before we begin a warning this episode contains material that may be upsetting to some listeners not long ago I drove from Atlanta Georgia to Birmingham Alabama it's a straight shot West on I-20 150 miles of Rolling Hills and Piney Woods I got off the freeway on the downtown exit just before what the locals call the malfunction junction and drove a few blocks south until I came to Kelly Ingram Park which covers a full City Block right in front of a 16th Street Baptist Church I wanted to see a statue that stands in the park a
famous statue I've always loved statues I find them moving don't know why maybe it's because they're a representation of something that we have chosen to take seriously to memorialize in a permanent form with a statue you're saying to the Future this is what I want you to remember about my generation [Music] the statue I came to see is at one end of Kelly Ingram Park it's of a police officer big guy menacing heavy pair of sunglasses he is a dog on a leash a big German Shepherd and the dog is lunging huge fangs bear to
the young black boy who's leaning back hands to his sides almost like he's sacrificing himself it's called foot soldier it looks simple but that statue is not what you think trust me [Music] my name is Malcolm Gladwell you're listening to revisionist history my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood episode is the second in what are going to be a few episodes this season on race and civil rights [Music] on race in the United States I'm an outsider I'm Canadian my family is half West Indian which is a very different cultural experience than being an African-American
my mom had a friend a Jamaican Who Went Down to Georgia once in the 1970s when she came back she said the racism there cut Like a Knife I couldn't have been more than eight or nine and that phrase startled me it seems so visceral but then I moved to the us as an adult and it seemed like the way race was discussed didn't cut like a knife at all [Music] what I saw around race in the United States was Invasion and euphemism the subject of my last episode was the brown decision for half a
century the integration story has been told with all the suffering taken out why is it really necessary that every Grand civil rights narrative be turned into a fairy tale which brings me to Kelly Ingram Park and its statue of the police officer and the dog and the boy there's a nice and tidy story you can tell about that statue but the real story is much different last summer I got a call from a man who was friends with the Widow of the police officer depicted in that statue I'd written about the officer and the dog
in my book David and Goliath but she wanted to tell me the rest of the story so I met with her then I went back to Birmingham a second time to look for the boy in the Statue and then a third time to Tuskegee two hours south of Birmingham and there on a long Lazy Afternoon I sat in the town museum with an artist named Ronald McDowell me and James Brown Ronald McDowell is an extraordinary man spidery and fine featured he showed me his portfolio and told me in his urgent confessional whisper about how he
was once walking down Sunset Boulevard years ago and ran into Louis Armstrong's nephew who took him to see Michael Jackson who wanted McDowell to teach him art which led intern to McDowell helping out on the album Thriller yeah I did the sketches for Michael on Thriller oh wow I was trying to make him into a black Superman and on the back of this piece of paper is a drawing Michael did for me when we were working on Trump that's Michael's artwork why not he did several pieces for me Richard Arrington who was the first black
mayor of Birmingham used to call Ron McDowell Mack which suits him perfectly he has an air of Mischief about him which we'll get to that's pictures of me and Johnny Cochran Spike Lee Natalie Cole that's in the state capital the first African-American painting hanging in the state of Alabama Governor siegelman commissioned me to do that Mack did the statue in Kelly Ingram Park he's the one responsible [Music] Birmingham is a strange and beautiful place it was a steel town like Pittsburgh was and at the height of the steel industry there was a lot of money
there there's an enormous Hill on the south side of town Mountain Brook with a gorgeous Country Club and graceful pre-war homes that's the wealthy white part of Birmingham down the hill is the other Birmingham where blacks and whites lived in uneasy proximity they used to call Birmingham the Johannesburg of the South or bombing him because bombs with a weapon of choice for white supremacists who wanted to keep black people in their place there's an old joke from that period that tells you all you really need to know a black man in Chicago wakes up one
morning and tells his wife that Jesus had come to him in a dream and told him to go to Birmingham his wife is horrified did Jesus say he'd go with you the husband replies he said it go as far as Memphis [Music] Birmingham was where Martin Luther King staged one of the most dramatic protests of the Civil Rights Movement and King chose Birmingham for a good reason he wanted to strike at the symbol of racial oppression to get ordinary Americans to understand just how bad things were for black people in the south so through the
