Charlie Was There

Charles Joseph McCarty is division news picture manager for all U.P.I, photographers in the Southwest, but he carries a camera like any man on his staff. Last week, in Little Rock from his Dallas base, scrappy Charlie McCarty, 42, caught a glimpse of a picture in the making: two white boys approaching a Negro boy and his sister as they walked past an all-white junior high school. McCarty wheeled in a U-turn, grabbed his Rolleiflex, sprinted up in time to hear the Negro boy say he would not get off the sidewalk. "I could see it building up in him," says McCarty. "I knew he was going to hit one of them." When the punch came, McCarty caught a memorable picture of a teen-ager exploding in a burst of rage expressive of a deep yearning for equality and civil rights.

While Roman Catholic McCarty went to church to give thanks for his startling picture, editors around the nation peeled it from Telephoto receivers with mixed reactions. Some newspapers that passed it by--Chicago American, Rocky Mount (N.C.) Telegram--called it "inflammatory." Little Rock's Arkansas Gazette did not use it, and Editor Harry Ashmore said: "Moving the picture on the wire was inexcusable. The fact is that racial incidents are no higher here than usual, despite the continuing struggle over school desegregation."

But the shot showed up in at least three Southern newspapers, the Mobile Register, Greenville (S.C.) Piedmont and Aiken (S.C.) Standard and Review, without a ruffle. Picture Editor Howard Knapp of the New York Daily News spread it across Page One and called it: "The best picture of the year--it's got motion and emotion."

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