Speaker 1: Pushkin Before we begin, a warning this episode contains material
Speaker 1: that may be upsetting to some listeners. Not long ago,
Speaker 1: I drove from Atlanta, Georgia to Birmingham, Alabama. It's a
Speaker 1: straight shot west on I twenty one hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: miles of rolling hills and piney woods. I got off
Speaker 1: the freeway on the downtown exit, just before what the
Speaker 1: locals call the Malfunction junction, and drove a few blocks
Speaker 1: south until I came to Kelly Ingram Park, which covers
Speaker 1: a full city block right in front of sixteen Street
Speaker 1: Baptist Church. I wanted to see a statue that stands
Speaker 1: in the park, a famous statue Valla's love Statues. I
Speaker 1: find them moving. Don't know why. Maybe it's because there
Speaker 1: are a representation of something that we have chosen to
Speaker 1: take serious, to memorialize in a permanent form. With a statue,
Speaker 1: you're saying to the future, this is what I want
Speaker 1: you to remember about my generation. The statue I came
Speaker 1: to see is at one end of Kelly Ingram Park.
Speaker 1: It's of a police officer, big guy menacing heavy pair
Speaker 1: of sunglasses. He is a dog on a leash, a
Speaker 1: big german shepherd and the dog is lunging huge fangs
Speaker 1: bared at a young black boy who's leaning back, hands
Speaker 1: to his sides, almost like he's sacrificing himself. It's called
Speaker 1: foot soldier. It looks simple, but that statue is not
Speaker 1: what you think. Trust me, my name is Malcolm Gladwell.
Speaker 1: You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked
Speaker 1: and Misunderstood. This episode is the second in what are
Speaker 1: going to be a few episodes this season on race
Speaker 1: and civil rights. On race in the United States, I'm
Speaker 1: an outsider. I'm Canadian. My family is half West Indian,
Speaker 1: which is a very different cultural experience than being an
Speaker 1: African American. My mom had a friend, a Jamaican, who
Speaker 1: went down to Georgia once in the nineteen seventies. When
Speaker 1: she came back, she said, the racism there cut like
Speaker 1: a knife. I couldn't have been more than eight or nine,
Speaker 1: and that phrase startled me. It seems so visceral. But
Speaker 1: then I moved to the US as an adult, and
Speaker 1: it seemed like the way race was discussed didn't cut
Speaker 1: like a knife at all. What I saw around race
Speaker 1: in the United States was evasion and euphemism. The subject
Speaker 1: of my last episode was the Brown Decision. For half
Speaker 1: a century, the integration story has been told with all
Speaker 1: the suffering taken out. Why is it really necessary that
Speaker 1: every grand civil rights narrative be turned into a fairy tale?
Speaker 1: Which brings me to kelly Ingram Park and its statue
Speaker 1: of the police officer and the dog and the boy.
Speaker 1: There's a nice and tidy story you can tell about
Speaker 1: that statue, but the real story is much different. Last
Speaker 1: summer I got a call from a man who was
Speaker 1: friends with the widow of the police officer depicted in
Speaker 1: that statue. I'd written about the officer and the dog
Speaker 1: in my book David and Goliath, but she wanted to
Speaker 1: tell me the rest of the story, so I met
Speaker 1: with her. Then I went back to Birmingham a second
Speaker 1: time to look for the boy in the statue, and
Speaker 1: then a third time to Tuskegee, two hours south of Birmingham.
Speaker 1: And there on a long, lazy afternoon, I sat in
Speaker 1: the town museum with an artist named Ronald McDowell. Uncle
Speaker 1: Jay Me and James Brown. And Ronald McDowell is an
Speaker 1: extraordinary man, spidery and fine featured. He showed me his
Speaker 1: portfolio and told me in his urgent confessional whisper about
Speaker 1: how he was once walking down Sunset Boulevard years ago
Speaker 1: and ran into Louis Armstrong's nephew, who took him to
Speaker 1: see Michael Jackson, who wanted McDowell to teach him art,
Speaker 1: which led in turn to McDowell helping out on the
Speaker 1: album Thriller. Yeah. I did the sketches for Michael Day.
