Civil Rights Photographer Bob Adelman Dies At Age 85
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MIAMI (CBSMiami/AP) — Photographer Bob Adelman - famous for documenting the civil rights movement in the South - has died at age 85.
Adelman was pronounced dead at his Miami Beach home Saturday afternoon, according to Miami Beach Police spokesman Ernesto Rodriguez. An autopsy is pending and Adelman's death remains under investigation, Rodriguez said.
Adelman volunteered his services as a photographer to the Congress of Racial Equality, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and other civil rights organizations in the 1960s. The work put him on the front lines of the civil rights movement, frequently in the company of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whom he called "Doc."
"Now they seem like momentous events. At the time, they were covered in the back pages of newspapers, for the most part. The only time blacks appeared in newspapers at that time was when there was violence," Adelman told The Associated Press in 2014.
Focus on South Florida: The Fight for Civil Rights
He went on to shoot the covers of national magazines and the front pages of national newspapers, but he always considered himself an activist.
Among Adelman's best-known images were a shot of King and his wife, rain dampening their clothes, leading a crowd on a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965; a sequence of frames showing a small group of young black people struggling to stand under a blast of water from a fire hose in Birmingham, Alabama; and King delivering his "I Have a Dream" speech, raising his right hand over his head as he crescendos with the words of an old spiritual, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"
Born in 1931, Adelman grew up in a Jewish family in The Rockaways in Queens, New York. In 2014, he said he couldn't remember meeting a black person until he started sneaking into New York City jazz clubs as a teenager.
"When the movement started, I was very, very moved by the first people sitting at lunch counters. It wasn't a front page story, the whole nation wasn't riveted by it," Adelman said.
As a photographer, Adelman was interested in showing how the descendants of enslaved people who had no rights to their own bodies were marching en masse across a landscape marked by signs telling black people where whites had decreed they could and could not go.
"I thought this using your body to try to change things, whether you tried to vote or went to the bathroom or you were trying to go into a movie theater or whatever — that was inescapable and it was I guess very, very provocative and confrontational," Adelman said.
Adelman's standing within the movement allowed him to get closer to King than many other news photographers. Other leaders of the era recognized him, too. Malcolm X once struck up a conversation with him about camera settings and the differences between the Nation of Islam and traditional Muslim beliefs.
Adelman went on to cover the war on poverty, the women's movement, the gay rights movement and public health issues. He also amassed an archive featuring the icons of pop art — Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons and Roy Lichtenstein. He made portraits of the writers Raymond Carter and Samuel Beckett, and he spent a year documenting the life of a pimp for the 1972 book "Gentleman of Leisure."
He published more than a dozen books, including one of work by Jacques Lowe, President John F. Kennedy's personal photographer, whose negatives were lost in the collapse of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Adelman and Lowe's daughter were able to salvage some of the lost images from existing prints and contact sheets stored elsewhere.
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