Talk:Birmingham campaign

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Copyedited by Finetooth (talk) – 19:44, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

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[edit] Images for article

Discussion about adding images for this article here, I hope. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Moni3 (talk • contribs) 15:13, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

Old discussion now archived here. New discussion is here. I've said there that discussion is best conducted here. We can go back there if needed later. Carcharoth (talk) 10:05, 22 December 2007 (UTC)
  • First up, the current image Image:Gaston motel 1963.jpg (should be cropped, really) has a tag saying "it is a work of the United States Federal Government". It is true that it is from an archive maintained by the US governemnt, but that is not the same thing as saying it is a work of the US government. The description page says "CREATOR: Trikosko, Marion S., photographer." and that this is part of the "U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection." (see U.S. News & World Report). It seems to me that this is a collection of news journalism, with one of the photographers being Marion S. Trikosko. The description page also says "RIGHTS INFORMATION: No known restrictions on publication." So we are probably OK there. The tag should be changed though. I'll have a look at that. Carcharoth (talk) 10:05, 22 December 2007 (UTC)
What we need is Commons:Template:PD-USNWR. I'll update the image and tags now. Carcharoth (talk) 12:40, 22 December 2007 (UTC)
It needed cropping, so I did that and uploaded the cropped image to Commons. Now replacing in this article. Carcharoth (talk) 12:52, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Now for your other examples:

You've linked to the temporary files, and the links no longer work (they may have only ever worked for you). You need to quote the Digital ID number and we can go from there. I've linked to what I think are the pictures. Can you confirm if these are the right pictures, please? Carcharoth (talk) 10:25, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

To summarise from the other page, the pictures are all B&W historic images from 1963, showing things related to, or part of, the struggle and campaigns for civil rights in Birmingham, Alabama, USA. The proximate source is the Library of Congress, which holds archives of such images. The original sources fall into three categories:

The last one is easy. It is indeed work by the US government (in this case the National Park Service). Our article says: "The permanent collection of HABS/HAER/HALS is housed at the Library of Congress. As a branch of the U.S. Federal Government, its created works are in the public domain." - so I'll upload that one now for Moni3's article. The others, I'll let others comment on. I think I've unearthed enough information for something definitive to be said. Carcharoth (talk) 11:50, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Carcharoth, thank you very much for helping me out on this. I have an excursion to attend today, but when I get back this evening, I will devote all my attention to the issue of the photos. There are quite famous photos associated with this event not on that list. I just don't know how to get them here. Thanks again.--Moni3 (talk) 12:39, 22 December 2007 (UTC)


