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Category: African American History

Smiling woman dressed in outdoor winter clothes holds a large, old-style camera

Signs of Their Times: “Jim Crow” Was Here

Posted by: Jeff Bridgers

It shall be unlawful for a negro and white person to play together or in company with each other in any game of cards or dice, dominoes or checkers. –Birmingham, Alabama, 1930. “Jim Crow” laws systematically codified separation by race in the American South. Although it had begun some years before and persisted for some …

Smiling woman dressed in outdoor winter clothes holds a large, old-style camera

Du Bois’s American Negro Exhibit for the 1900 Paris Exposition

Posted by: Jeff Bridgers

In this exhibit there are, of course, the usual paraphenalia for catching the eye — photographs, models, industrial work, and pictures. But it does not stop here; beneath all this is a carefully thought-out plan, according to which the exhibitors have tried to show: (a) The history of the American Negro. (b) His present condition. …

Smiling woman dressed in outdoor winter clothes holds a large, old-style camera

March on Washington, 1963: Many New Photographs Digitized

Posted by: Jeff Bridgers

The following is a guest post by Helena Zinkham, Chief, Prints & Photographs Division. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was a landmark Civil Rights demonstration held on August 28, 1963 in Washington, DC. We have photographs in many collections that document this famous event. But the U.S. News & World Report Collection …

Smiling woman dressed in outdoor winter clothes holds a large, old-style camera

Augustus Washington, Daguerreotypist

Posted by: Jeff Bridgers

Strange as it may appear, whatever may be a colored man’s natural capacity and literary attainments, I believe that, as soon as he leaves the academic halls to mingle in the only society he can find in the United States, unless he be a minister or lecturer, he must and will retrograde. –Augustus Washington, letter …

Smiling woman dressed in outdoor winter clothes holds a large, old-style camera

Brown v. Board of Education: Getting the Picture One Year Later

Posted by: Jeff Bridgers

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court issued a decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, declaring that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” This decision was pivotal to the struggle for racial desegregation in the United States. A year later, in May 1955, Thomas O’Halloran, on assignment for U.S. News & …