Black Victoriana: Part Two
I received an overwhelming response to the blog post Black Victoriana, so I decided to post more photos of African Americans from way back when. My Black Victoriana post, to date, has received the most views and comments of any other blog post that I have ever done since starting my blog in 2011. My other posts do not even come anywhere near the views and comments that Black Victoriana has received. My main reason for posting those photos is because I wanted people to see African Americans from the late 19th and early to middle 20th century in a different light. It is a way that is how we represented ourselves daily back in the day. We are not a group of people who mostly grew up in ghettos, turned to drugs and did not care about educating ourselves. The reality was quite the opposite. Education was extremely important to us, so we paved the way to start our own Universities. We did what had to be done to move forward from slavery and lead productive lives. We were law abiding citizens even though the law, for the most part, did not respect us. We were well dressed and well coiffed in the elegant styles of the times. Where possible I will link to photo source, but some of them I had for so long that I cannot recall where I found them. Some also now have outdated links so I simply left them off. Of you see a photo here and you are the original source, simply let me know and I will be happy to credit you. In the first photo above that looks like George Washington Carver sitting in the center front row.
Golf was a segregated sport in the United State up to1961. Therefore, in 1921 a group of black investors purchased an old country club and renamed it Shady Rest. It was the nations first African American golf and country club. Originally it was the Ephraim Tucker farmhouse built in the middle 1700′s.
The above and below photos are of “Negro Homesteaders”. Many blacks fled the south and tried to obtain land through the Homestead Act. There is plenty of information on blacks and the Homestead Act for its own blog post. Notice in both photos that the families are dressed in the best way that they know how for the picture taking. I think they are all beautiful.
Above photo – Yale Law School, class of 1921 (left to right): J. Alston Atkins, Charles A. Chandler, Mifflin Gibbs, and Leroy Pierce.
Above, left to right: Pharoah Sanders, John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Jimmy Garrison and Rashied Ali outside the Village Vanguard, New York, May 28, 1966.
Above photo: Two women attending a convention of former slaves in Washington D.C. circa 1916.
Fisk University students circa 1910.
I hope that you enjoyed these photos. They can also be found on my Pinterest page. Click on Africans and the Victorian period where you will find them along with other photos that I found there.
.
You May Also Like
More posts from Xenia
