July 6, 2017 • 34 mins
“Oh, Mac. What did you do?”
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Bushkin Before we begin, a warning this episode contains material
that may be upsetting to some listeners. Not long ago,
I drove from Atlanta, Georgia to Birmingham, Alabama. It's a
straight shot west on I twenty one hundred and fifty
(00:35):
miles of rolling hills and piney woods. I got off
the freeway on the downtown exit, just before what the
locals call the Malfunction junction, and drove a few blocks
south until I came to Kelly Ingram Park, which covers
a full city block right in front of sixteenth Street
Baptist Church. I wanted to see a statue that stands
in the park, a famous statue. I've always loved statues.
(01:01):
I find them moving. Don't know why. Maybe it's because
they're a representation of something that we have chosen to
take seriously, to memorialize in a permanent form. With a statue,
you're saying to the future, this is what I want
you to remember about my generation. The statue I came
(01:23):
to see is at one end of Kelly Ingram Park.
It's of a police officer, big guy menacing heavy pair
of sunglasses. He is a dog on a leash, A
big german shepherd, and the dog is lunging huge fangs
bared at a young black boy who's leaning back, hands
to his sides, almost like he's sacrificing himself. It's called
(01:45):
foot Soldier. It looks simple, but that statue is not
what you think. Trust me. My name is Malcolm Gladwell.
You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked
and Misunderstood. This episode is a second in what are
(02:08):
going to be a few episodes this season on race
and civil rights. On race in the United States, I'm
an outsider. I'm Canadian. My family is half West Indian,
which is a very different cultural experience than being an
African American. My mom had a friend, a Jamaican, who
(02:29):
went down to Georgia once in the nineteen seventies. When
she came back, she said, the racism there cut like
a knife. I couldn't have been more than eight or nine,
and that phrase startled me. It seems so visceral. But
then I moved to the US as an adult, and
it seemed like the way race was discussed didn't cut
like a knife at all. What I saw around race
(02:54):
in the United States was evasion and euphemism. The subject
of my last episode was the Brown Decision. For half
a century, the integration story has been told with all
the suffering taken out. Why is it really necessary that
every grand civil rights narrative be turned into a fairy tale?
Which brings me to kelly Ingram Park and its statue
(03:17):
of the police officer and the dog and the boy.
There's a nice and tidy story you can tell about
that statue, but the real story is much different. Last
summer I got a call from a man who was
friends with the widow of the police officer depicted in
that statue. I'd written about the officer and the dog
(03:38):
in my book David and Goliath, but she wanted to
tell me the rest of the story, so I met
with her. Then I went back to Birmingham a second
time to look for the boy in the statue, and
then a third time to Tuskegee, two hours south of Birmingham.
And there, on a long, lazy afternoon, I sat in
the town museum with an artist named Ronald McDowell.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
I mean, I'll cool Jane Me and James Brown.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
And Ronald McDowell is an extraordinary man. Spidery and fine featured.
He showed me his portfolio and told me in his
urgent confessional whisper about how he was once walking down
Sunset Boulevard years ago and ran into Louis Armstrong's nephew
who took him to see Michael Jackson, who wanted McDowell
(04:25):
to teach him art, which led in turn to McDowell
helping out on the album Thriller.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Yeah. I did the sketches for Michael Thriller.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Oh wow.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
I was trying to make him into Black Superman. And
on the back of this piece of paper is it
drawing Michael da for me? When we were working on Trump.
That's Michael's art work one. He did several pieces for him.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
Richard Arrington, who was the first black mare of Birmingham,
used to call Ron McDowell Mack, which suits him perfectly.
He has an air of mischief about him, which we'll
get to.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
That Pictures of Man Johnny Cochrane Spy Lean Natalie Cole
that's in the state capital, the first African American painting
hanging in the state of Alabama to Bosa Parks. Governor
Seglement commission me to do that.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
Mack did the statue in Kelly Ingram Park. He's the
one responsible. Birmingham is a strange and beautiful place. It
was a steel town like Pittsburgh was, and at the
height of the steel industry, there was a lot of
money there. There's an enormous hill on the south side
(05:34):
of town, Mountain Brook, with a gorgeous country club and
graceful pre war homes. That's the wealthy white part of Birmingham.
Down the hill is the other Birmingham, where blacks and
whites lived in uneasy proximity. They used to call Birmingham
the Johannesburg of the South, or Bombingham, because bombs were
(05:54):
a weapon of choice for white supremacists who wanted to
keep black people in their place. There's an old joke
from that period that tells you all you really need
to know. A black man in Chicago wakes up one
morning and tells his wife that Jesus had come to
him in a dream and told him to go to Birmingham.
His wife is horrified. Did Jesus say he'd go with you?
(06:16):
The husband replies, he said, it go as far as Memphis.
Birmingham was where Martin Luther King staged one of the
most dramatic protests of the civil rights movement, and King
chose Birmingham for a good reason. He wanted to strike
at the symbol of racial oppression, to get ordinary Americans
(06:37):
to understand just how bad things were for black people
in the South. So through the long spring of nineteen
sixty three, King and his people organized sit ins to
protest segregation, then boycott's, then marches. They called it Project
C for Confrontation. They were trying to provoke the Birmingham
(06:58):
Chief of Police, a trogolite named Bull Connor, into doing
something so outrageous that it would turn the tide of
public opinion in their favor. And that's exactly what happened.
May third, nineteen sixty three. King's people start at sixteenth
(07:19):
Street Baptist Church, right next to kelly Ingram Park. They
come out in waves, marching alongside the park and then
continuing on through downtown Birmingham. There are huge crowds, tons
of police in the middle of everything. A photographer named
Bill Hudson takes a picture of a white police officer
with dark sunglasses and a big german shepherd. The dog
(07:41):
is lunging at a young black teenager. The next day,
The New York Times publishes the photograph above the fold,
across three columns on the front page of its weekend paper,
as does basically every other major newspaper in the country.
President Kennedy is asked about the photo and he's appalled.
The Secretary of State says, it will quote embarrass our
(08:02):
friends abroad and make our enemies joyful. It's discussed on
the floor of Congress, Trials are written, people have debates
about it. It's exactly what King wants, something to show
the rest of the world, just how bad things are
in the South, and the tide turns. A year later,
Congress passes the Civil Rights Act, one of the most
(08:24):
important pieces of legislation in the history of the United States.
The Civil Rights Act, people always say was written in Birmingham.
