The dog attacks in Birmingham were not the first such assaults of the civil rights movement, and Moore's photographs were not the first depictions of that kind of event to be published. Police had used dogs to attack demonstrators in Greenwood, Mississippi, in March of 1963, and on the 29th of that month, The New York Times published a front-page photograph of a black man stumbling backward to the sidewalk in fear of a police dog. The caption conveyed a sense of alarm, reading, in part, "Yesterday the police set the dog on heels of Negroes marching home after having applied to register."²⁹ But the photograph itself is not particularly sensational. The dog is shown standing calmly some five or six feet from the fallen man, facing to one side, not even looking at him. Not surprisingly, this image attracted little attention. In Birmingham, by contrast, Moore recorded the viciousness of the dog attacks in graphic, peak action.

The dogs were brought out by the Birmingham police soon after the firemen had turned on their hoses. In the melee of the hosings, bystanders not trained in nonviolence had begun to throw rocks and bricks at the police. Moore himself was hit in the ankle by a piece of concrete. With the firemen absorbed by this new threat of rioting, the marchers began to evade them and make their way downtown. Still not wanting to rely on arrest as a primary tactic, because of the overcrowded jails, the police had to find another method to disperse the marchers that would be more mobile than the hoses. This is when they brought out dogs.

Life published Moore's dog attack photographs in the same story with his photographs of the fire-hosings. Given the general outcry over these pictures, it is interesting to note that Life's treatment of them was somewhat flippant. The photographs appear under a headline that reads, "the dog's attack is negroes' reward." The caption explains,

With vicious guard dogs the police attacked the marchers -- and thus rewarded them with an outrage that would win support all over the world for Birmingham's Negroes.... This extraordinary sequence -- brutal as it is as a Negro gets his trousers ripped off by Connor's dogs -- is the attention-getting jackpot of the Negroes' provocation.³⁰

As disturbing as the references to rewards and attention-getting jackpots may be, there is an element of truth in the writer's sly implication that it was part of SCLC policy to provoke racist violence against nonviolent protesters for the purpose of gaining national media attention. After their failure to use nonviolence as a means of moral persuasion in Albany, Georgia, the SCLC came to recognize that it was absolutely necessary for nonviolent demonstrators to be violently attacked if their issues were to attract attention. According to David Garrow, King never openly acknowledged the importance of the news media to nonviolent direct action in his public statements, always alluding to media coverage in indirect phrases about bringing evil into the "spotlight" or into the "light of day."³¹ In private, however, he once told photographer Flip Schulke not to intervene in violent confrontations between blacks and whites but to photograph them instead. Otherwise, the world would not know about them. Schulke reports that King told him, "I'm not being cold blooded about it, but it is so much more important for you to take a picture of us getting beaten up than for you to be another person joining in the fray."³²

In raising the issue of provocation and response, the Life caption also raises an important question of just who was "rewarded" for whose provocative actions. When demonstrators committed to nonviolence deliberately attracted violence to themselves, that violence often spilled over onto others nearby. The man in Moore's photograph is reported to have been recruited from a pool hall to organize his friends and encourage them not to react violently to the violence of the police.³³ His status in the demonstration is somewhat ambiguous. He apparently is not a committed nonviolent demonstrator associated with SCLC but someone SCLC has drawn into the action because of his willingness not to riot.

Of course, the subtleties of the man's views on nonviolence mattered little to the Birmingham police, but his relation to the demonstrations does have some bearing on how we as viewers read the photograph. Our empathetic response to his predicament might take one form if we see him as committed to nonviolence, trained by the SCLC, and deliberately putting himself on the line for his beliefs. It might take a slightly different form if we perceive him as having been urged into a situation he may not have fully considered.

Whatever views on nonviolence the man in Moore's photograph might have had, he exhibits a remarkable level of calm under duress. One German shepherd is rearing up on its hind legs and lunging toward the man's chest, tugging at its taut leash. A second dog has grabbed the seat of the man's pants in its teeth. To maintain his balance and counteract the pull of the dog behind him, the man must lean forward toward the snapping dog in front of him. He is leaning far enough that were the dog behind to let go, he would certainly stumble toward the jaws of the dog in front. His perilous position is reminiscent of a passage King had written one month before in his "Letter from Birmingham City Jail," describing the difficult psychological balance maintained by blacks in the South who live "constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next."³⁴ Caught in the web of violence, this man must have feared for his life, but he seemingly treats his situation as a difficult task of concentration and agility. With no visible fear or panic, he addresses himself to the immediate problems of tearing cloth, snapping jaws, and balance.

The details of the image and its visual structure eloquently enhance our sense of the man's predicament. The frame is tilted, as we see most clearly from the white lines in the street, and the visual effect of this not only adds a general sense of dynamism to the image but further tips the man toward the dog confronting him. The area of action, filled with diagonals, is dynamically placed to the left of center and defined at its edges by a policeman who is stepping into the frame at the left and another who looms from top to bottom just right of center. Visually and literally, the man under attack is hemmed in.

