Moneta Sleet Jr.

Moneta J. Sleet Jr. was born on the fourteenth of February 1926 at Owensboro, Kentucky, the son of Moneta J. Sleet Sr. — a Kentucky State University graduate and Owensboro public school teacher — and Ozetta Marie Sleet. He was raised in the segregated Black community of western Kentucky and given a Brownie camera by his parents at the age of nine.

He enrolled at Kentucky State University at Frankfort in 1944 and completed the bachelor's degree in business in 1947. He served in the United States Army across 1944 and 1945 in the segregated Quartermaster Corps in the Pacific theatre.

He completed the master's degree in journalism at the New York University School of Journalism in 1950.

He was hired in 1950 at the Amsterdam News at Harlem, New York as a staff photographer — and moved in 1951 to Our World magazine at New York under the picture editor Howard Morehead. He joined the Johnson Publishing Company at Chicago in 1955 — and served as staff photographer for Ebony and Jet from 1955 to his death in 1996.

He covered the principal events of the American civil rights movement across the 1950s and 1960s — including the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 and 1956, the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School in 1957, the funeral of Medgar Evers at Arlington National Cemetery in 1963, the Selma to Montgomery march of March 1965, and the funeral of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at Atlanta in April 1968.

He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography on the fifth of May 1969 — for his photograph of Coretta Scott King and her daughter Bernice King at the King funeral on the ninth of April 1968 at Ebenezer Baptist Church at Atlanta. He was the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize in a journalism category.

He photographed across the next two decades the African anti-colonial movements — including the Ghanaian independence celebrations of 1957, the Nigerian independence celebrations of 1960, the African National Congress meetings at Tanzania in the 1970s — and the Black popular culture of the post-civil-rights United States.

He died at Long Island, New York on the thirtieth of September 1996 of complications of cancer, at seventy.

He is honored here as the first African American Pulitzer Prize winner in journalism.