Page 125 – LIFE

Bigotry in the USA: Photos From a Ku Klux Klan Initiation

November 2, 2020March 5, 2013 by

When it comes to extremist groups in America, the longest-lived and most readily identifiable remains the Ku Klux Klan, which has been operating at varying degrees of influence and strength for close to 150 years. Hundreds of Klan groups are actively working and recruiting in the U.S. The KKK’s fortunes as a cultural and political force have waxed and waned over the decades, with Klan membership peaking in the 1920s, during the era of the “Second Klan.” (The First Klan, in the post-Civil War South, lasted from 1865 to 1874; the Second Klan from 1915 until about 1944; and the Third from roughly the end of WWII until today.) The Klan claimed literally millions of members at the height of the Second Klan era.

In May 1946, LIFE magazine ran a series of remarkable pictures from a Klan initiation in Georgia, at the start of the Third Klan era. Titled “The Ku Klux Klan Tries a Comeback,” the article noted that the KKK pledged initiates “in a mystic pageant on Georgia’s Stone Mountain.” The language that accompanied photographer Ed Clark’s pictures, meanwhile, made clear that, as newsworthy as the story of this particular initiation might have been, LIFE’s editors would have considered the figures in their white robes and hoods to be rather laughable if their rhetoric and arcane, pseudo-mystic shenanigans weren’t so unsettling.

On the evening of May 9 at 8 p.m. a mob of fully grown men solemnly paraded up to a wide plateau of Stone Mountain outside Atlanta, Ga., and got down on their knees on the ground before 100 white-sheeted and hooded Atlantans. In the eerie light of a half-moon and a fiery cross they stumbled in lockstep up to a great stone altar and knelt there in the dirt while the “Grand Dragon” went through the mumbo jumbo of initiating them into the Ku Klux Klan. Then one new member was selected from the mob and ceremoniously “knighted” into the organization in behalf of all the rest of his fellow bigots.
This was the first big public initiation into the Klan since the end of World War II. It was put on at a carefully calculated time. The anti-Negro, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, anti-foreign, anti-union, anti-democratic Ku Klux Klan was coming out of wartime hiding just at the time when the CIO and the A.F. of L. were starting simultaneous campaigns to organize the South. . . . But it is doubtful that the Klan can become as frighteningly strong as it was in 1919. One indication of the Klan’s impotence was its lack of effect on Negroes, who were once frightened and cowed by the white-robed members. More than 24,000 Negroes have already registered for next July’s primaries in the Atlanta vicinity alone, where the Stone Mountain ritual was held.

As mentioned in one of the captions in this gallery, the Stone Mountain ceremony was put off several times during the preceding year because of wartime sheet shortages. Or at least that’s what LIFE reported at the time.

The magazine also made a point of characterizing the garb and actions of members at Klan meetings (images 10 through 15) as both creepy and pathetic. “Childish ritual and secretiveness,” the magazine noted, “have always been the great attractions for the kind of people who make good Klansmen.”

A Ku Klux Klan initiation ritual in Georgia, May 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Grand Dragon of the Fulton County, Ga., Ku Klux Klan, an Atlanta doctor named Samuel Green, was surrounded by his assistants, May 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A Ku Klux Klan initiation ritual in Georgia, May 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

New Klan members marched in lock step up to the Klan’s big altar on Stone Mountain in Georgia, 1946. The Klan exultingly announced they had initiated 600 new members in one night; observers’ best guesses were lower, between 150 and 200.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Klan initiates (including some Atlanta policemen) knelt before the local Grand Dragon during a ritual in Georgia, 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

White-sheeted Ku Klux Klan members stood by a burning cross, May 1946. This Stone Mountain, Ga., ceremony was put off many times, Klansmen allegedly said, because of wartime sheet shortages during WWII.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Klan initiates (including some Atlanta policemen) stood before a burning cross during a ritual in Georgia, 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A Ku Klux Klan member demonstrated ritualistic aspects of a KKK meeting, Georgia, May 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The scene at a Ku Klux Klan initiation ritual in Georgia, May 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Klan members with KKK regalia, Georgia, May 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Certified Statement for Annual Registration of a Corporation for the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Inc., Fulton County, Ga., 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Grand Dragon of the Fulton County, Ga., Ku Klux Klan, Dr. Samuel Green, May 1946.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

‘Drama of Life Before Birth’: Lennart Nilsson’s Landmark 1965 Photo Essay

December 6, 2022March 4, 2013 by

In the five decades since Lennart Nilsson’s portrait of an 18-week-old human fetus appeared on the cover of the April 30, 1965, issue of LIFE along with other, equally jaw-dropping pictures across multiple pages inside the magazine the debate about when life begins and who, ultimately, wields control of a woman’s body, both before and after birth, has only intensified. Religious, ethical, legal and medical arguments swirl around the issues of conception, contraception and abortion, and few political “hot button” issues are more radioactive than that of (put in the simplest and, perhaps, the most incendiary possible terms) the “right to choose” versus a “right to life.”

