By Lee A. Daniels

It was just moments after reading earlier this week of photographer Charles Moore’s death that I thought of the words of another white Southerner whose allegiance to decency was in and of itself a rebuke to the brutality of the Jim Crow South and so much of the rest of the America of those years.

That Southerner wrote to a friend who had recently provoked the wrath of white supremacists: We will not sit quietly by and see our native land, the South, wreck and ruin itself twice in less than a hundred years over the Negro question. We speak now against the day when our Southern people will say: Why didn’t someone tell us this before? Tell us in time.

William Faulkner wrote those words to James W. Silver in the early 1960s, shortly before threats against Silver’s life and family forced the University of Mississippi history professor, who had supported James Meredith’s admission to Ole Miss, to flee the state.

Those words, with their undertone of quiet, heroic determination apply equally to Charles Moore. He was one of that intrepid band of white and black photographers whose professionalism and sympathy for the cause of justice brought America’s “Second Civil War” to the attention of the whole world. The photographs he published of the Movement in the South during the early to mid-1960s bore witness to history. They helped expose for all the world to see both the deliberate and casual cruelty that supported the reign of white supremacy in the South. More important, they helped reveal for all the world to see the determination and stoicism and faith of those adults and children who braved imminent danger to bring a new America into being.

All those forces, and more, are in the photographs Moore published in his 1991 book, Powerful Days: The Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore, with Michael S. Durham. One need not have lived through that time to be struck by the drama and poignancy in them. Nor should anyone mistake their importance as being merely historical documents. When I look at them, I think of the words civil rights veteran James Farmer wrote in his autobiography:

“Living was tenuous in movement days,” Farmer wrote, “but the grasping at liberty and the reaching toward happiness ennobled life for this nation.”

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc. and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline.