The marches that took place in Selma never would have happened without Martin Luther King, John Lewis, Hosea Williams and the cadre of civil rights leaders who organized the charge. They might not have happened if not for the tragic death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, and they certainly couldn’t have made the splash they did without the thousands of people who showed up to put feet to the pavement and march some at the cost of bodily harm, and two at the cost of their lives.
And their courageous actions would have gone unseen if not for the photojournalists on the ground to document the brutality they faced for the world to see. The images they created of Alabama state troopers rushing peaceful protestors like a monolithic mob, wielding weapons and riot gear that conjure war photography helped fuel the public outrage to which the Johnson administration had no choice but to respond.
LIFE’s coverage of the marches began in its March 19, 1965 issue, the cover of which shows a line of solemn marchers, two by two, disappearing over the horizon as helmeted troopers look on. By the time the issue was published, the protesters had made two attempts to march.
The first, on March 7, later referred to as “Bloody Sunday,” ended with troopers attacking the marchers in a scene that was nothing if not savage, sending 17 to the hospital with injuries. The second, two days later, ended in peaceful prayer, with King ordering the marchers to halt so as not to defy a pending restraining order. This day would come to be known as “Turnaround Tuesday.”
The March to Montgomery began on March 21, two days after the issue was published, and ended on March 25 at the Alabama State Capitol Building. As LIFE described the convergence of nuns, students and Americans of all races the following week in Selma, “In all the turbulent history of civil rights, never had there been such a widespread reaction to the doctrine of white supremacy.”
The photographs, by Charles Moore, Flip Schulke and Frank Dandridge, offered the magazine’s 7 million readers no equivocation as to what it meant to be black in America in 1965. And the images of violence, solidarity, prayer and resilience achieved the greatest results a photograph can hope to achieve: empathy, understanding and above all, social change.
‘Selma Starts the Savage Season,’ LIFE, March 19, 1965
LIFE Magazine
‘Selma Starts the Savage Season,’ LIFE, March 19, 1965
LIFE Magazine
‘Selma Starts the Savage Season,’ LIFE, March 19, 1965
LIFE Magazine
‘Selma Starts the Savage Season,’ LIFE, March 19, 1965
LIFE Magazine
‘Selma Starts the Savage Season,’ LIFE, March 19, 1965
You might say Helena Rubinstein’s story began at 16, when her father renounced her for refusing an arranged marriage in the Jewish district of Krakow where she grew up. You might say it began when she ventured to Australia and, bombarded with questions from sunburned ladies about how she maintained her fair complexion, smelled a profit.
Whichever origin story you favor, it’s safe to say that where the story ends multimillionaire magnate of a four-continent cosmetics empire that redefined beauty for generations of women may surprise those whose memory goes only as far back as Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer.
Today there are more female CEOs than ever, but the number of offices they fill in the C-suite remains few. In Rubinstein’s time she established her business in 1903, opened her first New York salon in 1915 and amassed $25 million by the time LIFE profiled her in 1941 they were as rare as a sunburn on Madame’s face.
An exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York City, “Helena Rubinstein: Beauty Is Power,” is the first to explore the influence and artifacts of Rubinstein’s life. (The exhibit, which ends on March 22, will travel to the Boca Raton Museum of Art, where it will be on view beginning on April 21). Rubinstein’s legacy is less about the fact that her brand existed than it is about the message it conveyed, says Jewish Museum curator Mason Klein. Her flavor of beauty for the masses “served not only to level the snobbish aesthetic taste that was upheld by others” like her longtime rival Elizabeth Arden “but, more importantly, to expand the notion of who and what could be considered beautiful.”
It might raise some eyebrows to suggest that the mass marketing of skin creams and mascara would positively influence women’s feelings of self-worth. But Rubinstein’s mission was not just to change how women look. It was to give women the ability to define their interior lives too. “She didn’t really want her clientele to think of going to a salon and being made over like you paper a room or reupholster a piece of furniture,” Klein says.
During a day at the Rubinstein salon (which could be found in more than a dozen cities worldwide), a woman could expect to be “stretched, exercised, rubbed, scrubbed, wrapped in hot blankets, bathed in infra-red rays, massaged dry and massaged under water, and bathed in milk all before lunch.”
