Every now and then, magic-lantern slides show up at auction, and I always check them for images of African Americans. Most times, there are none.
When I saw a group of the glass slides at auction recently, I couldn’t resist but to try again. This time, I got lucky. There were three black-and-white glass slides produced by the Williams, Brown & Earle Inc. of Philadelphia.
The first was a photo of a young African American woman in cap and gown, a graduate. In the bottom left corner was a round circle with the word “Hampden.” Not sure what it means.
Another showed seven well-dressed African American men, some seated while others stood, apparently members of a club or organization. Their clothes looked to be from the first half of the 20th century.
The third was most interesting because it contained a political statement: “The nominal rulers of Haiti with the white usurper in the center.” It was followed by another sentence that seemed to identify the location, but it was covered by the tag bearing the manufacturer’s name.
The slides, which measure 4 x 3 1/2 inches, were not dated – most of them never are – so I wasn’t sure when they were produced.
These type of glass slides were made to be shown on what were called magic lanterns, projector-like devices that first appeared in the 17th century. The early slides were hand-painted images on glass and used by traveling entertainers to project images on a wall or screen. By the mid-1800s, after the invention of photography, photographs were placed on the slides, which were used mostly in educational settings. Some schools, colleges and museums made their own.
Magic lanterns were still used into the 20th century but eventually lost their appeal, overtaken by film and moving pictures.
Williams, Brown & Earle was formed in 1890 and was located at 918 Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, on a “street that runs thru the ‘heart of the city.’ … The Williams, Brown & Earle window is one of the finest display windows on Chestnut Street,” gushed the Graphite trade magazine in 1922. The company grew to become a major seller of optical, photographic and scientific equipment. It was not among the major suppliers of magic-lantern slides; the Keystone View Co. & McAllister-Keller Co., both of Pennsylvania, were among the leaders.
Williams, Brown & Earle did sell magic lanterns, noting in a 1909 advertisement that it offered “electric lanterns for schools, churches, missionaries, lodges and traveling lecturers. … Slides for secret societies.” It is not believed that the company made its own lanterns.
In an advertisement in 1911, the company boasted that it had 40,000 slides for rent or sale, and in 1912, it set the number at 75,000 for rent. Williams, Brown & Earle produced slides on everything from U.S. presidents to the St. Louis Fair to the Russo-Japanese War to religious events to the Paris Exposition.
I was not able to find out how the company acquired the photographs for its slides. Keystone, which also made stereoview photographs, had its own staff photographers.
Googling, I found other magic lantern slides of black people, and unsurprisingly they were horrid, picking up the stereotypical images of the times – which the website on which they are shown tried to rationalize the images. Irish immigrants were treated much the same.
I’d love to know more about the people in the slides that I bought at auction. Since the company was based in Philadelphia, could the woman have graduated from a school or college in the area, and could the group of men be part of a “secret society”?
Update: Two readers suggested that the young woman may have been a graduate of Hampton University in Virginia (perhaps Hampden was a misspelling of the name). The young men may have been members of a fraternity; Alpha Phi Alpha and Omega Psi Phi had both been at the university since 1947.
Photography had long been a part of the school. A group of Hampton teachers set up their own camera club called the Kiquotan Kamera Klub in 1893. Frances Benjamin Johnston, a white woman who was the country’s first female professional photographer, was commissioned to photograph students at the then-Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute at the turn of the 20th century.
The camera club members created their own magic lantern slides. Later slides could ostensibly contain photos taken by the college’s longtime staff photographer Reuben V. Burrell, who died in 2015.