long spring of 1963 King and his people organized sit-ins to protest segregation then boycotts then marches they called it project C for confrontation they were trying to provoke the Birmingham chief of police a troglodyte named Bill Connor into doing something so outrageous that it would turn the tide of public opinion in their favor and that's exactly what happened May 3rd 1963 King's people started 16th Street Baptist Church right next to Kelly Ingram Park they come out in waves marching alongside the park and then continuing on through downtown Birmingham there are huge crowds tons of police
in the middle of everything a photographer named Bill Hudson takes a picture of a white police officer with dark sunglasses and a big German Shepherd the dog is lunging at a young black teenager the next day the New York Times publishes the photograph above the fold across three columns on the front page of its weekend paper as does basically every other major newspaper in the country President Kennedy is asked about the photo and he's appalled the secretary of state says it will quote embarrass our friends abroad and make our enemies joyful it's discussed on the
floor of Congress editorials are written people have debates about it it's exactly what king wants something to show the rest of the world just how bad things are in the south and the tide turns a year later Congress passes the Civil Rights Act one of the most important pieces of legislation in the history of the United States the Civil Rights Act people always say was written in Birmingham [Music] is now a shrine to the events of 1963. the first black mayor of Birmingham Richard Arrington takes office in 1979 and decides to fill this little patch
of history with sculptures that tell the story of the movement he commissions one of Martin Luther King another of Fred Shuttlesworth who was a key leader of the Birmingham protests it is one of the four little girls killed when white supremacists bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in September of 1963. finally Arrington turns to the photo the famous photo for one final statue and he calls up Mac McDowell who has moved out to Tuskegee from California and transformed himself into a kind of house artist for the Civil Rights Movement he said I got to get
a statue done right because the people that marched in the movement are complaining about the children don't look like them the children had white features with black hair and they were a lot of complaints and he said I need you to do a a design of this image this photograph of this boy and this police officer and the dog attacking him the other artists with sculptures in Kelly Ingram Park are big names white men with impressive resumes Mac a kid from the projects of Oakland entirely self-taught he had in fact never done a sculpture before
a detail that he conveniently failed to tell Richard Arrington the mayor just wants mac to do some sketches provide a guide this look on his face was a look of frustration like nobody's doing what I want they're not getting it none of the sculptures and I was like I can't say no to him because he's powerful he's a great Oz you know of Birmingham the next thing you know Max doing the whole thing and I started sculpting in and three hours later I was complete and I took it to Arrington about I wanted to think
I did it so quick so I'm waiting a week and took it to him and he said you got the commission how much and so the rest is history it was unveiled in a special ceremony in May 1995. it's called foot soldier because that was a term used to describe the people who marched in Martin Luther King's Army on a statue's granite base it reads this sculpture is dedicated to the foot soldiers of the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement on a little plaque next to it is the famous photo on which the statue is based if
you want to see a picture of it we have one up on revisionist history.com [Music] see it was Stevie Wonder's and Emmett Till's mother and what I didn't know at the time I did the Statue when you're doing bronze you have to smooth everything because I was untrained I didn't smooth the Rocks so Steven was filling the rocks and he cut his hand and one of the men in the Parks was there and he told me he said I'm getting blood in my hand because Stevie Wonder did I was like oh my God it's almost
it's almost it's almost biblical it's almost like he's blessing the park with his blood yeah Stevie got cut on those rocks foot soldier is the most powerful sculpture in Kelly Ingram Park nothing else comes close and maybe that's where the trouble starts the name of the police officer in the photograph was Richard Middleton everyone called him dick his best friend on the force was Bobby Hayes big guy lives near a golf course outside Birmingham must be in his 80s by now Hayes and Middleton started as police officers in Birmingham right at the moment when the
Civil Rights Movement was asserting itself the police department was all white and all male back then but in the streets the balance of power was shifting when integration came to the Birmingham school system Hayes remembers it as bewildering if you were a cop nobody really liked you because we were carrying the black kids in the school that's what we were ordered to do and they were going to get in that's just the way it was we had no choice the black people didn't like you because you were a policeman the white people didn't like you
because you're protecting the black kids and caring the men where the crowd the goofies didn't want them to go in 1963 King's protest campaign was headquartered in 16th Street Baptist Church which is an old red brick building on the northwest corner of Kelly Ingram Park the protesters would come out in the late afternoon March around the park on their way downtown they were trained in non-violence marched according to a strict schedule it was a military operation crowds of people would gather to see the spectacle the police were supposed to keep the protesters and the crowd