Kelly Ingram Park is now a shrine to the events
of nineteen sixty three. The first black mayor of Birmingham,
Richard Errington, takes office in nineteen seventy nine and decides
(08:47):
to fill this little patch of history with sculptures that
tell the story of the movement. He commissions one of
Martin Luther King, another of Fred Shuttlesworth, who is a
key leader of the Birmingham Protests. It is one of
the four little girls killed when white supremacists bombed the
Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in September of nineteen sixty three. Finally,
Errington turns to the photo, the famous photo, for one
(09:10):
final statue, and he calls up Mac McDowell, who has
moved out to Tuskegee from California and transformed himself into
a kind of house artist for the Civil rights movement.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
He said, I gotta get a statue done right because
people at Marshton and movement are complaining about the children
don't look like them. The children had white features with
black hair, and there were a lot of complaints. And
he said, I need you to do a design of
this image, this photograph of this boy and this police
officer and the dog attacking him.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
The other artists with sculptures in Kelly Ingram Park are
big names, white men with impressive resumes. Mac a kid
from the projects of Oakland, entirely self taught. He had
in fact never done a sculpture before, a detail that
he conveniently failed to tell Richard Arrington. The marriage just
wants Mack to do some sketches provide a guide.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
This look on his face was a look of frustration,
like nobody's doing what I want. They're not getting it,
none of the sculptures. And I was like, I can't
say no to him because he's powerful. Where it's a
great odd you know of Birmingham.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
The next thing, you know, Max doing the whole thing.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
And I started sculpting it in three hours later I
was complete, and I took it to Arrington about I
wanted to think. I did it a quick side, waited
a week and took it to him and he said,
you got the commission? How much? And so the rest
is history.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
It was unveiled in a special ceremony in May nineteen
ninety five. It's called foot Soldier because that was the
term used to describe the people who marched in Martin
Luther King's army. On a statue's granite base, it reads,
this sculpture is dedicated to the foot Soldiers of the
Birmingham Civil Rights Movement. On a little plaque next to
it is the famous photo on which the statue was based.
(10:57):
If you want to see a picture of it, we
have one up on revisionististory dot com.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
And the first you want to say. It was Stevie
Wanders and Emmettiel's mother. And what I didn't know at
the time I did the statue. When you're doing bronze,
you have to smooth everything. Because I was untrained, I
didn't smooth the rocks. So Steve was filling the rocks
and he cut his hand and one of the men
in the parks was there and he told me, he
saying I'm getting blood on my hand because Stevie wanted it.
(11:24):
I was like, oh my.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
God, it's it's almost it's almost biblical. It's almost like
he's blessing the park with his blood.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
Yeah, Stevie got cut on those rocks that I folked.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
It.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
Foot Soldier is the most powerful sculpture in kelly Ingram Park.
Nothing else comes close. And maybe that's where the trouble starts.
The name of the police officer in the photograph was
Richard Middleton. Everyone called him Dick. His best friend on
the force was Bobby Hayes. Big guy lives near a
(11:59):
golf course outside Birmingham. Must be in his eighties by now.
Hayes and Middleton started as police officers in Birmingham right
at the moment when the civil rights movement was asserting itself.
The police department was all white and all male back then,
but in the streets the balance of power was shifting.
When integration came to the Birmingham school system, Hayes remembers
(12:20):
it as bewildering.
Speaker 4 (12:22):
If you were a cop, nobody really liked you because
we were carrying the black kids in the school. That's
what we were ordered to do, and they were going
to get in. That's just the way it was. We
had no choice. The black people didn't like you because
(12:42):
you were a policeman. The white people didn't like you
because you're protecting the black kids and carrying the men
where the crowd the goofies didn't want them to go.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
In nineteen sixty three, King's protest campaign was headquartered in
sixteen Street Baptist Church, which is an old red brick
building on the northwest corner of kelly Ingram Park. The
protesters would come out in the afternoon march around the
park on their way downtown. They were trained in nonviolence,
marched according to a strict schedule. It was a military operation.
(13:19):
Crowds of people would gather to see the spectacle. The
police were supposed to keep the protesters and the crowd apart.
The protests get bigger and bigger, the crowds get bigger
and bigger. It's late spring, so it's starting to get
really hot. The police chief Bull Connor starts locking up
everyone he can. Then Connor says, to how with it,
(13:40):
bring in the dogs.
Speaker 4 (13:42):
Of course, there's a lot of noise, a lot of
tension in the air, a lot of people yelling and screaming.
Bricks started coming in, you know, throwing bricks. It got
to be a really ugly slight real quick, real quick.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
Dick Middleton, the cop in the photo, was a member
of the city's canine unit. He had a German shepherd
named Leo. He and the other members of the tactical
unit were posted behind a barricade, a row of wooden
saw horses running parallel to the curb. There's a line
of cops and dogs in a kind of no man's
land between the bystanders and the protesters.
Speaker 4 (14:25):
He was inside the barricade. The crowd was on the
other side, and they were taunting the police, and of
course all we could do is just stand at the police.
All they just stand there. At that time, Dick was
well back the way. He told me he was ten
yards maybe back of the barricades, and the guy came
(14:48):
round a barricade.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
So here we have a foot soldier in the middle
of all the mayhem, cutting through the no man's land
towards the sidewalk, and Middleton's German shepherd, Leo, lunges at him.
That's the moment Bill Hudson captures in his famous photograph,
and Ron mc dowell captures in his statue the confrontation
between the innocent foot soldier and the snarling face of
(15:14):
racial oppression. Bill Hudson's editor says later that he picked
that particular photo out of the many taken that day
because he was riveted by the saintly calm of the
young man and the snarling jaws of the German shepherd.
Here's where the story starts to get complicated.
Speaker 5 (15:37):
This is an interview today on Saturday, May twenty fifth,
nineteen ninety six at the Birmingham Service Answer Too, with
mister Walter Gaston of Atlanta, Georgia. Okay, how did you
get involved in the civil rights movement?
Speaker 6 (15:55):
Now, that's one thing that I always had a problem with.
I never did get involved with the civil rights movement.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
Walter Gadsden is the boy in the photograph, the one
bitten by Leo. He's a mysterious figure. He was interviewed
at the time of the photograph by Jet magazine back
in nineteen sixty three, but only briefly. From time to time,
other people have come forward to say that they were
the one in the photograph, not Gadsden, but those claims
seem dubious. Meanwhile, Gadsden disappears, people try and find him
(16:29):
in can't. All that seems to exist is this oral
history that you're hearing done in honor of the unveiling
of Ron McDowell's statue. And the interview is strange because
it doesn't go the way the interviewer thinks it's going
to go. She starts with the obvious question, you were
a foot soldier. Tell me how that came about? And
(16:51):
he says, I wasn't a foot soldier.
Speaker 6 (16:53):
But the fact is, the day of that movement, I
was supposed to have been in school, but a friend
of my acquaintance of mine had told me that earlier
that Martin Luther Gaine was him down that day and
he was going to be there. And I said I
(17:14):
wanted to be there too. I wanted to come and
thrit out what it was all a battle.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
Walter Gadsden is a bystander. The famous statue in kelly
Ingram Park foot Soldier is not in fact of a
foot soldier. It gets stranger, okay.