The links - sorry for posting the temp links, but the links you provided here are correct. I was actually thinking the 5th photo for the 16th Street Baptist Church.
I have to admit that I am really out to sea when it comes to the terms used for photo copyrights. I don't know which or how many photos to use, or what tags to use on the photos I can use. Does fair use mean I can use them? Must I contact the photography agency to get permission? I already contacted AP Images for some other photos, but they told me I would have to pay $500 for 5 years, and that's not possible. Can they be tagged as historic images that can't be replaced? --Moni3 (talk) 23:53, 22 December 2007 (UTC)
The short answer is that because Wikipedia tries to be as free as possible, it is not a case of getting permissions. The photos have to be completely released, and most newspaper photographers will not do that, so you have to wait for them to fall into the public domain, which takes a long time. There are exceptions, like those news agency photos that were donated to the Library of Congress (such as the Gaston motel explosion one). But most Library of Congress newspaper pictures aren't like that. The only way you will be able to use the photos above (apart from the HABS one, which is free) is under fair use. Yes, {{non-free historic image}} is the right tag to use, but it's not a case of finding lots of pictures and putting that tag on them. They have to be truly irreplaceable and essential to the article. The best way to decide that is to pick the most important one for the article, the most iconic, the most powerful imagery, the one that there is no free equivalent for. In other words, the ones that you can justify the most. What helps in cases like this is to find as many free images as you can find (I've found two more in the LOC archives), and to then see whether the article still needs any more photos. You should, in any case, link to the photos with descriptions, even if you can't use the actual photos themselves. Carcharoth (talk) 00:40, 23 December 2007 (UTC)
In this case, some of the most recognizable photos of the event are indeed iconic. Doing a very quick Google Images search, I've found four of the most famous. Of them, the one that has had the biggest impact in my memory is the second one. Numbers 1, 3 and 4 ran on the front page of The New York Times and The Washington Post. The second one ran in LIFE magazine and may have been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, but I need to confirm that with a source. Because the photos and video of the event actually became part of the event (national reaction to the marches), does that impact how they may potentially be used?
Oh, if they became iconic, then yes. But bear in mind that iconic and historic really, really, means iconic and historic. Think the Che Guevera picture, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, the Apollo pictures of the Earth from the Moon (which are free anyway). Having said that, these pictures are 44 years in the past, so we can make a stab at assessing iconicity and historicness, if you know what I mean. I'd advise you to pick one, two at most, and use those. And only use ones for which there are no free equivalents. There is an iconic picture of Chamberlain waving his piece of paper, but because there is a different, free picture, showing a similar moment, the preference is to show the free one. So if you have a free picture of the water hoses being used, that would be preferable to (say) a Pulitzer Prize-winning one. You should definitely still say in the article that the pictures generated huge media interest worldwide, and a Pulitzer Prize finallist, and still link to all of them. But the ones that actually get used should (as far as possible) be the free ones. Does that make sense? A comparison might help. If this was a book publishing firm with a large budget to spend on photos, you would have no restrictions on the choice or number of photos. But this is not a wealthy publishing company - this is Wikipedia. So we have to do things slightly differently here. Still, I think the house bombing and the memorial march photos do help in the articles I've used them in. I've also downloaded the very hi-res memorial march photo, and am cropping out a free version of the church bombing aftermath. Carcharoth (talk) 01:43, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

I tried a free museum exhibition shot, but it's not having the right effect. You have to peer at the screen to see anything, and even then its not much. I think we will need to upload the iconic fire hoses and police dog images. I'll try and do that tomorrow. Carcharoth (talk) 03:23, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Reset indent. Photo No. 2 was taken by Charles Moore. "This picture of people being pummeled by a liquid battering ram rallied support for the plight of the blacks." That's from the page I linked the photo to. From my source McWhorter, about Photo 3 and Photo 4 (taken by Bill Hudson) it says in the caption for them that they: "shifted international opinion to the side of the civil rights revolution and branded the man responsible for the imagery, Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor as the villain of the era." (photo spread p. 9)

In The Best of LIFE, pp. 38 - 39 show Photo 1 and Photo 2, both by Moore in a section described in the book as "an eloquent and graphic treasury of our times." (Time Inc, 1973) In McWhorter, Moore's and Hudson's reactions to the scene are described graphically. Moore, a former marine combat photographer was "jarred" and "sickened" by what he saw, and was hit in the ankle by a brick meant to hit the police from the crowd. Hudson said his only priorities in the melee were "making pictures and staying alive," and "not getting bit by a dog." Of Photo 4: the man getting bit by the dog is Walter Gadsden, a high school senior from Parker High School. He stepped out in front of Hudson, the officer grabbed Gadsden's sweater, the dog lunged, and Bull Connor chastised the officer for not bringing a meaner dog.