Speaker 1: Oh wow. I was trying to make him a tool
Speaker 1: black superman. And on the back of this piece of
Speaker 1: paper is it drawing Michael Diet for me when we
Speaker 1: were working on truck as Michael's arn't work one obviously.
Speaker 1: He did several pieces from Richard Arrington, who was the
Speaker 1: first black mare of Birmingham, used to call Ron McDowell Mac,
Speaker 1: which suits him perfectly. He has an air of mischief
Speaker 1: about him, which we'll get to. That's pictures of Man
Speaker 1: Johnny Couple, Nataliecole. That's in the state capital, the first
Speaker 1: African American painting hanging in the state of Alabama. Governor
Speaker 1: Siegleman commissioner living there. Mac did the statue in Kelly
Speaker 1: Ingram Park. He's the one responsible. Birmingham is a strange
Speaker 1: and beautiful place. It was a steel town like Pittsburgh was,
Speaker 1: and at the height of the steel industry, there was
Speaker 1: a lot of money there. There's an enormous hill on
Speaker 1: the south side of town, Mountain Brook, with a gorgeous
Speaker 1: country club and graceful pre war homes. That's the wealthy
Speaker 1: white part of Birmingham. Down the hill is the other Birmingham,
Speaker 1: where blacks and whites lived in uneasy proximity. They used
Speaker 1: to call Birmingham the Johannesburg of the South, or Bomingham,
Speaker 1: because bombs were a weapon of choice for white supremacists
Speaker 1: who wanted to keep black people in their place. There's
Speaker 1: an old joke from that period that tells you all
Speaker 1: you really need to know. A black man in Chicago
Speaker 1: wakes up one morning and tells his wife that Jesus
Speaker 1: had come to him in a dream and told him
Speaker 1: to go to Birmingham. His wife is horrified. Did Jesus
Speaker 1: say he'd go with you? The husband replies, he said
Speaker 1: it go as far as Memphis. Birmingham was where Martin
Speaker 1: Luther King staged what are the most dramatic protests of
Speaker 1: the Civil rights movement, and King chose Birmingham for a
Speaker 1: good reason. He wanted to strike at the symbol of
Speaker 1: racial oppression, to get ordinary Americans to understand just how
Speaker 1: bad things were for black people in the South. So
Speaker 1: through the long spring of nineteen sixty three, King and
Speaker 1: his people organized sit ins to protest segregation, then boycott's,
Speaker 1: then marches. They called it Project C for Confrontation. They
Speaker 1: were trying to provoke the Birmingham Chief of Police, a
Speaker 1: troglelte named Bull Connor, into doing something so outrageous that
Speaker 1: it would turn the tide of public opinion in their favor.
Speaker 1: And that's exactly what happened. May third, nineteen sixty three.
Speaker 1: King's people start at sixteenth Street Baptist Church, right next
Speaker 1: to Kelly Ingram Park. They come out in waves, marching
Speaker 1: alongside the park and then continuing on through downtown Birmingham.
Speaker 1: They're huge crowds, tons of police in the middle of everything.
Speaker 1: A photographer named Bill Hudson takes a picture of a
Speaker 1: white police officer with dark sunglasses and a big german shepherd.
Speaker 1: The dog is lunging at a young black teenager. The
Speaker 1: next day, The New York Times publishes the photograph above
Speaker 1: the fold, across three columns on the front page of
Speaker 1: its weekend paper, as does basically every other major newspaper
Speaker 1: in the country. President Kennedy is asked about the photo
Speaker 1: and he's appalled. The Secretary of State says it will
Speaker 1: quote embarrass our friends abroad and make our enemies joyful.
Speaker 1: It's discussed on the floor of Congress at toils are written.
Speaker 1: People have debates about it. It's exactly what King wants,
Speaker 1: something to show the rest of the world just how
Speaker 1: bad things are in the South, and the tide turns.
Speaker 1: A year later, Congress passes the Civil Rights Act, one
Speaker 1: of the most important pieces of legislation in the history
Speaker 1: of the United States. The Civil Rights Act, people always
Speaker 1: say was written in Birmingham. Kelly Ingram Park is now
Speaker 1: a shrine to the events of nineteen sixty three, the
Speaker 1: first Black Mare of Birmingham. Richard Arrington takes office in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy nine and decides to fill this little patch
Speaker 1: of history with sculptures that tell the story of the movement.