Speaker 3 (17:29):
And when you go to school? Where did you come downtown.
Speaker 7 (17:33):
To the park area? The kelly Ingram Park over there.
Speaker 6 (17:37):
So we started walking toward the activity, and as I
approached and got closer, they turned and looked with me,
and I saw it coming toward me, so I turned
to lee.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
He was walking down the street with the protesters coming
towards him. So he veers off to get out of
their way and rejoin the spectators on the sidewalk. Duckson
behind the row of sawhorses, where he runs into officers
Middleton and Leo.
Speaker 7 (18:06):
So as I turned and started to walk away, I
was great.
Speaker 6 (18:09):
And the rest of it are about the policeman Gray
about the policeman and yank toward him.
Speaker 3 (18:16):
Does that happen? The dog bits you there?
Speaker 7 (18:19):
As I can remember that that happened simultaneously.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Did you go.
Speaker 7 (18:25):
The policeman gray at me? I don't remember what hand,
but the dog the gray at me with one hand.
Speaker 6 (18:32):
It happened so fast there was nothing to do except
throw up the leg and try to protect usself.
Speaker 7 (18:37):
And as I was doing that, there I went. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
If you look at the famous photo, Gasden's explanation makes sense.
Leo is lunging. The bite is a millisecond away. But
Gaston and Middleton just look startled, the way people do
if they unexpectedly bump into each other. Gaston has his
knee up as a reflex and his hand on Middleton
as if to steady himself. Middleton has one hand on
(19:06):
Gadsden and his other arm is flexed. He's yanking back
on the leash. Leo has freaked out and he's trying
to restrain him. Leo whoa. Middleton's colleague, Bobby Hayes made
the same point to me. Middleton's not letting Leo loose
on Gadsden. Quite the opposite.
Speaker 4 (19:25):
If you look at the picture, you can tell he's
holding the dog back the lion's taunt the dog feeder
in the air the best I recall, and Dick got
him here. He's holding that line. He don't only invite
that guy.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
Now, what does Gadsden say about all this. Does he
think he's been the victim of police brutality? Not at all.
In fact, he can't seem to understand why everyone makes
such a big deal out of what happened to him
that day.
Speaker 5 (19:58):
How does your family members react to your participation, Well,
they were angry because I didn't attend school that day.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
He appears in an image that transfixed the world, and
his parents are mad that he skipped school. The interviewer
then tries to get at Gadsden's connections to the struggle
for civil rights.
Speaker 5 (20:19):
Okay, well, the church where your parents or your family
members were attending, were they involved in the civil rights
movement during that time?
Speaker 7 (20:26):
You know they never told me of it. Okay.
Speaker 5 (20:30):
What benefits do you your family in the community realize
as a result of that movement?
Speaker 7 (20:38):
None.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
In answer to the question what benefits did your family
receive from the civil rights movement, he answers none. He's
not having any of it. Gadsden's interview, in fact, just
gets weirder.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
Okay, if you were.
Speaker 5 (20:56):
In control of an organization or a movement of such
and could go back and change some things, what would
you change?
Speaker 7 (21:05):
Okay?
Speaker 6 (21:06):
The things that would change would be a more careful
choice of people involved.
Speaker 7 (21:19):
In all of those movements. There are too many, well
the big just blunt, crooked people. Many of the people
that were involved and had no abiety became too crooked.
Speaker 1 (21:38):
The most famous photograph of the Civil rights movement is
of a startled cop trying desperately to hold his dog
back from biting a bystander who wasn't that much of
a fan of the civil rights movement.
Speaker 6 (21:51):
I'm wondering, Steel, why mean, because I've never had any
notoriety whatsoever.
Speaker 7 (21:56):
Concerning that picture. That picture was in the paper, but
many other people were too, Yes, many other situations.
Speaker 6 (22:04):
Plus it's Bonnie, yes, but they chose to use a
lip boy at fifteen of that statue.
Speaker 7 (22:11):
The little boy in aves put up a little boy
in size.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
Are you surprised when you found out about it?
Speaker 7 (22:19):
I was totally flabbergas cause I don't know who to thin.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
And Gadsden's main objection he's light skinned, he says, The
statue makes him look dark skinned.
Speaker 6 (22:30):
That statue doesn't look like me. It looks like a
totally different boy. That looks like an African boy.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
What do you feel about it looks like African boy?
Speaker 6 (22:40):
It looks like an African boy.
Speaker 5 (22:45):
Uh, the color of the features, the features, the lips,
the size.
Speaker 7 (22:52):
You take a look at the pictured air and the
statue air the boy short. I was tall for my ads.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
If you listen to the whole interview, it nearly goes
off the rails. At this point, the interviewer expected to
find a heroic civil rights veteran. Instead, she's getting a
grumpy old man still wedded to some of the oldest
and most awkward of black prejudices.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
We're very proud of it, and I hope you will
be too. And now that we know who you are,
we can add a name under there. But you with
the young boy, let's comet tore used.
Speaker 6 (23:32):
Well, M, I'm still wondering why after all the information
that I had given, and and and all that, all
that established me as being a young African boy, which
I'm not.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
You prefer being called a negro.
Speaker 7 (23:58):
I prefer being called what I am, a colored?
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Oh oh, you prefer you were colored?
Speaker 7 (24:03):
I am?
Speaker 1 (24:04):
Okay, okay, euphemism and evasion. At the beginning, I said
that what I object to is the way so many
stories about race get cleaned up, sanitized, so the brown
decision becomes a fairy tale in which black people triumph
(24:25):
without effort. Well, here's the flip side. When we stop
evading and just listen, it gets complicated. Our hero, Walter
Gadsden isn't all that heroic. As for the bad guy,
the officer, his colleague Bobby Hayes says he wasn't a
bad guy. Did Officer Hayes tell me things that surprised me?
(24:46):
And did listening to Walter Gadsden shock me? Absolutely? Because
I'm no different from anyone else. I liked the fairy tale.
So the person who invited me down to Birmingham in
the first place was Dick Middleton's widow. Everyone calls her
missus Klingler. Her husband died not long ago, and I
think she felt it was time to speak out. We
(25:08):
met at a barbecue you restaurant in downtown Birmingham, sat upstairs.
So he's a police officer at a time when Birmingham
is obviously going through some very tumultuous times. Can you
tell me about that?
Speaker 8 (25:24):
The first that was the first ten years I'd still
learning to speak English. I didn't really know what's going on.
I didn't understand what's going on.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
Missus Klingler was from Germany. She met Richard when he
was stationed there with the army. She says, what happened
on that spring day in nineteen sixty three was like
a shadow over her husband.
