Beuford Smith, Man Crying, (MLK Essay), 1968

Beuford Smith: This was part of my “Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr." essay. This was taken on 125th Street and I think Lenox Avenue. The man was crying because a white delivery man and he had made some kind of delivery. And people were attacking him, you know punching him, etcetera. And he was crying “please don’t attack him, leave him alone,” Martin Luther King wouldn’t like that. That’s why he was crying. That’s one of my favorite photographs.

Narrator: Smith has described the difficulty of getting mainstream magazines to publish works like this one. 

Beuford Smith: I tried to get Look Magazine, the other magazines interested in it but they didn’t want to touch it. They said, oh no if that had been in color we would get it, we would buy it. But if it had been color they would have said, oh if it was black and white we would buy it.  But if a white photographer had taken it, it would have been there. See, racism was not—someone was talking about racism, and stuff like that. In my lifetime, no one has ever called me the N-word, except growing up when I was fifteen or sixteen years old. But as an adult, a young adult, the racism that I have faced is racism that’s subtle, you can’t really prove.