Spider Martin: Image and Activism

Media coverage and public awareness of alleged police brutality has drastically changed in the era of YouTube and Twitter. During the Civil Rights Movement, only journalists sent by publications to cover racial unrest could widely disseminate images from demonstrations like the Selma to Montgomery March. Alabama native Spider Martin was one of those journalists. The Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas in Austin acquired Mr. Martin’s archive, including more than 1,000 images shot in and around Selma, which lead to our collaborative publication, Selma 1965: The Photographs of Spider Martin. We asked Ahmad Ty-ke Ward, the Head of Education at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, to comment on Spider Martin's significance and how the power to engage in this kind of activism is now in the public's hands.

Spider Martin: Image and Activism

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By Ahmad Ty-ke Ward, Head of Education at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute

The Selma to Montgomery March was a landmark event in American history which ultimately led to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In February of 1965, twenty-seven-year-old Jimmy Lee Jackson, demonstrating with his family for the right to vote, was fatally injured in Marion (Perry County), Alabama. Jackson had placed his body between his mother and a state trooper’s club and was shot in his abdomen. His death galvanized groups like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Active in voter registration efforts in the Black Belt, these groups decided to stage the largest demonstration on behalf of equal voting rights for African Americans in history—a march from the Dallas County seat, Selma, to the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery, a distance of fifty-four miles.

James “Spider” Martin, a native of Wylam, Alabama, and an up-and-coming photographer with the Birmingham News, was sent down to Selma to cover Jackson’s death. Martin had cut his teeth on civil rights coverage during the events that happened in Birmingham in 1963. Even with that background, he could have no idea how instrumental his work would be to the Selma movement. With his camera, Spider Martin would serve as recorder, witness and moral compass for the rest of the country trying to make sense of the situation unfolding in Alabama.

“Dr. King told me the reason they were marching and protesting in Alabama was because of George Wallace, Bull Connor, Sheriff Jim Clark and Al Lingo. They all fell into the plan. Dr. King said we could march and protest in Chicago and nobody would care. But in Alabama . . .”

—Spider Martin