Speaker 8 (25:45):
He went to work and come home and enjoy the family. Ah,
but I knew something is going on.
Speaker 3 (25:53):
You know.
Speaker 8 (25:54):
Then later on you see the picture in the paper. Oh,
he never really discussed it.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
She had a big book with her filled with clippings
of her husband's career and other photographs from that day
in kelly Ingram Park. She wanted to set the record straight.
Her husband was unfairly vilified.
Speaker 8 (26:15):
He done his job and he was spit at, he
was thrown rocks at and he did not let the
guy put the dog to him. He was holding the
leash away from him. If you see other pictures what happened.
(26:37):
This was not the right picture.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
This was not the stort, this was not the truth.
For the longest time afterwards, they got hate mail. So
how soon did the letters start coming?
Speaker 8 (26:52):
Just like, I'm sure like the next month or so
when it went all over the world, just as ugly
as you can imagine.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
Yeah, did he ever talk to any journalist? Or do
you know. No, you never gave any interviews.
Speaker 8 (27:09):
He didn't give no interviews because I think he felt
like what he was betrayed es they would not tell it.
No matter what he say, no matter what he would do,
they would not believe him. All they look at the picture,
that's all.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
Do you think your husband suffered?
Speaker 8 (27:31):
I think he has.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
Yes, there's a statue in Kelly Ingram Park of one
of the most iconic moments in civil rights history, and
everyone directly involved in that moment thinks it didn't happen
that way. Oh Mac, what did you do? You said
(27:55):
earlier that when you draw, you try and inhabit the characters. Yes,
and so tell me your emotional reactions to that photograph.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
Well, I saw that the boy was maybe about six four,
the officers maybe five ten, five nine, And I said,
this is a movement about power. So I made the
little boy younger and smaller, and the officer taller and stronger.
The armor of the law is so strong, that's why
his arm is almost like strength. And the dog is
(28:25):
more like a wolf than a real dog. Because if
I'm a little boy, that's what I would see. I
would see, like this super man hovering over me, putting
this big, old, giant monster of a dog in my
gran area, in my private area. And so that's what
I envisioned when I first saw the photograph.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
And you changed it. In the photograph, I noticed the
boy is leaning in, and in your sculpture, he's leaning back.
Tell me about that.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
He's leaning back because I wanted to depict him showing
that I'm not gonna fight you. I'm not leaving, I'm
not moving, I'm standing, but I'm not gonna fight you.
This is a non violent protest. That's why his hands
are open and he's going back, like, do whatever you're
gonna do. Put the dog on me, beat me with
the color, whatever you want to do. And I saw
all of that when I saw the photograph.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
We were in the Tuskegee History Center, a museum on
Elm Street, not far from the university. It's in what
looks like an old bank, and it's filled with exhibits
to the town's extraordinary history, the infamous Tuskegee Syphliss Study,
the Tuskegee Airman, Rosa Parks. Tuskegee native McDowell's work was
all over the walls. He took me on a little tour.
(29:34):
Then we sat down and he took out his portfolio.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
Here's the statue.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
Those glasses are like we are the glasses the same.
I think, did you make the glasses bigger?
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Too good?
Speaker 1 (29:46):
Piper maca is a whole section on the statue, preliminary drawings, sketches, photographs, so.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
He's almost like a blind officer. He doesn't even see
the kid because he's so far beyond that killed this nigger,
attacked this nigger. He's so passed the reality of this
is a human, innocent, human child, human being. That's why
he was wearing blind people glass.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
That is so interesting because when you see that, that's
the thing I couldn't put my finger on. The officer
is behaving as if he's blind. The dog is attacking.
He doesn't even see the boy.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
You're the first person I tell that to. That's so interesting.
See how vicious the dog will.
Speaker 1 (30:28):
Oh my, that is a wolf.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
I did the hair with the I don't I don't
have to. I didn't know what instruments to use. I
did all this with a pencil pencil in the hair,
and I do the teeth like that, and oh, look
at the teeth. I did that on purpose. The curved
Oh yeah, because if you have a curve too, like
when you see those those World Wolf pictures, the teeth
(30:54):
the curve because once there's like a snake when he
bites you, if he doesn't retrack and he's gonna rip,
it's not going in and coming out when it comes out,
he's gonna rip flesh.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
When you're face to face with the statue. It has
historical authority. It's in the shadow of sixteenth Street Baptist
Church inside kelly Ingram Park at the actual site of
the Birmingham Marches. But it's a work of imagination. It's
not a literal representation. It's art. Well, are there other
(31:28):
details that I mean you were saying you there's the
blind officer, there's the curved teeth on the dog.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
See the officer moved all of his anger into the
doll and it's the dog that's attacking the boy. You know.
That's what they'll do with with racism.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
Mac made Leo into a wolf and blinded Middleton and
shrank Walter Gaston until he was tiny and helpless because
he was telling a story about Birmingham. That's what history is.
Each side writes their own story, and the winner story
is the one we call the truth. You don't think
white people told their share of whoppers over the years
(32:07):
in the South. You don't think that there's a statue
in a Southern town somewhere of a champion of the
Confederacy that makes a hero of someone who's actually a villain.
White people got to do that in the South for centuries.
Foot Soldier is just what happens when the people on
the bottom finally get the power to tell the story
their way. It was a long time coming. It's a
(32:33):
brilliant statue.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
Thank you. I'll pour my heart into.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
Yeah, there's some you have some mischief in you.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
What do you mean there's.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
A little bit of mischief in that in your recreation
of that photo, you're you were using that opportunity to
make a much broader kind of subversive point.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
I maybe I.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
Went back through Birmingham after talking to Mac and Tuskegee,
and I went to Kelly Ingram Park one last time
stood in front of the statue. I think everyone who
wants to understand the civil rights movement should do that
because of what it means, the hard won reward of
a long and costly battle over who gets to control
the stories that make up history. But if you do,
(33:24):
just keep in mind that Dick Middleton didn't actually sick
his dog Leo on Walter Gadsden, and that Walter Gadsden
wasn't actually a foot soldier for civil rights.
Speaker 2 (33:33):
Mayor Rrington told me right often we did the unfail me.
He got hundreds of threats about bombing and tearing a
statue up from all over the world, and his response was,
I'll just get back into a bigger one and a
batter one so they never touched it.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
Oh, he said, if you if you destroy that statue,
we're coming back bigger.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
Do you know how many times I begged for somebody.
Speaker 9 (33:55):
I hope somebody blows it down to a bigger one.