In 1965, however, the central question gripping most everyone who saw Nilsson’s pictures was the far more prosaic, and readily answerable, “How on earth did he do that?”

As LIFE told its readers when Nilsson’s pictures first appeared in the magazine’s pages:

“Ten years ago, a Swedish photographer named Lennart Nilsson told us that he was going to photograph in color the stages of human reproduction from fertilization to just before birth. It was impossible for us not to express a degree of skepticism about his chances of success, but this was lost on Nilsson. He simply said, ‘When I’ve finished the story, I’ll bring it to you.’ Lennart kept his promise. He flew into New York from Stockholm and brought us the strangely beautiful and scientifically unique color essay in this issue.”

What most people don’t recall or, more likely, never knew about Nilsson’s achievement is that, in fact, many of the embryos pictured in the photo essay “had been surgically removed,” as LIFE told its readers, “for a variety of medical reasons.”

In other words, while Nilsson (and Karl Storz in Germany and Jungners Optiska in Stockholm, who manufactured special macro-lenses and wide-angled special optics to Nilsson’s specs) revolutionized photography with mind-expanding devices and techniques for in utero photography, it’s worth recalling that not all of the embryos or fetuses seen in that groundbreaking 1965 LIFE article lived very long beyond the moment that Nilsson made their portraits. Doomed to a mortal end, they gained a kind of immortality through a photographer’s inspired vision and tenacious pursuit of what so many, for so long, deemed the impossible.

Of the pictures themselves, and the years and years spent designing, experimenting with and ultimately putting to use the radical equipment that allowed the world to see what it had never before witnessed, Nilsson once told an interviewer (in a revealing Q&A published on his own site):

The first job I did for [LIFE] on an exclusive basis was when Dag Hammarskjöld was elected UN Secretary General in 1953. I traveled to New York with him and photographed the newly installed Secretary General in his office in the 38th floor in the UN Building. I had my first embryo pictures along with me on that trip. “Unbelievable!” they said at LIFE. I thought so, too! But I didn’t know anything about the development of the fetus and had to learn from scratch. But they were incredibly enthusiastic at LIFE and twelve years later, in 1965, they published their big story on human reproduction.

Today, so many years after Nilsson’s at-once exalting and humbling pictures of “the drama of life before birth” first mesmerized and astounded millions of people all over the globe, the photos he made and those he continues to make, in his 90s remain among the most thrilling amalgams of art and science the world has ever seen.

[Visit LennartNilsson.com to see more of Nilsson’s astonishing photography, across a variety of subjects]

Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com

The Drama of Life 1965

LIFE Magazine

LIFE at the Vatican: Unearthing History Beneath St. Peter’s

January 17, 2020March 1, 2013 by

The walled, pint-sized city-state known as the Vatican physically takes up around 100 acres in the center of Rome, but occupies a measureless space in the lives of more than a billion practicing Catholics around the globe. Here, LIFE.com looks back to a time when the church was actively unearthing its own secrets . . . literally.

In 1950, LIFE reported on a years-long effort undertaken beneath the staggeringly ornate public realms of the Vatican, as teams of workers meticulously excavated the myriad tombs and other long-sealed, centuries-old chambers far underground. Nat Farbman’s color and black and white images in this gallery most of which never ran in LIFE, were touted on the cover of the March 27, 1950, issue of the magazine as “exclusive pictures” for the story titled “The Search for the Bones of St. Peter.”

Deep in the earth below the great basilica of St. Peter’s in Rome [LIFE wrote] the clink of pickaxes and the scrape of shovels in the hands of workmen have been echoing dimly for 10 years. In the utmost secrecy, they have penetrated into a pagan cemetery buried for 16 centuries. Architects feared they might disturb the foundations on which rests the world’s largest church. But the workmen, with careful hands, pushed forward finally to the area where, according to a basic tenet of the Catholic Church, the bones of St. Peter were buried about A.D. 66.