apart protests get bigger and bigger the crowds get bigger and bigger it's late spring so it's starting to get really hot the police chief Bill Connor starts locking up everyone he can then Connor says to hell with it bring in the dogs of course there's a lot of noise a lot a lot of tension in the air a lot of people yelling and screaming bricks started coming in you know throwing bricks it it got to be a really ugly fight real quick real quick dick Middleton the cop in the photo was a member of the
city's K-9 unit he had a German Shepherd named Leo he and the other members of the Tactical Unit were posted behind a barricade a row of wooden saw horses running parallel to the curb there's a line of cops and dogs in a kind of no man's land between the bystanders and the protesters he was inside the barricade the the crowd was on the other side and they were taunting the police and and of course all we could do is just stand at the police all they do just stand there at that time dick was well
back the way he told me he was 10 yards maybe back of the barricades and the guy came around the barricade so here we have a foot soldier in the middle of all the Mayhem cutting through the No Man's Land towards the sidewalk and Middleton's German Shepherd Leo lunges at him that's the moment Bill Hudson captures in his famous photograph and Ron McDowell captures in his statue the confrontation between the innocent foot soldier and the snarling face of racial oppression Bill Hudson's editor says later that he picked that particular photo out of the many taken
that day because he was riveted by the saintly calm of the young man and the snarling jaws of the German Shepherd [Music] here's where the story starts to get complicated this is an interview today Saturday May 25th 1996 at the Birmingham Showbox Institute with Mr Walter Gaston of Atlanta Georgia okay how did you get involved in the Civil Rights Movement now that's that's one thing that uh I always have a problem with I never did get involved with the Civil Rights Movement Walter Gadsden is the boy in the photograph the one bitten by Leo he's
a mysterious figure he was interviewed at the time of the photograph by Jet Magazine back in 1963 but only briefly from time to time other people have come forward to say that they were the one in the photograph not Gadsden but those claims seem dubious meanwhile Gadsden disappears people try and find him and can't all that seems to exist is this oral history that you're hearing done in honor of the unveiling of Ron McDowell's statue and the interview is strange because it doesn't go the way the interviewer thinks it's going to go he starts with
the obvious question you were a foot soldier tell me how that came about and he says I wasn't a foot soldier but the fact is the day of that movement I was supposed to have been in school but a friend of mine or acquaintance of mine had told me that earlier that Martin Luther King was in town that day and he was going to uh be there and I said I wanted to be there too I wanted to come and find out what it was all about Walter Gadsden is a bystander the famous statue in
Kelly Ingram Park foot soldier is not in fact of a foot soldier it gets stranger okay and when you left school where did you come downtown uh to uh the Park area the Kelly Ingram Park over there so we started walking toward the activity and as I approached and got closer they turned and moved with me and I saw them coming toward me so I've turned to leave he was walking down the street with the protesters coming towards him so he veers off to get out of their way and rejoin the spectators on the sidewalk
ducks in behind the row of saw horses where he runs into officer Middleton and Leo so as I turned and started to walk away I was Grand and the rest of it I am not a policeman grabbed by the policeman and yank toward him is that when the dog bits you and the dog bites I can remember that that happened simultaneously the the policeman grabbed me I don't remember what hand but the dog the gray at me with one hand it happened so fast there was nothing I could do he said throw a leg and
try to protect myself and as I was doing that out there I went yeah if you look at the famous photo gadsden's explanation makes sense Leo is lunging the bite is a millisecond away but Gadsden and Middleton just looked startled the way people do if they unexpectedly bump into each other Gaston has his knee up as a reflex and his hand on Middleton as if to steady himself Middleton has one hand on Gadsden and his other arm is flexed he's yanking back on the leash Leo has freaked out and he's trying to restrain him Leo
whoa Middleton's colleague Bobby Hayes made the same point to me Middleton's not letting Leo lose on Gadsden quite the opposite if you look at the picture you can tell he's holding the dog back but the Lion's talk the dog's feet are in the air the best I recall and dick got him here he's holding that line he's not going to invite that guy laughs now what does Gadsden say about all this does he think he's been the victim of police brutality not at all in fact he can't seem to understand why everyone makes such a