Speaker 1: He commissions one of Martin Luther King, another of Fred Shuttlesworth,
Speaker 1: who was a key leader of the Birmingham protests. There's
Speaker 1: one of the four little girls killed when white supremacists
Speaker 1: bombed the sixteenth Street Baptist Church in September of nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty three. Finally, Errington turns to the photo, the famous photo,
Speaker 1: for one final statue, and he calls up Mac McDowell,
Speaker 1: who has moved out to Tuskegee from California and transformed
Speaker 1: himself into a kind of house artist for the civil
Speaker 1: rights movement. He said, I got to get a statue
Speaker 1: down right, because the people that marshton a movement are
Speaker 1: complaining about the children don't look like them. The children
Speaker 1: had white features with black hair, and there were a
Speaker 1: lot of complaints. And he said, I needed to do
Speaker 1: a design of this image, this photograph of this boy
Speaker 1: and this police officer and the dog attacking him. The
Speaker 1: other artists with sculptures in Kelly Ingram Park are big names,
Speaker 1: white men with impressive resumes. Mac a kid from the
Speaker 1: Projects of Oakland, entirely self taught. He had in fact
Speaker 1: never done a sculpture before, a detail that he conveniently
Speaker 1: failed to tell Richard Arrington. The mayor just wants Mack
Speaker 1: to do some sketches, provide a guide. This look on
Speaker 1: his face, a look of frustration, like the thing he's
Speaker 1: doing what I want. You're not getting it, none of
Speaker 1: the sculptures. And I was like, I can't say no
Speaker 1: to him because he's powerful. It's a great odd you
Speaker 1: know of Birmingham. The next thing, you know, Max doing
Speaker 1: the whole thing. And I started sculptinging. In three hours
Speaker 1: later I was complete, and I took it to Arrington
Speaker 1: about I wanted to think I did it so quick.
Speaker 1: SIM waited a week and took it to him and
Speaker 1: he said, you got the commission? How much and sell them?
Speaker 1: The rest is history. It was unveiled in a special
Speaker 1: ceremony in May nineteen ninety five. It's called foot Soldier
Speaker 1: because that was the term used to describe the people
Speaker 1: who marched in Martin Luther King's army. On the statue's
Speaker 1: granite base, it reads, this sculpture is dedicated to the
Speaker 1: foot Soldiers of the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement. On a
Speaker 1: little plaque next to it is the famous photo on
Speaker 1: which the statue is based. If you want to see
Speaker 1: a picture of it, we have one up on revisionist
Speaker 1: history dot com. And the first people to see it
Speaker 1: was Stevie Wanders and Mattel's mother and but I didn't
Speaker 1: know at the time I did the statue. When you're
Speaker 1: doing bronze, you have to smooth everything. Because I was untrained,
Speaker 1: I didn't smooth the rocks. So Stevens was filling the
Speaker 1: rocks and he cut his hand and one of the
Speaker 1: men in the parks was there and he told me,
Speaker 1: he saying I'm getting blood of my hand because Stevie
Speaker 1: wanted did I was like, oh my god. But it's
Speaker 1: almost it's almost it's almost biblical. It's almost like he's
Speaker 1: blessing the park with his blood. Yeah, Stevie got cut
Speaker 1: on those rocks and Foot Soldier is the most powerful
Speaker 1: sculpture in kelly Ingram Park. Nothing else comes close. And
Speaker 1: maybe that's where the trouble starts. The name of the
Speaker 1: police officer in the photograph was Richard Middleton. Everyone called
Speaker 1: him Dick. His best friend on the force was Bobby Hayes.
Speaker 1: Big guy lives near a golf course outside Birmingham. Must
Speaker 1: be in his eighties by now. Hayes and Middleton started
Speaker 1: as police officers in Birmingham right at the moment when
Speaker 1: the civil rights movement was asserting its health. The police
Speaker 1: department was all white and all mail back then, but
Speaker 1: in the streets the balance of power was shifting. When
Speaker 1: integration came to the Birmingham school system, Hayes remembers it
Speaker 1: as bewildering. If you were a cop, nobody really liked
Speaker 1: you because we were carrying the black kids in the school.