The Church has always held that Peter was buried in a pagan cemetery on Vatican Hill. Now, for the first time, there is archaeological evidence to support this: the newly discovered tombs, which LIFE shows [in these exclusive pictures].

The greatest secret of all—whether the relics of the Chief Apostle himself were actually found —s one which the Vatican reserves for itself, although there have been rumors that the discovery of the relics will be announced at an appropriate time during the Holy Year.

In the end, LIFE’s editors expressed their appreciation for “the privilege of guiding LIFE’s readers through these chambers where in the dust of antiquity can be traced the humble yet transcendent beginnings of the Christian faith.”

[MORE: Buy the LIFE book, Pope Francis: The Vicar of Christ, From Saint Peter to Today.]

NOTE: In December 1950 Pope Pius XII announced that bones discovered during the excavation could not conclusively be said to be Peter’s. Two decades later, in 1968, Pope Paul VI announced that other bones unearthed beneath the basilica—discovered in a marble-lined repository, covered with a gold and purple cloth and belonging to a man around 5′ 6″ tall who had likely died between the ages of 65 and 70—were, in the judgment of “the talented and prudent people” in charge of the dig, indeed St. Peter’s.

To this day, that claim has as many doubters as adherents.

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.

In a clutter of bones and artifacts the foreman of a team of Vatican workmen examined an ancient archway, St. Peter’s, Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The interior of St. Peter’s basilica, with markers indicating the location of the excavation beneath the floor, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The tomb of the Caetennii (17 x 18 feet) was one of the richest and most lavishly decorated of all those excavated beneath St. Peter’s.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Tomb of the Egizio featured elaborate sarcophagi sculpted with scenes of Bacchic rites. While most of the findings here were purely pagan, there were also Christian designs—for example, of a palm leaf and a dove.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Scene during the excavation beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The hunt of the Amazons was portrayed on a polychrome mosaic decorating the facade of the tomb of the Marci.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Scene during the excavation beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A workman cleaned an inscription during the excavation beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pope Pius XI, whose desire to be buried below St. Peter’s nave led to the historic excavations, lay in his stone sarcophagus in renovated upper grottoes.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The oldest burial chamber found during the excavation beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Scene during the excavation beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Workmen examined underneath the floor of the Basilico.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Workers gauged damage from water seepage during the excavation beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Workmen gauged damage from water seepage during the excavation beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The oldest burial chamber found during the excavation beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A double row of burial chambers beneath St. Peter’s, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

An inscription revealed during the excavation beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

An early Christian mosaic, possibly the earliest known, decorated the ceiling and walls of a mausoleum close to area where St. Peter is supposed to have been buried, Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Rich polychrome stucco work in the southwest corner of the Tomb of the Caetennii showed how resplendently it was decorated.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Classic sculpture adorned the Marci sarcophagus of Q. Marcius Hermes and his wife.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Scene during the excavation beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The foreman of work crew posed during the excavation beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The tomb of Pope Boniface VIII, beneath the Vatican, photographed in 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Scene during the excavation beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, 1950.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Old-Time Baseball: Dodgertown, 1948

July 24, 2020February 28, 2013 by

Few baseball franchises are as storied as the Dodgers—especially the incarnation that played at old Ebbets Field in Brooklyn until the club’s abrupt (and, for countless Brooklynites, unforgivable) move to L.A. in 1958.

Those Brooklyn teams from the 1940s and ’50s—with players such as Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Roy Campanella and Duke Snider—hold a special place not only in the memories of millions of fans of a certain age, but also in the annals of the game itself. Dem Bums won eight pennants and a World Series during those years, and might have won a few more championships if they didn’t have to keep facing the powerhouse Yankees.

In these photos, most of the stars are notable by their absence. Instead the frame is occupied by the crowds of long-forgotten young hopefuls at spring training in 1948, the very first year the team trained at the “Dodgertown” complex in Vero Beach, Florida. (The Los Angeles Dodgers left Dodgertown in 2008, one of many to trade in Florida’s Grapefruit League for Arizona’s Cactus League for spring training.) But what the pictures lack in star power, they make up in charm. To be sure, the players and coaches pictured here are all very, very white. Jackie Robinson had only debuted the previous year, and at the start of 1948 there were only three (that’s not a typo) black players in the National and American leagues. But the jarring racial uniformity aside, the gallery also capsules the aura of spring training, as athletes shook off their winter rust and concentrated on practicing the game’s fundamentals. In several photos general manager Branch Rickey studies the action with his grandson, and the game’s generational appeal is palpable.

