The Northwest Neighborhood Alliance is working on a request for an official name change of Max Rhoads Park to the Moneta Sleet Jr. Park.
The park houses the marker containing a brief history of Sleet, as he grew up just around the corner from the park. It is currently named for Max Rhoads, a former city finance director and a WWII and Korean War veteran who died in 2008.
“I and some other folks have talked about the importance of recognizing Moneta Sleet Jr. as being from Owensboro — specifically this area, the northwest area of Owensboro,” Alliance Chair Rafe Buckner said.
Buckner said that while the festival and canvas unveiling was announced this past fall, the discussion to change the park’s name came up before those events.
The request to change the name will first have to be approved by the Parks and Recreation Department and the Neighborhood Alliance before City Commissioners cast the final vote.
“If ever there was a reason or a person of great historical significance from our area, that man is the top in the city. There’s no doubt about it,” Commissioner Mark Castlen said. “And yet he’s basically been ghosted, other than a small plaque in the park.”
Xavier Curry, a member of the alliance, said that he believes with the current momentum for the festival and the canvas that was unveiled in November, there is a relevance to the request for the name change.
Sleet was born in Owensboro in 1926. After graduating from Western High School — the then-segregated school in town — he went on to graduate from Kentucky State University with a degree in business and from New York University with a master’s in journalism.
Eventually, Sleet formed a close relationship with civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. and photographed King’s work during the civil rights movement in the 1960s. When King died, his wife Coretta Scott King insisted Sleet photograph her husband’s funeral.
At this funeral, Sleet shot a photo of Coretta with her daughter, an imaged that earned Sleet a Pulitzer Prize for Best Feature Photo — marking Sleet as the first Black winner of a Pulitzer Prize in journalism.