big deal out of what happened to him that day how does your family members react to your participation well they were angry because I didn't attend school that day he appears in an image that transfixed the world and his parents are mad that he skipped school the interviewer then tries to get at gadsden's connections to the struggle for civil rights okay well the church where your parents or your family members were attending were they involved in the civil rights movement during that time do you know they never told me of it what benefits do you
uh your family in the community realize as a result of that movement none in answer to the question what benefits did your family receive from the Civil Rights Movement he answers none he's not having any of it gadsden's interview in fact just gets weirder okay if you were in control of an organization or a movement of such and could go back and change some things what would you change okay the things that I would change would be a more careful choice of people involved in all of those movements there are too many uh well the
bee just blood crooked people [Music] many of the people that were involved and and had notarized it became too crooked the most famous photograph of the Civil Rights Movement is of a startled cop trying desperately to hold his dog back from biting a bystander who wasn't that much of a fan of the Civil Rights Movement I'm wondering still why me because I've never had any notoriety whatsoever concerning that picture that picture was in the paper of many other people were too yes many other situations versus bombing yes but they chose to use the little boy
at 15 of that statue the little boy in eve were not the little boy's eyes are you surprised when you found out about it I was totally flabbergasted I don't know who it to be and gadsden's Main objection he's light-skinned he says the statue makes him look dark-skinned that statue doesn't look like me it looks like a totally different boy that looks like an African boy it looks like an African boy [Music] uh the color are the features the features the lips the size you take a look at the picture there and the statue there
the boys short I was tall with my age if you listen to the whole interview it nearly goes off the rails at this point the interviewer expected to find a heroic civil rights veteran instead she's getting a grumpy old man still wedded to some of the oldest and most awkward of black prejudices we're very proud of it and I hope you will be too and now that we know who you are we can add a name under there but you will be avoid that this company used well I'm still wondering why after all the information
that I had given and and and all of that uh all that does established me as being a young African boy which I'm not you prefer being called a negro I prefer being called what I am a colored oh oh you prefer you weren't colored I am good okay okay [Music] euphemism and evasion at the beginning I said that what I object to is the way so many stories about race get cleaned up sanitized so the brown decision becomes a fairy tale in which black people Triumph without effort well here's the flip side when we
stop evading and just listen it gets complicated our hero Walter Gadsden isn't all that heroic as for the bad guy the officer his colleague Bobby Hayes says he wasn't a bad guy did Officer Hayes tell me things that surprised me and did listening to Walter Gadsden shock me absolutely because I'm no different from anyone else I like the fairy tale so the person who invited me down to Birmingham in the first place was Dick Middleton's Widow everyone calls her Mrs Klingler her husband died not long ago and I think she felt it was time to
speak out we met at a barbecue restaurant in downtown Birmingham sat upstairs so he's a police officer at a time when Birmingham is obviously going through some very tumultuous times can you tell me about that the first that was the first 10 years I still learning to speak English I didn't really know what's going on I didn't understand what's going on Mrs Klingler was from Germany she met Richard when he was stationed there with the Army she says what happened on that spring day in 1963 was like a shadow over her husband he went to
work and come home and enjoyed a family uh but I knew something is going on you know then later on you see the picture in the paper oh he never really discussed it she had a big book with her filled with clippings of her husband's career and other photographs from that day in Kelly Ingram Park she wanted to set the record straight her husband was unfairly vilified he done his job he was shaped at he was throwing rocks at and he did not let the guy put the dog tomb he was holding the leaves away
from him if you see other pictures what happened this was not the right picture this was not Disturbed this was not the truth for the longest time afterwards they got hate mail so how soon did the letter start coming just like I'm sure that the next months or so when it went all over the world just as ugly as you can imagine yeah did he ever talk to any journalist or do you know no he never gave any interviews he didn't give no interviews because I think he felt like what he was betrayed as they
would not tell the truth yeah yeah no matter what he say no matter what he would do they would not believe him only look at the picture that's all do you think your husband suffered I think he has yes there's a statue in Kelly Ingram Park of one of the most iconic moments in civil rights history and everyone directly involved in that moment thinks it didn't happen that way oh Mac what did you do you said earlier that when you draw you try and inhabit the characters yes so tell me your emotional reactions to that
