Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [Portrait of Civil Rights Legend]

Chicago: Sydney Harris, 1958 Black-and-white print depicting the civil rights leader against a black background, signed by Civil Rights photographer, Sydney Harris. Matted and framed, 19 x 17 inches, in fine condition. Provenance: From the estate of Addie Wyatt, who appears in an Associated Press photograph by Nam Huh with the print. The Reverends Addie and Claude Wyatt, Jr. were fixtures of the American Civil Rights movement through the second half of the 20th century. Addie began her career working with the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America in Chicago in 1941. Together they founded Chicago’s Vernon Park Church of God in 1956, and for the next twelve years were closely associated with Dr. Martin Luther King’s peace movement, joining him at the March on Washington in 1963, the Selma to Montgomery Marches in 1965, and the Chicago demonstration in 1966. In the early 1960s Eleanor Roosevelt appointed Addie to a position on the Labor Legislation Committee on the United States Commission on the Status of Women. A vital force in the arena of labor rights, she founded the Coalition of Labor Union Women in 1974. The following year she and Barbara Jordan became the first African American women to be honored as Persons of the Year by Time Magazine. Claude Wyatt, Jr. served as the Southern Christian Leadership as Chicago director of the Ministerial Leadership Movement and as a board member of People United to Serve Humanity (PUSH). Sydney Harris worked for nearly half a century as a photographer, activist, and union organizer with a focus on civil rights. During the Spanish Civil War he served as a scout with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and upon his return to American shores he devoted himself to the cause of equal rights in the United States. During the 1950s he was labeled a subversive by the U.S. government and was subject to surveillance for many years after, his associations with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr and Cesar Chavez gaining him extra scrutiny throughout the 1960s.