Sleet, Moneta J. Jr.

Impact on the world

A 41-year staff photographer for Ebony and Jet magazines, Sleet documented nearly every major moment of the civil rights movement from the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott through the 1963 March on Washington and beyond, building close personal trust with movement leaders; when Coretta Scott King learned that no Black photographers were included in the press pool assigned to cover her husband's 1968 funeral, she threatened to bar all photographers unless Sleet was admitted and given a clear vantage point. His resulting image of King, grieving with young daughter Bernice in her arms, was distributed nationwide by the Associated Press and won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography, making Sleet the first Black man to win a Pulitzer in any category and the first to win the prize for journalism; over his career he also photographed Malcolm X's widow Betty Shabazz at his funeral, a young Muhammad Ali, Nelson Mandela, and numerous African heads of state during the continent's independence era.

Life & background

Born February 14, 1926, in Owensboro, Kentucky, Sleet received his first box camera as a boy and edited his high school newspaper before earning a business degree cum laude from Kentucky State College in 1947, having interrupted his studies for World War II military service. He briefly taught photography at Maryland State College (now the University of Maryland Eastern Shore) before earning a master's degree in journalism from New York University in 1950, then worked as a sports reporter for the New York Amsterdam News before joining the large-format magazine Our World and, in 1955, Ebony, where he remained for the rest of his career. He died of cancer on September 30, 1996, in New York at age 70; his hometown of Owensboro declared February 24, 2000, “Moneta Sleet Jr. Day” and dedicated a historical marker in his honor.

Sources

1. The Pulitzer Prizes; BlackPast.org; Saint Louis Art Museum