A Haunting Portrait of Newark’s Bloody Summer of Unrest

After Lee’s Newark assignment, Life sent him to cover the unrest in Detroit in July, 1967, and the funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968. “I was like their golden boy,” Lee later remarked. Eventually, he grew weary of documenting so much national trauma. He went on to photograph the scene around Andy Warhol’s Factory and worked briefly as an on-set photographer for Federico Fellini and Arthur Penn. In the early seventies, he was sent by Esquire to Los Angeles, to cover the city’s occult scene after the Manson murders. Around this time, he experimented with drugs and experienced thoughts of suicide. “He ended up having a bad acid trip,” his son Thomas, who oversees his archive, told me recently. “He was looking for a way out of that whole life.” After undergoing treatment at a veterans’ hospital in Iowa City, Lee settled in Florida, where he became a schoolteacher and lived until his death in 2015.

According to Lee’s widow, Peggy, Lee remained “haunted” by what he had seen in Newark. That summer, he had photographed a twenty-four-year-old named Billy Furr outside of a looted liquor store as Furr and other men carried out cases of beer. When a squad arrived, Furr ran up the block. Police fired at Furr, killing him and wounding Joey Bass, Jr., in the same spray of bullets. On the final day of Lee’s assignment, he visited the Montclair home of Furr’s mother, Joyce. In one photo, she stands in her son’s room looking out the window. Her back is turned to the camera, and the walls are unnervingly spare. The bed is made, but with a slight depression on one side that suggests the recent presence of a body. Joyce’s hand rests on a table, as though she is steadying herself. She is waiting.