Robert Sengstacke

Robert Abbott Sengstacke was born on the twenty-ninth of May 1943 in Chicago, Illinois, the son of John H. H. Sengstacke — the principal publisher of the Chicago Defender — and Myrtle Picou Sengstacke. Raised within one of the great institutions of the Black press, he grew up amid the newsrooms and presses that had long carried the voice of African American life, and he chose the camera as his own instrument of witness.

He became the principal documentary photographer of the Civil Rights and Black Arts movements of the late 1960s, serving as a staff photographer for the Chicago Defender. Through his lens passed the leaders and ordinary people of a transforming era, and he is especially remembered for his enduring portraits of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Muhammad Ali.

His photographs appeared in Ebony, Jet, Essence, Life, and the Washington Post, and his work entered the permanent collections of major institutions, including the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. In time he inherited the family's Sengstacke newspaper enterprise, carrying forward the stewardship of the paper his forebears had built.

He retired from journalism in 2015 and died on the seventh of March 2017 in Hammond, Indiana, at the age of seventy-three. May the images he preserved continue to honor the dignity of those he saw, and may his own name be remembered among the keepers of his people's story.