Content-Type: text/html Southern Mentalities, Photographic Reflections In Black and White: The 1915-1960 Mississippi Pictures of O.N. Pruitt Southern Mentalities, Photographic Reflections In Black and White: The 1915-1960 Mississippi Pictures of O.N. Pruitt Berkley Hudson Ph.D. student and Park Fellow University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 43 Oakwood Drive Chapel Hill, N.C. 27514 [log in to unmask] (919) 942-0654 Submitted to the Visual Communication Division of AEJMC 5-8 August 2001 Washington, D.C. Introduction Two Photographs A photograph, taken in the Columbus, Mississippi studio of O.N. Pruitt in the 1930s, shows a young man, Oscar West, posing for his portrait while sitting on a wooden barrel. He holds a worn broom with one hand; with the other, he rests a tweed cap on his knee. He looks directly at the camera. A quiet flame of pride burns in his eyes. West was "the clean-up boy" for the Brown Buick-Cadillac Co., and he was the "manservant" for the Brown family. Yet, there he was, an African-American, in a photography studio operated by a white man. West is depicted in the same studio setting where prominent white leaders were often photographed as well, in this northeastern Mississippi county seat town along the Tombigbee River by the Alabama border. Another photograph, from 1935: The bodies of two young African-American men hang lynched, side-by-side, by ropes from an oak tree. A white man, wearing a straw boater and kneeling with his back to the camera, gathers their pants' legs into his grasp to keep the bodies of Bert Moore and Dooley Morton steady for the picture. At least four thousand African-Americans, records show, were lynched in the United States between 1889 and 1946. Several lynchings were documented near Columbus, in surrounding Lowndes County, in the 1920s and 1930s.[1] These two contrasting photographs taken by Otis Noel Pruitt-who lived from 1891 to 1967-represent the extremes of Southern white "mentalities" from the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. The picture of West reflects an attitude of tolerance, of white liberalism; in the lynching, white radicalism is made manifest. Between those views resides the conservative white outlook. Research Method: Three Mentalities As a way to explain race relations in the South during the last 170 years, cultural historian Joel Williamson has posited a template of three, Southern white mentalities: conservative, radical and liberal. The conservative, according to Williamson, "preferred to let well enough alone. It was not aggressively anti-Negro, unless the Negro deserted his assigned place and that was always assumed to be somewhere safely below the place of white people." This attitude, dating from the 1830s, "is the long-running and mass mode of thought on race in the white South, and, stubborn at its core and subtly pliant on its surface, it persists strong and essentially unchanged even today." The conservative view gave birth to the other two modes-extremes in either direction. The radical, according to Williamson, was the most pessimistic of the mentalities. This view held that freedom from slavery and the loss of the "protective" bondage by whites would result in African-Americans retrogressing to their "natural state of savagery and bestiality." The radical considered that African-Americans had "no place_in the future of America" and that they would disappear either through their own self-destruction or at the hands of radicals. The white liberal, however, was most optimistic about the potential of progress for African-Americans. Still, the Southern liberal stopped short of one Northern liberal view that considered even miscegenation as one solution to racial strife.[2] These three mentalities have evolved and fluctuated since the 1830s when conservatism arose and then flourished until about 1880. At that point, Williamson says, liberalism developed and found energy in the success of African-Americans via the Reconstruction under the guidance of Northerners. Yet by 1889 radicals gained credence when, among other things, academics, including ones at prestigious institutions such as Harvard, shepherded the notion of an inherent "retrogression" among freed slaves. During the 1889 to 1915 period, the radical view dominated; its major expression was evidenced in lynchings. In radical strongholds such as Mississippi and Alabama, radicalism subsided more gradually. Indeed, the interplay of radicalism and conservatism continued for decades, and even as radicalism waned it still influenced the tone of race relations in the South throughout the entire time Pruitt worked in Mississippi.[3] Using these strands of white mentalities, this paper will look at a representative sample of nine Pruitt images taken in the 1920s and 1930s[4]. In doing so, this paper also will bear in mind the critiques of such cultural and photographic scholars as Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Jane Collins, Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Catherine Lutz, Alan Trachtenberg and Deborah Willis. hooks particularly serves to remind us the vital role that visual images played in the black community. She writes: "In the world before racial integration there was a constant struggle on the part of black folks to create a counter-hegemonic world that would stand as visual resistance, challenging racist images. All colonized and subjugated people, who by way of resistance create an oppositional subculture within the framework of domination, recognize that the field of representation (how we see ourselves, how others see us) is a site of ongoing struggle_. Displaying those images in everyday life was a central as making them. The walls and walls of images in southern black homes were sites of resistance."