Moneta John Sleet, Jr , February 14, 2026

Описание: Today, February 14, 2026, we celebrate the birthday of Moneta John Sleet, Jr., who was born one hundred years ago on Valentine’s Day, 1926, in Owensboro, Kentucky.
In 1969, Sleet was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography, the first African-American to win both a Pulitzer and the award for journalism.
Sleet’s parents gifted him his first box camera when he was just a child, sparking his interest in photography. While attending Western High School in Owensboro, he joined the camera club and served as editor of the school newspaper.
He went on to attend Kentucky State College, majoring in photography and taking pictures of campus events. He went on to complete his Master’s degree in Journalism at New York University after serving in the 93rd Engineers, an all-Black unit, in World War II.
Sleet first found employment as a sports journalist working for the New York-based The Amsterdam News, then moving on to the magazine Our World, where he focused primarily on photography.
Sleet worked for Our World until it closed in 1955. He spent the next 41 years working at Ebony, along with documenting the civil rights movement alongside Martin Luther King, Jr., for 13 years.
He photographed celebrities and small, poor children, kings and civil rights marchers walking from Selma to Montgomery. The same camera lens that caught the spirit of celebrities such as Muhammad Ali, Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt, Dizzy Gillespie, Moms Mabley, and Sammy Davis, Jr., on film also recorded the lives of poor children on the streets and the hope of the civil rights marchers in the rain.
Spending over a decade with Martin Luther King, Jr., he recorded many formal and informal moments of King, from the famous march in Washington to casual moments at home with his family.
Sleet didn’t just take photographs of the civil rights movement. He was part of it, marching alongside the others.
Then King was assassinated.
When his widow Coretta Scott King learned that no African American photographers were assigned to document King’s funeral service, she issued an ultimatum. If the press did not include Sleet as part of the press pool, then she would ban all photographers from the funeral service.
Sleet’s photograph of the grieving but dignified widow holding their daughter Bernice on her lap during the funeral captured her sorrow and invoked the sympathy of the nation.
This is the photograph that led to Sleet being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography.
Sleet recorded the civil rights movement through the lens of his camera, and his work has been frequently exhibited at museums, most famously at the St. Louis Art Museum.
His work is available in one collection in the book Special Moments in African-American History, 1955-1996: the Photographs of Moneta Sleet, Jr., Ebony Magazine's Pulitzer Prize Winner, published posthumously in 1998.