Speaker 1: That's what we were worried to do, and they were
Speaker 1: going to get in. That's just where it was. We
Speaker 1: had no choice. The black people didn't like you because
Speaker 1: you were a policeman. The white people didn't like you
Speaker 1: because you're protecting the black kids and caring. The men
Speaker 1: were the crowd. The goofies didn't want them to go.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty three, King's protest campaign was headquartered in
Speaker 1: sixteen Street Baptist Church, which is an old red brick
Speaker 1: building on the northwest corner of kelly Ingram Park. The
Speaker 1: protesters would come out in the afternoon march around the
Speaker 1: park on their way downtown. They were trained in non violence,
Speaker 1: marched according to a strict schedule. It was a military operation.
Speaker 1: Crowds of people would gather to see the spectacle. The
Speaker 1: police were supposed to keep the protesters and the crowd apart.
Speaker 1: The protests get bigger and bigger the crowds get bigger
Speaker 1: and bigger. It's late spring, so it's starting to get
Speaker 1: really hot. The police chief, Bull Connor, starts locking up
Speaker 1: everyone he can. Then Connor says to Hew with it,
Speaker 1: bringing the dogs. Of course, there's a lot of noise,
Speaker 1: a lot of tension in the air, a lot of
Speaker 1: people yelling and screaming. Bridge started coming in, you know,
Speaker 1: throwing bridge. It got to be a really ugly shlight
Speaker 1: real quick, real quick. Dick Middleton, the cop in the photo,
Speaker 1: was a member of the city's canine unit. He had
Speaker 1: a German shepherd named Leo. He and the other members
Speaker 1: of the tactical unit were posted behind a barricade, a
Speaker 1: row of wooden saw horses running parallel to the curb.
Speaker 1: There's a line of cops and dogs in a kind
Speaker 1: of no man's land between the bystanders and the protesters.
Speaker 1: He was inside the barricade. The crowd was on the
Speaker 1: other side, and they were taunting a pollation, and of
Speaker 1: course all we could do is just stand at a
Speaker 1: police shall like you just stand there. At that time,
Speaker 1: Dick was well back and away. He told me he
Speaker 1: was jin yards maybe back at the barricade, and a
Speaker 1: guy came around a barricade. So here we have a
Speaker 1: foot soldier in the middle of all the mayhem, cutting
Speaker 1: through the no man's land towards the sidewalk, and Middleton's
Speaker 1: German shepherd, Leo, lunges at him. That's the moment Bill
Speaker 1: Hudson captures in his famous photograph, and Ron McDowell captures
Speaker 1: in his statue the confrontation between the innocent foot soldier
Speaker 1: and the snarling face of racial oppression. Bill Hudson's editor
Speaker 1: says later that he picked that particular photo out of
Speaker 1: the many taken that day because he was riveted by
Speaker 1: the saintly calm of the young man in the snarling
Speaker 1: jaws of the German shepherd. Here's where the story starts
Speaker 1: to get complicated. This is an interview today Saturday, May
Speaker 1: twenty five, nineteen ninety six at the Burringham Civil Rights
Speaker 1: ins Or two with mister Walter Gaston of Atlanta, Georgia. Okay,
Speaker 1: how did you get involved in the civil rights movement? Now,
Speaker 1: that's that's one thing that I've always have a problem with.
Speaker 1: I never did get involved with the civil rights movement.
Speaker 1: Walter Gadsden is the boy in the photograph. The one
Speaker 1: bitten by Leo. He's a mysterious figure. He was interviewed
Speaker 1: at the time of the photograph by Jet magazine back
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty three, but only briefly. From time to time,
Speaker 1: other people have come forward to say that they were
Speaker 1: the one in the photograph, not Gadsden, but those claims
Speaker 1: seem dubious. Meanwhile, Gadsden disappears, people try and find him
Speaker 1: in can't. All that seems to exist is this oral
Speaker 1: history that you're hearing done in honor of the unveiling
Speaker 1: of Ron McDowell's statue. And the interview is strange because
Speaker 1: it doesn't go the way the interviewer thinks it's going
Speaker 1: to go. She starts with the obvious question, you were
Speaker 1: a foot soldier? Tell me how that came about? And
Speaker 1: he says, I wasn't a foot soldier. But the fact is,
Speaker 1: the day of that moment, I was supposed to have
Speaker 1: been in school. But a friend of mine, acquaintment that
Speaker 1: told me that earlier that Martin Luke game with him
Speaker 1: down that day and he was going to be there,
Speaker 1: and I said I wanted to be there too. I
Speaker 1: wanted to come and flat out what it was all
Speaker 1: a battle. Walter Gadsden is a bystander. The famous statue
Speaker 1: in kelly Ingram Park foot Soldier is not in fact
Speaker 1: of a foot soldier. It gets a stranger. Okay. And
Speaker 1: when you're up the school, where did you come downtown
Speaker 1: to the park? Areas kelly Ingram Park over there. So
Speaker 1: we started walking to the activity and as I approached
Speaker 1: and got closer, they turned and looked at me, and
Speaker 1: I saw it coming towards me, So I've turned to Lee.
Speaker 1: He was walking down the street with the protesters coming
Speaker 1: towards him, so he veers off to get out of
Speaker 1: their way and rejoined the spectators on the sidewalk. Ducks
Speaker 1: in behind the row of sawhorses, where he runs into
Speaker 1: officer in Middleton and Leo. So as I turned and
Speaker 1: started to walk away, I was great, and the rest
Speaker 1: of it grabbed bout the policeman and yain't toward him.
Speaker 1: Has that happened to dog, bitch you? I can remember
Speaker 1: that that happened simultaneously. Did you go the policeman Gray?
Speaker 1: I don't remember what hand, but the dog the grayant
Speaker 1: me one hand. If it happened so fast, there was
Speaker 1: nothing I gonna do except throw up the league and
Speaker 1: trying to protect us. Yeah, and as I was doing
Speaker 1: that there I went. Yeah. If you look at the
Speaker 1: famous photo, Gadsden's explanation makes sense. Leo is lunging. The
Speaker 1: bite is a middlesecond away. But Gaston and Middleton just
Speaker 1: look startled, the way people do if they unexpectedly bump
Speaker 1: into each other. Gaston has his knee up as a
Speaker 1: reflex and his hand on Middleton as if to steady himself.
Speaker 1: Middleton has one hand on Gaston and his other arm
Speaker 1: is flexed. He's yanking back on the leash. Leo has
Speaker 1: freaked out and he's trying to restrain him. Leo whoa.
Speaker 1: Middleton's colleague, Bobby Hayes made the same point to me.
Speaker 1: Middleton's not letting Leo loose on Gaston quite the opposite.
Speaker 1: If you look at the picture, you can tell he's
Speaker 1: holding the dog back. But that line taunt that dog
Speaker 1: feeder in the air the best I recall, and Dick
Speaker 1: got him here. He's holding that line. He's not only
Speaker 1: invited guy. Now what does Gaston say about all this?
Speaker 1: Does he think he's been the victim of police brutality?
Speaker 1: Not at all? In fact, he can't seem to understand
Speaker 1: why everyone makes such a big deal out of what
Speaker 1: happened to him that day. How does your family members
Speaker 1: react to your participation, Well, they were angry to go
Speaker 1: by doing teen school that day he appears in an
Speaker 1: image that transfix the world, and his parents are mad
Speaker 1: that he skips school. The interviewer then tries to get
Speaker 1: at Gadsden's connections to the struggle for civil rights. Okay, well,
Speaker 1: the church where your parents are, your family members were attending.
Speaker 1: Were they involved in the civil rights movement during that time?
Speaker 1: You know they never told me of it. What benefits
Speaker 1: to you your family in the community realize as a
Speaker 1: result of that movement? None. In answer to the question
Speaker 1: what benefits did your family receive from the civil rights movement,
Speaker 1: he answers none. He's not having any of it. Gadsden's interview,
Speaker 1: in fact, just gets weirder. Okay, if you were in
Speaker 1: control of an organization or a movement of such and
Speaker 1: could go back and change some things, what would you change? Okay,
Speaker 1: The things that would change would be a more careful
Speaker 1: choice of people involved in all of those movements. There
Speaker 1: are too many, well, the big just blood crooked people
Speaker 1: many of the people that were involved and had an
Speaker 1: oloriety became too crooked. The most famous photograph of the
Speaker 1: Civil rights movement is of a startled cop trying desperately
Speaker 1: to hold his dog back from biting a bystander who
Speaker 1: wasn't that much of a fan of the Civil rights movement.
Speaker 1: I'm want to ring Steel, why me, because I've never
Speaker 1: had any oloriety whatsoever concerning that picture. That picture who's
Speaker 1: in the paper? But many other people were too, many
Speaker 1: other situations Buss Bonnie, Yes, but they chose to use
Speaker 1: the little boy at fifteen that the little boy, and
Speaker 1: he's put up a little boy's eyes. Are you surprised
Speaker 1: when you found out about it? I was the oldly flamborgaster.
Speaker 1: I don't know who's to thin. And Gadsden's main objection
Speaker 1: he's light skinned, he says. The statue makes him look
Speaker 1: dark skinned. That statue doesn't look like me. It looks
Speaker 1: like a totally different boy. That looks like an African boy.
Speaker 1: That's what are your favor It looks like Afican boy.
Speaker 1: It looks like an African boy. The color of the features,
Speaker 1: the features, the lips, the size. You take a look
Speaker 1: at the pictured air and the statue air the boy
Speaker 1: short I was told for my age. If you listen
Speaker 1: to the whole interview, it nearly goes off the rails.
Speaker 1: At this point, the interviewer expected to find a heroic
Speaker 1: civil rights veteran. Instead, she's getting a grumpy old man
Speaker 1: still wedded to some of the oldest and most awkward
Speaker 1: of black prejudices. We're very proud of it, and I
Speaker 1: hope you will be too. And now that we know
Speaker 1: who you are, we can add a name under there
Speaker 1: that you will be a boy let's come to use Well,
Speaker 1: m h. I'm still wondering why, after all the information
Speaker 1: that I had given, and and and all that, all
Speaker 1: that the established me as being a young African boy,
Speaker 1: which I'm not. You prefer being called a negro. I
Speaker 1: prefer being called what I am? A colored? Oh oh,
Speaker 1: you prefer you were colored? I am good? Okay, okay.
Speaker 1: Euphemism and evasion. At the beginning, I said that what
Speaker 1: I object to is the way so many stories about
Speaker 1: race get cleaned up, sanitized, so the brown decision becomes
Speaker 1: a fairy tale in which black people triumph without effort. Well,
Speaker 1: here's the flip side. When we stop evading and just listen,
Speaker 1: it gets complicated. Our hero, Walter Gadsden isn't all that heroic.
Speaker 1: As for the bad guy, the officer, his colleague Bobby
Speaker 1: Hayes says he wasn't a bad guy. Did Officer Hayes
Speaker 1: tell me things that surprised me? And did listening to
Speaker 1: Walter Gadsden shock me? Absolutely? Because I'm no different from
Speaker 1: anyone else. I liked the fairy tale. So the person
Speaker 1: who invited me down to Birmingham in the first place
Speaker 1: was Dick Middleton's widow. Everyone calls her Missus Klingler. Her
Speaker 1: husband died not long ago, and I think she felt
Speaker 1: it was time to speak out. We met at a
Speaker 1: barbe restaurant in downtown Birmingham, sat upstairs. So he's a
Speaker 1: police officer at a time when Birmingham is obviously going
Speaker 1: through some very tumultuous times. Can you tell me about that?
Speaker 1: The first that was the first ten years i'd still
Speaker 1: learned to speak English. I didn't really know what's going on.
Speaker 1: I didn't understand what's going on. Missus Klingler was from Germany.
Speaker 1: She met Richard when he was stationed there with the army.
Speaker 1: She says, what happened on that spring day in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty three was like a shadow over her husband. He
Speaker 1: went to work and come home and enjoy the family.
