The historic photo is a little grainy, produced in black-and-white. That was not by choice, as some artistic metaphor; color photography in 1965 was expensive to print.
The picture was part of Ebony magazine's coverage of the third Alabama voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, which began on March 21, 1965.
Foremost in the picture are James Luther Bevel, who initiated the marches as a leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Cager Jackson, whose grandson, activist Jimmie Lee Jackson, was killed by Alabama police a month before.
Behind Jackson in the photo is a young, white college student, a head taller than everyone, wearing thick black eyeglass frames of the day. And his presence there, at that moment, is metaphorical.
"We showed up, that's what we did. We showed up to bear witness," said Mark Denbeaux, who plans to return to Selma later this month for the 50th anniversary. "I was just one guy walking over the bridge, being present and bearing witness."
Mark Denbeaux was 21 at the time, down from the College of Wooster (Ohio) with a group of buddies who made the 750-mile trip in a red Rambler station wagon, driving over backroads of Kentucky and Tennessee into the Deep South.
Denbeaux is now 71 and a law professor at Seton Hall Law School in Newark, best known for his extensive research into the detention center at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
He and his students have published nearly 20 reports, examining hundreds of thousands of documents to detail abuse of detainees and unwarranted claims by the government. It is a search for truth, or at least finding true north in the national moral compass, as we are a country with a constitution that holds dear the rights of individuals.
That sense of justice, instilled by his parents, brought him to the civil rights movement as a teenager.
"My father was a combat chaplain with (Gen. George) Patton's 3rd Army," Denbeaux said during an interview at his home in Woodcliff Lake. "He had five battle stars, he was at D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge, but when he talked about his war years, it was only about the concentration camps, and treatment and discrimination of the Jews."
After the war, Fred Denbeaux became a theology professor at Wellesley and moved his family to the Massachusetts college town.
Mark Denbeaux remembers watching news reports with his parents about the Freedom Riders, an interracial group of activists often attacked while challenging segregation law on interstate buses.
"Those were brave guys," Denbeaux said. "I become embarrassed when people suggest going to Selma when I did was brave. We didn't get attacked and beaten. People lined the road and said vile things, but we had snipers up in the trees and soldiers on the road to protect us."
Nineteen months before Selma, Denbeaux marched on Washington, where he heard Martin Luther King deliver his "I have a dream" speech.
"My summer job (at college) was working as a baggage agent at Greyhound, so me and a friend got free bus passes and went to Washington," he said. "We slept in these bushes near the Washington Monument, and the next day we ran into my parents and my sister."
Denbeaux called the march "iconic" and King's eloquence moved him to return to Wooster and start a NAACP chapter, which still exists.
"The first black person to join was the groundskeeper at the college," he said. "His name was Jim Harris, and we stayed in touch. I'm going to see him in October."
In the summer of 1964, Denbeaux tried to join John Lewis and the Students Nonviolent Coordinating Committee for a voting drive in Mississippi.
"I had an interview and they turned me down," he said. "They didn't believe I was nonviolent enough. Now, I've never been in a fight in my life, but I guess they saw that while I wasn't violent, I could be confrontational."
The violence visited upon those in the movement - protesters being clubbed, doused with fire hoses or attacked by police dogs - and the courage of those under attack, moved Denbeaux to "bear witness" to the brutal but historic events.
The first attempt of protesters to march from Selma to Montgomery on March 7, 1965, was met with such violence. Alabama state and local police were met at the Edmund Pettus Bridge and "Bloody Sunday" commenced. Police officers in riot helmets and tear gas masks beat the marchers indiscriminately.
"People were knocked unconscious. When we got there two weeks later (for the third march), some still had bandages on their heads," Denbeaux said.
On the way to Selma, Denbeaux and his friend weren't too afraid of violence - "We were 21, we didn't think about getting killed." - but as they got closer, the sight of pick-up trucks with rifle racks unnerved them.
"Suddenly, the guys in the back were all trying to get the middle seat," he said.
In Selma, they slept in the balcony of First Baptist Colored Church "on Jefferson Davis Boulevard," Denbeaux said. "There were bullet holes in the walls."
Their first night, he and his friends went to the office of Sheriff Jim Clark, who had marshaled the force against the protesters, to complain about the treatment of blacks.
"It was just what you'd expect," he said. ""All these white, beer-bellied guys hanging around. On the wall was a poster of Nikita Khrushchev that said 'A Vote for Lyndon Johnson is a Vote for Me,' " he said. "We asked to see the sheriff and they sent out the county engineer."
Ten years ago, around the 40th anniversary of the march, Denbeaux and his son, Joshua, went to Alabama and Denbeaux finally had that conversation with Clark, who was in a nursing home.
"We took him to lunch and talked for three hours," Denbeaux said. "He told us things weren't any better since Selma. The world was better, he said, when everybody knew their roles."
That mentality seem to be stubborn; 50 years after the march voting rights are still under attack.
"There is always a test to see who controls the voting," Denbeaux said. "And that control is always used to make it harder on poor people. The places now where they are trying to force voting restrictions are all former Confederate states."
But other things have changed.
When Denbeaux returned to Selma for the 40th Anniversary, he assisted an elderly black woman who was walking across the bridge.
"She told me, she had waited her whole life to cross it," he said.
The woman was struggling and Denbeaux took her arm, without thought, without hesitation.
In 1965, as he marched with a few thousand other protesters, he took the hand of a young black girl next to him, in response to the racist hecklers who lined the road, but she stiffened under his grasp.
"She must have been a sharecropper's daughter because her hands were rough," he said. "And I remember how she kept her hand close to her side. I thought I was making a big statement and then I realized, 'I'm going home, but she has to live among these people.
"I would give a lot to know what happened to her," Denbeaux. "I hope it was good."
Mark Di Ionno may be reached at mdiionno@starledger.com. Follow The Star-Ledger on Twitter @StarLedger and find us on Facebook.