The victim's stance, with legs spread wide and arms flung out, forms a tense X that focuses our attention and contrasts effectively with the simpler, closed stances of the bystanders. Only a few of these people are watching the attack, and they react with stunned immobility. One young man -- in a dark sweater and light slacks, with his hands in his pockets -- is apparently unaware of what is happening. Other bystanders are seemingly distracted by additional policemen with dogs who prowl the far right of the picture. These policemen serve to add visual interest and menace to what might have been a dull area of the photograph, and by attracting the attention of some of bystanders, they create a sub-theme in the picture's narrative. The core of the photograph is concisely summed up just below its very center by a diamond shape formed by a policeman's nightstick, the victim's right leg, and the dog biting his trousers.

The policeman who is holding the dog behind the black man stands out clearly in profile against the white shirt of a fellow officer beyond him. His mouth open, he concentrates solely on his dog. The direction of his attention makes his involvement in this scene somewhat detached. Often in photographs of this era we see policemen engaged in the intimacy of violence meted out at the end of a night stick, but this policeman does not appear to be attacking another man so much as operating his dog like a piece of powerful and sensitive machinery. For this policeman, the black man is an almost psychologically detached target. The white policeman controls the dog; the dog controls the black man.

This relationship is a succinct statement of the theme of man and beast that lies at the heart of this image and touches the primal nerve. This is a theme that resonates throughout Western art and culture from antiquity -- where it appeared in such works as the equestrian statue of the second century Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius, who calms his fiery steed with nothing more than the force of his regal presence -- to the present, where it appears in such popular vehicles as Jaws and Jurassic Park, in which the beast is an uncontrollable and irrational intrusion of chaos and terror into human affairs.

Looking just at the policemen and the dogs, we may be reminded of the Marcus Aurelius and its many progeny, such as David's painting of Napoleon astride a rearing, wild-eyed stallion, leading his army through an Alpine pass. Such images celebrate human mastery over animal passion.

Looking at the dogs and the black man, we may be reminded of the hand-to-claw combat paintings of Rubens or Delacroix. In works such as Rubens' Lion Hunt (1617-18) and Delacroix's Tiger Hunt (1854), men are shown losing command of their horses and falling into the clutches of wild beasts, which they engage directly in a test of strength and agility, using only knives and spears to match claws and teeth. As North Africans depicted by Europeans, these men are shown as lesser beings who may deserve their plight, but at the same time, they are admirable as noble savages who live close to nature and are fit to match wits with ferocious animals.

The special outrage of Birmingham is that the black victims of the dog attacks are relegated to a position below even that of the noble savage. In Delacroix's paintings, the North Africans are diminished in their humanity for having fallen from their horses, from their place of command over the animal kingdom. But they have chosen to hunt, to pit themselves against the wild animals, and they are armed and capable even in defeat. In the dog-attack pictures, the unarmed victims are relegated to the status of prey as a punishment for having asserted their humanity.

In both David's portrait of Napoleon and the Marcus Aurelius sculpture, human rational mastery of bestial aggression is a sign of exaltation used to aggrandize a leader. In Birmingham, this mastery is merely technical, and it is used to diminish another human being to a status beneath that of a dog.

The relegation of blacks to the realm of animals or near-animals has a long history in Western culture and the United States, and the dog-attack pictures gain emotional depth by reminding us of that history. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, blacks and Indians were often compared with animals in plays or other texts, and sometimes people of color who had been captured by sailors were exhibited alongside apes in European cities. The idea that blacks were permanently different from and inferior to whites, constituting a link in the Great Chain of Being between animals and humans, was first suggested in the British literature of anatomy in last quarter of the seventeenth century. By the end of the eighteenth century, the slightly different concept of separate human species had gained legitimacy in some circles, despite the fact that this idea contradicted the Biblical notion of a single line of human descent from Adam.³⁵

In the United States, the belief in the inferiority of blacks was largely justified on environmental grounds until the 1830s when a few anatomists began to assert that blacks and whites constituted unalterably different human types. This concept was first articulated in American scientific circles by J. C. Nott and G. R. Gliddon in the Types of Mankind (1854).³⁶ The Reconstruction era saw the most vicious attacks on the humanity of black people in such volumes as J. R. Hayes's Negrophobia "on the Brain" in White Men (1869). Hayes admitted that blacks are human but concluded that they are "the lowest of the human species," falling somewhere between the "highest of the human species" and "the ape of a high rank."³⁷ The association of blacks and animals was so ubiquitous in American culture that Herman Melville, for example, could use that association as a succinct characterization of the unselfconscious racism of one of his characters. "In fact, like most men of a good, blithe heart, Captain Delano took to negroes [sic], not philanthropically, but genially, just as other men to Newfoundland dogs."³⁸