Speaker 1 (34:08):
Revisionous History is produced by Me Label and Jacob Smith,
with Camilloe Baptista, Stephanie Daniel, and Ciomara Martinez White. Our
editor is Julia Barton. Lawn Williams is our engineer. Original
music by Luis Guerra. Special thanks to Andy Bauers and
Jacob Weisberg at Panoply. I'm Malcolm Gladwell
Bushkin Before we begin, a warning this episode contains material
that may be upsetting to some listeners. Not long ago,
I drove from Atlanta, Georgia to Birmingham, Alabama. It's a
straight shot west on I twenty one hundred and fifty
(00:35):
miles of rolling hills and piney woods. I got off
the freeway on the downtown exit, just before what the
locals call the Malfunction junction, and drove a few blocks
south until I came to Kelly Ingram Park, which covers
a full city block right in front of sixteenth Street
Baptist Church. I wanted to see a statue that stands
in the park, a famous statue. I've always loved statues.
(01:01):
I find them moving. Don't know why. Maybe it's because
they're a representation of something that we have chosen to
take seriously, to memorialize in a permanent form. With a statue,
you're saying to the future, this is what I want
you to remember about my generation. The statue I came
(01:23):
to see is at one end of Kelly Ingram Park.
It's of a police officer, big guy menacing heavy pair
of sunglasses. He is a dog on a leash, A
big german shepherd, and the dog is lunging huge fangs
bared at a young black boy who's leaning back, hands
to his sides, almost like he's sacrificing himself. It's called
(01:45):
foot Soldier. It looks simple, but that statue is not
what you think. Trust me. My name is Malcolm Gladwell.
You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked
and Misunderstood. This episode is a second in what are
(02:08):
going to be a few episodes this season on race
and civil rights. On race in the United States, I'm
an outsider. I'm Canadian. My family is half West Indian,
which is a very different cultural experience than being an
African American. My mom had a friend, a Jamaican, who
(02:29):
went down to Georgia once in the nineteen seventies. When
she came back, she said, the racism there cut like
a knife. I couldn't have been more than eight or nine,
and that phrase startled me. It seems so visceral. But
then I moved to the US as an adult, and
it seemed like the way race was discussed didn't cut
like a knife at all. What I saw around race
(02:54):
in the United States was evasion and euphemism. The subject
of my last episode was the Brown Decision. For half
a century, the integration story has been told with all
the suffering taken out. Why is it really necessary that
every grand civil rights narrative be turned into a fairy tale?
Which brings me to kelly Ingram Park and its statue
(03:17):
of the police officer and the dog and the boy.
There's a nice and tidy story you can tell about
that statue, but the real story is much different. Last
summer I got a call from a man who was
friends with the widow of the police officer depicted in
that statue. I'd written about the officer and the dog
(03:38):
in my book David and Goliath, but she wanted to
tell me the rest of the story, so I met
with her. Then I went back to Birmingham a second
time to look for the boy in the statue, and
then a third time to Tuskegee, two hours south of Birmingham.
And there, on a long, lazy afternoon, I sat in
the town museum with an artist named Ronald McDowell.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
I mean, I'll cool Jane Me and James Brown.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
And Ronald McDowell is an extraordinary man. Spidery and fine featured.
He showed me his portfolio and told me in his
urgent confessional whisper about how he was once walking down
Sunset Boulevard years ago and ran into Louis Armstrong's nephew
who took him to see Michael Jackson, who wanted McDowell
(04:25):
to teach him art, which led in turn to McDowell
helping out on the album Thriller.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Yeah. I did the sketches for Michael Thriller.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Oh wow.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
I was trying to make him into Black Superman. And
on the back of this piece of paper is it
drawing Michael da for me? When we were working on Trump.
That's Michael's art work one. He did several pieces for him.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
Richard Arrington, who was the first black mare of Birmingham,
used to call Ron McDowell Mack, which suits him perfectly.
He has an air of mischief about him, which we'll
get to.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
That Pictures of Man Johnny Cochrane Spy Lean Natalie Cole
that's in the state capital, the first African American painting
hanging in the state of Alabama to Bosa Parks. Governor
Seglement commission me to do that.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
Mack did the statue in Kelly Ingram Park. He's the
one responsible. Birmingham is a strange and beautiful place. It
was a steel town like Pittsburgh was, and at the
height of the steel industry, there was a lot of
money there. There's an enormous hill on the south side
(05:34):
of town, Mountain Brook, with a gorgeous country club and
graceful pre war homes. That's the wealthy white part of Birmingham.
Down the hill is the other Birmingham, where blacks and
whites lived in uneasy proximity. They used to call Birmingham
the Johannesburg of the South, or Bombingham, because bombs were
(05:54):
a weapon of choice for white supremacists who wanted to
keep black people in their place. There's an old joke
from that period that tells you all you really need
to know. A black man in Chicago wakes up one
morning and tells his wife that Jesus had come to
him in a dream and told him to go to Birmingham.
His wife is horrified. Did Jesus say he'd go with you?
(06:16):
The husband replies, he said, it go as far as Memphis.
Birmingham was where Martin Luther King staged one of the
most dramatic protests of the civil rights movement, and King
chose Birmingham for a good reason. He wanted to strike
at the symbol of racial oppression, to get ordinary Americans
(06:37):
to understand just how bad things were for black people
in the South. So through the long spring of nineteen
sixty three, King and his people organized sit ins to
protest segregation, then boycott's, then marches. They called it Project
C for Confrontation. They were trying to provoke the Birmingham
(06:58):
Chief of Police, a trogolite named Bull Connor, into doing
something so outrageous that it would turn the tide of
public opinion in their favor. And that's exactly what happened.
May third, nineteen sixty three. King's people start at sixteenth
(07:19):
Street Baptist Church, right next to kelly Ingram Park. They
come out in waves, marching alongside the park and then
continuing on through downtown Birmingham. There are huge crowds, tons
of police in the middle of everything. A photographer named
Bill Hudson takes a picture of a white police officer
with dark sunglasses and a big german shepherd. The dog
(07:41):
is lunging at a young black teenager. The next day,
The New York Times publishes the photograph above the fold,
across three columns on the front page of its weekend paper,
as does basically every other major newspaper in the country.
President Kennedy is asked about the photo and he's appalled.
The Secretary of State says, it will quote embarrass our
(08:02):
friends abroad and make our enemies joyful. It's discussed on
the floor of Congress, Trials are written, people have debates
about it. It's exactly what King wants, something to show
the rest of the world, just how bad things are
in the South, and the tide turns. A year later,
Congress passes the Civil Rights Act, one of the most
(08:24):
important pieces of legislation in the history of the United States.
The Civil Rights Act, people always say was written in Birmingham.
