Harlem Street Signs

This image from 1987 highlights the street sign added that year to a segment of Sixth Avenue north of Central Park honoring slain civil rights leader Malcolm X. It was shot by Don Hogan Charles, the first Black photographer to be hired by The New York Times and a figure widely regarded for his poignant images of the civil rights movement and of everyday life in New York. A lifelong New Yorker and longtime resident of Harlem, Charles photographed historically Black neighborhoods with nuance, thoughtfulness and depth, providing a fuller portrait of life not previously seen by many readers. In the words of his colleague Chester Higgins, who joined The Times as one of a small number of Black photographers in 1975, “He felt that his responsibility was to get the story right, that the white reporters and white photographers were very limited.” Among his most best-known photographs is one from 1964 of Malcolm X holding a rifle and peering out the window of his home in Queens. The activist an