"Moore sensed (the film he shot that was on its way to New York) was likely to obliterate in the national psyche any notion of a 'good southerner.' The first shot he had gotten that day would grace the double-truck opening of Life's spread - firemen thrusting their hose in a common purpose that recalled another era-defining picture, of the Marines planting the American flag at Iwo Jima...The headline would be 'They Fight a Fire That Won't Go Out.' The dogs and fire houses dominated the evening news. The scene had been a cameraman's dream...(Huntley-Brinkley reporter) R.W. "Johnny" Apple Jr. would maintain that none of the many war zones he covered upset or frightened him as much Birmingham....Some of Hudson's hose-spray shots captured the "fair atmosphere" he had discerned before the K-9 Corps was called out. but one of them - the saintly calm of young Walter Gadsden in the snarling jaws of the German shepherd (Photo 4) - gave (AP Atlanta editor) Jim Laxon the same surge he had felt when he processed his first Pulitzer Prize winner, a shot of a woman jumping from an upper story window in Atlanta's Winecoff Hotel fire of December 1946."(McWhorter, pp 370-374)

Hudson's photo of Walter Gadsden ran across three columns above the fold in The New York Times on May 4, 1963. The K-9 Corps of Birmingham took its mystical place next to the bloodhounds chasing Eliza across the ice floes in Uncle Tom's Cabin.

(I swear I didn't make up that bit about Iwo Jima.) I feel like the best photos that have the most documentation of the most impact of the day are Photo 2 and Photo 4. --Moni3 (talk) 04:01, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

You've more than convinced me! :-) I'll try and upload those two later today and sort out non-free use rationales based on what you've said, unless you want to try doing that yourself. I'll probably do this in about 6-9 hours (it's Christmas shopping time here...). Carcharoth (talk) 11:45, 23 December 2007 (UTC)
If you load the photos and get the tags in order, I can add to their summaries the information here, complete with pretty citations. I really do appreciate your help very much. I also need to get the mall. I am lax in yule preparedness. Good luck. --Moni3 (talk) 14:11, 23 December 2007 (UTC)
Pictures uploaded and tagged and placed in the article. Looking forward to seeing how they can be integrated into the text. Very happy to help out here, do let me know if I can help on any other articles. Carcharoth (talk) 22:15, 23 December 2007 (UTC)
1. You are awesome. 2. I shifted one to the top of the page because it needed something up there. The infobox for an historical event made the picture small and the caption font large - I didn't like the way it looked. I may delete the infobox altogether. --Moni3 (talk) 00:36, 24 December 2007 (UTC)
Removing the infobox is fine - they are seriously over-rated. Often a good picture and lead section is better. Sometimes the infobox can be placed lower down if it will help some people. Oh, and you are awesome as well, and more so! :-) I've just read the Images of the day section, and it is a classic example of meeting all the criteria for using non-free content. If you don't mind, I'm going to note this over at WT:NFCC - we need more examples like this. Carcharoth (talk) 11:15, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Church photo ready

See Image:321037pv cropped.JPG. I'll put it in the article. Carcharoth (talk) 12:14, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

I added it, but didn't realise it was not strictly part of the campaign. So I've added it to the bombing and church articles instead. Carcharoth (talk) 12:27, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Two more photos

The other two photos I found are not strictly central to this article, but I'll note them here in case you find a use for them.

  • (1) Image:03194v cropped.jpg: "Group of African Americans viewing the bomb-damaged home of Arthur Shores, NAACP attorney, Birmingham, Alabama" (5 September 1963) - see ppmsca 03194 - we don't have an article on Arthur Shores, but maybe we should? See his New York Time obituary from 1996.
  • (2) Image:04298v cropped.JPG: "Congress of Racial Equality conducts march in memory of Negro youngsters killed in Birmingham bombings, All Souls Church, 16th Street, Wash[ington], D.C." (22 September 1963) - see ppmsca 04298 - more the after effects, and more relevant to the articles about the bombings, but still, could be useful

I'll go and upload those now. Carcharoth (talk) 00:54, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Copyeditor's comments