Kelly Ingram Park is now a shrine to the events
of nineteen sixty three. The first black mayor of Birmingham,
Richard Errington, takes office in nineteen seventy nine and decides
(08:47):
to fill this little patch of history with sculptures that
tell the story of the movement. He commissions one of
Martin Luther King, another of Fred Shuttlesworth, who is a
key leader of the Birmingham Protests. It is one of
the four little girls killed when white supremacists bombed the
Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in September of nineteen sixty three. Finally,
Errington turns to the photo, the famous photo, for one
(09:10):
final statue, and he calls up Mac McDowell, who has
moved out to Tuskegee from California and transformed himself into
a kind of house artist for the Civil rights movement.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
He said, I gotta get a statue done right because
people at Marshton and movement are complaining about the children
don't look like them. The children had white features with
black hair, and there were a lot of complaints. And
he said, I need you to do a design of
this image, this photograph of this boy and this police
officer and the dog attacking him.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
The other artists with sculptures in Kelly Ingram Park are
big names, white men with impressive resumes. Mac a kid
from the projects of Oakland, entirely self taught. He had
in fact never done a sculpture before, a detail that
he conveniently failed to tell Richard Arrington. The marriage just
wants Mack to do some sketches provide a guide.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
This look on his face was a look of frustration,
like nobody's doing what I want. They're not getting it,
none of the sculptures. And I was like, I can't
say no to him because he's powerful. Where it's a
great odd you know of Birmingham.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
The next thing, you know, Max doing the whole thing.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
And I started sculpting it in three hours later I
was complete, and I took it to Arrington about I
wanted to think. I did it a quick side, waited
a week and took it to him and he said,
you got the commission? How much? And so the rest
is history.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
It was unveiled in a special ceremony in May nineteen
ninety five. It's called foot Soldier because that was the
term used to describe the people who marched in Martin
Luther King's army. On a statue's granite base, it reads,
this sculpture is dedicated to the foot Soldiers of the
Birmingham Civil Rights Movement. On a little plaque next to
it is the famous photo on which the statue was based.
(10:57):
If you want to see a picture of it, we
have one up on revisionististory dot com.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
And the first you want to say. It was Stevie
Wanders and Emmettiel's mother. And what I didn't know at
the time I did the statue. When you're doing bronze,
you have to smooth everything. Because I was untrained, I
didn't smooth the rocks. So Steve was filling the rocks
and he cut his hand and one of the men
in the parks was there and he told me, he
saying I'm getting blood on my hand because Stevie wanted it.
(11:24):
I was like, oh my.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
God, it's it's almost it's almost biblical. It's almost like
he's blessing the park with his blood.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
Yeah, Stevie got cut on those rocks that I folked.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
It.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
Foot Soldier is the most powerful sculpture in kelly Ingram Park.
Nothing else comes close. And maybe that's where the trouble starts.
The name of the police officer in the photograph was
Richard Middleton. Everyone called him Dick. His best friend on
the force was Bobby Hayes. Big guy lives near a
(11:59):
golf course outside Birmingham. Must be in his eighties by now.
Hayes and Middleton started as police officers in Birmingham right
at the moment when the civil rights movement was asserting itself.
The police department was all white and all male back then,
but in the streets the balance of power was shifting.
When integration came to the Birmingham school system, Hayes remembers
(12:20):
it as bewildering.
Speaker 4 (12:22):
If you were a cop, nobody really liked you because
we were carrying the black kids in the school. That's
what we were ordered to do, and they were going
to get in. That's just the way it was. We
had no choice. The black people didn't like you because
(12:42):
you were a policeman. The white people didn't like you
because you're protecting the black kids and carrying the men
where the crowd the goofies didn't want them to go.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
In nineteen sixty three, King's protest campaign was headquartered in
sixteen Street Baptist Church, which is an old red brick
building on the northwest corner of kelly Ingram Park. The
protesters would come out in the afternoon march around the
park on their way downtown. They were trained in nonviolence,
marched according to a strict schedule. It was a military operation.
(13:19):
Crowds of people would gather to see the spectacle. The
police were supposed to keep the protesters and the crowd apart.
The protests get bigger and bigger, the crowds get bigger
and bigger. It's late spring, so it's starting to get
really hot. The police chief Bull Connor starts locking up
everyone he can. Then Connor says, to how with it,
(13:40):
bring in the dogs.
Speaker 4 (13:42):
Of course, there's a lot of noise, a lot of
tension in the air, a lot of people yelling and screaming.
Bricks started coming in, you know, throwing bricks. It got
to be a really ugly slight real quick, real quick.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
Dick Middleton, the cop in the photo, was a member
of the city's canine unit. He had a German shepherd
named Leo. He and the other members of the tactical
unit were posted behind a barricade, a row of wooden
saw horses running parallel to the curb. There's a line
of cops and dogs in a kind of no man's
land between the bystanders and the protesters.
Speaker 4 (14:25):
He was inside the barricade. The crowd was on the
other side, and they were taunting the police, and of
course all we could do is just stand at the police.
All they just stand there. At that time, Dick was
well back the way. He told me he was ten
yards maybe back of the barricades, and the guy came
(14:48):
round a barricade.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
So here we have a foot soldier in the middle
of all the mayhem, cutting through the no man's land
towards the sidewalk, and Middleton's German shepherd, Leo, lunges at him.
That's the moment Bill Hudson captures in his famous photograph,
and Ron mc dowell captures in his statue the confrontation
between the innocent foot soldier and the snarling face of
(15:14):
racial oppression. Bill Hudson's editor says later that he picked
that particular photo out of the many taken that day
because he was riveted by the saintly calm of the
young man and the snarling jaws of the German shepherd.
Here's where the story starts to get complicated.
Speaker 5 (15:37):
This is an interview today on Saturday, May twenty fifth,
nineteen ninety six at the Birmingham Service Answer Too, with
mister Walter Gaston of Atlanta, Georgia. Okay, how did you
get involved in the civil rights movement?
Speaker 6 (15:55):
Now, that's one thing that I always had a problem with.
I never did get involved with the civil rights movement.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
Walter Gadsden is the boy in the photograph, the one
bitten by Leo. He's a mysterious figure. He was interviewed
at the time of the photograph by Jet magazine back
in nineteen sixty three, but only briefly. From time to time,
other people have come forward to say that they were
the one in the photograph, not Gadsden, but those claims
seem dubious. Meanwhile, Gadsden disappears, people try and find him
(16:29):
in can't. All that seems to exist is this oral
history that you're hearing done in honor of the unveiling
of Ron McDowell's statue. And the interview is strange because
it doesn't go the way the interviewer thinks it's going
to go. She starts with the obvious question, you were
a foot soldier. Tell me how that came about? And
(16:51):
he says, I wasn't a foot soldier.
Speaker 6 (16:53):
But the fact is, the day of that movement, I
was supposed to have been in school, but a friend
of my acquaintance of mine had told me that earlier
that Martin Luther Gaine was him down that day and
he was going to be there. And I said I
(17:14):
wanted to be there too. I wanted to come and
thrit out what it was all a battle.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
Walter Gadsden is a bystander. The famous statue in kelly
Ingram Park foot Soldier is not in fact of a
foot soldier. It gets stranger, okay.
