A nearly three-year, student-driven effort has led the University of South Carolina Libraries to preserve more than 5,000 images capturing Columbia’s Black community during the Jim Crow era.
The photographs were taken by Richard Samuel Roberts, a self-taught photographer active in Columbia from 1921 until his death in 1936. The collection is now freely accessible to the public.
Abigail Cole is the development communications and social media manager with USC Libraries and the writer of the digital collection’s story. She says the collection began in the 1970s, when former professor and photographer Philip Dunn and former South Caroliniana Library archivist Tom Johnson worked with the Roberts family to recover thousands of glass plate negatives from underneath a crawl space in his family home.
Three students, funded by the Center for Civil Rights, each went through roughly 10 to 20 photos per day. The process included scanning the negatives, converting them into photos, digitally processing them, and adding metadata, or information that makes the photos searchable by the public.
Roberts, who was a U.S. Post Office janitor by night, would go to his studio on Washington Street during the day. He captured the Black working and middle class in a segregated Columbia, including multigenerational families, mechanics, doctors, and laborers.
Roberts photographed prominent Black historical figures like Dr. Matilda Evans, the first Black woman to practice medicine in South Carolina, and Celia Dial Saxon, a celebrated educator in Columbia who founded schools of her own.
"Roberts was advertised in the 'colored section' of the newspaper," Cole says, "so, [for] these people, there's no other place for them to get their photograph taken." He would go to funerals, events, and was commissioned by Black colleges and high schools.
According to Cole, the Manigault Hurley Funeral Home, a funeral home for Black families in Columbia, was bought by USC. "It was on Main Street and they had to move. [Their] original building only now exists in these photographs."
One of the Black schools Roberts photographed was Booker T. Washington High School, where he would take class photos. The school was eventually demolished, and "it now only exists, outside of living memory, in photographs," she says.
"His grandson told me [Roberts] would bring in children from the country to Columbia to go to Booker T. Washington," Cole says. The high school was the only Black school in South Carolina that was state credited. "They would stay in his house and he would host them."
At the time, Columbia was a hub for Black upward mobility and education in the state. In hosting students from areas absent of opportunities that the state's capital provided, Roberts became a conduit for opportunity and positioned himself as part of that access. Roberts opening his own home, the way his photographs opened a window into the Black community of that era. "He wanted to capture people at their best and possibly make them better," says Cole.
When flipping through the collection, multiples truths about Black life are pulled to the front. "[The photos] kind of affirm, yes, the segregated city is a thing," Cole says. "These photos couldn't have been taken anywhere else, they're not going to be taken by a white photographer [during this time]." The segregated schools, local establishments, and homes all confirm the limitations of the era and what could or could not be explored through a Black lens.
"But then I think the fact that these photos exist and looking at the people in these photos shows this triumphant spirit of humanity," Cole says. "It negates this narrative of what white supremacy kind of states that African American life was at the time."
Cole says that despite social, economic, and other compounding struggles of the era, Roberts photographs show, "they were chasing the American dream. They had their own identities. They had their own careers. They ran their own businesses. They were providing services for their community that the state and white community would not, [so] it kind of just shows this beautiful inclusion of the true American dream of this is our community. We want to show who we are."
For Cole, this sentiment is why there library is encouraging the public to help identify all the people in the photographs.
"When you put a name to [a] face, this is who that person is. We can postulate all we want, but their name was Walter Adams," Cole says. "They gain so much power, and once [you know] someone's name, you can't make up their story." Expanding on that point, Cole says she believes identifying is "equally as important," as digitizing, in terms of preserving history and legacy.
When Johnson and Dunn first recovered the collection, they would carry contact sheets to interview people in historically Black neighborhoods such as Arsenal Hill, asking if they recognized the women, men, and children in the pictures. While many are identified in the collection, there is still a vast amount of unnamed faces. The digital collection has a "contribute info" button for the public to identify members of their family, church community, neighborhood, or wherever they draw those connections.
In viewing the Roberts collection, Cole says she hopes the public takes away a fuller picture of Black life during the Jim Crow era, specifically in Columbia. But she says she also hopes the everyday activities and milestones captured by Roberts in the antsy kids captured, the men heading to work, the multigenerational family photographs, in the couples documenting their union, that is taking part in telling the history of their time.
"Just because you're not capturing 'historic events' doesn't mean you're not a historian. Everyone can take part in their own history and preserving that [and for] future generations," Cole says. "Everyone is history. We're all stories in the end."