[5] Such resistance is evidenced in a limited manner in the Pruitt pictures, as is the radical viewpoint. White conservatism dominates, however, and this was also reflected in the local daily newspaper, The Commercial Dispatch. Editorials and news stories alike in the headlines and the body of stories in the 1920s and 1930s extol the virtues of "the sensible negro, the good negro, the worthy negro-of the old school."[6] The style of the era was to lowercase the "n" in negro when it appeared in the text of stories, making it not that dissimilar from the lower case n of the word nigger.[7] During this time-the 1920s and 1930s-Columbus was essentially a half-white, half-black community of 10,000 residents. It was a growing agricultural market center for cotton, lumber, floral plants, honey and cattle. The Columbus Chamber of Commerce boasted in its brochure, entitled "Columbus, The Friendly City," that: "We have few major crimes in the county and 95 percent of the petty offenses are committed by our colored population."[8] Research Questions As its research questions this paper asks: Can we find evidence of the strands of conservatism, radicalism and liberals in Pruitt's photographs? As we ask that question, we will explore these nuances: What can the "gaze," or point of view, of Pruitt's camera tell us about his own racial sentiments and how does that gaze reflect life between the races in the community? How did the gaze of Pruitt's subjects themselves address the racial mentalities? Preliminary research of Pruitt's life and of a sampling of thousands of photographs in the Pruitt Collection, which contains perhaps 50,000 images, suggest that the photographer fluctuated between the liberal and conservative mentalities. Yet, in practice, he mirrors each mentality. When he photographs African-Americans in their churches and homes, the subjects co-create the image with the photographer. This is also true in what must have been unusual in many respects in the segregated South: when he photographs African-Americans in his studio. This was happening in a town where for decades, even until the 1970s, "colored only" or "whites only" signs were posted in virtually every public place such as train and bus depots, hospital and physician waiting rooms and restaurants. Yet Pruitt invited blacks to his studio to photograph them, and he went to their houses to take their pictures, too. At the same time, he photographed a lynching and converted that image into a postcard that he apparently sold discreetly.[9] Mississippi's grand literary dame Eudora Welty, who from 1927 to 1929 lived as a college student in Columbus[10], once wrote glowingly about another Mississippi-connected photographer, William Eggleston, considered one of the foremost photographers working in color today. She said something that applies equally to the best of Pruitt. In her 1989 introduction to Eggleston's Democratic Forest, (referenced that year in the summation paragraph to John Szarkowski's Photographs Until Now), Welty wrote: "He sets forth what makes up our ordinary world. What is there, however strange, can be accepted without question; familiarity will be what overwhelms us."[11] From 1915 to 1960, Pruitt recorded all the actualit‚s in town: christenings and weddings, churches, river baptisms, ribbon cuttings, bridge and road construction as well as carnival sideshows, funerals, floods, fires, car wrecks and tornadoes. He took medical photographs to document for local physicians the ravages of disease. He recorded people showing off a string of fresh-caught bass, holding a broken off tree branch with a swarm of bees, or handling a live rattlesnake. His work emblematizes how small communities-the heart and soul of the South in the first half of the twentieth century-recorded and processed information about what occurred in daily life.[12] Above all, what distinguishes his work, however, and what makes this study relevant-since none other has been done on Pruitt-is that he, with Linnaean completeness, documented one place at a critical time in history: World War I era to pre-Civil Rights era, small town Mississippi. Findings Nine Photographs In one respect, you do not need to know any more information other than what you can extract from the visual image in the nine photographs; nonetheless, to know something about who is in the photograph, or what or why they are doing can illuminate the image. For some of the photographs, research has yielded a substantial amount of information; for others, much more research must be done. The dating of the photographs was undertaken partly by assessing whether the negatives are nitrate, glass plate used by Pruitt in the 1920s and 1930s, or safety film which he began to use in the late 1930s and 1940s. Oral history, automobiles, clothing, buildings and landscapes were also used to date the