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    A True Likeness: The Black South of Richard Samuel Roberts, 1920–1936
    A True Likeness: The Black South of Richard Samuel Roberts, 1920–1936
    A True Likeness: The Black South of Richard Samuel Roberts, 1920–1936
    Ebook269 pages1 hour

    A True Likeness: The Black South of Richard Samuel Roberts, 1920–1936

    By Elaine Nichols

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    About this ebook

    Extraordinary photos that reveal the social, economic, and cultural realities of the Black South

    A True Likeness showcases the extraordinary photography of Richard Samuel Roberts (1880–1935), who operated a studio in Columbia, South Carolina, from 1920 to 1935. He was one of the few major African American commercial photographers working in the region during the first half of the twentieth century, and his images reveal the social, economic, and cultural realities of the black South and document the rise of a small but significant southern black middle class.

    The nearly two hundred photographs in A True Likeness were selected from three thousand glass plates that had been stored for decades in a crawl space under the Roberts home. The collection includes "true likenesses" of teachers, preachers, undertakers, carpenters, brick masons, dressmakers, chauffeurs, entertainers, and athletes, as well as the poor, with dignity and respect and an eye for character and beauty.

    Thomas L. Johnson and Phillip C. Dunn received a 1987 Lillian Smith Book Award for their work on this book. This new edition of A True Likeness features a new foreword by Elaine Nichols, the supervisory curator of culture at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. A new afterword is provided by Thomas L. Johnson.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of South Carolina Press
    Release dateJul 30, 2019
    ISBN9781643360171
    A True Likeness: The Black South of Richard Samuel Roberts, 1920–1936

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      Book preview

      A True Likeness - Thomas L. Johnson

      A True Likeness

      A True Likeness

      The Black South of

      Richard Samuel Roberts

      1920–1936

      Edited by

      Thomas L. Johnson and Phillip C. Dunn

      For Our Families

      Roberts

      Johnson

      Dunn

      Cloth edition published by Bruccoli, Clark and Algonquin Books, 1986

      This edition published in Columbia, South Carolina, by the University of South Carolina Press, 2019

      Photographs © 1986, 1994 Estate of Richard Samuel Roberts

      Text © 1986, 1994 Thomas L. Johnson and Philip C. Dunn

      New material © 2019 University of South Carolina

      www.sc.edu/uscpress

      28  27  26  25  24  23  22  21  20  19

      10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data for the 1986 cloth edition can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/.

      Frontispiece: Richard S. Roberts (1880–1936), Fernandina, Florida, before 1920.

      This self-portrait was made in Roberts’s Florida studio which he called The Gem.

      ISBN 978-1-64336-016-4 (paperback)

      ISBN 978-1-64336-017-1 (ebook)

      Front cover photograph: unidentified couple, 1920s

      Contents

      Foreword

      Elaine Nichols

      Richard Samuel Roberts: An Introduction

      A True Likeness

      Afterword

      Thomas L. Johnson

      Acknowledgments for the 2019 Edition

      Foreword

      In the 1986 introduction to A True Likeness: The Black South of Richard Samuel Roberts, 1920–1936, Thomas Johnson wrote for himself and his coeditor, Phillip Dunn, a statement that precisely expressed Richard Roberts’s philosophy and creative vision for his work as a photographer. It was based on Roberts’s statement in a promotional leaflet: "A true likeness of oneself was just as necessary as every other necessity in life. To have one’s photograph taken was a duty that one owed relatives and friends." Such an approach to taking pictures of others elevates the meaning of photographs and makes the provision of them an essential and obligatory function in life.

      I first met Tom Johnson sometime between 1987 and 1989, after the publication of the book in 1986. He was the field archivist at the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina, and I was a guest curator for the South Carolina State Museum, researching African American funeral and mourning customs for an upcoming exhibition and catalogue. I was immediately impressed by his resourcefulness and extensive knowledge of South Carolina’s African American history.

      Tom was also a poet and an active member of the board of governors of the South Carolina Academy of Authors. In 1993 the academy inducted Kelly Miller Jr. (1863–1939), one of its posthumous honorees, into the organization. Miller, a native of Fairfield County, South Carolina, was a nationally recognized mathematician, philosopher, sociologist, writer, newspaper editor, and educator. In the early twentieth century, he was a leading figure in the intellectual discussion on race in America. Tom asked me to present the formal biographical statement about Miller at the induction ceremony in Charleston.

