The Counts photo demanded witnessing across the failed decade

Evidence

Looking back, after the deaths of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr., the photo with all of its pathos, anguish, and pride represented for Baldwin in 1972 the demand to bear witness to what was happening in 1957 and to what had transpired since, which led to his recollection of it in No Name in the Street. Dot’s eyes captured the trauma of that journey. Baldwin sought to narrate what happened on the eve of a social movement that would attempt to transform the country, and to testify to that odd combination of trauma and grit, which he now knew so well, seen in a fifteen-year-old black girl’s courage that spurred him, so he believed, to leap into the fire. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 170

Categorization

• XREF: The 1957-to-1972 arc of the photo’s meaning gives the reader a concrete case study of how the after times recontextualizes pre-movement hope.