While Selma was happening I was packing for Vietnam, a paratroop/grunt in the famous 101st Airborne Division, armed with a dictionary & a camera.  While in Special Forces training in North Carolina, I witnessed some of the roots of the Civil Rights Movement in Chapel Hill.

 

I singed my first Freedom Song in the First Baptist Church.  The spirit was willing but the flesh was consigned to the U.S. Army (and the only war dumber than Iraq) until February 1966.  I immediately began photographing the movement events on my turf, (the left coast), until Dr. Martin Luther King’s death, at which point I dropped everything and flew to Memphis, for Newsweek, et al.

 

I covered the funeral in Atlanta, thence to Marks, Mississippi, the poorest county in the U. S.  For the next 3 months I ‘embedded’ with the Poor Peoples Campaign, Dr. King’s next political initiative.  Stalked through woods by the KKK, saved by the FBI, chased from Mississippi. *

 

The Funeral image is in the permanent collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego.

 

*    (For ever-after the “Just Driving Thru, Officer.” State).