King: A Life

by Jonathan Eig

In the midst of the chaos, a fifteen-year-old boy named Walter Gadsden stepped across the street at the corner of Sixteenth Street and Sixth Avenue North, in front of the Jockey Boy Restaurant. He was a high school student who had come to watch the demonstration, not to participate. But as he crossed the street, a police dog lunged at him. Gadsden was not afraid of big dogs—his family owned one, in fact. Instinctively, he raised his left knee in self-defense, connecting with the dog’s chest, but he appeared to remain calm, hands at his side. At the same moment, three more things happened: the white police officer who held the dog’s leash grabbed the front of Gadsden’s cardigan sweater with his right hand; Gadsden’s left hand clasped the police officer’s right wrist; and, perhaps most important, an Associated Press photographer named Bill Hudson snapped a picture. Bull Connor had used the dogs for about thirty minutes, and they had inflicted little damage. Even the fire hoses had caused more havoc than injury. In the century since slavery’s end, Black people in America had endured far worse, but most of it had happened without white witnesses in the news media, without widespread photographic evidence. It was the image of this single encounter—a young Black man under attack by a police dog—that appeared the next day on the front page of The New York Times and in other newspapers across the country. The photo shook the world and crystallized the message King and others had b...