Happy New Year POU! It’s a new decade.
Today’s featured African-American Photographer: Moneta Sleet Jr.
From the time he was sent to Montgomery, Ala., in 1955 to cover an unlikely boycott organized by a young minister named Martin Luther King Jr. until long after he captured what became the signature moment of Dr. King’s funeral in Atlanta in 1968, Mr. Sleet was a gentle, ubiquitous presence in the civil rights struggle in the United States and a fixture at independence ceremonies and celebrations in Africa.
In a profession whose practitioners are expected to bring a certain detachment to their work, Mr. Sleet saw no reason to apologize for his commitment to the cause he covered or for his emotional involvement with those he photographed. ”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.”
In the era of civil rights marches, Mr. Sleet tended to march double-time, once estimating that he had walked 100 miles during the 50-mile march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 because he kept walking back and forth along the line of march to take photographs.
Mr. Sleet was a native of Owensboro, Ky., and his father was the business manager at Western Kentucky State College in Paducah. He got his first box camera as a child but did not think of becoming a professional photographer until he went to Kentucky State College in Frankfort. Initially a business major, he decided to switch to photography after getting a job as an assistant at a commercial studio operated by a college dean.
Mr. Sleet, whose education was interrupted by Army duty in World War II, later studied at the School of Modern Photography in New York and received a master’s degree in journalism from New York University. After a brief stint as a sportswriter for The Amsterdam News in 1950, he joined Our World, a popular black picture magazine. When it folded in 1955, he joined Ebony, the black-owned monthly based in Chicago.
Over the next 41 years, he captured photos of young Muhammad Ali, Dizzy Gillespie, Stevie Wonder, and Billie Holiday. Besides his photo of Coretta Scott King, he also captured grieving widow Betty Shabazz at the funeral of Malcolm X. His collection Special Moments in African American History: The photographs of Moneta Sleet, Jr. 1955-1996 was published posthumously in 1999.
