Joe Postiglione, a freelance photographer for The Anniston Star known as “Little Joe,” took what became the most famous photograph of the Freedom Rides and one of the most iconic images of the Civil Rights movement after being tipped off on the evening of May 13, 1961, by the Greyhound bus station manager that something was brewing for the next day. He arrived at the bus station early on May 14 before 8 o'clock and, when a local Klansman asked why he had a camera, protected himself by saying, “Hell, don't ask me. Ask Ken. You all sent for me,” invoking local Klan leader Ken Adams so he would be left alone. Remaining cautious, he photographed the burning bus, and his images ran in the Star the next day before being purchased by other news organizations, helping provoke national and international outrage. Historian Ray Arsenault said that without the widespread press coverage his photographs helped ignite, the moral drama of the 1961 Freedom Rides might never have reached the broad audience necessary to force change. On May 16, he was interviewed by the FBI and identified people and the sequence of events. After he and his family received death threats and their cars were vandalized, the FBI gave them round-the-clock protection and walked his younger children to school. The family was ostracized, he was hung in effigy at a Klan rally on Quintard Ave., and they ultimately left the area never to return. Postiglione died in Kentucky in 1995. The photos later disappeared from the Star's records, and the negatives' fate remains unknown, but a set resurfaced in 2005 when the law firm Merrill, Merrill, Mathews & Allen, which had defended the attackers, found copies in files being sorted for destruction and donated them to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.