Moneta Sleet, Jr. 1926–

Photojournalist

At a Glance…

Documented the Fight for Civil Rights

Pulitzer Prize Winner

Successful Retrospective in the Mid-1980s

Sources

Moneta Sleet, Jr., has been taking pictures of people all of his life, capturing on film the exuberance, sorrow, steadfast determination, and introspection of his various subjects—celebrities and unknowns alike. Working exclusively for the black press, he continues to exhibit a strong commitment to showing slices of black life that might otherwise be missed by the white-dominated media. This commitment, together with his natural sensitivity and gentleness, has made him a prize-winning photojournalist and artist.

Sleet’s parents sparked his interest in photography when they gave him a box camera as a child, and his hobby grew throughout his high school and college years. Sleet studied business at Kentucky State College, interrupted by a couple of years in the U.S. Army, and after graduating in 1947 he began pursuing photography as a career. In 1948 he was invited to set up a department of photography at Maryland State College. After a year, he left to engage in postgraduate study in New York. Sleet briefly attended the School of Modern Photography, and in 1950 he received a master’s degree in journalism from New York University.

Sleet’s first journalism job was as a sportswriter for the Amsterdam News, a black newspaper in New York, in 1950. Several months later, he secured a position with the black picture magazine Our World and worked there until it folded in 1955. That same year, he joined the staff of the Johnson Publishing Company and began shooting pictures for Jet and Ebony magazines.

In four decades as a staff photographer for Johnson Publishing, Sleet has documented the struggles and triumphs of people of color throughout the world. In addition to traveling extensively in the United States, he has been to Liberia, Libya, the Sudan, Ghana, the Gambia, Kenya, Nigeria, Norway, Russia, South America, and the West Indies. He has photographed former African heads of state such as Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, Ghanaian prime minister Kwame Nkrumah, Liberian president William Tubman, and Kenyan president Jomo Kenyatta. His celebrity photos include memorable shots of singers Billie Holiday and Patti LaBelle; jazz musician Thelonius Monk; actors Bill Cosby, Phylicia Rashad, and Sidney Poitier; and the late tennis great Arthur Ashe.

But Sleet has also taken pictures of the less famous in various settings from civil rights marches to beauty contests. He recorded the woes of the less fortunate in such places as death

At a Glance…

Born Moneta J. Sleet, Jr., February 14, 1926, in Owensboro, KY; son of Moneta J. and Ozetta L. Sleet; married Juanita Harris; children: Greg, Michael, Lisa. Education: Kentucky State College, B.A., 1947; New York University, M.A., 1950.

Taught photography at Maryland State College, 1948-49; sportswriter for Amsterdam News, New York City, 1950; photographer for Our World, 1951-55; Johnson Publishing Company, Chicago, staff photographer for Ebony and Jet magazines, 1955—; first one-man show in St. Louis and Detroit, 1970; second one-man show in New York City, Newark, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and other U.S. cities, 1986. Military service: Served in the U.S. Army, 1944-46.

Member: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Black Academy of Arts and Letters.

Awards: Citation for excellence, Overseas Press Club of America, 1957; Pulitzer Prize for feature photography, 1969; photojournalism awards from the National Association of Black Journalists, 1978, and the National Urban League; named to Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame, University of Kentucky, 1989.

Addresses: Office—Ebony Magazine, Johnson Publishing Company, Inc., 820 South Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60605.

row, a West Virginia mining town, and Miami, Florida, in the aftermath of a riot. Traveling so much has been difficult on his family. As he told Ebony, “It’s not an easy life, so it’s important to have a family who understands. I have been very fortunate.”

Documented the Fight for Civil Rights

Sleet’s major contributions to photojournalism and world history are his pictorial chronicles of both the American civil rights movement and the emergence of independent South African States. He has recorded such major events as the famous 1963 march on Washington, D.C.; the 1965 Selma, Alabama march for voting rights; and the independence day celebrations in Nairobi, Kenya—a former British colony—in 1963.

