Mario Tama: The Picture From Birmingham

I’ve been speaking with Mario Tama, the fine Getty photographer and friend of BNN who is tracking the election from Alabama. Following yesterday’s image here of college students retracing the “Bloody Sunday” march across the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Mario forwarded this photo from Birmingham.

Eighty-five year old Civil Rights leader James Armstrong participated with Martin Luther King in the Bloody Sunday march and was arrested six times during various civil rights protests in the 1960’s. His children, Dwight and Floyd, were the first African-Americans to integrate Graymont Elementary School in Birmingham in 1963, five days before a bomb killed four girls at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

Reflecting on Obama’s potential election, we see Armstrong sitting in his barber shop (reminiscent of a historical museum) where he cut Dr. King’s hair.

(image: ©Mario Tama/Getty. October 31, 2008. Birmingham, AL)