Hi Moni3, I added an LoCE in-use tag to the top of the article a few moments ago, and I'm beginning my copyedit. If I get stuck or have questions, I'll post more comments here. Finetooth (talk) 18:57, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Thank you. I'm around and should be able to answer fairly quickly. --Moni3 (talk) 19:13, 22 January 2008 (UTC)
I'm watching as you go, and I have one comment so far. In the Commissioner of Public Safety Section, Klan members beat Freedom Riders in 1961. There is some speculation that the police department worked with the Klan to coincide the arrival of police 15 minutes after the riders announced when they would arrive in the bus station. For those 15 minutes, Klan members beat the Freedom Riders, with the knowledge of the police. So Connor did order police to intervene, but deliberately late. --Moni3 (talk) 21:25, 22 January 2008 (UTC)
I will go back to that tomorrow. Right now, my eyes have had it, and I need to get some sleep. I have been pretty heavy-handed in my editing, especially in re-writing the lead. I started to work on it at the beginning of my edit, then moved to the rest of the article before coming back to the lead. I thought its long paragraphs really needed to be broken up a bit and re-cast. I tried not to alter the sense of the original as I went, though I removed a few entire sentences and a couple of ideas. I removed Gandhi, for example, because he was mentioned in the lead but nowhere else. That violates MOS since the lead is to be a summary of the article proper, and I thought since you hadn't pursued the Gandhi idea, it probably would not be missed. You may notice other missing things or things not reasonably rearranged, and I'm sure it's not possible that I caught everything or that every one of my choices was spot on. I'll sleep on this and come back tomorrow for another shorter visit and perhaps catch the things I missed on the first round. We can discuss anything about the article at all. My changes aren't precious to me, and I mean them as suggestions rather than anything set in concrete. By the way, this is a most interesting article about a most interesting topic. Finetooth (talk) 05:04, 23 January 2008 (UTC)
Well, no lie. I'm impressed. I thought it would take you two hours at the most. You put quite a lot of time into it. I appreciate it very much! --Moni3 (talk) 13:03, 23 January 2008 (UTC)
Hi again. I'm almost done with my second run-through. In the "After the campaign" section, I see a sentence that says, "By July, the desegregation laws were overturned, and some of the lunch counters in department stores complied with the new rules." The sense of this doesn't quite seem to fit the rest of the paragraph, and I'm wondering if the word "desegregation" really should be "segregation"? Finetooth (talk) 19:21, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

<undent>I think that's it except for the question noted above. I'm going to sign off on the LoCE copyediting form, and a proofreader may come along after me to look things over with a fresh set of eyes. Please post messages here or on my talk page if you have questions or comments. Good luck with the continuing process at FAC. Finetooth (talk) 19:43, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

I think Dystopos did that quick edit (thank you) before I could. Thank you again, Finetooth. --Moni3 (talk) 22:48, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] City government

  • I don't have the references on hand to expand/rewrite this section, but the change in government was pushed through by progressive moderates (such as the Young Businessmen's Association) who were hoping that a more progressive government would defuse the escalating tension and (depending on your view) either usher in peaceful progress toward civil rights or help preserve some of the status quo without inviting violence or a showdown with the federal courts. The election proved that a majority citizens were uncomfortable with having the galvanizing personality of Connor in power. Many wanted to proceed as Albany and other cities had done before, quietly and on their own terms. It was in this context that the ministers wrote their open letter to King asking for the demonstrations to be delayed. King responded directly to that request in his Letter from Birmingham Jail. --Dystopos (talk) 21:24, 30 January 2008 (UTC)
I added some detail about this, with sources. --Moni3 (talk) 02:17, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Recent changes by Brucehartford

I'm primarily responsible for expanding this article and bringing it to FA - a very difficult and tedious process. I'm sure you know that anyone may add to the article, but much work is involved in keeping the high quality in featured articles. I would very much like to see it remain FA, so some of the changes you made to the article will have to be compromised. I hope you would consider reading the Featured Article process this article went through, which you can find at the top of the page under "Article Milestones".