      Tom later introduced me to a number of influential persons with South Carolina connections, including members of the Roberts family and Nina Root. Nina was the director emeritus of the Research Library at New York’s American Museum of Natural History. She was also Tom’s coeditor for another photographic book about African Americans, Camera Man’s Journey: Julian Dimock’s South. Subsequently, that introduction led to a wonderful sisterly bond that we maintained until her death in 2017.

      While the Roberts photographs were taken more than a decade after the Dimock images (which were produced in 1904 and 1905) and mostly in Columbia and in rural communities across the state, both photographers tried to present African Americans in the best possible and truest light—as beautiful, dignified people whose images were worthy of being preserved in the photographic records. Similarly, Tom Johnson has consistently demonstrated a passion for researching, chronicling, and preserving the African American experience in South Carolina. In addition, he has approached this work as a discoverer who knows that there is a wealth of untapped information waiting to be found and shared with the world.

      I continue to be moved by the number and quality of images of babies and children who are part of Roberts’s narrative of black life in South Carolina. Two images remain with me. The first is that of a beautiful, smiling baby seated in and filling up a washbasin. It is such a captivating and cheerful image that if you have ever encountered a happy or contented baby, you will recognize the face of this child as the representative model. The second image, Portrait of an unidentified deceased child, probably 1920s, had a profound effect on me. When I first saw this image, I did not immediately recognize the child as deceased. I thought that she was asleep on a lace blanket. Her soft curls, rounded baby-cheeks, and delicate nose and lips gave no hint that she had transitioned from this world. I wanted to know her story: Who were her parents? Did she have any brothers or sisters? What were the circumstances of her passing? What would her life have been like had she lived? The questions were endless.

      Winner of the Southern Regional Council’s Lillian Smith Book Award in 1987, A True Likeness is, in many ways, a book of memories. Even the acknowledgments section preserves some important South Carolina remembrances as many, if not most, of the persons listed as contributing to the photo identifications in the book have passed away.

      The photographs of Richard Samuel Roberts evoke a sense that we know these people, as well as their circumstances and neighborhoods, even if they are from a bygone era. Here we find the faces of relatives, friends, children, community leaders, faith, recreation, and even death. In short, the book captures not only the likenesses of individuals but also the authentic ethos of the community they inhabited.

      Elaine Nichols

      Supervisory Curator, Culture

      Smithsonian National Museum of

      African American History and Culture

      Richard Samuel Roberts: An Introduction

      by Thomas L. Johnson

      During the 1920s and 1930s in Columbia, South Carolina, a black man named Richard Samuel Roberts was employed weekdays from four A.M. to noon as a custodian at the U.S. Post Office. When his workday there was done he went a few blocks south to 1119 Washington Street, in the heart of the segregated city’s black commercial district, where on the second floor he maintained a photography studio. His clientele was largely the black population of the city. He also often took his equipment to residences, schools, and funeral homes in and around the city and at times he went on picture-taking trips to other cities and towns in the state, as well as into the rural sections.

      He had taught himself photography in Fernandina, Florida, while working with his father as a stevedore and later as a fireman-laborer at the post office there. In Fernandina he eventually established and operated The Gem Studio. His wife, Wilhelmina Pearl Selena Williams, was a native of Columbia, and in 1920, after her health had begun to suffer from the humid Florida climate, the Robertses moved to Columbia. They bought a house, and by 1922 Roberts had rented the studio on Washington Street.

      He operated his business for close to fifteen years. After his death in 1936 at least a portion of the negatives that Roberts had accumulated over the years—some three thousand glass plates (out of a possible ten thousand pictures he may have made during the Columbia years)—were stored in the crawl space beneath the family home at 1717 Wayne Street.

      For almost half a century they remained there—a priceless cache documenting the black community of Columbia and South Carolina during the decades between the two world wars. His children cherished their father’s work and at one time had begun retrieving some of the negatives with the hope of having a book of their father’s work privately published. But their various

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