photographs. The negatives of these pictures are either 4x5 or 8x10. In providing captions for these nine, it is useful to consider Walter Benjamin's comments about the caption and to recognize that to say a little, sometimes, is to say a lot. Much could be said about each of these photographs, all taken around the time Benjamin wrote an essay in 1931, "A Small History of Photography." Over the decades the essay has contributed to an on-going scholarly discussion of the relationship between words and pictures. In the essay, Benjamin cryptically refers to the importance of the caption. Acknowledging the technological advances of the early twentieth century camera, Benjamin says: "The camera is getting smaller and smaller, ever ready to capture fleeting and secret moments whose images paralyze the associative mechanisms in the beholder. This is where the caption comes in, whereby photography turns all life's relationships into literature, and without which all constructivist photography must remain arrested in the approximate_.Is it not the task of the photographer-descendant of the augurs and haruspices-to_ point out guilt in his pictures?_Will not the caption become the most important part of a photograph?"[13] Also in that essay, his observations about society and the camera potentially can change how one looks at the Pruitt photographs. Referring to the medium as practiced in the mid-nineteenth century, Benjamin writes: "Everything about these early pictures was built to last; not only the incomparable groups in which people came together-and whose disappearance was surely one of the most telling symptoms of what was happening in society in the second half of the century-but the very creases in people's clothes have an air of permanence."[14] Since historian Williamson proposes that the conservative ideology represented the dominant mode of Southern white thought, this discussion of the evidence of the mentalities begins with the conservative. Then we consider the radical view and the liberal outlook. The Conservative Mentality 1. Seven African-American bellhops & the white manager of the Gilmer Hotel, circa 1930s For decades, the Gilmer Hotel was one of the central spots for the wealthy white power brokers in Columbus. It was a four-story hotel, made from bricks dug by hand by slaves in 1860 when Columbus boomed as a cotton town before the Civil War. The Gilmer was considered elegant for Mississippi. Heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey stayed at the Gilmer when he came to town in 1930. Years later, so did newsman Walter Cronkite. [15] Once, occasional Gilmer guest William Faulkner wrote a semi-autobiographical piece in the April 1954 Holiday magazine, which refers to the Gilmer and moonshine whiskey. After leaving the hotel to go on a frightful car ride to a bootlegger's outside of town in the Alabama hills, Faulkner's personae concludes: "Lord, You know I haven't worried you in over forty years, and if You'll just get me back to Columbus I promise to never bother You again."[16] The seven bellhops in the picture may have waited on Faulkner, Dempsey or Cronkite. Here, with brassy buttons seeming to pop off their chests, the bellhops stand in varying states of attention and deference by the desk of the hotel's manager, a white man, J.O. Slaughter, who noticeably the only one who is seated. The manager seems about the same age or even younger than some of the bellhops. Research has not yet revealed why the picture was taken, why the group members don't seem too jolly about having their picture taken or why no one looks at the camera. Blacks can be bellhops, but not hotel managers. This is a picture of conservatism. That said, the bellhop who is second from the right is apparently Edward C. Bush. After World War Two ended, roughly a decade after this picture was taken, Bush and his wife Bessie Will renovated and cleaned up an old building in a residential neighborhood on the north side of Columbus. There, in 1947, they opened up the Queen City Hotel, at the time the only hotel in Mississippi available solely to African-Americans. Gilmer Hotel manager Slaughter helped them to secure a loan to open and stay in business. Guests such as Louis Armstrong, Little Richard and contralto Marian Anderson stayed at the Queen City. In a newspaper interview in January 2000, Bessie Bush said, "Armstrong or Little Richard would play at the [Queen City] dance hall or Union Academy and people would be everywhere-sitting on the grounds, dancing in the street."[17] 2. Camel Ride at Locke's Zoo, circa late 1920s The significant detail of this is the black man's hands holding the rope for the three white children. Likewise, the shapes of the little white boy in his cap, his body rakishly cocked into the neck of the camel, make the image visually compelling. This photograph took place at the house of one of the richest white men in town, wholesale grocer Thomas Locke, who had a menagerie of animals which he called Locke's Zoo. Over the years, Pruitt took a number of photographs of Locke. Pruitt was even called to testify in a murder trial of Locke. In 1927 Locke shot and killed another white man, a prominent retail grocer. Locke's first night after being arrested he was allowed to stay in the Gilmer Hotel until his own bedroom set could be moved to the county jail. He bailed out of jail shortly after being taken there. He was exonerated in a jury trial[18] This is a conservative to radical picture. It is unclear why the black man wasn't included in the shot. Pruitt had a tripod and couldn't move it easily. Maybe he told the man leading the camel to walk in front of the camera, and maybe there are several more photographs, including ones with the man shown fully. Maybe Locke said he didn't want his "hired-hand" in the picture; yet the "hands" are there. 