that leads this post was taken at 8:20 in the morning at the urging of Jerry Wilson, police chief of the Washington, DC police department.  As I looked at him addressing his top commander with his men behind him, I thought that it would be a short day for the demonstrators. I was so wrong. They came to Washington with passion and a cause they believed in: End the war at all cost. That anthem carried them for three long days and nights, but in the end, they had no choice but to choose the course of cessation.  

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Prachard Alabama jail

 Prichard, Alabama jail

A cry of innocence that went unheard

People often ask me what it was like to work at the weekly Life magazine. I tell them that they should read The Bridges of Madison County. It was a book and a movie that made me cry. It captured in many ways what life was like for me as a photographer on the road. Mine was life always full to overflowing with new people, people that I often cared deeply about. People that I often formed a lasting bond with, people that I met once and would never see again.

            Horace Wilcox was just such a man. I had been on the road for almost two months straight when my best friend at the time, and fellow Life staff photographer, Vernon Merritt, sold the magazine on doing a story on Prichard Alabama. Vernon, a white man born in Alabama, had a perfect insight into the southern mindset and I, a New York-born black kid, felt deeply the need for freedom that all blacks felt. We were a perfect team to cover the changing city, and the magazine was eager to send us. We had worked together often over the years covering riots in Birmingham, Selma, Watts, Detroit, Newark, New York. We photographed back to back; I shot in one direction, he in the other, our bodies never more then two feet apart. That way if the cops were coming after us, we would see them and could beat a hasty retreat into a near by crowd. 

Prichard had been the center of Klan activity in Alabama and had just elected its first black mayor a man named Jay Cooper. Vernon covered the city’s whites, and I its blacks. Cooper had vowed to change Prichard, to shatter the Klan’s long strangle hold on city government and bring an end to the violence and segregation that had marked Prichard’s past. Looking back on that period, I sometimes think that the problems our current president is facing are mild when compared to the problems and racial hatred that Cooper faced his first days in office.

It was against this background of racial hatred that I heard about Horace Wilcox. Wilcox was from the windy city of Chicago. He moved to Prichard to work on the Cooper campaign, but with the campaign two years off, he started working as a social activist with the goal of ending segregation in the local high schools. His work put him in touch with many students, both black and white. In the course of his work, he attended many school football games, dances and other social events sponsored by Prichard’s many black churches. Horace was well liked and as his work with white students started to become more visible in the local press, the police and other white city officials marked him as an outside northerner, a troublemaker who wanted to change the status quo. They found their chance after a school dance. He was falsely arrested for dancing and later raping a young white woman.

I went to see Horace in the Prichard county jail. The jail was a grim place that looked like it was pulled from an old thirties movie. Its broken windows and cracked walls provided little shelter from the outside winds and rain. The smell of unwashed flesh filled my nose the moment I stepped from my rental car. As I entered the jail, I watched two rats run along the jailhouse wall and thought about what a night in the jail must have been like with a rat as a bedside companion. As I walked through the maze of tunnels that led to Horace’s cell, voices called out to me from behind locked doors. “Cigarette, mister, cigarette, mister,” was a constant refrain.

When I got to Horace’s cell I found him staring at me with a look that could have frozen the dead. I was able to take one picture before he pulled back from his cell’s only window. The window provided his cell’s only light and was his only contact with the outside world. The cell door was secured with a small lock and had a tray of rotten food sitting at its base. The bread was blue with mold.

“How long has this food been here?” I asked.

“This morning,” he said.

“How long have you been in here?”

“I don’t know, maybe a year. They never turn off the outside light. I don’t know when one day starts and another ends.”

“People tell me that you never raped that girl.”

“Everyone at the so called trial told them that I didn’t do it,” his voice boomed from deep inside his small-blackened cell.

“Then why are they holding you?” I asked.

“You’re in Prichard, mister,” Horace said.

That was the last thing that Horace ever said to me. I told Vernon what had happened to Horace. He shook his head and repeated what Horace had said to me.

“You’re in Prichard mister.”

