Where I come from, Bibb County, GA, you won’t likely see photos of black and white children in the same class before the 1960s. That just did not happen in the South – especially not in 1937.
So I am always surprised to see class photos that depict this intermingling, or at least a racial mix. What the photos don’t show is how the children interacted back in the classrooms or on the school grounds at recess.
Recently, I came across almost a dozen elementary school photos from 1937 that showed a handful of black boys and girls in each class. The photos gave up no information about the school, its name or its location, not even the photographer’s name. Written in fountain-pen ink in the top left margin of each photo was only the year, 1937. Graffiti (GS + PW) can be seen on the school wall in several of the photos.
I was very curious about how these photos ended up on the auction table. Was the school cleaning out its inventory? Or had these been in the possession of a dealer for years who was now cleaning out his own stash? In fact, tons of photos presumably from the same source have turned up recently at auction, including some pre-1950s pictures shot by a Cleveland amateur photographer.
Among the school photos at auction was one of children sitting in front of a Christmas tree. There was no date on the photo, but there was a photography studio: Branch Photo Service, which was stamped in green ink on the back along with a partial address and phone number.
From what I could decipher, the photographer was based in Yonkers, NY., which had a long march toward school desegregation. “… racial segregation was only an intermittent issue throughout the 1940s and 1950s (in Yonkers),” according to a 2004 report by Harvard and Princeton professors. The NAACP sued city and school officials, and a federal judge ruled in 1985 that those officials since 1949 had deliberately segregated both public schools and public housing by race. The schools began the desegregation process, but it would be 27 years before the lawsuit would eventually end.
Here is a sampling of the school photos:
