Photos the Twitter of Past Revolutions

Twitter and Facebook may be the civil uprising tools du jour, but they certainly weren’t the first. Photography helped bring Southern brutalities to light and sustained the African American Civil Rights movement. For nearly two weeks in early May of 1963, national and international audiences rose each morning to images of violence, confrontation, and resistance splashed across the front pages of their major newspapers. They vividly and visually challenged an entire economic and social regime of power, galvanizing support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “The brutality with which officials would have quelled the black individual became impotent when it could not be pursued with stealth and remain unobserved.”