Civil rights photographer Bob Adelman dies at age 85

MIAMI (AP) — Bob Adelman, a photographer who documented the civil rights movement across the Deep 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.

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 starting 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.