3. Fishermen, circa 1930s Two African-American men stand in a long wooden boat filled with big spoon-billed catfish and gar. A white man, in the water next to another boat laden with fish, holds one by the gill, vertically, to enhance the display of his fish trophy. The two black men in the boat, one smiling, seem deferential. But their looks combined with the black man leaning against the tree suggest the statement: That white guy may have caught that fish, but he didn't catch them all. The detail of all four men's shadows seen reflected murkily in the water enhances the image. This is a conservative image. 4. Catfish Alley fire, circa 1940 For decades in the twentieth century, Catfish Alley was a one-block long strip of flourishing black businesses, including restaurants, pool halls, honky-tonks, black-run medical clinic and black doctors' offices. African-Americans could go to the clinic and be treated without having to bow-and-scrape at the two white hospitals. There were rooming houses on the second floor of some of the buildings, and they functioned like a mini-hotel. B.B. King and Louis Armstrong stayed here and performed here. In the photograph you can see under the Falstaff sign of the Blue Front Caf‚ No. 2: Colored Caf‚. Behind that is a sign for Sykes Cab, an all-black cab service. Blacks and whites, many of them wearing hats and some of both races in overalls, are all mixed together in the chaotic fire scene. One white fireman apparently died in the fire, which started was in a restaurant. Playwright Tennessee Williams was born in St. Paul's Episcopal rectory, not shown but some 50 yards from the part of the street at the picture's bottom. A product of segregation, Catfish Alley and its depiction here de-facto represents conservatism. Normally, Catfish Alley is a mainly a blacks-only locale; however, when there is a fire, white fireman and white on-lookers arrive on the scene.[19] 5. Sylvester Harris, March 1934 The caption of this picture in The Commercial Dispatch read this way: "Sylvester Harris, negro of Lowndes County, Miss., has plenty to be happy about. Recently he telephoned President Roosevelt in a plea to save to his home from mortgage foreclosure, and a few days later an extension was granted on the mortgage. Here's Sylvester, with this mule, in front of his farmhouse near Columbus, Miss.[20]" Harris was known as a good mule trader and mule breeder, and Pruitt makes a choice to include a mule. Harris is pictured in work clothes. He holds his hat in his hand, either because he considered that the proper thing to do or Pruitt asked him to do so because his face would show up better. Confident and comfortable before Pruitt's lens, Harris and his mule gaze directly at the camera. Chickens peck and flutter around in the background. The picture is framed so that Harris' house is well seen. The feel of this picture is conservative, on the border of liberal. This is a "worthy negro" who took a chance and succeeded. A Fox Movietone newsreel crew also came to town to record Harris' story.[21] The Radical Mentality 6. The execution of James Keaton, May 1934 Pruitt set up his lights, tripod and view camera early on Friday, 25 May 1934. He draped the camera's black cloth over his head to better see the upside down and backwards image that appeared on the ground glass. Shortly after 2 a.m., he pressed the shutter. This is the picture he took on nitrate, black-and-white film, 8 inches by 10 inches. In the photograph six white law enforcement officials surround James Keaton, an African-American. From head-to-toe, Keaton is clearly depicted before his execution for murder. He has been convicted of killing a white service station owner. In one of the last executions in Mississippi by hanging at a local courthouse, Keaton wears bib overalls and an open-collared, long sleeve shirt. At his feet, knees and chest, a leather strap binds his legs together. His hands are bound behind his back. The thick rope noose is loose around his neck and shown attached to the gallows. There is a ritual formality to the tableau. Sheriff Harry West, pictured on the right, smiles. Onlookers watch the spectacle from the open courthouse window behind; they lurk beneath the scaffold.[22] Absent, however, from the photograph is District Attorney John C. Stennis. (As a Democrat, he later represented Mississippi in the U.S. Senate. From the 1940s to 1980s, he was a strident voice for "states rights," including the protection of a state's right to uphold racial segregation, without interference from the federal authorities.)