On a warm Saturday in the spring of 1963, more than 6,000 men, women, and children congregated in downtown Los Angeles—a historic turnout for any kind of public demonstration taking place in Los Angeles in the 1960s—and marched from Pershing Square to the Los Angeles Federal Building.
On that afternoon, just days after the infamous “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, Alabama, the peaceful demonstration at the Federal Building devolved into a brutal clash between police officers and protestors, who were demanding a response from city officials to the violence in Selma. Though local civil rights organizations had been staging demonstrations for years, the struggle for racial justice in Los Angeles had reached a fever pitch.
While most news photographs from that day seem to show either bird’s eye views of crowds or sensationalized stand-offs between protestors and police officers, the images of activist-photographer Charles Brittin emerged from a radically different angle.
In representing compelling—and, at times, disturbing—displays of resistance, Brittin’s images focus on moments in which protestors risked personal safety, physical harm, and public humiliation in the face of violent threats from authorities. Instead of crowds, people emerge as the focal points of the photographs, reminding viewers of the physical toll exacted by the act of radical protest.
In the photograph above, a group of protestors form a chain of outstretched limbs. Two Black women are in the center—one fully lies on the concrete ground while the other sits more upright, her exposed garters and shoeless foot kick into the air. As sunlight dapples over their bodies, gripped hands seem to join in physical and spiritual unity. A brief scuffle between another protestor and a federal agent can be seen in the right corner. The threatening tips of dark leather shoes surround the group. With their bodies, the protestors defy the threats of police and other forms of state power—it is an act of refusal, and a demand for justice.
Though many photographers at the Federal Building that day were shooting on behalf of local and national news outlets, Brittin was serving as the house photographer for the local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). He began his career in the 1950s photographing the Venice arts scene while also freelancing for local news outlets. But by the early 1960s, Brittin had started to use photography in service of his emerging activism. He joined CORE with his wife Barbara in 1962 and worked exclusively to document the group’s efforts in organizing for anti-segregation and racial equality.
Brittin’s photographs, housed at the Getty Research Institute, are visual testaments to Los Angeles during the Civil Rights and Black Power Eras. And unlike the type of photography so often found in periodical archives, Brittin’s photographs highlight an unusual connection with Southern California’s civil rights movement. Here, the photographer operates as an active conspirator with those seeking to dismantle systems of oppression.
CORE protest at the Los Angeles Federal Building (woman with arms being held), Charles Brittin, 1965. Charles Brittin papers, Getty Research Institute, 2005.M.11
As one of CORE’s few on-the-ground photographers, Brittin’s Federal Building Protest series elicits a sense of empathy, and reveals a solidarity with his fellow activists. Together, his “portraits” of protestors form subtle odes to those who dared to resist with their bodies. With their intimate angles and tightly cropped compositions, Brittin’s photographs extend past the conventions of photojournalism to focus on the people of the movement—and the victims it claimed—as much as the movement itself.
CORE protest at the Los Angeles Federal Building (contact sheet frame; woman with arms being held). Charles Brittin, 1965. Charles Brittin papers, Getty Research Institute, 2005.M.11
In the image above, Brittin viscerally displays the brutality that CORE and other protestors faced in their struggle for justice. A young woman, her head eerily obscured by her diagonally extended right arm, is being dragged by two white men onto a sidewalk. Two other figures—a suited man in the foreground and another in a stark white button up—almost mask the grueling scene but Brittin’s camera has intervened. With the woman’s shirt riding up as she is being forcibly pulled, Brittin captures a tender and exposed band of skin, her tightly gripped hand, and the racialized drama of her hanging, contorted body.
CORE protest at the Los Angeles Federal Building (woman being dragged), Charles Brittin, 1965. Charles Brittin papers, Getty Research Institute, 2005.M.11
In a subsequent photograph, this struggle unfolds with increasing tension. Now fully lifted onto the sidewalk, the young Black woman is depicted within a tightly focused and centrally composed frame as her purposefully limp body continues to be dragged by a set of gripping white hands. The image builds on the series’ motif of clenched hands; though, in this case, the hands signify less a bond of alliance than a merciless and painful tugging. Underneath the image’s brutality, a subtle and powerful defiance is revealed in the woman’s slack and dragging body. She embodies an act of refusal. Her stretched arms lead into a slender and elongated form punctuated only by the stylish flair of her white heeled shoes, perhaps echoing a Crucifixion scene. By formal artistic standards, the image’s composition is a compelling arrangement of light, space, and form in spite of its horrendous implications—an arresting picture of the drastic measures taken against Black Angelenos who publicly defended their rights to fair and equal citizenship.
These and other photographs by Brittin reflect an ambivalence that is often pictured in civil rights imagery—a push and pull between the tragedies of state-inflicted violence and the triumphs of individual and collective bravery by Black Americans. Cultural historian Leigh Raiford wrote in 2011 that these types of images “reveal how vulnerable African Americans were when demonstrating for the most basic and fundamental rights. They laid bare to nonblack audiences what African Americans of the Jim Crow era had long known, seen, and experienced.”
Brittin’s photographs lay bare the intensity of racial justice work in the 1960s—a kind of horror and heroics that continues to frame the understanding of this turbulent period in American racial politics. For myself, Brittin’s photographs, in all their rawness, are striking visual precursors to the kind of personal and chilling footage captured on smart phones and distributed via social media channels today. In their raw intimacy, suggesting ambivalently that justice is just within our reach, his photographs recall the unsettling reality of what radical action ultimately requires: putting one’s body on the line.
