Leaders of the civil rights movement called their protests "demonstrations" because they aimed to make visible the systems of political repression and physical violence that were all too often hidden from public view. Because they wanted to force the nation to confront the ugly realities of racism and discrimination in the Jim Crow South, securing images of their activism – sometimes filmed video, but usually still photographs – remained a constant priority throughout the various stages of the struggle.
An early example came in the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the fall of 1957. This photo – showing one brave African American student, fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford, calmly bearing the screams of abuse from segregationists – quickly became an iconic image in the struggle for school integration across the South.
The image, snapped by Will Counts for the Arkansas Democrat, created a national sensation, only missing out on a Pulitzer Prize because the board had already granted the Arkansas Gazette prizes for its reporting on the same event. But it helped set a national model that photographers would seek to replicate and, of course, activists would try to demonstrate as well.
During the sit-ins of 1960-1961, for instance, these images were used with great effect to dispel the stubborn argument from white southerners that the region's race relations were civil and, moreover, that southern whites were civilizing forces who should be trusted to take the lead.
So powerful were these images, in fact, that even some dedicated segregationists understood how deeply they undermined the region's defenses of racial separation and white supremacy.