Civil Rights Movement Photography of Martin Luther King Jr. in Cleveland’s Hough Neighborhood, 1967

Martin Luther King

Photograph

King, Martin Luther Jr., photograph with Sonny Denton, 1967, records King’s Cleveland civil rights work as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference identified the city as one of its summer project sites. Taken less than a year after the July 1966 Hough uprising, the image connects King’s national leadership to Northern urban segregation, poverty, and community organizing. The photograph provides visual evidence of SCLC’s attention to Cleveland during a period when civil rights activism increasingly addressed housing, employment, and municipal inequality outside the South.

United Press International. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. pictured with Sonny Denton of the Hough Opportunity Center. Cleveland, Ohio, May 16, 1967. Black-and-white press photograph. 9 x 7 inches. Caption attached. Verso contains newspaper-use inscriptions. The image shows King and Denton seated together, both wearing slight smiles, shortly before or after King’s announcement that Cleveland would be one of the SCLC’s project cities for civil rights action that summer. The press caption situates the photograph at the Hough Opportunity Center, tying the image to neighborhood-level organizing after the Hough riots of July 18 to 23, 1966.

Original wire-service press photographs were produced for rapid editorial circulation and helped shape national public understanding of civil rights campaigns through newspaper reproduction. This example preserves King’s late-career Northern organizing in a city that became central to debates over racial inequality, Black political power, and urban reform. Vertical crease down middle, with margin and verso markings typical of press use; very good. A news-service photograph documenting King’s Cleveland campaign work and the SCLC’s response to urban racial crisis in 1967.

Item #17382

Price: $450.00