But when the milk baths were over, the salon Rubinstein conceived of shared more than a name with the literary salons she frequented in Paris. With the fortune she amassed, Rubinstein had become both a patron of the arts and a discerning collector, boasting one of the first extensive collections of Latin American art and one of the most important early collections of African and Oceanic art. For her, there was no line between commercial beauty and modern art and if there was, she was trying to blur it.
A patron of Helena Rubinstein’s salons which operated at a loss but helped evangelize her line of 629 products learned about art, design and color, developed her own personal taste and incorporated it into the way she presented herself to the world. According to Klein, with “her encouragement of women to trust their own instincts and her advocacy of exceptionality at a time when non-conformism was taboo, she offered women this ideal of self-invention, and that’s a fundamental principle of modernity.”
Getting to international magnate status requires an ingredient many women are told is unbecoming: self-promotion. LIFE wrote that despite Rubinstein’s genius for marketing she was, among other things, an early adopter of the white lab coat uniform “Rubinstein’s greatest promotion … is undoubtedly herself.” She commissioned portraits by artists from Warhol to Picasso, and featured prominently in her own ads. A couple of inches shy of five feet tall, before an important meeting she often placed a cushion under her seat to increase her stature, letting her legs dangle behind her desk.
Success on this level also requires a shrewd business savvy, and Rubenstein was nothing if not conservative with the company coffers. “If somebody offered Rubinstein a package of gum for a nickel she would say “too much,”” one associate told LIFE, “in the hope that it was the only package of gum in the world that could be bought for four cents.” And she sniffed out new markets with the same discerning nose she used to nix or approve perfume scents. “Ever on the lookout for new sales openings,” LIFE wrote in 1941, “she has lately been turning over in her mind the idea that perhaps the beauty business has exploited only half its potential market.” As she put it herself: “Men could be a lot more beautiful.”
Rubinstein made a bold decision, too, in keeping her name at a time when anti-Semitism kept her flagship storefront relegated to 5th Avenue side streets for two decades. (Money, of course, was a powerful tool in the face of discrimination. When she tried to upgrade from one posh Park Avenue apartment to another with a bigger balcony, she was told that the owner didn’t rent to Jews. She promptly told her accountant to buy the whole building.) Emblazoning her name on products and advertisements not only affirmed her identity (even as a non-practicing Jew), but appealed to the masses of immigrant women pouring into the country, going to work and seeking to define their identities in America.
When Helena Rubinstein equated beauty with power, her aim was not only profit, but empowerment. Reflecting on her life in 1964 at an age she called “older than you think,” she told LIFE she squeezed 300 years of work into a single lifetime. “Shrugging like a Jewish grandmother she claims, “I did it not for money but because I love work. I will never retire.””
Liz Ronk, who edited this gallery, is the Photo Editor for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.
Helena Rubinstein, 1941
Herbert Gehr The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock
Helena Rubinstein, 1941
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Helena Rubinstein, 1941
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Helena Rubinstein Salon, 1937.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Helena Rubinstein Salon, 1937.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Helena Rubinstein Salon, 1937.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Helena Rubinstein Salon, 1937.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Helena Rubinstein Salon, 1937.
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Helena Rubinstein, 1941
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Helena Rubinstein, 1941
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Helena Rubinstein, 1941
Herbert Gehr The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock
Helena Rubinstein products, 1941
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The casual student of history might not look to Frederick Douglass for wisdom on the power of photography. The abolitionist is best known for his unmatched talent for oration, and when he died in 1895, the medium was still an evolving technology. But Douglass knew that photography had a quality that couldn’t always be found in other art forms. He touched on the transformative energy of the image when he wrote in 1864 that making pictures enables us to “see what ought to be by the reflection of what is, and endeavor to remove the contradiction.”
Douglass’ words introduce a selection of some of the most iconic photographs of African American history in the book Through the African American Lens, curated by Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. The book is the first in a series, and based on an exhibit of the same name that opened in 2015.
“The book essentially reflects the vastness and the dynamism that is the subject matter for the museum,” says Rhea Combs, Curator of Film and Photography at the museum, who led the team that distilled a collection of 15,000 images into the 60 photographs that make the book. While future books will delve into more specific themes in Black history, like the civil rights movement and Black women, the first book takes a sweeping look at more than 150 years of the vast and varied set of African American experiences in America.
