BLOOD BROTHERS
Fifty years ago this week, America lost Martin Luther King Jr. to an assassin’s gun, only to see Robert F. Kennedy cut down two months later. While their deaths have linked them in the public’s mind, it’s how they lived — agitating for civil rights and the end of the Vietnam War — that made them “Rebel Spirits.”
That’s the title of the NewYork Historical Society’s exhibit, flush with Lawrence Schiller’s photos of both men. As seen through his wideangle lens, their personalities were very different.
“Martin Luther King was an inspirational leader,” says Schiller, who found RFK “tactical, political” and “ruthless,” at least when he was managing his older brother John’s presidential campaign. But that changed, Schiller says: Just days before RFK’s death, the photographer caught a more pensive, thoughtful man, one whose empathy had expanded over time.
Schiller met Dr. King in 1965, photographing him as riots roiled the Watts ghetto in Los Angeles. As King urged an end to the violence, you can see his hold on the crowd.
But the most riveting image here, Schiller says, is the one taken by someone else: an unidentified photographer who captured the moment King held one of his children, staring at the cross the Ku Klux Klan set ablaze on his lawn. “Rebel Spirits: Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.” runs through May 20 at the New-York Historical Society, NYHistory.org