Speaker 1: But I knew something is going on. You know. Then
Speaker 1: later on you see the picture in the paper. He
Speaker 1: never really discussed it. She had a big book with
Speaker 1: her filled with clippings of her husband's career and other
Speaker 1: photographs from that day in kelly Ingram Park. She wanted
Speaker 1: to set the record straight. Her husband was unfairly vilified.
Speaker 1: He done his job and he was he was spit at,
Speaker 1: he was thrown rocks at, and he did not let
Speaker 1: the guy put the dog toom he was holding the
Speaker 1: leash away from em. If you see other pictures what happened.
Speaker 1: This was not the white picture, This was not the
Speaker 1: stoyed this was not the truth. For the longest time afterwards,
Speaker 1: they got hate mail. So how soon did the letters
Speaker 1: start coming, Just like I'm sure like the next months
Speaker 1: or so when it went all over the world, just
Speaker 1: as ugly as you can imagine. Did he ever talk
Speaker 1: to any journalist or do you know he never gave
Speaker 1: any interviews. He didn't give no interviews because I think
Speaker 1: he felt like what he was portrayed. They would not
Speaker 1: tellt yeah, yeah, No matter what he say, no matter
Speaker 1: what he would do, they would not believe him. All
Speaker 1: they look at the picture, that's all. Do you think
Speaker 1: your husband suffered a thank he has. Yes, there's a
Speaker 1: statue in Kelly Ingram Park of one of the most
Speaker 1: iconic moments in civil rights history, and everyone directly involved
Speaker 1: in that moment thinks it didn't happen that way. Oh Mac,
Speaker 1: what did you do? You said earlier that when you draw,
Speaker 1: you try and inhabit the characters. Yes, and so tell
Speaker 1: me your emotional reactions to that photograph. Well, I saw
Speaker 1: that the boy was maybe about six four, the officers
Speaker 1: maybe five ten, five nine, And I said, this is
Speaker 1: a movement about power. So I made the little boy
Speaker 1: younger and smaller, and the officer taller and stronger. The
Speaker 1: arm of the mall is so strong. That's why his
Speaker 1: arm is almost like strength. And the dog is more
Speaker 1: like a wolf than a real dog. Because if I'm
Speaker 1: a little boy, that's what I was seeing, I would
Speaker 1: see like this super man hovering over me, putting this big, old,
Speaker 1: giant monster of a dog in my groan area, in
Speaker 1: my private area. And so that's what I envision when
Speaker 1: I first saw the photographs, and you changed it. In
Speaker 1: the photograph, I noticed the boy is leaning in, and
Speaker 1: in your sculpture he's leaning back. Tell me about that
Speaker 1: he's leaning back because I wanted to depict him showing
Speaker 1: that I'm not going to fight you. I'm not leaving,
Speaker 1: I'm not moving, I'm standing, but I'm not going to
Speaker 1: fight you. This is a non violent protest. That's why
Speaker 1: his hands are open and it's going back, like do
Speaker 1: whatever you're gonna do. Put the dog on me, beat
Speaker 1: me with the come of whatever you want to do.
Speaker 1: And I saw all of that when I saw the photograph.
Speaker 1: We were in the Tuskegee History Center, a museum on
Speaker 1: Elm Street, not far from the university. It's in what
Speaker 1: looks like an old bank, and it's filled with exhibits
Speaker 1: to the town's extraordinary history, the infamous Tuskegee Selfless Study,
Speaker 1: the Tuskegee Airman, Rosa Parks, Tuskegee native. McDowell's work was
Speaker 1: all over the walls. He took me on a little tour.
Speaker 1: Then we sat down and he took out his portfolio.
Speaker 1: Here's the natural Those glasses are like Wait, are the
Speaker 1: glasses the same? Did you make the glasses bigger too? Yeah? Good, bigger.
Speaker 1: Mac is a whole section on the statue, preliminary drawings, sketches, photographs,
Speaker 1: So he's almost like a blind officer. He doesn't even
Speaker 1: think again because he's so far beyond that killed this nigger,
Speaker 1: attacked this nigger. He's so past the reality of this
Speaker 1: is a human, innocent, human child, human being. That's why
Speaker 1: he was wearing blind people glass. That is so interesting
Speaker 1: because when you see that, that's the thing I couldn't
Speaker 1: put my finger on. The officer is behaving as if
Speaker 1: he's blind. The dog is attacking. He doesn't even see
Speaker 1: the boy. You're the first person. I'm telling them too.
