Alex Cohn is curator of Unseen.

Topeka ? The civil rights movement and Birmingham, Ala., bring to mind images burned into America’s collective memory by newspaper photographs and TV footage: Public Safety Commissioner “Bull” Connor turning loose police dogs and directing fire hoses against demonstrators; Ku Klux Klan members beating Freedom Riders at the bus station.

However, those weren’t the only images captured of Birmingham during the tumultuous era.

Photographer Alex Cohn found hundreds more in November 2004 when he was an intern at his hometown newspaper, The Birmingham News. Dozens of them, previously unpublished, were organized by Cohn into an exhibit, “Unseen. Unforgotten.” The exhibit can be seen through March 31 at the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site.

Cohn, 31, who recently visited Topeka and the Brown site, said he was looking for photo lights in a storage closet when he came across a box of negatives marked, “Keep. Do Not Sell.”

Cohn said he generally was aware of the role Birmingham had played in the civil rights movement.

“Most of my exposure was through ninth-grade history class. You have Kansas history class. We had Alabama history class,” Cohn said.

“We spent a week watching ‘Eyes on the Prize,'” said Cohn, referring to the PBS documentary series about the movement.

However, in looking at the negatives in the storage closet, Cohn said he came across many showing stories with which he was unfamiliar. Others, he said, showed “things that had been seen before but in fresh ways.”

With the cooperation of The Birmingham News and as a master’s degree candidate at the University of Missouri, Cohn researched the negatives he found, as well as other photos in the newspaper archives.

Cohn interviewed the photographers who took the images.

“No one had ever interviewed them,” he said.

Cohn also sought out the subjects of the photographs as he organized what would be a special section of the newspaper published last year at www.al.com/unseen.

The “Unseen. Unforgotten.” exhibit also was created, and this is the first time it has been displayed outside of Birmingham.

Some of the images dovetail directly with the Brown site’s purpose to tell the story of the landmark Supreme Court case that ended legal segregation in public schools.

Although the high court issued its ruling in 1954, Birmingham schools weren’t integrated until September 1963.

The photos include ones of well-known civil rights leaders, such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., but they also show some people critical to the movement in Birmingham who are less known on the national stage, such as the Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth.

A fiery orator in his own right, Shuttlesworth, who spoke in 2004 at the opening of the Brown site, can be seen preaching June 4, 1956. Earlier that day, Shuttlesworth and others created the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights in response to Alabama outlawing the NAACP.

Under Shuttlesworth’s leadership, the human rights group filed lawsuits, coordinated demonstrations and protests, and otherwise challenged Birmingham’s segregation laws. In response, Shuttlesworth’s home was bombed repeatedly.

Three photos tell an even lesser known story, that of another Birmingham minister, the Rev. Lamar Weaver, a white man who was beaten by a mob after he sat with Shuttlesworth and his wife in the “Whites Only” waiting room of the bus station.

Cohn called Weaver’s tale one of “the forgotten stories” of the movement.

“You’re looking back from a distance of 50 years,” he said.

Cohn, who completed his master’s degree in May and has moved back to Birmingham, said ultimately he would like to see a book made of the “Unseen. Unforgotten.” images plus others he found in his research.