AP photog captured Korean War, civil rights
VA. • Gene Herrick, a retired Associated Press photographer who covered the Korean War and is known for his iconic images of Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and the trial of the killers of Emmett Till in the early years of the Civil Rights Movement, died Friday. He was 97.
In 1956, Herrick photographed Rosa Parks during her second arrest, for participating in the boycott against segregated busing that followed her refusal to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Ala. That same year, Herrick captured an image of King smiling while being kissed by Coretta Scott King on the courthouse steps after being found guilty of conspiracy to boycott the city’s buses.
In a 2020 interview with The Associated Press, Herrick said it was rare to get a photo of King smiling.
“I knew he was going to be let out of jail that morning,” Herrick said. “And all these people were out there on the steps waiting for him, including his wife, who reached out and gave him a big kiss.”
Herrick’s longtime companion Kitty Hylton said he died at a nursing home in Rich Creek, Va., surrounded by people who loved him.
“He was so proud to be a journalist. That was his life,” Hylton said.
Herrick also covered the trial of two white men in the killing of the 14-yearold Till, a Black youth who was abducted, tortured and lynched in Mississippi after being accused of flirting with a white woman. The two men were found not guilty in 1955 by an allwhite jury, and admitted to the murder a year later in an interview with Look Magazine.
Herrick was particularly proud of his Korean War coverage. “Good journalists want to go where the action is, wherever it is,” he said for an AP article in 2018.
He also covered sports including Major League Baseball, Elvis Presley and five U.S. presidents.
Herrick joined the AP at age 16 in Columbus, Ohio, as an office assistant. Two years later he transferred to Cleveland, where he lived with an AP photographer and often assisted him. Herrick got his big break when his roommate was unable to cover a Cleveland Indians game, and he was asked to take his place.
“They’ve got to be stupid,” Herrick said he thought at the time. “Me cover a ball game for the AP?”
Herrick was equally stunned when, not long after, he was promoted to AP photographer in Memphis.