Here is a brief excerpt from. the April 5, 1948, cover story LIFE, followed by a few photos that appeared in the issues, and some other memorable diamonds as well:

Branch Rickey himself did not succeed as a major-league field manager (with the St. Louis Cardinals from 1919 to 1925), but that was because he had too many scientific theories about how baseball should be played and too few good players to make the theories work. Dodgertown proved to be the ideal place to test all of Rickey’s ideas. At the outset he laid down the law to his 35 instructors on how he wanted Dodgertown run i.e., with metronomic precision. Everybody had to bounce out of bed at 6:45 a.m. After breakfast there was a classroom session on the intricacies of “inside baseball,” followed by mass calisthenics. Rickey wandered all over the camp, shaking hands briskly with the kid pitchers, not just to be friendly but to test their grip as well.

Fresco Thompson, a former National League infielder, spoke to Dodger coaches and prospects at Dodgertown, Vero Beach, Fla., 1948.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Prospects at Dodgertown, Vero Beach, Fla., 1948.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Batting practice in the cage, Dodgertown, Fla., 1948.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Top row, left to right: Pitchers Carl Erskine, Carroll Beringer, Edward Yasinski; bottom row, infielder Russ Rose, outfielder Bill Wolfe, outfielder Bernie Zender.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Brooklyn Dodger rookies and prospects did calisthenics as part of their daily training routine at Dodgertown, Vero Beach, Fla., 1948.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

These prospects bought their own baseball mitts.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Dodgers players and coaches attended an instructional talk.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Dodgers rookies and prospects listened to a hitting instructor at Dodgertown, Vero Beach, Fla., 1948.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey and his grandson watched a pitcher go through his wind-up.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Players were timed for speed.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

General manager Branch Rickey and a catcher.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Players practiced base-running and pick-off attempts.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Brooklyn coaches posed for a group portrait.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Brooklyn Dodger rookies and prospects played a spring training scrimmage at Dodgertown, Vero Beach, Fla., 1948.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Branch Rickey watched practice with his grandson at Dodgertown, Vero Beach, Fla., 1948.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Brooklyn rookies and prospects practiced hook slides.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Strings marked the strike zone as this pitcher delivered at Dodgertown, Vero Beach, Fla., 1948.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Batting practice.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Two coaches (including Pepper Martin, right) held rope at a level designed to force players into proper slide technique.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Top row, left to right: Outfielder Vic Marasco, catcher Dick Ballestrini, outfielder (and future Hall of Fame manager) Dick Williams; bottom, first baseman Dee Fondy, infielder Jim Baxes, catcher Mervin Dornburg.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Players drank fresh orange juice at Dodgertown, Vero Beach, Fla., 1948.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Players relaxing during spring training.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Players competed in horseshoes during spring training at Dodgertown, Vero Beach, Fla., 1948.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Brooklyn Dodgers and young women relaxed on the beach during spring training.

George Silk The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Slow Ride: LIFE Visits a British Snail-Watching Society

August 12, 2021February 28, 2013 by

Consider the snail. Humble, deliberate, primeval, the wee gastropod that comes to mind when we hear or see that one, simple word snail is seemingly the very last creature about which anyone would or could grow not merely protective, but passionate. After all, seen in a certain light (for that matter, seen in any light) the common snail is an irrelevancy or, if one is a gardener, a pest to be dispatched posthaste.

Then again, perhaps we’re not giving the snail its due. Perhaps there’s more to this mucus-y, slithering, boneless lazybones than meets the eye. Perhaps, if we engage in a subtle recalibration of our assumptions about our fellow creatures, we might find that the snail is not only worthy of our attention, but even of something like devotion. Perhaps the mild snail, dilly-dallying its way through life, can teach us something about the . . .

Oh, never mind! The fact is, most of us pass our days blissfully unconcerned with what snails — near and far, large and small — might be up to. Most of us, quite frankly, just don’t care.

But there was once a time, in a land called England, when dozens nay, scores! of snail fanciers did care, and struggled to rehabilitate the image of the oft-maligned critters. LIFE magazine photographer Hans Wild visited the intrepid souls of the British Snail-Watching Society in 1946. This gallery highlights some of the pictures he made. For the story of the society itself, however, it’s probably best to simply quote from the December 2, 1946, issue of LIFE, which really did manage to hit just the right tone when discussing this slippery issue:

The British Snail-Watching Society is an organization dedicated to the theory that man, harassed by the mounting tempo of modern life, has something to learn from contemplating the snail. The society’s whimsical propaganda has fascinated England and even resulted in editorials in the [London] Times. A recent meeting of the society, at which the pictures on these pages were taken, featured a snail race which, to snail lovers, is the equivalent of the Kentucky Derby.

