Jack Moebes - Photographer

For 30 years starting in late 1946, Moebes was a photographer with the morning paper, the Greensboro Daily News, and the afternoon paper, The Greensboro Record. He took the only photo of the four sit-in participants as they left the lunch counter on the first day. Moebes attended Loyola University on a football scholarship and studied arts and sciences. While also on football scholarship at Cumberland University he studied arts and sciences and earned a law degree in 1935.

Because jobs were few for lawyers during the Depression of the 1930s, he became a photographer. He served in the Air Force during World War II. He won awards from the North Carolina Press Association for both news and feature photography. A series of pictures he shot in 1957, when five black students enrolled in previously all-white Gillespie Park School, appeared in Life Magazine.

Audio (MP3)

What happened on Feb. 1(1:40)
The once forgotten, but now famous photo(:53)
Moebes tangles with Curly Harris to get photos of sit-ins (1:50)
How Moebes got "the photo" (:51)

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