[23] Also absent are the African-Americans, including several preachers, who had sung spirituals for hours before the execution. Keaton had been arrested in March 1934 for shooting service station owner Fred Hayslett, who had gone to his station "to get a drink" with some friends late one Sunday night after it had closed. The group of white men surprised Keaton, a former station employee, who was inside. A shooting occurred; the next month, an all-male, all-white jury found Keaton guilty. As was standard practice, presumably to avoid a lynching during confinement, Keaton was taken to an "unannounced jail" in nearby town for "safe-keeping." [24] In the photograph, a most telling detail is the look of Keaton, who at age twenty-two, faces death in minutes. He looks straight into the camera. Before a black execution cowl had been pulled over his head, he said: "Goodbye, everybody." [25] A few minutes later, underneath the scaffold Pruitt documented what has become over the centuries a stereotypical image of executions and lynching: the mob gathered around the condemned man's body. Nineteen white men and boys crammed under the scaffold to be in the photograph with the body of Keaton, still suspended by a rope hanging through the opened trap door.[26] Seven months earlier, Pruitt had recorded a similar execution at the Lowndes County Courthouse in Columbus. In that case as well, it was an African-American man convicted of killing a white farming couple. The Commercial Dispatch had editorialized that "the severest punishment would be too good" for the African-American defendant. "He should be given a speedy trial and promptly made to pay the extreme penalty. Examples should be made of beasts in human form who commit such crimes." [27] Perhaps it is "presentism" to say so, but the Keaton execution photograph represents a radical viewpoint, an attitude equivalent to one supportive of lynching. It is an outlook removed from a conservative one that suggests there is a place for African-Americans in Southern society. 7. The Lynching of Bert Moore and Dooley Morton, 1935 Sometime on a Monday, 15 July 1935, fourteen months after the Keaton execution, the telephone rang in Pruitt's home. Come quickly, he was told; there's been a lynching, a double lynching. With that, Pruitt, who always kept his bulky, view camera and tripod at the ready in his car trunk, sped down paved roads and then gravel ones, and headed south of town. [28] Soon, in a backwoods churchyard, he found two men-described as young "Negro farmers" in Associated Press accounts published around the nation-lynched from a big oak tree.[29] Two African-American men, Bert Moore and Dooley Morton, had been accused of harassing a white woman.[30] They had been arrested and were being taken surreptitiously by a deputy sheriff to jail in a nearby town when a mob of 35 men overtook the deputy, seized the prisoners and drove to an African-American church south of Columbus. "Each was made to stand on top of an automobile with his hands tied behind him and a noose fastened around his neck," the Associated Press reported. "The ropes were knotted to the tree limbs and at a given signal the cars were driven out and the bodies swung downward."[31] The wire service account also noted: "Columbus and Lowndes County were in a high state of excitement during the double lynching, but when the mob had dispersed they quieted down."[32] The next day, a Tuesday, the local newspaper reported this salient detail: hundreds of spectators came to look at the bodies of the lynched men before the bodies were cut down, more than 12 hours after the lynching occurred.[33] That Pruitt was contacted to document this horrific event bespeaks volumes about his role in his community. It also addresses his professional ambidextrousness, his ability to blend into any and all situations. In the lynching photograph, radicalism is explicit. Williamson writes, "Radicals insisted that there was no place for the Negro in the future American society, and, moreover, that his disappearance was imminent." [34] The Liberal Mentality Beginning with the post-Reconstruction South era, historian Williamson says, white liberalism "could contemplate with relative equanimity, if not outright pleasure, an eventual parity of Negroes with whites in the enjoyment of many-but never all-white cultural ideals." [35] 8. African-American family in their Sunday best, May 1941 This is a serious group, for the most part, the James Mann family. Certainly white and black folks alike gazed into the camera with a fair degree of seriousness in the Depression-era 1930s and early 1940s in Mississippi. There was not a lot to smile about. Here, the family group members have put chairs out in the grass to have their picture made. All twelve have dressed in their Sunday-go-to-meeting best. It seems Pruitt made a conscious choice to include a portion of the house in the background. This photograph gives the lie to the notion of the discombobulated black family. The looks on the faces of the people makes you want to know their stories. These are people who surely paid Pruitt to come to their house and make their family photograph. Pruitt's lens depicts them as they want to be depicted; not as white society wants to depict them. This represents a liberalism that says African-Americans can do great things, that they deserve a standing of more than separate-but-equal, rather as co-equals. [36] Feminist bell hooks has discussed the gaze in talking about the role intimate family photographs play within the African-American community. These photographs, hooks writes, can reveal "a sense of how we looked when we were not 'wearing the mask,' when we were not attempting to perfect the image for a white supremacist gaze."