DC -- Natl Museum of American History -- Exhibit: Celebration: Snapshots of African American Communities:
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Description of Pictures: Celebration: Snapshots of African American Communities
September 9, 2016 – December 27, 2016
To celebrate the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Museum of American History presents a special display of 25 photographs that reflect the diversity of the African American experience. The photos come from two collections in the Museum’s Archives Center that depict special occasions and everyday life in African American communities: the Scurlock Studio Collection and the Fournet Drug Store.
The Washington, D.C., based Scurlock Studio Collection includes the work of Addison Scurlock and his sons, Robert and George, who documented not only graduations and weddings but also significant community events over a period of 90 years. The family-owned Fournet Drug Store in St. Martinsville, La. was a multi-generation business with an African American clientele that closed in 1984. The collection includes photos from the 1940s-1970s, mostly black-and-white and some hand colored, that were never retrieved by customers.
Six of the photos in the exhibit will be chosen with the assistance of the public in an online polling activity.
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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.
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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
SIAHCE_160912_001.JPG: Celebration
"Every during those hard times and more to come, there was room for feelings of happiness, belonging, and pride in our lives."
-- Website visitor
To mark the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, we offer these images of joy-filled moments.
To help select images for display, we asked staff members and visitors to our website to vote for their favorites. And we asked them to share their thoughts about what they saw -- thoughts that you'll find on this and other labels in the gallery.
These photographs were taken when the United States was a society segregated by race. Nonetheless, African Americans lived in complex communities in which families and church groups, schools and businesses,sport teams and social clubs thrived. As one website visitor wrote: "These photographs show the diversity of our lives and our strength regardless of how others viewed us."
Share your thoughts about these moments of celebration. Tweet us @amhistorymuseum!
SIAHCE_160912_010.JPG: Sharon Jones' birthday party at Mrs. Howard's Nursery School
March 4, 1949
SIAHCE_160912_024.JPG: Mrs. M.J. Dickerson, clergy, and group
Around 1935-1937
SIAHCE_160912_038.JPG: Miss American Legion Post 567 and her court
St. Martinville, Louisiana, 1954
SIAHCE_160912_051.JPG: Addison and Mamie Scurlock at their 50th wedding anniversary (detail)
November 18, 1962
SIAHCE_160912_062.JPG: Paid in Full
Mortgage Burning
Shiloh Baptist Church
On a Sunday morning in 1943, the Rev. Earl L. Harrison and members of Shiloh Baptist Church burned the mortgage, retiring the debt on their building -- no small feat coming out of the Great Depression. They must have found special satisfaction on this day; this was their accomplishment. As a dead of Howard University's Divinity School later noted, the church was "the only institution that blacks could own and define, where whites were not behind the scenes."
-- Howard Morrison
SIAHCE_160912_080.JPG: Proud Moment
Dr. and Mrs. E.C. Smith
1928
Is this the moment when Ernest Clarence Smith began his 48-year tenure as pastor of the Metropolitan Baptist Church in Washington, DC? Here he stands, along with his wife, Mamie Odile Smith, in front of the church; they each have just the beginning of a smile as they look toward the camera. I think they're forward to the start of a journey, those long years of service to their church and community.
-- Bob Horton
SIAHCE_160912_084.JPG: User comment: The sign said:
Unidentified wedding party (detail)
1954
However, someone provided this detail:
Groom is George Mallery Sr. Bride is Mary Alice Menard
SIAHCE_160912_102.JPG: Children playing
Probably 1952
SIAHCE_160912_109.JPG: Leonard Mitchell and friend
St. Martinville, Louisiana, 1957
SIAHCE_160912_118.JPG: Elementary School Graduation
St. Martinville, Louisiana, date unknown
SIAHCE_160912_127.JPG: The Scurlock family
November 1952
SIAHCE_160912_136.JPG: Lucy Hawkin's birthday party
May 30, 1957
SIAHCE_160912_146.JPG: Rug cutting
1950
SIAHCE_160912_157.JPG: Marian Anderson at the Lincoln Memorial
April 9, 1939
SIAHCE_160912_164.JPG: Jackie Robinson and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at Howard University (detail)
June 7, 1957
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2016 photos: Equipment this year: I continued to use my Fuji XS-1 cameras but, depending on the event, I also used a Nikon D7000.
Seven relatively short trips this year:
two Civil War Trust conference (Gettysburg, PA and West Point, NY, with a side-trip to New York City),
my 11th consecutive San Diego Comic-Con trip (including sites in Utah, Nevada, and California),
a quick trip to Michigan for Uncle Wayne's funeral,
two additional trips to New York City, and
a Civil Rights site trip to Alabama during the November elections. Being in places where people died to preserve the rights of minority voters made the Trumputin election even more depressing.
Number of photos taken this year: just over 610,000.
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