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Fall guy

New York Commissioner of Corrections Russell Oswald at attica prison riot

 

Portraits that tell a story

 

It’s been awhile since my last post; sometimes life gets in the way. I have started a new web site, which you will see the link for in the upper left corner of my blog page. I hope you enjoy it and if you’re interested in purchasing prints, please contact me.

 In looking through my pictures for the web site I started to think about portraits and how they have changed over the years. Early portraits were very formal. People sat before the camera dead still, the exposures often lasted twenty or thirty seconds. They were often beautifully posed but beyond a strong look in the eyes, a turn of a shoulder, the nature of what they wore, the viewer new little about who they were.

Russell Oswald was the New York Commissioner of Corrections. The Attica prison riot left a deep stain on the America conscious; see my August 6, 2009 post. We lived in a world of deep denial, we had fought a war very few supported and race relations in America, was nearing an all time low.  Oswald was one of the good guys who took a fall for the man above. Nelson Rockefeller was the governor of New York at the time of the Attica prison riot. Everyone wanted him to come to the prison, talk with the prisoners, make things right. He didn’t come.

Oswald had been a reformer. He cared about the inmates. He wanted them to leave prison better people than when they came. He cared about family and had set up a program where wives could spend the weekend with their husbands twice a year.  He developed retraining programs that worked and hired a stream of consultants who delivered on his promise.

1972 had been a turbulent year for me. I had covered a story on George Jackson, the Black Panthers leader who was killed in San Quentin in an alleged prison escape that never happened. Prison authorities said that he had a gun in his hair when he escaped but anyone who knew him recognized the fallacy of this statement: at a half inch it would be hard to hide a gun in his hair.

I was traveling twenty-nine days a month and breaking up with my girlfriend as a result. I was very much alone and trying to find myself in all that I had covered. People seemed to be very happy with my pictures but I found it hard to be an observer, which by now was my life’s first rule. I had covered gangs and race riots of all kinds and just watched people at their worst. Hardest of all was that there was no one to talk to about what I was feeling. Making a great picture that was all that mattered.

Attica prison was not far from Buffalo. I had just gotten home from the Jackson story and I had turned off my phone. My girlfriend and I were lying in bed when we heard a loud knock on the door. It was Bob Stokes, a writer from Life magazine. A riot seemed to be starting at the Attica prison. I packed quickly and we were off.

There must have been 500 journalists when we got there on that rain-filled morning but I was lucky. The inmates wanted me inside as an observer, a merit badge for all the civil rights stories I had covered.  Early on in the struggle, a prison guard who had been taken hostage had been killed and the inmate leaders didn’t want anymore violence, just their rights. Getting inside was a lucky break for me. For Bob, his view from the outside would later cost him his job.

I remember the sound of the doors closing behind me as I entered the prison. There was no way out. I walked one dark hall after the other. There was dark grit on the walls and the wet floors squeaked from all the rain that had fallen and the many broken windows. The prison had a hard smell, one of unwashed flesh from too few showers. It was a place of cold food and a concrete bed. It was a time before cell phones. I was on my own and I was ready to take whatever pictures I could. I spent time in cellblock D where the inmates were camped. Everyone was one edge. Voices came over loud speakers from outside the prison wall. ‘Put down your arms or we’re coming in,’ they said. Not a man flinched.

I remember a big man as tall as a redwood tree who grabbed my arm between two large fingers and said, “Remember this day son, you’ve never done time till now and if we see a morning sun it will be a day you remember for the rest of your life.”

The next day I worked my way to a part of the prison where all of the officials and other members of the press were encamped. It was about an hour before all hell would break loose. A last call had been put into the governor’s office and with no response, the decision to move on the inmates rested on Russell Oswald’s shoulders.

 A TV cameraman tested his lights and Oswald was standing alone in the corner of the room where we all waited. When I saw the light hit his face it was clear to me that here was a man under pressure and man who saw his life’s work turn to ashes, a man alone, hung out to dry. You could see it in his eyes, the lines of his face—a big man made small. It was the third day of a stalemate. He had little choice.  He ordered the guards to retake the prison. Oswald was a great man; his name now lives in infamy.

In the split second in which the camera lights illuminated Oswald’s face, I was able to create a portrait that told his story.

 

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