  • Please keep "black" consistent throughout the article: lowercase.
  • Please expand the citations for the CMVets website, or use print references. As the citations stand now, they are insufficient. Try WP:CITE. I had to have an editor go through my print, magazine, newspaper and online citations twice to format them correctly.
<Response: I'm not sure if this is the correct way to respond to your comments, if it is not, please tell me how to do so. I am not clear what you mean by "expand the citations for the CMVets website." Please explain what I need to do. Brucehartford (talk) 18:35, 9 March 2008 (UTC)>
It's not usually necessary to provide "<Response:" prior to your comment. My primary concern with the CRMVets page you cited is that it may not be a reliable citation. The author of the text and the date of the text is essential to the citation, per the WP:CITE link I provided. If you did not write it first, who did? If it was originally the city ordinances of Birmingham, the ordinances should be cited instead. --Moni3 (talk) 21:26, 9 March 2008 (UTC)
  • Any term used "in quotes" must have a citation. This is why I removed the passage about keeping blacks "in their place". In fact, the population of Birmingham in 1963 will need a citation.
<Response: Obviously phrases like "in their place" and "southern way of life" are not quotes from specific individuals but rather quotes of common terms in the culture at the time. How should they be indicated if not by quotes? Italics? Brucehartford (talk) 18:55, 9 March 2008 (UTC)>
Articles should be literal to a fault. It's popular historical interpretation - almost common sense - that violence against a minority keeps them afraid and weaker. The article must provide concrete examples of this, however. Nothing can be taken as common perception. --Moni3 (talk) 21:26, 9 March 2008 (UTC)
  • I had, at one point, the incident where Nat King Cole was attacked onstage in the article. However, an FAC editor objected to it, as it seemed an afterthought to the nearly 50 unsolved racially motivated bombings. I removed it again, as well as the grammatically incorrect passage about the individual who was kidnapped by the Klan. Those incidents will need citations.
<Response: I think that it is important to note the use of violence against blacks as a method of maintaining segregation beyond the bombings which were usually targeted at a black who had shown some overt action in regards to civil rights. The Nat King Cole incident is mentioned on his Wikipedia page (though I had never heard the "kidnapping" angle and I tend to distrust it). Since it was mentioned on that Wiki page I assumed that was sufficient attribution, is that not the case? I will add back that info and include citations from outside Wikipedia. But it is not clear to me if you are saying that the CRMVets website can, or cannot, be used as a cited source. Brucehartford (talk) 18:55, 9 March 2008 (UTC)>
If the information is better expanded in the CRMVets website, it may be used. However, if material on the CRMVets site was summarized from other published sources, it's better to use the published source. I understand the point of the editor who requested I remove the information about Nat King Cole. I wonder if information you add regarding violence against blacks maintaining segregation belongs in this article or others about the South before the Civil Rights era. --Moni3 (talk) 21:26, 9 March 2008 (UTC)
  • I removed information about the NAACP being banned from Alabama because once again, it is unsourced. Everything that mentions a statistic, a quote, or any information that may be disputed must be sourced with a reliable and verifiable publication.
<Response: Again I'm a bit confused because there is a Wikipedia article on the topic National Association for the Advancement of Colored People v. Alabama. Is it not sufficient source to simply link to that article? Brucehartford (talk) 18:55, 9 March 2008 (UTC)>
Articles should be verifiable independently from one another. This article stands alone from the September 1963 bombings of the 16th Street Baptist Church as it does from the Selma Marches. Anything claimed in the article as fact, even if it references another article, should be cited. Even if an article is a Featured Article, if it changes quality beyond was was accepted when it was promoted, it can go to Featured Article Review and be demoted unless someone maintains its integrity. I hope you understand my scrutiny. --Moni3 (talk) 21:26, 9 March 2008 (UTC)
  • These changes can be added to the article if they are accurate. If you need assistance with the code, I can provide that. And please understand that I am not trying to keep you from making improvements to the article, but the rules on featured material are very strict. --Moni3 (talk) 14:38, 9 March 2008 (UTC)