Throughout history, photographs have afforded African Americans a way of “inserting themselves into a conversation,” Combs says, especially in a society “that oftentimes dismissed them or discounted them.”
The images reveal how agency can be created in the space between lens and subject. “There is a real, conscientious effort with individuals that are standing in front of the camera to present themselves in a way that shows a regality, a fortitude, a resolve,” she says. Whenever Douglass was photographed, he made sure to see the photographs before they were distributed, as he knew the importance of controlling his image. During the mid-nineteenth century, abolitionists mailed out photographs of slaves in an effort to change hearts and minds on the matter of abolition.
Many of the photographs were taken by photographers who were not African American themselves. When Wayne Miller, a white photographer, knocked on the doors of black Chicagoans in the 1940s, he earned their trust through conversation rather than setting out to conduct an anthropological study. Though this was certainly not always the case, and the relationship between subject and photographer can be quite complicated, “I think the agency was definitely in their gaze at the camera instead of the camera recording them,” says Combs.
Sixty might sound like an impossibly small number of images to capture all of African American history. But the images Combs and her team selected speak volumes. A 1938 photograph of a Harlem Elks Parade shows, rather than the parade itself, the sense of community and togetherness among its spectators. Images of exile in the form of James Baldwin and Eldridge Cleaver speak to, in Combs’ words, “freedom movements that are part of American history, but didn’t occur on American soil.”
LIFE photographer Eliot Elisofon’s photo of Zack Brown photographing two men in Harlem is a fitting choice for the book’s cover. In it, a black photographer, behind the lens, documents the dapper and dignified appearance of two black men in Harlem. The photograph is about urban life and the Great Migration, but it’s also about photography itself: that interplay between the voyeurism of viewers and the self-awareness of subjects that brings a static image to life nearly 80 years later.
Many of the photographs have this sense of immediacy, a sometimes startling relevance that belies their age. In a picture taken by Dave Mann of Emmett Till’s funeral in 1955, Till’s mother clutches a handkerchief in one hand and extends the other, searching, it seems, for balance. The track of a single tear, which appears to have fallen just before the shutter was clicked, is visible on her face.
“Especially on the heels of things that are happening now,” says Combs, “this story unfortunately how many years later feels very, very familiar.”
Liz Ronk edited this gallery. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.
Photographer Zack Brown shooting dapper men in Harlem, ca. 1937
In 2015 the Oregon chub was removed from the Federal List of Endangered and Threatened Animals, becoming the first fish ever to shed its endangered status. When it was placed on the list in 1993, there were fewer than 1,000 of the minnow species left. At the time of removal there were more than 140,000.
In the years since the first official list of threatened and endangered species was published in 1967, 28 species have been recovered, 10 have become (or were discovered to already be) extinct, and more than 2,000 species have joined the original 78.
Though the notion of extinction entered public awareness at the turn of the 20th century and the federal government began taking steps to protect certain species then, it wasn’t until the 1960s that environmental activism pressured the government to be more proactive in identifying and taking measures to protect threatened species. The first significant piece of legislation, the Endangered Species Protection Act, was passed in 1966, followed by an amendment in 1969 and a reworking in the 1973 Endangered Species Act.
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.
Henry, a 12-pound orangutan at the St. Louis zoo, woke from a nap in his incubator.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Orangutan, 1964.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Oryx, 1964.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Okapi, San Diego zoo, 1964.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Ocelot, 1964.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Hilda, the 15-year-old grande dame of the Detroit zoo’s bears, cradled her latest set of twins, her fourth pair.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Growling hungrily, polar bears at Detroit’s zoo waited for their next meal while one impatient female rose on her hind legs for a better look.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Przewalski’s wild horses, believed extinct in their habitat on the Mongolian steppes, were being bred at the Catskill Game Farm, a private zoo in Catskill, N.Y.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Tusk to tusk, two white rhinos eyed each other at the Oklahoma zoo. The largest of all rhinos, they came from Zululand in South Africa where only 300 survived.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Whooping Crane, 1964.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Cheetahs at a zoo in Oklahoma, 1964.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Cheetahs at an Oklahoma zoo, 1964.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Koala, 1964.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Two young tortoises crawled by a 500-pound, century-old adult at the San Diego zoo.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Bongos, a kind of antelope, at a zoo in Cleveland, 1964. At the time they were the only pair in captivity.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Pygmy Hippos, 1964.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Pygmy hppos at the Washington zoo, 1964.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Tapir, 1964.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Boy meets girl. Boy and girl fall in love. Boy and girl get married, buy a house and have (on average) 2.2 children. This may have been a common story for heterosexual couples in America in the 1950s, but when LIFE dispatched John Dominis to capture love and marriage in post-war Japan, he found a landscape undergoing a significant transformation.
