Gene Herrick, AP photographer who covered the Korean war and civil rights, dies at 97
RICH CREEK, 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 Emmett Till’s killers in the early years of the Civil Rights Movement, passed away on Friday. . He was 97.
In 1956, Herrick photographed how Rosa Parks was fingerprinted after she refused to sit at the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. That same year, Herrick created an image of King smiling as he was kissed by Coretta Scott King on the courthouse steps after he was found guilty of conspiring to boycott the city 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 released from jail that morning,” Herrick said. “And all these people were waiting for him on the steps, 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, Virginia, surrounded by people who loved him.
“He was so proud to be a journalist. That was his life,” Hylton said. “He loved The Associated Press. He loved the people of the AP. He was so grateful to have experienced all the adventures.”
Herrick also reported on the trial of two white men in the murder of 14-year-old Till, a black youth who was kidnapped, tortured and lynched in Mississippi after being accused of flirting with a white woman. The two men were found not guilty by an all-white jury in 1955 and admitted to the murder in an interview with Look Magazine a year later.
Herrick was particularly proud of his reporting on the Korean War. “Good journalists want to go where the action is, wherever it is,” he said in a 2018 AP article.
In a 2015 interview for AP corporate archives, Herrick acknowledged the danger of war photography, but added: “That goes for civilian photography too. I came close to being killed with guns and having guns stuck in my chest many times during the riots in Clinton, Tennessee and places like that.”
He also reported on sports such as Major League Baseball, Elvis Presley and five U.S. presidents.
“God and the AP have given me opportunities that I never could have had,” Herrick said in the 2018 AP story. “I mean, I’m the luckiest kid in the world to have done what I’ve done.”
AP Editor-in-Chief Julie Pace said Sunday that Herrick “recorded history for the AP. We, and so many people around the world, have benefited from his keen eye and the power of his visual storytelling.”
Herrick joined the AP in Columbus, Ohio, at age 16 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 couldn’t cover a Cleveland Indians game, and he was asked to take his place.
“They must be stupid,” Herrick said as he thought. “I’m reporting on a ballgame for the AP?”
Herrick was equally stunned when he was promoted to AP photographer in Memphis not long after. He still didn’t have much experience when he volunteered for Korea in 1950 and found himself on the front lines, in the middle of the road, completely exposed.
“It is a beautiful war that is going on. I mean, the planes are coming in, dropping napalms and machine guns, and right there on the mountainside, and I’ve got a picture here of wounded people being carried on a litter, coming up the road, straight towards me, and, oh I thought, man, this is amazing,” Herrick recalled in 2015, laughing at the memory. “I’m bam-bamming with the old four-by-five Speed Graphic, the movie package of the day. And I look around and some GI in a ditch goes, ‘Sir?’ I said yes?’ He said, “You see that dirt popping up there…do you know what that is?”
And I said, ‘No. What is it?’ He said, ‘Those are bullets!’ …so I went off the road and ended up in the ditch with him. But I do have very nice photos.”
He retired from the AP in 1970 to begin a second career working for the developmentally disabled in Columbus and later in Rocky Mount, Virginia.
At the age of 91, Herrick was inducted into the Virginia Communications Hall of Fame at Virginia Commonwealth University – an event he considered a highlight of his life.
Born in Columbus and previously married, Herrick is survived by two sons, Chris and Mark Herrick of the Indianapolis area, daughter Lola Reece of Peterstown, W. Va., five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.