Editorial

African-American history is more than a month

Posted

Moneta Sleet Jr. took one of the most famous photographs in American history, of a black-veiled, grief-stricken Coretta Scott King at the funeral of her slain husband, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., embracing her 5-year-old daughter, Bernice. It was April 9, 1968, among the saddest days in our country’s collective memory.

The photo, a tender portrait of a family overcome by sorrow, won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography in 1969. Sleet was the first African-American to be awarded a Pulitzer for journalism, according to The New York Times’s obituary for him.

Sleet died in 1996, at age 70, of cancer. We are proud to say that he made his home on Long Island, in Baldwin.

The story of how he came to take Mrs. King’s photo is remarkable in itself: A pool of white press photographers had crowded around her, according to The Times. She would have none of it. An African-American photographer should be in the pool, she said; otherwise she would not allow her picture to be taken. She asked that Sleet, who only four years earlier had covered Dr. King’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in Oslo, Norway, be included in the pool. The rest, as they say, is history.

Sleet earned a master’s degree in journalism from NYU and began his career as a photojournalist in 1955 at Ebony magazine, one of the country’s leading African-American news and cultural journals. Over the next four decades, he captured a number of the most famous images of Dr. King and his family, Malcolm X, Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, James Brown, Muhammad Ali and Stevie Wonder, among many others. According to The Times, he photographed nearly every African head of state during his time at Ebony.

Sleet covered the civil rights movement throughout the 1960s, marching alongside fellow African-Americans and considering himself as much a part of the story as any of the lines of courageous protesters that he photographed. He made no apologies for that. “I wasn’t there as an objective reporter,” he once said. “I had something to say and was trying to show one side of it. We didn’t have any problems finding the other side.”

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