African Americans were well aware of the status to which they were relegated. Frederick Douglass wrote of slave life on the plantation, "There were horses and men, cattle and women, pigs and children, all holding the same rank in the scale of being, and were all subjected to the same narrow examination."³⁹ Even by the time of the civil rights movement, activists still felt it necessary to grapple with these associations in their own rhetoric. James Bevel, preaching in Birmingham in 1963 said, "If God can feed the cockroach, he can feed the Negro."⁴⁰ A banner carried at the march on Washington of the same year read, "Dogs have television shows. Negroes don't."⁴¹

In the 1930s, Richard Wright had explored the metaphor of dogs as it applied to both blacks and whites in a short story titled "Big Boy Leaves Home." The story tells of some black youngsters in the deep South who sneak a swim in a creek on a white man's property. While in the water, nude, they are surprised by a white woman who suddenly appears on the bank. Confused and frightened, the boys try to retrieve their clothes from near where the woman is standing. She sees them as they approach and screams for her male companion. He arrives with a rifle and shoots two of the children. He then turns on the remaining two youngsters, Big Boy and his companion, Bobo. Big Boy struggles with the white man and ultimately shoots him. Then, knowing that he faces certain lynching if caught, Big Boy goes into hiding.

Living in the Jim Crow South, the boys have thoroughly assimilated a sense of inferiority, including the association of blacks with dogs. Early in the story, as they first approach the swimming hole, Lester reads a "no trespassing" sign.

"Know whut tha mean?"

"Mean ain no dogs n niggers erllowed," said Buck.

The boys decide to ignore the sign, and as they rush out of their clothes and into the water, they call,

"las one ins a ol dead dog!"

"thas yo ma!"

"thas yo pa!"

"thas both yo ma n yo pa!"⁴²

As the story progresses, Big Boy's anger grows, his sense of inferiority and helplessness begins to shift, and so does the symbolism of dogs. As Big Boy hides from the lynch mob, he begins to think of white people as a savage pack of hounds: "Thas all they wuz good fer, t run a nigger down lika rabbit! Yeah, they git yuh in a corner n they let yuh have it. A thousan of em!"⁴³ Big Boy then fantasizes choking a white man to death with his bare hands.

Eventually, from his hiding place, Big Boy witnesses the fate of his friend, Bobo, at the hands of the lynchers. As the mob assembles with the captured Bobo, Wright describes how the men and women are singing. A dog has gone to the top of a nearby hill and "At each lull of the song his howl floated full into the night."⁴⁴ Clearly, the singing of the whites is equated with the howling of the dog.

At the climax of the story, a dog finds Big Boy hiding in a kiln hole like a cornered animal. The dog snarls and attacks the boy; the two of them are face to face; the dog claws Big Boy, and Big Boy chokes the dog, finally strangling him as he had earlier imagined strangling the dog's white master. Wright gives us a strange and sad image of the aftermath of this fight that underlines the intimacy of the racial struggle: "For a long time he held the dog, held it long after the last footstep had died out, long after the rain had stopped."⁴⁵ Big Boy clutches to his chest the symbol of both his own degraded status at the hands of whites and of the self-degradation of whites mired in hatred and bigotry.

As in Wright's story, the dogs in Moore's photograph might function as symbols for both blacks and whites. The white policemen are telling the black man that he is no better than a dog. In the viewpoint articulated by Wright, the white policemen become no more than the dogs they wield.

The dogs also point to us as viewers. At the lower right of the image, one police dog faces out at the viewer from a position quite close to Moore and his camera. This dog recalls the advice of the Renaissance art theorist Leon Battista Alberti who urged painters to underline the moral lesson of their paintings by including "someone who admonishes and points out to us what is happening there; or beckons with his hand to see; or menaces with an angry face and with flashing eyes, so that no one should come near...."⁴⁶ The dog threatens us, warns us away, or perhaps dares us to try to stop what we see going on here. It serves to draw us into the moral sphere of the photograph.

The history represented in this photograph and the one of the fire-hosing is still part of living memory, and the issues raised are still with us in one form or another despite the very real changes in the American racial landscape since 1963. In time, however, these pictures will recede into a historical past where one's link to what they represent will be much more tenuous. Will they lose their power then? It is my contention that they will not because that power does not lie exclusively in their connection to living history but also in their structure as images and in their evocation of symbolic meanings of great depth and longevity. It is my wager that by speaking in allusive terms, these photographs will continue to live as powerful images even at a great distance from the history they record. In addition, their continuing symbolic potency may very well serve to keep their historical connections vital, continuing to draw people back to the history they depict, encouraging them to refresh it time and again.