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Photojournalism: Flip Schulke

Flip Schulke Photo by Gary Truman Photo by Gary Truman

Flip Schulke was one of America’s premier photojournalists for more than forty years. A native of New Ulm, Minnesota, and a graduate of Macalester College in St. Paul, Schulke moved to Miami in the 1950s, where he developed specialties in underwater photography, auto racing, the space program, and the history of the Berlin Wall. Schulke also invented several cameras and lenses that contributed to the improvement of underwater photography.

Through his close friendship with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Schulke became best known as one of the leading chroniclers of the civil rights movement. He covered nearly every major civil rights story in the South from the 1950s until Dr. King’s assassination in 1968. In 1995, he received the Crystal Eagle Award from the National Press Photographers Association for his lifelong documentation of the civil rights movement. His books include Witness to our Times: My Life as a Photojournalist and He Had a Dream: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement.

The Schulke collection at the Briscoe Center, acquired in 1999, contains approximately 300,000 images—all of Schulke’s work on the civil rights movement, as well as his underwater and space flight images and his acclaimed photographs of Jacques Cousteau, Fidel Castro, John F. Kennedy, and Muhammad Ali/Cassius Clay.

Finding aid for the Flip Schulke Archive

Online Exhibit:
Flip Schulke: Capturing the life of a leader in photos

Photojournalism (Collection Strength)
News Media History (Collection Strength)