Speaker 1: That's so interesting. See how vicious the dog with Oh my,
Speaker 1: that's a wolf. I did the hair with a I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't have to, I don't. I didn't know what
Speaker 1: instruments to use. I did all this with a pencil,
Speaker 1: pencil the hairs, and I do the teeth like that,
Speaker 1: and oh look at the teeth. I did that on purpose.
Speaker 1: The curved Oh yeah, because if you have a curve tooth,
Speaker 1: like when you see those those um world wolf pictures,
Speaker 1: the teeth, the curve because once there's like a snake
Speaker 1: when he bites you, if he doesn't retrack and he's
Speaker 1: gonna rip, it's not going in coming out. When it
Speaker 1: comes out, he's gonna rip flesh. When you're face to
Speaker 1: face with the statue. It has historical authority. It's in
Speaker 1: the shadow of sixteen Street Baptist Church inside kelly Ingram
Speaker 1: Park at the actual site of the Birmingham Marches. But
Speaker 1: it's a work of imagination. It's not a literal representation.
Speaker 1: It's art. We are there other details that I mean
Speaker 1: you were saying you there's the blind officer. There's the
Speaker 1: curved teeth on the dog. The officer moved all of
Speaker 1: his anger into the dog, and it's the dog that's
Speaker 1: attacking the war. You know. That's what they do with
Speaker 1: when racism mac made Leo into a wolf and blinded
Speaker 1: Middleton and shrank Walter Gadston until he was tiny and
Speaker 1: helpless because he was telling a story about Birmingham. That's
Speaker 1: what history is. Each side writes their own story, and
Speaker 1: the winner's story is the one we call the truth.
Speaker 1: You don't think white people told their share of whoppers
Speaker 1: over the years in the South. You don't think that
Speaker 1: there's a statue in a Southern town somewhere of a
Speaker 1: champion of the Confederacy that makes a hero of someone
Speaker 1: who was actually a villain. White people got to do
Speaker 1: that in the South for centuries. Foot Soldier is just
Speaker 1: what happens when the people on the bottom finally get
Speaker 1: the power to tell the story their way. It was
Speaker 1: a long time coming. It's a brilliant statue. Thank you,
Speaker 1: a Poorma Hartington. Yeah, there's some you've some mischief in you.
Speaker 1: What do you mean there's a little bit of mischief
Speaker 1: in that in your recreation of that photo, you're you're
Speaker 1: using that opportunity to make a much broader kind of
Speaker 1: subversive point. I'm maybe I went back through Birmingham after
Speaker 1: talking to Mac and Tuskegee, and I went to Kelly
Speaker 1: Ingram Park one last time stood in front of the statue.
Speaker 1: I think everyone who wants to understand the civil rights
Speaker 1: movement should do that because of what it means, the
Speaker 1: hard one reward of a long and costly battle over
Speaker 1: who gets to control the stories that make up history.
Speaker 1: But if you do, just keep in mind that Dick
Speaker 1: Middleton didn't actually sick his dog Leo on Walter Gadsden,
Speaker 1: and that Walter Gadsden wasn't actually a foot soldier for
Speaker 1: civil rights. Mayor Arrington tell me, Marnathan, we did the
Speaker 1: unvail me. He got hundreds of threats about bombing and
Speaker 1: tearing a statue up from all over the world, and
Speaker 1: his response was I'll just get backed into a bigger
Speaker 1: one in a battle run. So they never touched him. Oh,
Speaker 1: he said, if you if you destroy that statue, we're
Speaker 1: coming back bigger. Do you know how many times I
Speaker 1: begged for somebody. I hope somebody blows it out. I
Speaker 1: was like into a bigger one. Revisionist is produced by
Speaker 1: Meil LaBelle and Jacob Smith, with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel,
Speaker 1: and Ciomara Martinez wife. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flawn
Speaker 1: Williams is our engineer. Original music by Luis Guerra. Special
Speaker 1: thanks to Andy Bowers and Jacob Weisberg at Panopley. I'm
Speaker 1: Malcolm Gladwell