Before the war, most marriages in Japan were arranged by the bride’s and groom’s parents. Men and women rarely spent much time together prior to the wedding, let alone took part in anything that might qualify as “dating.” But during the Allied occupation of Japan from the end of World War II until 1952 the ubiquity of the American soldier’s courtship rituals jump-started the Westernization of love and marriage in Japan.
Whether accompanied by their visiting wives, Japanese girlfriends or prostitutes known as “pan pan girls,” American soldiers modeled the behavior they knew from home: public displays of affection and leisure time spent with women at cafés, parks or the movies. And inside those movie theaters, American movies offered even more examples of Western mating rituals to a Japanese public at once hesitant and intrigued by the bold behaviors of their American counterparts.
In his photographs—which never ran in LIFE—Dominis captured a moment when the new had caught on, but the old had not yet been forgotten. The young couples he photographed in 1959 were living on the edge of modernity, but still holding onto many of the the traditions long followed by their culture.
Notes written by Dominis and someone who appears to be an assistant that accompanied the dozens of rolls of film he shot provide insight into the song and dance (sometimes literal) in which the young lovers engaged. Some met by chance, others in settings tailor-made for matchmaking.
One of these settings was the “Shibui” dance, run by a man of the same name. For $2.50, young men and women could attend a night of dinner and dancing with the express purpose of introducing eligible bachelors to single young women. Upon arrival, new members bowed to one another and offered the greeting “yoroshiku,” described as “a very loose greeting which is used to fit any situation and in this case meaning “I hope I can find a mate among you.” During dinner, partygoers were expected to “learn proper manner of eating western food.” If a young man found a young woman intriguing, he was not allowed to leave with her. Instead, he would tell Mr. Shibui, who would then arrange a date if the feelings were mutual.
One young couple, Akiksuke Tsutsui and Chiyoko Inami, met when Chiyoko, who worked at a bank in the same building as Akiksuke’s father’s clothing shop, began frequenting the shop during breaks. When Akiksuke brought Chiyoko to meet his family after several outings to the beach, cafés, beer halls and department stores his siblings welcomed her in ways that reflected the changing times. His younger brother showed off his Western knowledge by demonstrating how to swing a baseball bat and singing a rockabilly song. His sisters, meanwhile, sang Chiyoko Japanese folk songs.
Before meeting Akiksuke, Chiyoko had had five meetings with potential husbands, all arranged by her family. During these meetings, the young man and woman walked past each other in a Japanese garden, catching a quick glimpse of their potential mate, and delivering a decision to a go-between. Chiyoko had declined them all.
Dominis also photographed Takahide Inayama and Mitsuyo Ogama, two university students in their early 20s. The pair met six months prior, at Takahide’s house, when a friend of his brother’s brought her to a party there. Takahide and Mitsuyo, in a better financial position than some of the others, led Dominis to make an observation about class and marriage. “Most couples in Tokyo just can’t afford to get married until the guy is around 30 unless they both work or he has an exceptional job, or there is money in the family,” he wrote. “These kids go out with other couples and act more or less like you would expect western young lovers to act.”
While the photographs capture the increasing normalization of modern Western customs in Japan, they also exhibit the excitement and tenderness of being allowed to choose a privilege which, of course, includes the right to opt out. “Two of the couples have since broken up,” reads a note from the files, “and are being shy about letting us know whether they have taken up with new friends.”
AnRong Xu, who edited this gallery, is a contributor to LightBox. Follow him on Instagram @Anrizzy.
A young couple on a date in a cafe in Tokyo.
John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A Shibui dance function in Tokyo where young people would go to meet other young people in hopes of finding a partner.
JOHN DOMINIS THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
A Shibui dance function in Tokyo where young people would go to meet other young people in hopes of finding a partner.
JOHN DOMINIS THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
A young couple walked around in the Ginza district of Tokyo. 1959.
