Sleet, Moneta J. Jr.
1926-1996 · Contribution: 1955-1996
Photojournalist
Became the first African American man to win the Pulitzer Prize and the first person to win it while working for a Black-owned publication, awarded in 1969 for his photograph of Coretta Scott King at Martin Luther King Jr.'s funeral

Portraits are AI-generated interpretations, not photographs.
Quick facts
- Born
- 1926, Owensboro, Kentucky
- Active since
- 1955
- Category
- Press & Photography
- Best known for
- First African American man to win a Pulitzer Prize
Impact on the world
Sleet's trusted place inside the movement produced its defining images, and his Pulitzer broke a barrier no Black man had crossed in the prize's history.
Sources
- The Pulitzer Prizes
1 more sources and references are available to members.
Related visionaries
Muhammad, Ozier
1950-present
Shared the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for Newsday’s “Africa, the Desperate Continent” series documenting famine on the continent, then spent 22 years as a staff photographer for The New York Times covering Nelson Mandela’s inauguration, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, and Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath
Withers, Ernest Columbus Sr.
1922-2007
Photographed nearly every major event of the Southern civil rights movement over a 60-year career, including the Emmett Till murder trial, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the “I Am a Man” Memphis sanitation strike, while also — as revealed decades after his death — secretly reporting information about the movement to the FBI
Harris, Charles “Teenie”
1908-1998
Spent roughly four decades as staff and freelance photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier, amassing an archive of nearly 80,000 images — now held by the Carnegie Museum of Art — that forms one of the largest and richest visual chronicles of 20th-century Black urban life in the United States
Payne, Leslie “Les”
1941-2018
Won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service as part of Newsday’s “Heroin Trail” investigative team, co-founded the National Association of Black Journalists in 1975, and, nearly three decades in the making, posthumously won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for The Dead Are Arising, his exhaustively researched life of Malcolm X, completed after his death by his daughter and principal researcher, Tamara Payne