[37] There are ways in which this family's picture exhibits the gaze of not wearing a mask. 9. Oscar West, "cleanup boy" at Brown Buick Cadillac, circa 1930. Posing for his studio portrait while sitting on a wooden barrel, Oscar West wears a worn leather jacket, the seams almost falling apart where the jacket looks as if it has been mended. A young man, he nonetheless is stoop-shouldered. With a direct gaze, he exhibits a confidence in his pose and comfort with the camera and with Pruitt. His turned-up, right foot reveals the underside of a worn shoe. Although "the clean-up boy" for the Brown Buick-Cadillac and "manservant" for the Brown family, the African-American is photographed in a studio operated by a white man. He is in the same setting, with the same rug, where whites are often photographed. This happened in a separate-but-unequal town where blacks were restricted in where and how they could eat, walk, drink from a water fountain, shop, see movies, or go to the bathroom in public places. Even if West were considered "a worthy negro" or "a house nigger," this picture would seem to represent a liberal viewpoint. The circumstances of the West picture are not clear. Nor is it clear if West or someone else paid to have it made. Hallie Brown, whose late husband owned the car company where West worked and who also was West's employer when he worked at her home caring for her children, is now over ninety years old. She has a clear memory, yet says she had never before seen the photograph of West until May 2000 when I visited her and showed it to her. A tiny woman with sharp-boned face and immaculately groomed white hair she lit up when saw the picture of the man she called Humpy, so named because of a upper back problem he had his entire life. She spun out the complicated story of West and his family, his several wives and girlfriends. West has several children still living in Columbus; Brown talks with them regularly, she said. After my visit, she telephoned several of them for me and asked them to contact me. Eventually, last summer, I met with one of West's nine children, Oscar Lang. He is an energetic electrician who loves used Volvos and loves telling stories. He had never seen this picture of his father. I gave him a copy. His dad was born in 1911 in nearby Ethelsville, Alabama, and died in 1964. Lang told many stories about his father. One of his favorites is how his father inspired one of the Brown children, Floyd Brown Jr., to become an Air Force pilot. Brown also became one of the top-ranking officials at the Citadel Military Academy in South Carolina and attributed his military success and love of flying, in part, to Oscar West. Once, a few years ago after he had left the Citadel, Brown told Lang: "The reason I'm sitting here now as a retired military colonel, as a flier, is your daddy (Oscar West)" took two old wooden milk crates and fashioned an airplane from them when Brown was five years old. "He put on a propeller and spun it and said: 'All right, now, you're flying. '" From that day on Brown told Lang, his goal was to fly, thanks to Oscar West.[38] Conclusion: Equal Before the Lens Some Pruitt photographs clearly exhibit one of the Southern mentalities; others have elements that range among the mentalities. Regardless which mentality is reflected, it is clear that as a white man, Pruitt moved freely and authoritatively in both the worlds of black and white; rich and poor, and conservative, radical and liberal. He documented a complexity that was at once brutal and genteel, archaic and modern. In doing so, he supplied some vital images for the black community's use and the white's as well: pictures he took and pictures they took, which he developed and printed. He was the town's single photographer-black or white-for much of the two decades of the 1920s and 1930s. Even after other white photographers came to town around shortly before the start of World War Two, Pruitt until his retirement at age 70 continued to take photographs with an approach that said, in a sense, all were equal before his lens. Regardless of what Pruitt's racial views might have been, black and white alike interviewed for this project said they considered him overtly fair in his racial dealings. In the sense of a Walker Evans, Eug ne Aget, August Sander or Dorthea Lange, Pruitt was not a great photographer; it would be too much to suggest he was an artist, and doubtless he did not consider himself one. Pruitt was like many that took up photography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and even today: He was a photographer in the business of photography. Clearly, however, he loved taking pictures, was obsessed with the practice and was very good at it. Nonetheless, it can be argued that a number of Pruitt images do evoke Evans or Aget, Sander, Lange or even the iconoclastic Arthur Fellig-known as Weegee. This is the case not only because of Pruitt's use of large format view cameras, his often elegant composition with a true sense of the edges of an image, and his subject matter, which often resembles these celebrated photographers. This is true because Pruitt's pictures sometimes are sublime or simply compelling, shocking or delightfully surprising. And although he made his living as a studio and commercial photographer, he served a broader role: He functioned as a de facto notary public. By photographing the public life, familial and communal life, the sacred and the profane, he authenticated it for everyone, including himself, a white man in a place where race-and the three Southern white mentalities-mattered greatly.