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Vancouver man makes Time’s top photos

Resident’s picture in 1963 civil rights march hailed as one of most influential of all time

By Tom Vogt, Columbian Science, Military & History Reporter
Published: November 25, 2016, 6:02am
2 Photos
Harry Shambry looks back as a police dog, held by an officer with a billy club, tears his trouser leg during a civil rights march in Birmingham, Ala., on May 3, 1963. Police officers used both dogs and firehoses to break up the non-violent demonstration. Shambry, an Alabama native who moved to the Northwest in 1968, died in 2011.
Harry Shambry looks back as a police dog, held by an officer with a billy club, tears his trouser leg during a civil rights march in Birmingham, Ala., on May 3, 1963. Police officers used both dogs and firehoses to break up the non-violent demonstration. Shambry, an Alabama native who moved to the Northwest in 1968, died in 2011. (Charles Moore Getty Images) Photo Gallery

A Vancouver resident knew that a photograph taken of him in 1963 affected the course of the civil rights movement.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. told him so.

Now there is another testament to the significance of that photograph of Henry Shambry, an Alabama native who moved to the Northwest in 1968.

Time magazine calls it one of the 100 most influential images of all time. It shows Shambry being attacked by a police dog during a civil rights demonstration in Birmingham, Ala. It was one of several images Charles Moore took that day for Life magazine.

Shambry died in 2011, but he talked about the circumstances surrounding that photograph with The Columbian in 1995.

Shambry wasn’t trying to be a symbol, he told The Columbian back then. He just wanted to show the Birmingham, Ala., cops that he wasn’t afraid of them or their dogs.

“I never did get afraid,” Shambry said. “I got mad, and I was thinking, ‘What are these people doing?’ When you get that mad, you get stubborn and just don’t care.”

“I made up my mind I wasn’t going to run. I just walked and walked,” he said. “The only time I looked back was when the dog tore my pants.”

It might not have been his intention, but that photograph of Shambry did turn into a symbol.

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In the online gallery of 100 influential photographs, the image of Shambry is accompanied by a quote from historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.: “The photographs of Bull Connor’s police dogs lunging at the marchers in Birmingham did as much as anything to transform the national mood.”

He didn’t mention Shambry by name, however. But other authors noted Shambry’s role in that pivotal moment in their histories of the civil rights movement.

• “Dogs sank their sharp teeth into Milton Payne, Henry Lee Shambry and others.” (“A Child Shall Lead Them: Martin Luther King Jr., Young People, and the Movement,” by Rufus Burrow.)

• “Two German shepherds attacked Henry Lee Shambry, ripping his trousers off and lacerating his leg.” (“But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle,” by Glenn T. Eskew.)

• “Charles Moore captured the shocking images … a police dog ripping the trousers off Henry Lee Shambry.” (“From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice,” by Thomas F. Jackson.)

This is not the first time the photograph has been part of a gallery of history-making images. In 1996, CBS aired a show about Life magazine called “The Photographs That Changed the World.”

That photo of Shambry was part of the show’s opening title sequence, and it appeared again during a segment on the civil rights movement.

“A photograph takes something that’s been very intellectual and abstract and makes it real,” former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young said on the show. “You can’t argue with a photograph.”

Shambry told The Columbian in 1996 that he didn’t see the show. But Shambry said he was glad that shot was included in a show called “The Photographs That Changed the World.”

“It feels good, man,” Shambry said.

Shambry also said that he’d heard that description of the photograph before: “That’s the same thing Dr. King told me.”

In his 1995 interview, Shambry provided an inside look at that civil rights march. Like so many others, the march started at a church.

“When we went to the churches in the mornings to march, ladies couldn’t even keep a stick-pin in their hat. You had to take everything out of your pockets and put it in a big box. No razors, no keys, no pocket knives. Nothing you could scratch someone with.”

Shambry then pointed to a Life magazine photo to provide some play-by-play on the policemen and their dogs.

“This guy pulled his dog back,” he said, gesturing toward a policeman in the picture, “but this one let his dog do whatever he wanted. So he tore my pants completely off me. The only thing holding it on was my belt. It was swinging like a skirt.

“I got to the corner of the street, and another policeman ran up with another dog,” Shambry said. “The dog jumped up, I threw my arm up, and he bit my shirt-sleeve off.”

The dogs tore more than cloth.

“Yeah, I got bit right up under there,” gesturing at the photo, toward the seat of his pants.

Some friends hustled Shambry and another marcher into a nearby church. There he was, standing in a church, pretty much without pants.

Shambry laughed at the memory: “One lady said, ‘He’s got on polka-dot shorts!’ And I did.”

The damage could have been worse.

“I wore a silk suit that morning. If I hadn’t decided to go home and change, that dog would have torn my best suit off,” he said.

He went to the hospital for a rabies shot, and at 7:30 p.m. Shambry was back at the church for another demonstration, he said.

Shambry said he got a mixed response after the photos appeared.

“Some guys at work called me a fool and asked why I’d let a dog bite me in the ass.”

He said that others called him a hero. “I wasn’t looking for anything like that,” he said. “I was trying to do something so my kids could grow up in a better and more civilized country than when I was young.

“I didn’t want my kids to have to go in the back door of a restaurant, sit in a little room not as big as this kitchen, and be served through a window,” Shambry said.

Students at the black high school got books that had been discarded by the white eighth-graders, Shambry said.

The cause, as he called it, was almost another full-time job for Shambry, who worked all night long at a bakery.

“I’d get off work at 6:30 a.m., sleep two or three hours, and go to the church,” he said. “We’d march four or five hours, until 2:30 or 3. I’d go home for a couple more hours of sleep and then go back to the church. That went on for the better part of a month.”

Within a year, when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, the marchers’ passive resistance approach had paid off.

“They wanted violence,” Shambry said, referring to the police. “They knew how to handle that. They couldn’t handle non-violence.”

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Columbian Science, Military & History Reporter