His brother wrote with great pride how he had met a ship of The Black Star Line and posed for photographs with the captain...he wrote that it was in 1965 iirc, but that’s open to question. One of the items on the dock might be described as either a sea chest or a camera case.
Richard Wright, who accompanied MX to both the Bandung Conference in Indonesia where MX first met Sukarno (most timelines leave that out) and his first trip to the Middle East in 1959, was a photographer and publisher of a magazine known as NOW! for which we can find no archives.
You really want to go there?
There are people in that image who appear to have been added, one of whom has been tentatively indentified as the Marda who was at the Nachmanoffs in Hawaii. The central character appears to be too tall to be the kenyan, he’s loaded down with a cartload of false lei, and the man who is supposed to be Stanley Armour Dunham has an arm that was taken from the man on the far right - whose right arm is missing.
I have a love-hate relationship with that image. It both tells much and conceals much. One thing it appears to conceal is a white object on the ground - that follows the contours one would expect to see if it was a basinette.
The original of that image would be interesting.
Was I wrong in remembering that MX returned to the US on a Black Star Line ship?
It’s very interesting that they made the dock photo collage. Why not just hide it, burn it, rip it up?
I can only assume that it supported some part of the myth, and also pre-empted any undoctored photo that might appear at some point.
Like in “NOW”.