[39] Selected Bibliography Adelman, Bob. Down Home. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972. Agee, James and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941. Revised edition, 1960. Barthes, Roland. A Barthes Reader. Edited and with an Introduction by Susan Sontag. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. ---Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. ---The Grain of the Voice. Interviews 1962-1980. Translated by Linda Coverdale. New York: Hill and Wang, 1985. Bayer, Jonathan. Reading Photographs: Understanding the Aesthetics of Photography. Essays by Ainslie Ellis, Ian Jeffrey, and Peter Turner. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. Beloff, Halla. Camera Culture. Oxford, England and New York: Basil Blackwell Inc., 1985. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Edited and with an introduction by Hanna Arendt. Translated by Harry Zorn. London: Pimlico, 1999. ---One-Way Street and Other Writings. Introduction by Susan Sontag. Translated by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. London: NLB, 1979. Berger, John. About Looking. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. Bloom, Lisa, ed. With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing. Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: The MIT Press, 1989. Caldwell, Eskine and Margaret Bourke-White. You Have Seen Their Faces.Foreword by Alan Trachtenberg. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1995. Carlebach, Michael L. American Photojournalism Comes of Age. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997. Coleman, A.D. Light Readings, A Photography Critic's Writings 1968-1978 2nd edition. 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Wiencek, Henry. The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White.New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. Williamson, Joel. A Rage for Order. Oxford, England and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. ---. The Crucible of Race. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Willis, Deborah. Reflections in Black: a History of Black Photographers 1840-Present. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2000. ---.ed., Picturing Us: African-American Identity in Photography. New York: The New Press, 1994. [1] Joel Williamson, A Rage for Order (Oxford, England, and New York: Oxford, University Press, 1986), 84-85. "Awful as they were, published statistics in the period undercounted the number of lynching," Williamson, page 122, A Rage for Order. See also "Two Negroes Pay For Act On Tree Limb. Lynching Marks Attempted Assault on White Lady," The Commercial Dispatch, Columbus, Mississippi, 15 July 1935, 1; "Lynch Episode Is Closed Here. Negroes Met Death at 'Hands of Unknown Parties' Is the Verdict," The Commercial Dispatch, Columbus, Mississippi, 16 July 1935, 1; Associated Press, "2 Negroes Lynched By Mississippi Mob," The New York Times, 16 July 1935, 40, and "Report Lynching Near Caledonia," The Commercial Dispatch, Columbus, Mississippi, 23 July 1933, 3. [2] Williamson, 70-73. [3] Williamson, The Crucible of Race (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1984), 4-8. [4] The author is a co-owner of the Pruitt Collection. [5] bell hooks, "In Our Glory," in Picturing Us: African-American Identity in Photography, ed. Deborah Willis, (New York: The New Press, 1994), 46. [6] "Aged Negro With 47 Grand Children Dies at Trinity," The Columbus Dispatch, 23 January 1921, 1. "A Good Negro Gone," The Commercial Dispatch, 21 February 1935, 4. [7] It would not be until the late 1960s that The Commercial Dispatch would capitalize the word Negro in stories. In headlines, the first letter was capitalized since the newspaper's style called for capitalization of the first letter in all words of headlines. [8] "Columbus, The Friendly City," undated brochure with pencil notation-circa 1932-34--in local history archival files at Columbus-Lowndes Public Library. [9] Irene Pruitt Raper, taped interview with James P. Carnes, Columbus, Mississippi, October 1991, and Merle Fraser, taped interview with author, Columbus, Mississippi, June 1994. [10] Welty attended Mississippi State University for Women as a freshman and sophomore, before transferring to University of Wisconsin where she completed her undergraduate degree. See Welty's One Writer's Beginnings (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1984), 76-80. [11] Eudora Welty, introduction to William Eggleston. Democratic Forest (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 10. Also cited in John Szarkowski, Photography Until Now (Boston and Toronto: Bullfinch Press of Little, Brown and Company), 1989, 293. [12] Pruitt was not unlike many commercial photographers who worked in small towns during the 1920s and 1930s when the local newspapers did not have its own photographer. His photographs