Speaker 3 (17:29):
And when you go to school? Where did you come downtown.
Speaker 7 (17:33):
To the park area? The kelly Ingram Park over there.
Speaker 6 (17:37):
So we started walking toward the activity, and as I
approached and got closer, they turned and looked with me,
and I saw it coming toward me, so I turned
to lee.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
He was walking down the street with the protesters coming
towards him. So he veers off to get out of
their way and rejoin the spectators on the sidewalk. Duckson
behind the row of sawhorses, where he runs into officers
Middleton and Leo.
Speaker 7 (18:06):
So as I turned and started to walk away, I
was great.
Speaker 6 (18:09):
And the rest of it are about the policeman Gray
about the policeman and yank toward him.
Speaker 3 (18:16):
Does that happen? The dog bits you there?
Speaker 7 (18:19):
As I can remember that that happened simultaneously.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Did you go.
Speaker 7 (18:25):
The policeman gray at me? I don't remember what hand,
but the dog the gray at me with one hand.
Speaker 6 (18:32):
It happened so fast there was nothing to do except
throw up the leg and try to protect usself.
Speaker 7 (18:37):
And as I was doing that, there I went. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
If you look at the famous photo, Gasden's explanation makes sense.
Leo is lunging. The bite is a millisecond away. But
Gaston and Middleton just look startled, the way people do
if they unexpectedly bump into each other. Gaston has his
knee up as a reflex and his hand on Middleton
as if to steady himself. Middleton has one hand on
(19:06):
Gadsden and his other arm is flexed. He's yanking back
on the leash. Leo has freaked out and he's trying
to restrain him. Leo whoa. Middleton's colleague, Bobby Hayes made
the same point to me. Middleton's not letting Leo loose
on Gadsden. Quite the opposite.
Speaker 4 (19:25):
If you look at the picture, you can tell he's
holding the dog back the lion's taunt the dog feeder
in the air the best I recall, and Dick got
him here. He's holding that line. He don't only invite
that guy.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
Now, what does Gadsden say about all this. Does he
think he's been the victim of police brutality? Not at all.
In fact, he can't seem to understand why everyone makes
such a big deal out of what happened to him
that day.
Speaker 5 (19:58):
How does your family members react to your participation, Well,
they were angry because I didn't attend school that day.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
He appears in an image that transfixed the world, and
his parents are mad that he skipped school. The interviewer
then tries to get at Gadsden's connections to the struggle
for civil rights.
Speaker 5 (20:19):
Okay, well, the church where your parents or your family
members were attending, were they involved in the civil rights
movement during that time?
Speaker 7 (20:26):
You know they never told me of it. Okay.
Speaker 5 (20:30):
What benefits do you your family in the community realize
as a result of that movement?
Speaker 7 (20:38):
None.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
In answer to the question what benefits did your family
receive from the civil rights movement, he answers none. He's
not having any of it. Gadsden's interview, in fact, just
gets weirder.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
Okay, if you were.
Speaker 5 (20:56):
In control of an organization or a movement of such
and could go back and change some things, what would
you change?
Speaker 7 (21:05):
Okay?
Speaker 6 (21:06):
The things that would change would be a more careful
choice of people involved.
Speaker 7 (21:19):
In all of those movements. There are too many, well
the big just blunt, crooked people. Many of the people
that were involved and had no abiety became too crooked.
Speaker 1 (21:38):
The most famous photograph of the Civil rights movement is
of a startled cop trying desperately to hold his dog
back from biting a bystander who wasn't that much of
a fan of the civil rights movement.
Speaker 6 (21:51):
I'm wondering, Steel, why mean, because I've never had any
notoriety whatsoever.
Speaker 7 (21:56):
Concerning that picture. That picture was in the paper, but
many other people were too, Yes, many other situations.
Speaker 6 (22:04):
Plus it's Bonnie, yes, but they chose to use a
lip boy at fifteen of that statue.
Speaker 7 (22:11):
The little boy in aves put up a little boy
in size.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
Are you surprised when you found out about it?
Speaker 7 (22:19):
I was totally flabbergas cause I don't know who to thin.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
And Gadsden's main objection he's light skinned, he says, The
statue makes him look dark skinned.
Speaker 6 (22:30):
That statue doesn't look like me. It looks like a
totally different boy. That looks like an African boy.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
What do you feel about it looks like African boy?
Speaker 6 (22:40):
It looks like an African boy.
Speaker 5 (22:45):
Uh, the color of the features, the features, the lips,
the size.
Speaker 7 (22:52):
You take a look at the pictured air and the
statue air the boy short. I was tall for my ads.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
If you listen to the whole interview, it nearly goes
off the rails. At this point, the interviewer expected to
find a heroic civil rights veteran. Instead, she's getting a
grumpy old man still wedded to some of the oldest
and most awkward of black prejudices.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
We're very proud of it, and I hope you will
be too. And now that we know who you are,
we can add a name under there. But you with
the young boy, let's comet tore used.
Speaker 6 (23:32):
Well, M, I'm still wondering why after all the information
that I had given, and and and all that, all
that established me as being a young African boy, which
I'm not.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
You prefer being called a negro.
Speaker 7 (23:58):
I prefer being called what I am, a colored?
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Oh oh, you prefer you were colored?
Speaker 7 (24:03):
I am?
Speaker 1 (24:04):
Okay, okay, euphemism and evasion. At the beginning, I said
that what I object to is the way so many
stories about race get cleaned up, sanitized, so the brown
decision becomes a fairy tale in which black people triumph
(24:25):
without effort. Well, here's the flip side. When we stop
evading and just listen, it gets complicated. Our hero, Walter
Gadsden isn't all that heroic. As for the bad guy,
the officer, his colleague Bobby Hayes says he wasn't a
bad guy. Did Officer Hayes tell me things that surprised me?
(24:46):
And did listening to Walter Gadsden shock me? Absolutely? Because
I'm no different from anyone else. I liked the fairy tale.
So the person who invited me down to Birmingham in
the first place was Dick Middleton's widow. Everyone calls her
missus Klingler. Her husband died not long ago, and I
think she felt it was time to speak out. We
(25:08):
met at a barbecue you restaurant in downtown Birmingham, sat upstairs.
So he's a police officer at a time when Birmingham
is obviously going through some very tumultuous times. Can you
tell me about that?
Speaker 8 (25:24):
The first that was the first ten years I'd still
learning to speak English. I didn't really know what's going on.
I didn't understand what's going on.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
Missus Klingler was from Germany. She met Richard when he
was stationed there with the army. She says, what happened
on that spring day in nineteen sixty three was like
a shadow over her husband.
Speaker 8 (25:45):
He went to work and come home and enjoy the family. Ah,
but I knew something is going on.
