The black-and-white image — Coretta Scott King, veiled and weary, seated in a church pew cradling her daughter while looking toward the out-of-frame tragedy, her husband’s body — won its photographer the Pulitzer Prize in 1969, a year after it was taken.

It was the first Pulitzer awarded to a black photojournalist.

Now, on Wednesday morning, that picture and thousands of others from the photo archives of Ebony and Jet magazines will be auctioned in a private sale in Chicago, with the results likely to be made public on Thursday. The collection is considered the most extensive photographic record of black life in America in the second half of the 20th century.

The sale, part of a Chapter 7 bankruptcy action, is no ordinary liquidation. It has produced anxiety among historians and art experts, with some fearing the archive’s most sensitive images could wind up with a bidder who puts them on drink cozies or makes them available to hot-take blogs or those with a penchant for reckless comparisons. Much like the publications that produced the archive, which today exist as online shells of their former print selves, the archive sale is a commercial endeavor with social meaning. And, it comes, experts say, at a troubling time for minority groups in America.

“Ebony had the power to publish information of both great significance and minor meaning — and with that, change the narrative about black people in the United States, which it very much did,” said Brenna Wynn Greer, a historian at Wellesley College.

“Without that kind of vehicle, there’s this pressing question: Who or what is responsible for that now, at what is clearly a difficult time? Who or what is going to reliably publish the images, the stories, the editorials that challenge our otherness?”

In a poll released this month, 45 percent of young black Americans and 40 percent of Latino young adults told researchers with the Knight Foundation, a media funding and research organization, that they do not trust the mainstream media’s coverage of people like themselves. Many also described it as spotty, insufficient or often inaccurate.

Johnson Publishing Company, creator of Ebony and Jet, got its start in 1940s Chicago, after founder John Johnson borrowed $500 against the value of his mother’s furniture. The grandson of slaves, Johnson had moved to Chicago from Arkansas with his family in the 1930s, part of the Great Migration, because Johnson’s hometown had no high school that black teens could attend. While working part-time in college, Johnson hit upon an idea, a kind of Reader’s Digest for black America. That publication, Negro Digest, began in 1942. But it was Ebony, a wide-net lifestyle monthly that debuted in 1945, modeled on Life magazine, and Jet, a news and events weekly first published in 1951, that became the commercial center of Johnson Publishing.