"Keeping the dream alive."
Lonnie Bunch - Director of the Smithsonian Institute's new African American Museum of History and Culture.To see a sampling of The Spider Martin Civil Rights Collection go to www.spidermartin.com
Alabama Public Television is currently filming a documentary about the life and times of Spider Martin, to be released in the fall of 2008.He was born James Martin, the eldest son of the eldest son, on April 1, 1939 in Fairfield, Alabama, near the small steel-working town of Wylam. His father was a supervisor, a "salary man" at the steel plant. As the eldest son, Martin was entrusted with the family's oral history, stories from a long line of proud French on his father's side and Scots on his mother's side. Young Jimmy was fascinated by the drama of history in the vivid stories of his ancestors, a fascination that would inspire his later work. Particularly colorful were his great-great grandfather, William T. Martin, a Brigadier General in the Army of Mississippi, and his grandfather, James Lee "Scrappy" Martin, who rode with Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders in Cuba. Also a strong influence was his Grandfather Davidson on his mother's side, who taught Martin to be what he called "a Spartan," hunting and fishing in the woods along the Warrior River.The young Martin inherited the adventurous, "scrappy" spirit of both his grandfathers. Small for his age, the result of several bouts of infant pneumonia, Jimmy Martin often found himself the target of neighborhood bullies. He quickly learned to make up for his stature with resourcefulness, speed, and a resolve to overcome his limitations. It was a lesson that shaped his character and helped him achieve some of his most important work.It also got him into trouble. Once, he opened the school doors to a bull that had wandered into the school yard, just to see what it would do. Unfortunately for Martin, the angry bull went straight for the boys' advisor. Martin's stunt resulted in his expulsion from every high school in the city. He ended up at Hueytown High School where, determined to play football despite his size, Martin's quick, darting moves on the field led a local sports writer to dub him "Spider" and wrote that "Jimmy Martin ran down the field like a spider last night." The nickname Spider quickly stuck and was the name by which he was known ever since.Martin's early life was also influenced by his Aunt Annie, an artist and potter who hand painted china and had the largest kiln in Alabama. She recognized and encouraged the young boy's artistic talent, giving him the official title of "the artist in the family."Spider resolved to live up to the title. At Jacksonville State University, he majored in art and history. His marriage at 19, and fatherhood at 20, temporarily curtailed his college education. But he was soon back in class at the University of Alabama, working the night shift at a local steel plant and weekends.The turning point in his professional life came when he received a fifty-dollar commission to do a drawing of a US Steel office building. Martin took a Polaroid snapshot of the building on which to base the drawing, and when the client saw the snapshot he ordered 100 copies. So Martin bought a second-hand 35 millimeter camera and an enlarger and taught himself photography. Before long, he was working as a freelance photographer, frequently hired by The Birmingham News.The News dispatched Spider on the night of February 18, 1965 to cover the shooting of a young African American named Jimmie Lee Jackson. Jackson was shot by State Troopers after participating in a peaceful protest against discriminatory voter registration practices. In two years, Alabama had moved to the forefront of the civil rights efforts. When Spider later asked the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. why the civil rights leader had chosen to focus on Alabama, King responded, "Alabama offers the best theatre. No other state has Bull Connor, George Wallace, Al Lingo (Director of Alabama state troopers) and Jim Clark (the Dallas County sheriff)." Alabama had become, in the words of King, "the symbol of bitter-end resistance to the civil rights movement in the Deep South." In the aftermath of Jackson's death, however, civil rights leaders became more determined than ever to push their cause. Under the leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and other civil rights groups, a march from Selma to Montgomery was planned to protest Jackson's unjust treatment and the larger issue of voting rights for African-Americans throughout the south. And so, as protest organizers began planning their historic march, Spider Martin began his own journey both professional and personal, during which he compiled what is likely the largest single photographic collection of the civil rights era. Over the next several weeks Spider remained in the area, chronicling the day-to-day events of the Selma campaign, from church rallies and strategy sessions to the marches themselves. On the