JOHN DOMINIS THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
Akiksuke Tsutsui, left, bid his girlfriend, Chiyoko Inami, farewell as her train departed. March 1959.
JOHN DOMINIS THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
Akiksuke Tsutsui, left, and his girlfriend Chiyoko Inami, right, walked around in the Ginza district during their lunch hour. March 1959.
JOHN DOMINIS THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
Nohito Mukai, left, and his girlfriend, Hiroko Inayaki, went roller skating on a date in Tokyo. March 1959.
JOHN DOMINIS THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
Hiroko Inayaki, left, went for a drive with her boyfriend, Nohito Mukai. March 1959.
JOHN DOMINIS THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
Takahide Inayama (Age 20), left, and his girlfriend, Mitusyo Ogama (age 20), both were university students. Here they were picking out apples on a date near their university.
JOHN DOMINIS THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
Chiyoko Inami, left, and her boyfriend, Akiksuke Tsutsui, played a game on a train headed to Kyoto to meet Tsutsui’s family. March, 1959.
JOHN DOMINIS THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
A young couple out on a date in Tokyo, 1959.
JOHN DOMINISÑTHE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
A young couple visited a bridge near the Imperial Palace, 1959.
JOHN DOMINIS THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
A young couple took a “selfie” on a self-timer on their camera.
JOHN DOMINIS THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
Chiyoko Inami, left, and her boyfriend, Akiksuke Tsutsui, right, shared an intimate moment on a date, March, 1959.
JOHN DOMINIS THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
A young couple kissed on a date in a park in Tokyo, 1959.
JOHN DOMINISÑTHE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
In 1891, Asa Candler bought a company for $2,300. That price tag in today’s dollars is closer to $60,000, but still, not a bad deal for a business that would gross a profit of more than $30 billion in 2014. During the early years, Candler focused his efforts on building his brand, offering coupons for free samples and distributing tchotchkes with the company’s logo on them. The aggressive marketing paid off. By 1895, a glass of [f500link]Coca-Cola[/f500link] could be found in every state in America.
By the time Henry Luce purchased LIFE Magazine in 1936, Coca-Cola was just years away from producing its billionth gallon of its trademark soda syrup. The pages of LIFE bubble with Coke ads, the first one appearing in 1937, and many issues included multiple invitations to “add zest to the hour” and take “the pause that refreshes.”
But LIFE was not only a purchaser of Coca-Cola advertising. LIFE’s photographers were also capturing the growing ubiquity of that Spencerian Script the looping, cursive font of Coke’s logo in places as far-reaching as Bangkok and the Autobahn. During the 1930s, the company had begun to set up bottling plants in other countries. But when General Eisenhower sent an urgent cable from North Africa in 1943, requesting that Coca-Cola establish more overseas bottling plants in order to boost soldiers” morale, the wheels were set in motion for rapid international expansion. Wartime saw the addition of 64 foreign plants to the existing 44, and post-war growth continued steadily.
The photos here depict not just the way Coke began to blend into international surroundings by the late 1960s, half of the company’s profits would come from foreign outposts but also the wide array of American locales and subcultures the brand was penetrating. Led by company president Robert Woodruff, whose term began in 1923, Coca-Cola’s vigorous marketing efforts found footholds for the brand from segregated country stores to New York City’s Columbus Circle to roadside stands in Puerto Rico.
Of the dozens of slogans Coca-Cola has had over the years, the one it debuted in 1945 was certainly aligned with the global domination the company had set its sights on. “Passport to refreshment” was not just a clever pun, but a sign of things to come.
Liz Ronk, who edited this gallery, is the Photo Editor for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.
Coca Cola, 1938
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Coca-Cola, 1944
Marie Hansen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A Frenchman considers Coke’s allure in 1950.
Mark Kauffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A Coke truck makes its rounds in 1950 France.
Mark Kauffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Coca-Cola sign, 1938
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Coca Cola truck, 1950
Mark Kauffman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Coca Cola sign 1947, Germany
Walter Sanders The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Coca Cola, 1938
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Coca Cola, 1950
Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Summer Days on Cape Cod, 1946
Cornell Capa The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Coca Cola 1943
THOMAS D. MCAVOY
Boy selling Coca Cola from roadside stand., 1936
Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
