A young black boy playing in Chicago’s Crown Fountain takes Thomas Fiffer back to a flashpoint in the Civil Rights Movement.
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Yesterday afternoon I took my sons over to Chicago’s Millennium Park to play in the Crown Fountain, a 232-foot reflecting pool that serves as an endless source of delight to the children who run, slide, splash, and dance in the inch or so of water supplied by the 50-foot towers at each end. The towers are also giant video screens that display enormous faces, and every ten minutes or so, the mouths open and spit a stream of water onto the eager kids waiting underneath. As I viewed the photo I’d taken of this joyful young black boy blissfully soaking himself, I thought of a different, darker scene: the infamous images from Birmingham, AL, 1963, when Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor ordered the fire department to direct their hoses on the protesters. And I thought about how far we’ve come.
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The fight against racism isn’t over and probably never will be. But we can thank those who got drenched on the front lines 40 years ago for this boy’s joyful smile as he plays in a fountain open to all.
Top photo courtesy of author.
Middle photo—Doris “Dj” Boyd/Flickr
Video—berlinott/YouTube