photograph well I saw that the boy was maybe about six four the officers maybe five ten five nine and I said this is a movement about power so I make the little boy younger and smaller and officer taller and stronger the arm of the law is so strong that's why his arm is almost like strength and the dog is more like a wolf than a real dog because if I'm a little boy that's what I was seeing I would see like this super man hovering over me putting this big old giant monster of a dog
in my groin area in my private area and so that's what I envisioned when I first saw the photographs and you changed it in the photograph I noticed the boy is leaning in and in your sculpture he's leaning back tell me about that he's leaning back because I wanted to depict him showing that I'm not going to fight you I'm not leaving I'm not moving I'm standing but I'm not going to fight you this is a non-violent protest that's why his hands are open and he's going back like do whatever you're going to do put
the dog on me beat me with the color whatever you want to do and I saw all of that when I saw the photograph we were in the Tuskegee History Center a museum on Elm Street not far from the University it's in what looks like an old bank and it's filled with exhibits to the town's extraordinary history the infamous Tuskegee selfless study the Tuskegee Airmen Rosa Parks Tuskegee native McDowell's work was all over the walls he took me on a little tour then we sat down and he took out his portfolio hear the statue those
glasses are like wait are the glasses the same are they did you make the glasses bigger too yeah the paper Mac is a whole section on the Statue preliminary drawings sketches photographs so he's almost like a blind officer he doesn't even see the kid because he's so far beyond that killed this [ __ ] attacked this [ __ ] he sold past the reality of this is a innocent human child a human being that's why he's wearing blind people glasses that is so interesting because when you see the that's the thing I couldn't put my
finger on the officer is behaving as if he's blind the dog is attacking he doesn't even see the boy you're the first person I told them to that's so interesting see how vicious the dog looks oh my I was a wolf I did the hair with a I don't have I only I didn't know what instruments to use I did all this with a pencil pencil in the hairs and I just do the teeth like that and oh look at the teeth I did that on purpose it curved oh yeah because if you have a
curved too like if you see those those um werewolf pictures the teeth the curved because once there's like a snake when he bites you if he doesn't retract him he's gonna rip it's not going in coming out when it comes out he's gonna rip flesh when you're face to face with a statue it has historical Authority it's in the shadow of 16th Street Baptist Church inside Kelly Ingram Park at the actual site of the Birmingham marches but it's a work of imagination it's not a literal representation it's art wait are there other details that I
mean you were saying you there is the blind officer there's the curved teeth on the dog see the officer moved all of his anger into the doll and it's the dog that's attacking you know that's what they're doing with racism Mac Made Leo into a wolf and blinded Middleton and shrank Walter Gadsden until he was Tiny and helpless because he was telling a story about Birmingham that's what history is each side writes their own story and the winner story is the one we call the truth you don't think white people told their share of Whoppers
over the years in the south you don't think that there's a statue in a southern town somewhere of a champion of the Confederacy that makes a hero of someone who's actually a villain white people got to do that in the South for centuries foot soldier is just what happens when the people on the bottom finally get the power to tell the story their way it was a long time coming it's a brilliant statue thank you I pour my heart into it yeah there's some you have some Mischief in you what do you mean there's a
little bit of Mischief in that in your Recreation of that photo you're you are using that opportunity to make a much broader kind of subversive point I'm maybe I went back through Birmingham after talking to Mack and Tuskegee and I went to Kelly Ingram Park One Last Time stood in front of the statue I think everyone who wants to understand the Civil Rights Movement should do that because of what it means the hard one reward of a long and costly battle over who gets to control the stories that make up history but if you do
just keep in mind that dick Middleton didn't actually sick his dog Leo on Walter Gadsden and that Walter Gadsden wasn't actually a foot soldier for civil rights mayor Arrington told me run after we did to unveil me he got hundreds of threats about bombing and tearing a statue up from all over the world and his real his response was I'll just get Max into a bigger one in a better one so they never touched it oh he said if you if you destroy that statue we're coming back bigger do you know how many times I
begged for somebody I hope somebody below said that I was talking to a bigger one [Music] revisionist history is produced by Mia LaBelle and Jacob Smith with Camille Baptista Stephanie Daniel and siamara Martinez white our editor is Julia Barton flan Williams is our engineer original music by Luis Guerra special thanks to Andy Bowers and Jacob Weisberg at pennantly I'm Malcolm Gladwell foreign [Music]
