Bus Stop Downtown Montgomery, from a series of drawings documenting the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott, Montgomery, AL

Burton Silverman and Harvey Dinnerstein made a series of drawings recording the Montgomery Bus Boycott of the mid-1950s, a turning point in the civil rights struggle. Beginning with the arrest of Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat on a public bus to a white man, the boycott ended a year later when the high court ordered integration of Montgomery’s bus system. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led the successful boycott. Silverman and Dinnerstein—both white and from New York—went to Alabama to make the series. Their drawings show Montgomery’s African American citizens engaged in dignified, nonviolent civil disobedience.

Here Silverman shows two white men from the back, and an African American woman on the right, with a pier separating them. The composition expresses the social dislocation between them. With these drawings, Silverman and Dinnerstein hoped to convey a sense of immediacy and to incite support for political change in the South.