In a recent episode of his
absorbing podcast, «Revisionist History,» cultural critic Malcolm Gladwell interrogates a statue modeled after a news photograph of a confrontation in 1963 between a police officer with a
dog and a young
black boy in Birmingham, Alabama.1 Made by African American sculptor Dr. Ronald McDowell, The Foot Soldier (1995) is far more horrific than the photo, Gladwell convincingly argues, because it bears an added imaginative potency: the narrative is told by a traditionally silenced voice, and for Gladwell this «is just what happens when the people on the bottom finally get the power to tell the story their way.»