In March 1906, US troops attacked a large group of Moros who had taken refuge atop the extinct volcano of Bud Dajo in the southern Philippines. Once infamous as slave raiders, pirates and polygamists, the Moros owed their name to the Spanish word for ‘Moors’. When the dust had settled after a three-day fight, an estimated one thousand Moro men, women and children lay dead. American casualties were eighteen killed and fifty-nine wounded. Influenced by the official report, American newspapers dubbed the Moros ‘insurgents’ and hailed the heroism of the US troops who had prevailed in the so-called Battle of Mount Dajo.

Only later, as more details emerged, did anti-imperialists like Mark Twain condemn the action as a needless slaughter and Democrat politicians call on the Republican government of President Theodore Roosevelt to provide an official explanation and publish all relevant correspondence. That never happened – only a handful of telegrams already in the public domain were ‘released’ – and the story was quickly buried. There it would have remained, largely lost to history, but for the survival of a single photo of the aftermath of battle taken by a former soldier called Aeronaut Gibbs. It depicts the exhausted but victorious US soldiers posing ‘like hunters after a successful shoot’ beside a trench filled ‘with the bodies of the people they have killed as if they were so many trophies’.

A copy of the photo was sent in 1907 by Moorfield Storey, president of the Anti-Imperialist League, to W E B Du Bois, the prominent African-American civil rights activist, who wanted to distribute an enlarged version throughout the United States to highlight the injustice of American rule in the Philippines.