New York Times Unearths Photos In Black History Month

by David Schonauer

NYT: “Pensive. Quizzical. Amused. Then, suddenly, that wide grin.” Frame 19 was used for the culture pages of The New York Times in 1972. Jack Manning/The New York Times.

The New York Times has created a new way to view Black History. And its own photographic history as well.

The Times’s Unpublished Black History feature presents never-published images from the newspaper’s archive and contextualizes them within the broader scheme of history and its own coverage of race in America. In honor of Black History Month, the Times is publishing a new photo or series of photos each day during February, along with the stories behind the images. Readers are invited to add their own insights, expanding on what we can learn about these images, and what we can learn from them.

A portrait of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. taken in 1963 and the stamp-posted back of the original photograph. Credit: Allyn Baum/New York Times.

The Times staff searched through more than five million photos and 300,000 negatives for the new project. The images capture historic events and everyday scenes, as well as celebrated figures including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and actress and singer Lena Horne.

1969: Young paraders marched along Seventh Avenue for the city’s first Afro-American Day parade. Credit Donal F. Holway/The New York Times.

A 1962 photograph by Patrick A. Burns shows future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall at St. Philip’s Protestant Episcopal Church in Harlem, where he was a vestryman. He is seen bowing his head to receive the St. Philip’s Rector’s Award from the Rev. Dr. M. Moran Weston.

“To outsiders perhaps, it was a minor accolade for Mr. Marshall, then a federal appeals court judge,” note the editors. “It went unmentioned in Justice Marshall’s lengthy Times obituary. But the quiet humility he displays here in a photograph (never published until now) reveals just how much his faith, and church, provided him with spiritual strength.”

Left: Thurgood Marshall, five years from becoming the first black Supreme Court justice, received the St. Phillip’s Rector’s Award from Father M. Moran, 1962. Right: Jackie Robinson, the Brooklyn Dodgers second baseman, addressing a City College Sociology Society meeting about his work with Harlem boys’ groups, 1949.

Another image, uncredited, shows Jackie Robinson giving a speech to the Sociology Society of City College in New York in 1949. Editors noted that the caption on the image did not detail what subject Robinson was discussing, but readers filled in the blanks: Robinson, it turns out, was about speaking his work with the YMCA in Harlem.

Rachel Swarns, the Times’s metro columnist, recently told PBS that there were a number of reasons the photographs were never published — including the fact that the newspaper made relatively limited use of photography in the past.

Left: 1969: Kenneth B. Clark, the prominent psychologist, scholar and educator, at home in a predominantly white New York suburb, Hastings-on-Hudson. Eddie Hausner/The New York Times. Right: July 21 1973, The Black Rodeo at Freehold Raceway in New Jersey (unpublished). Carl T. Gossett Jr./The New York Times

“We didn’t run photos back then the way we do today,” Times photo editor Darcy Eveleigh tells Nieman Lab. “The Times had a small photo staff, and if these photographers were lucky, they might get one or two columns in the paper. The words ran long, and sometimes there wasn’t room to include them — it was a word paper back then.”

The biases of editors also played a role. “We have also really got to be frank and honest and acknowledge that this was a time period when African-Americans were marginalized in media,” Swarns told PBS.

Participants gathered for the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom in Washington, D.C. in 1957 to demand more action on civil rights and to observe the third anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education, 1957. Photo: George Tames/ New York Times.

Eveleigh, who is also the curator and creator of the Lively Morgue, a Tumblr featuring material from the Times photo archive, notes that the new project can only scratch the surface of the 10 to 12 million photos in the collection.

Times senior editor Dana Canedy contacted Eveleigh several months ago about leveraging the Times photo archives for Black History Month, notes Nieman Lab. Research turned up some surprises.

Eveleigh discovered, for instance, that a 1963 portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. by Allyn Baum — an iconic photo that has appeared in the Times countless times — was actually taken on set during a taping of a round-table for NBC and was later cropped to look like a head shot, its context lost.

Arthur Ashe won a gruelling two-hour game against top-seed Dennis Ralston in the quarterfinals of the Eastern Grass Court Championships in South Orange, N.J., July 30, 1964. Credit Neal Boenzi/The New York Times.

While the scope of the project is limited, the conversations with readers about the images from the Times archives will continue in a newsletter called Race/Related. Sign up!

Originally published by American Photography AI-AP. David Schonauer is editor of Pro Photo Daily and AI-AP Profiles. Follow him onTwitter. Jeffrey Roberts is publisher of Pro Photo Daily and AI-AP. Follow Jeffrey onTwitter. Follow Pro Photo Daily on Facebook.