would on occasion appear in the news pages and in advertisements, too. In this era, The Commercial Dispatch was essentially the only local news medium for Columbus residents. Other newspapers from the "big cities:" Jackson, Memphis and Birmingham covered news from Northeast Mississippi but in a limited manner. Local radio news didn't become a fact of life until the 1940s. [13] Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 257. The essay's title sometimes is translated as "A Short History of Photography." Pruitt captioned his photographic records in a sparse manner, sometimes with little more than a date and name. [14] Benjamin, 245. [15] See "Jack Dempsey" and "Gilmer Hotel" vertical file, local history archives of Columbus-Lowndes Public Library in Columbus, Mississippi. [16] William Faulkner, "Mississippi," in A Place Called Mississippi: Collected Narratives, ed. Marion Barnwell (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), 118-119. [17] "The Queen City and the Alexandria," The Commercial Dispatch, Columbus, Mississippi, 2 January 2000, 2C. [18] "No Date Set For Hearing For Locke For Slaying Of Stevens," The Commercial Dispatch, Columbus, Mississippi, 27 December 1927, 1, and "Case Given to Jury Late Yesterday and Verdict Early Today," The Commercial Dispatch, Columbus, Mississippi, 21 September 1928, 1. [19] Ed Bush, Joe and Selma Hanna, and Bonnie Kimbrel interviews recorded by folklorist and photographer Mark Gooch, November 1974 to January 1975; copies in possession of the author. June 1994 interview by the author with Dr. E.J. Stringer, a civil rights leader who had a dental office on Catfish Alley. [20] "He Telephoned the White House," The Commercial Dispatch, Columbus, Mississippi, 8 March 1934, 1. [21] "Sylvester in Movies; Sound Reel Men Here," The Commercial Dispatch, Columbus, Mississippi, 6 March 1934, 1. [22] "Negro Slayer Is Hanged At Lowndes Jail," The Commercial Dispatch, Columbus, Mississippi, 25 May 1934, 1. [23] "Murder Trial of Negro Set Friday Morn," The Commercial Dispatch, Columbus, Mississippi, 17 April 1934, 1. [24] "Negro Held in Murder Of Fred Hayslett At Service Station Here," The Commercial Dispatch, Columbus, Mississippi, 5 March 1934, 1. [25] "Negro Slayer Is Hanged At Lowndes Jail," The Commercial Dispatch, Columbus, Mississippi, 25 May 1934, 1. [26] This photograph not included for review as part of this paper. [27] "The Crosby Crime,"The Commercial Dispatch, Columbus, Mississippi, 13 July 1933, 4. [28] The accounts of Pruitt's documenting the lynching, in part, were drawn from interviews, including one with his daughter, Irene Pruitt Raper. She was interviewed by James Carnes, in Columbus, Mississippi, October 1991. A recording of the interview is in possession of the author. The author between 1994-2000 conducted other interviews about the lynching with Columbus residents Merle Fraser, Eva Byrd Heard, Parker George, Sarah Lusk, Wilbern Sprayberry and Billy Thompson. [29] The Associated Press, "2 Negroes Lynched By Mississippi Mob," The New York Times, 16 July 1935, 40. Note: The bound copies of The Commercial Dispatch at the newspaper's office in Columbus, Mississippi, have the lynching stories missing on the front pages on the Monday of the lynching, 15 July 1935, as well as the Tuesday after. Apparently the material was taken out with a knife or scissors. Likewise, some microfilm records of the newspaper on those dates show the articles excised on those days. Other microfilm records fortunately contained the missing stories. [30] The Pruitt images did not appear in the local newspaper. However, one of the lynching photographs was converted into a poster image for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in about 1965. See Without Sanctuary (Santa Fe: Twin Palms Press, 2000), figure 91 and endnote 91, 199-200. The information about the Columbus lynching is incomplete and also partially incorrect. For a discussion of executions in Mississippi see David M. Oshinsky, Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). [31] See also Stewart Tolnay and E.M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), ix. The Mob Still Rides: A Review of the Lynching Record, 1931-1935. Atlanta: Commission on Interracial Cooperation, 1936. On page 6 the Columbus lynching referenced. [32] Associated Press, "2 Negroes Lynched By Mississippi Mob," 16 July 1935, The New York Times, 40. [33] "Two Negroes Pay For Act On Tree Limb. Lynching Marks Attempted Assault on White Lady," The Commercial Dispatch, Columbus, Mississippi, 15 July 1935, 1; "Lynch Episode Is Closed Here. Negroes Met Death at 'Hands of Unknown Parties' Is the Verdict," The Commercial Dispatch, Columbus, Mississippi, 16 July 1935, 1 [34] Williamson, A Rage for Order, 71-72. [35] Williamson, A Rage for Order, 73. [36] The faded brown envelope containing this 8x10 negative only indicates the name of the family and the date of the photograph. [37] hooks, 50. [38] Oscar Lang, interview with the author at Lang's house in Columbus, Mississippi, 7 July 2000. [39] Evans worked as a federal Farm Security Administration photographer throughout the country, including in Mississippi. A review of the images Evans took indicates that he photographed as close as 60 to 100 miles to Columbus, including in Tupelo and Oxford, but not in Lowndes County.