Racist Dogs Sculpture

Birmingham, Alabama

This sculpture is one of several "interactive" monuments in Kelly Ingram Park, north of the Baptist church where a KKK bomb killed four young African-American girls in 1963. Artist James Drake's 1991 work depicts snarling police dogs made of scrap iron leaping inward from two walls on either side of the park's walkway. Visitors can stand between and try to imagine the terror when civil rights marchers were assaulted with the canines and water cannons -- which, by the way, are also in the park, and can be pivoted to point toward a sculpture of two cowering protesters.

Also in the park are statues of a protestor being assaulted by a policeman and a German shepherd, and a boy and girl behind bars over the legend, "We ain't afraid of your jail" -- more memorials to the period in history when the city was known as "Bombingham."