Far more likely is that he needs reading glasses but doesn’t like to be seen wearing them.

Oh it gets better (or worse?) there are plenty of color photographs from Dr King’s 1963 march and speech. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kennethbachor/rare-color-martin-luther-king-photos

At least this is somewhat more excusable since newspapers were still mostly using B&W. The color photos would have been for the weekly or monthly news magazines which were using color.

You and I were both born closer to WW2 than to today.

At no point in my HS history class did our teacher mention that she was alive and living a few hours away from us.