Speaker 3 (25:53):
You know.
Speaker 8 (25:54):
Then later on you see the picture in the paper. Oh,
he never really discussed it.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
She had a big book with her filled with clippings
of her husband's career and other photographs from that day
in kelly Ingram Park. She wanted to set the record straight.
Her husband was unfairly vilified.
Speaker 8 (26:15):
He done his job and he was spit at, he
was thrown rocks at and he did not let the
guy put the dog to him. He was holding the
leash away from him. If you see other pictures what happened.
(26:37):
This was not the right picture.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
This was not the stort, this was not the truth.
For the longest time afterwards, they got hate mail. So
how soon did the letters start coming?
Speaker 8 (26:52):
Just like, I'm sure like the next month or so
when it went all over the world, just as ugly
as you can imagine.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
Yeah, did he ever talk to any journalist? Or do
you know. No, you never gave any interviews.
Speaker 8 (27:09):
He didn't give no interviews because I think he felt
like what he was betrayed es they would not tell it.
No matter what he say, no matter what he would do,
they would not believe him. All they look at the picture,
that's all.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
Do you think your husband suffered?
Speaker 8 (27:31):
I think he has.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
Yes, there's a statue in Kelly Ingram Park of one
of the most iconic moments in civil rights history, and
everyone directly involved in that moment thinks it didn't happen
that way. Oh Mac, what did you do? You said
(27:55):
earlier that when you draw, you try and inhabit the characters. Yes,
and so tell me your emotional reactions to that photograph.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
Well, I saw that the boy was maybe about six four,
the officers maybe five ten, five nine, And I said,
this is a movement about power. So I made the
little boy younger and smaller, and the officer taller and stronger.
The armor of the law is so strong, that's why
his arm is almost like strength. And the dog is
(28:25):
more like a wolf than a real dog. Because if
I'm a little boy, that's what I would see. I
would see, like this super man hovering over me, putting
this big, old, giant monster of a dog in my
gran area, in my private area. And so that's what
I envisioned when I first saw the photograph.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
And you changed it. In the photograph, I noticed the
boy is leaning in, and in your sculpture, he's leaning back.
Tell me about that.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
He's leaning back because I wanted to depict him showing
that I'm not gonna fight you. I'm not leaving, I'm
not moving, I'm standing, but I'm not gonna fight you.
This is a non violent protest. That's why his hands
are open and he's going back, like, do whatever you're
gonna do. Put the dog on me, beat me with
the color, whatever you want to do. And I saw
all of that when I saw the photograph.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
We were in the Tuskegee History Center, a museum on
Elm Street, not far from the university. It's in what
looks like an old bank, and it's filled with exhibits
to the town's extraordinary history, the infamous Tuskegee Syphliss Study,
the Tuskegee Airman, Rosa Parks. Tuskegee native McDowell's work was
all over the walls. He took me on a little tour.
(29:34):
Then we sat down and he took out his portfolio.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
Here's the statue.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
Those glasses are like we are the glasses the same.
I think, did you make the glasses bigger?
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Too good?
Speaker 1 (29:46):
Piper maca is a whole section on the statue, preliminary drawings, sketches, photographs, so.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
He's almost like a blind officer. He doesn't even see
the kid because he's so far beyond that killed this nigger,
attacked this nigger. He's so passed the reality of this
is a human, innocent, human child, human being. That's why
he was wearing blind people glass.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
That is so interesting because when you see that, that's
the thing I couldn't put my finger on. The officer
is behaving as if he's blind. The dog is attacking.
He doesn't even see the boy.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
You're the first person I tell that to. That's so interesting.
See how vicious the dog will.
Speaker 1 (30:28):
Oh my, that is a wolf.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
I did the hair with the I don't I don't
have to. I didn't know what instruments to use. I
did all this with a pencil pencil in the hair,
and I do the teeth like that, and oh, look
at the teeth. I did that on purpose. The curved
Oh yeah, because if you have a curve too, like
when you see those those World Wolf pictures, the teeth
(30:54):
the curve because once there's like a snake when he
bites you, if he doesn't retrack and he's gonna rip,
it's not going in and coming out when it comes out,
he's gonna rip flesh.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
When you're face to face with the statue. It has
historical authority. It's in the shadow of sixteenth Street Baptist
Church inside kelly Ingram Park at the actual site of
the Birmingham Marches. But it's a work of imagination. It's
not a literal representation. It's art. Well, are there other
(31:28):
details that I mean you were saying you there's the
blind officer, there's the curved teeth on the dog.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
See the officer moved all of his anger into the
doll and it's the dog that's attacking the boy. You know.
That's what they'll do with with racism.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
Mac made Leo into a wolf and blinded Middleton and
shrank Walter Gaston until he was tiny and helpless because
he was telling a story about Birmingham. That's what history is.
Each side writes their own story, and the winner story
is the one we call the truth. You don't think
white people told their share of whoppers over the years
(32:07):
in the South. You don't think that there's a statue
in a Southern town somewhere of a champion of the
Confederacy that makes a hero of someone who's actually a villain.
White people got to do that in the South for centuries.
Foot Soldier is just what happens when the people on
the bottom finally get the power to tell the story
their way. It was a long time coming. It's a
(32:33):
brilliant statue.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
Thank you. I'll pour my heart into.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
Yeah, there's some you have some mischief in you.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
What do you mean there's.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
A little bit of mischief in that in your recreation
of that photo, you're you were using that opportunity to
make a much broader kind of subversive point.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
I maybe I.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
Went back through Birmingham after talking to Mac and Tuskegee,
and I went to Kelly Ingram Park one last time
stood in front of the statue. I think everyone who
wants to understand the civil rights movement should do that
because of what it means, the hard won reward of
a long and costly battle over who gets to control
the stories that make up history. But if you do,
(33:24):
just keep in mind that Dick Middleton didn't actually sick
his dog Leo on Walter Gadsden, and that Walter Gadsden
wasn't actually a foot soldier for civil rights.
Speaker 2 (33:33):
Mayor Rrington told me right often we did the unfail me.
He got hundreds of threats about bombing and tearing a
statue up from all over the world, and his response was,
I'll just get back into a bigger one and a
batter one so they never touched it.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
Oh, he said, if you if you destroy that statue,
we're coming back bigger.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
Do you know how many times I begged for somebody.
Speaker 9 (33:55):
I hope somebody blows it down to a bigger one.
Speaker 1 (34:08):
Revisionous History is produced by Me Label and Jacob Smith,
with Camilloe Baptista, Stephanie Daniel, and Ciomara Martinez White. Our
editor is Julia Barton. Lawn Williams is our engineer. Original
music by Luis Guerra. Special thanks to Andy Bauers and
Jacob Weisberg at Panoply. I'm Malcolm Gladwell
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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