Before he became a photographer, Dawoud Bey trained as a jazz percussionist, looking to John Coltrane as a role model for melding craft with a commitment to social justice. As a teenager in the 1960s, Bey was finely attuned to the social and political upheavals of the civil rights movement, staging sit-ins and demonstrations with his high school classmates and joining the Black Panther Party, whose newspaper he sold on the weekends. By 1968, the struggle for racial equality was converging with demonstrations against the war in Vietnam and the early stages of women’s liberation, forming a pattern of transformation and upheaval that culminated with the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
