by Rita Baladad
Quick Summary
The New York Times has started a month-long photo-essay project called Unpublished Black History.
The New York Times has started a month-long photo-essay project called Unpublished Black History. Each day in February the New York times will highlight an unpublished photo from The New York Times Archive along with commentary and context about the photo.
The introduction highlights photographs taken of Martin Luther King Jr. Following is an excerpt:
Hundreds of stunning images from black history, drawn from old negatives, have long been buried in the musty envelopes and crowded bins of the New York Times archives.
None of them were published by The Times until now.
Were the photos — or the people in them — not deemed newsworthy enough? Did the images not arrive in time for publication? Were they pushed aside by words here at an institution long known as the Gray Lady?
As you scroll through the images, each will take you back: To the charred wreckage of Malcolm X’s house in Queens, just hours after it was bombed. To the Lincoln Memorial, where thousands of African-American protesters gathered, six years before the March on Washington. To Lena Horne’s elegant penthouse on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. To a city sidewalk where schoolgirls jumped rope, while the writer Zora Neale Hurston cheered them on, behind the scenes.
Photographers for The Times captured all of these scenes, but then the pictures and negatives were filed in our archives, where they sat for decades.
This month, we present a robust selection for the very first time.