The Snail-Watching Society was founded last year as an elaborate family joke by Peter Henniker Heaton, an ex-employee of the Admiralty, after he had extravagantly admired a roadside bank silvered by snails after a rain. The snail, Henniker Heaton declared, can teach man a thing or two because it has solved many of man’s own dilemmas: 1) it carries its house on its back, 2) it makes its own roads by glandular secretion, 3) it takes its time.

Already the society has 70 members, a book full of press clippings and correspondence from far parts of the world. Its members write indignant letters to the press protesting such barbaric customs as eating snails, of which there are 40,000 varieties. Best known are the small garden snails of the order stylommatophora, but in Australia there is a variety, megalatractus proboscidiferus Lamarck, whose shell measures two feet. Of the society’s favorite sport, Henniker Heaton says, “When you are used to snail-racing, horse races are over too quickly.”

Snail Appreciation, 1946

Hans Wild Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Life Goes to a Snail Watch in England 1946

Hans Wild Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Mourning FDR: In a Classic Photo, the Face of a Nation’s Loss

January 17, 2020February 26, 2013 by

Franklin Delano Roosevelt remains the only person elected four times to the nation’s highest office (although he would die within months of being sworn in to his final term), but his greatness can be measured, in one elemental sense, by the passions he still excites in both his supporters and detractors. To the former, he was a courageous and compassionate leader—a politician born into great privilege who nevertheless oversaw the creation of America’s government-run safety nets for the least powerful among us; a steady hand at the helm during the darkest, early days of World War II; and a man willing to spend most of his political capital pushing for policies and programs that were controversial and even revolutionary in their time, but today form the bedrock of America’s social contract.

To his naysayers, of course, Roosevelt’s New Deal was an egregious example of governmental overreach, while his political philosophy smacked of class betrayal and an un-American belief that the feds can solve every problem we’ll ever face.

His wife Eleanor, meanwhile, was even more progressive (and polarizing) than her husband. While her humanitarian work all over the globe in her later years would win her near-universal praise, as a First Lady she was something of a radical, giving her own press conferences (the first woman in her position ever to do so), arguing for expanded workers’ rights and sometimes publicly disagreeing with her husband on national issues.

One national issue on which the Roosevelts agreed to an extent was that of civil rights. Eleanor was the more vocal and adamant of the two, but it was FDR who signed Executive Order 8802 in June 1941. Geared toward defense workers, 8802 was the first federal action designed to prohibit employment discrimination in the United States. It was, arguably, the most significant action in the realm of civil rights by a 20th-century American president until LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

(Roosevelt’s record on civil rights as a whole is somewhat more checkered, especially in light of the internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War.)

Ed Clark’s photograph, meanwhile, of an openly weeping Chief Petty Officer (USN) Graham W. Jackson playing “Goin’ Home” on his accordion as FDR’s flag-draped casket passes by in April 1945 has, through the years, come to symbolize not merely a nation’s grief, but black America’s acknowledgement of Roosevelt’s efforts on behalf of civil rights.

It’s tricky, even dangerous to presume that one person’s emotions represent those of millions of others, merely because those people are of the same race. After all, Jackson had played music for FDR, and for countless other people at and around the so-called “Little White House” in Warm Springs, Ga., many times in the past. The two men had a history. The tears coursing down Jackson’s cheeks were, assuredly, the outward sign of an inward, personal grief.

That said, the anguish on Chief Petty Officer Jackson’s face was not his alone; in Ed Clark’s masterful, unforgettable portrait, we see, and feel, a nation’s loss.

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Bigotry in the USA: Photos From a Ku Klux Klan Initiation

‘Drama of Life Before Birth’: Lennart Nilsson’s Landmark 1965 Photo Essay

LIFE at the Vatican: Unearthing History Beneath St. Peter’s

Old-Time Baseball: Dodgertown, 1948

Slow Ride: LIFE Visits a British Snail-Watching Society

Mourning FDR: In a Classic Photo, the Face of a Nation’s Loss

A Healing Return: Marlene Dietrich Goes Back to Germany, 1960

Mysterious Italy: The Mummies of Venzone

“Robot Planes”: When the U.S. Military Unveiled Its First Drones

The Logging Life: Gone Down the River

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