Moneta Sleet Jr.

Moneta J. Sleet Jr. was born on the fourteenth of February 1926 in Owensboro, Kentucky, the son of Moneta J. Sleet Sr. and Ozetta L. Sleet. A camera placed in his hands in boyhood set the course of a life that would witness, and preserve, the defining moments of a people's struggle for dignity. He graduated cum laude from Kentucky State College in 1947 and earned a master's degree in journalism from New York University in 1950, joining a generation of Black professionals who turned rigorous training toward the telling of their own story.

In 1955 the Johnson Publishing Company brought him onto the staff of Ebony and Jet, where he would remain for four decades. From that post he became one of the great chroniclers of the twentieth century, following Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Oslo for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and walking the road from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. His lens carried the same care to portraits of Muhammad Ali, Stevie Wonder, and the leaders of newly independent African nations.

On the fifth of May 1969 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for his photograph of Coretta Scott King holding her young daughter Bernice at the funeral of Dr. King — becoming the first African American to receive a Pulitzer for journalism. That image, tender and unflinching, gave a grieving nation a way to see its own sorrow.

He worked for Ebony until his death from cancer on the thirtieth of September 1996, in Baldwin, New York. He did not merely record history; he insisted, frame by frame, that Black life be seen in its full humanity. May his eye be honored, and the faces he preserved never forgotten.