infamous "Bloody Sunday," when over 600 marchers were violently turned back at Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge by state troopers and sheriff's deputies armed with tear gas and nightsticks, Spider was right in the fray, his camera capturing the shocking spectacle for the world to see. Among the unforgettable images he captured that day were: the determined faces of marchers, dressed in their Sunday best, holding their ground at the bridge; the barricade of bitterness formed by the "public officials"; a masked state trooper attacking John Lewis with a nightstick, fracturing his skull; terrified marchers supporting Amelia Boynton as she falls to the ground; the chaos and the fear and the bloodshed that resulted in the hospitalization of 65 African Americans. Despite violent resistance, the movement was not to be stopped. Two weeks later, Spider Martin joined Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lewis, and 3,000 other determined protesters on their peaceful, four-day march to Montgomery. He and his camera documented the determination and courage of supporters, black and white, as they made the 54-mile march. His photographs appeared in national and international publications: the one-legged man who made the entire journey on crutches; the smiling face of the woman everyone knew as 'Sunshine"; the bloody soles of a marcher sleeping in a field at the end of a long day of walking; the hostile faces of jeering onlookers. Because of his continual presence in and around Selma, Spider was often the target of violence himself, despised by racist whites and public officials whose acts of violence and intimidation he captured for the world to see. His perseverance earned him the respect and admiration of local and national civil rights leaders, including Andrew Young, Amelia Boynton, Martin Luther King, Jr., and John Lewis, who remained a close friend. The success of the Selma to Montgomery March led to the passage just a few months later of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But Spider's work did not end with the triumphant march to Montgomery. Within hours of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s victorious address on the steps of the state capitol, Viola Luizzo, a Detroit housewife returning to Montgomery after driving exhausted marchers back to Selma, was chased down on the highway by a carload of Ku Klux Klan members and shot to death. Spider covered the tense trial of Collie Leroy Wilkins, the Klansman accused of the murder in the small town of Hayneville in Lowndes County. When the judge banned cameras from the courtroom, the resourceful Spider found other ways to record events surrounding the proceedings. His images of the trial - from the cocksure insolence of the defense attorney who virtually dared the all-white jury to find the defendants guilty to the pained resignation of Luizzo's family and supporters - reflect the reality of justice in a small Southern courtroom in the mid-1960's. In what was perhaps fateful irony as well as a testament to Spider's abilities, Alabama Governor George Wallace called upon Spider to serve as his official photographer during the controversial governor's 1968 campaign for President. At first Spider declined the invitation; after all, it was Wallace who had, a few years earlier, ordered much of the violent resistance of which the photographer had been both a target and a witness. But Spider's commitment to documenting history overrode his political differences with the candidate. When Spider received a personal call from the governor, the photographer accepted the assignment. "I told him I wouldn't vote for him," Spider recalls, "but I'd take his pictures - and his money." Spider accompanied the candidate on the campaign trail, recording both official and unofficial moments in the first of Wallace's three national campaigns. With Wallace's death, historians no doubt forged assessments of a man that has been called "the most colorful politician of our century." Spider's significant Wallace campaign collection, which includes many "behind the scenes" photographs, represent important visual documentation of the spirit and character of this important, complex and controversial historical figure in southern and national politics. Spider Martin was a man of justice known for his struggle against racism in Alabama and our nation. He died on April 8, 2003 leaving a legacy of photographs that documented and preserved some of the most defining moments in America's Civil Rights History. The Spider Martin Civil Rights Collection remains well preserved in it's entirety and represents one of the most historically significant collections of the era 1965-1968. It is the goal of The Spider Martin Civil Rights Collection to see that it be permanently housed in The Smithsonian Institute's African American Museum of History and Culture in Washington D.C. To see a sampling of The Spider Martin Civil Rights Collection go to www.spidermartin.com
John Lewis ~ My brother, my friend, my hero.