Eight years after first seeing the photograph, English professor Paul Hendrickson's obsession with it produced a book, Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and its Legacy, that is now a finalist for the 2003 National Book Critics Circle award for nonfiction.
At a time when many other men would have been out drinking at a bar, Hendrickson found himself browsing Black Oak Books in Berkeley, Calif.
An old black-and-white photograph from the '60s had caught his eye, and Hendrickson stood transfixed, staring at pages 55 and 56 of Powerful Days: The Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore.
"Something about this stopped me in my tracks," he says, looking at the large poster of the photograph that hangs in his office. "Something about it scared me."
The photo depicts seven white Southerners, "dressed as if they're going to church," Hendrickson says, one of them swinging a billy club.
As he stood in the bookstore, Hendrickson wondered what the group was up to.
"Why are they enjoying themselves so nastily?" he recalls asking himself.
History had an answer: All seven men were sheriffs, waiting on the University of Mississippi campus in Oxford, preparing to prevent the school's planned integration from taking place.
But many more questions followed. Hendrickson wondered what legacy these men had left to their children and their grandchildren.
"How did this gene of intolerance mutate as it came down through the generations?" he asks.
The questions would not leave him alone.
"Somehow or other, there were codes, messages in that photograph," Hendrickson says, recalling the fateful February night.
"It's my feeling that books find us and we don't find them," he adds. Sons of Mississippi "found me."
His reaction that night was not an uncommon occurrence for Hendrickson, who more often than not finds himself searching for the story behind the picture.
"There are storytelling impulses wrapped up in photographs," he says. "A lot of what I do as a writer has to do with photographs. [They] speak to me."
When Moore's photograph spoke to him, Hendrickson had just finished working on his previous book, Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War. He had struggled with the book throughout the writing process, and wasn't necessarily looking for another one.
But that didn't stop Hendrickson from pursuing the story that was calling to him.
"You have to write about what is urgent to you, which won't let you go," he says. "I wanted to own that story."
Sons of Mississippi brought with it its own set of hurdles, challenges to overcome.
"Some people just don't want to talk," Hendrickson says, explaining that, even in modern times, the culture in Mississippi retains old suspicions and secrets.
"I'm the guy with the wrong accent," he says.
But after 30 years in journalism, including nearly 25 at The Washington Post, Hendrickson knew how to find a story.
"You fly down to Mississippi with a photograph under your arm and you start asking questions," he says. "You knock on the door and sometimes they let you in."
Eventually, Hendrickson found what he was looking for.
"When you get to the sons of these men," he says, "the grandsons, they're much more apt to talk to you."
In his interviews, Hendrickson discovered that the South has changed for the better since Moore took that photograph. But, he said, that the progress can be reversed quickly.
"Scratch the back of Mississippi," he says, "and you're not far from" that picture.
The theme of his book bears special significance to Hendrickson, whose father grew up on a farm in Kentucky, in the segregated South during the depression pf the 1920s.
Hendrickson himself spent some time in the South in his earlier days, attending a seminary in Alabama just as the civil rights movement was in its earliest stages.
Though he didn't consider the possibility at the time, Hendrickson now feels that this past may have contributed to the effect that the photograph had on him initially.
"There are ghosts everywhere," he says. "These are the kinds of things a writer has to be open to."
His struggle with those ghosts now in print, Hendrickson has signed with his publisher for another book, to be titled Hemingway's Boat.
