Charles Moore, whose landmark photographs of the US civil rights struggle helped change American public opinion, has died at a nursing home in Florida aged 79.
Moore’s career took off when he was the only photographer to capture the arrest and roughing up of Martin Luther King in Montgomery, Alabama in 1958, images which made the pages of LIFE magazine.
For the next seven years he covered the Civil Rights movement supplying LIFE with powerful black and white images of unrest in the American South – images which in the words of US senator Jacob K Javits, “helped to spur passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
Moore also covered political unrest in Haiti and Venezuela and went to Vietnam on three occasions.
In 1989 Charles Moore was awarded the first Crystal Eagle Award for impact in photojournalism. In 1966 the Aviation/Space Writers Association presented Moore with an award for his LIFE magazine photographs of the air war in Vietnam.
His books include The Motherlode, a chronicle of the California Gold Rush; and Powerful Days, The Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore, which was published in 1991 by Stewart, Tabori & Chang.
The POWERFUL DAYS web site hosted by Ohio State University, features the civil rights work of Charles Moore.