Over the years, his efforts—and the contributions of Jet and Ebony magazines—were often overshadowed by the white media. As a black artist, his works have not enjoyed the wide exposure often afforded the works of white artists. He has, however, been able to bring his experience as an African American to his photography of black subjects. Sleet’s photographs illustrate a great sense of commitment: “I must say that I wasn’t there [at major civil rights demonstrations] as an objective reporter,” he told the New York Times. “To be perfectly honest I had something to say, or, at least hoped that I did, and was trying to show one side of it—because we didn’t have any problems finding the other side. So I was emotionally involved. That may not be a good school of journalism, but that’s the way I felt.”

Because of his personal and professional interest in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Sleet came to know Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., well and produced one of the largest collections of candid shots of King and his family. He took one of his first shots of the Kings in 1956—a photo of Dr. and Mrs. King with their infant daughter, Yolanda, on the steps of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, at the very beginning of the King crusade. He traveled with the family to Oslo, Norway, when King received the Nobel Peace Prize. Sleet grew close to the family over the years. “It’s kind of a peculiar position to be in,” he told the New York Times, “because, on one hand, you are there as [a photographer], but people soon forgot that.”

Pulitzer Prize Winner

Following the assassination of King in 1968, Sleet attended the slain leader’s funeral and received a Pulitzer Prize for his picture of Coretta Scott King comforting her young daughter, Bernice, during the service. In explaining the compassion shown in this picture to American Photographer, he said simply, “He was my leader, too.”

Sleet’s Pulitzer Prize for photography was the first awarded to an African American, as well as the first bestowed upon anyone working for a black publication. Sleet has also received a citation for excellence from the Overseas Press Club of America, awards from the National Urban League and the National Association of Black Journalists, and induction into the Hall of Fame at the University of Kentucky.

Some observers—and Sleet himself—credit his success more to his sensitivity and patience than to his practical technique. As the photographer explained in the New York Times: “You’ve got to know when to intrude and when not to intrude and when to pull back. You have to be very patient, a thing that’s good for me because I have a lot of patience and don’t mind waiting.” And in An Illustrated Bio-Bibliography of Black Photographers, Sleet commented: “You try to develop the sensitivity and the ’eye’ to see that very special mood of the moment. You develop the discipline to block out everything but you, the camera and the subject, and you develop the tenacity to stick with it, to have patience. The picture will happen—that very special picture will happen.”

Successful Retrospective in the Mid-1980s

Although Sleet’s photographs have been shown at the prestigious Metropolitan Museum of Art, he saw only one solo exhibition of his work during the height of the civil rights movement. This showing was sponsored by the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority and toured St. Louis and Detroit in 1970. For more than a decade and a half after that, Sleet’s works were not displayed in formal one-man exhibitions. But in 1986, the Philip Morris Companies and the Johnson Publishing Company cosponsored Sleet’s second one-man retrospective exhibit, which opened first at the New York Public Library.

Initially set to run for two years and visit four cities, the show received so much attention and so many requests for bookings that its schedule was expanded. In addition to New York, the retrospective was shown in Chicago; Milwaukee; Newark, New Jersey; Frankfort, Kentucky; and Washington D.C. Highlights of the exhibit included many of his most famous shots of the King family, other political leaders, and celebrities. The photographs ranged in mood from heart-rending sadness to triumph; included was a strikingly poignant photograph of blues great Billie Holiday, wearily resting her head on her needle-scarred arms, as well as a shot of an unknown, exultant woman tramping and singing through the rain during the 1965 Selma march.

Sleet’s body of work serves as a permanent reminder of the richness of black history and culture while providing a pictorial legacy of the key figures in the burgeoning civil rights movement. As he stated in the New York Times, “A lot of people have forgotten those days and I don’t think they ever should.”

Sources

Books

Crawford, Joe, editor, The Black Photographers Annual: 1973, Black Photographers Annual, 1972.

Willis-Thomas, Deborah, editor, An Illustrated Bio-Bibliography of Black Photographers, 1940-1988, Garland Publishing, 1989.

Periodicals

American Photographer, July 1988.

Chicago Defender, May 2, 1987.

Ebony, February 1969; June 1969; August 1971; January 1987.

Jet, October 13, 1986; March 2, 1987; June 5, 1989.

New York Times, October 19, 1986.

—Robin Armstrong