Kicha's photos

"I ran away from home. I ran away from St. Louis, and then I ran from the United States of America, because of that terror of discrimination, that horrible beast which paralyzes one's very soul and body." ~ Josephine Baker Lucien Walery, Photographer

A 1927 photograph by Czech photographer, František Drtikol.

Original caption under photo: The dark star from Harlem continues to be the bright star of Paris, in a new revue at the Casino de Paris. George Hoyningen-Huene, Photographer

Photographed in Vienna in 1928. Photographer unknown.

From an Italian magazine announcing her first feature film "Siren of the Tropics," in 1927. Josephine Baker; Compilation by Bryan Hammond; Biography by Patrick O'Connor.

This was while she was in Vienna in 1928. [ 'Josephine Baker' Compilation by Bryan Hammond ].

Two lovebirds --- may we all live and love long. Names unknown. donated photo

Cabinet card of two beautiful young ladies (almost certain they're sisters) photographed by African American photographer, James E. Reed at Headley & Reed Studios in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Sources: African American Vernacular Photography; Selections from the Daniel Cowin Collection

Famed yet sadly unknown African American photographer, James E. Reed, poses for a formal portrait with his wife and children. By 1895 James E. Reed was bringing in enough revenue to open his own studio, which he did with his partner white Phineas C. Headley. Headley & Reed were the premier studio at 5 Purchase Street in New Bedford and ran a successful business from 1890-1896. For unknown reasons Headley left the business in 1896, however, Reed continued on until 1914. James married Anna Jourdain. His wife studied at the Swain School of Design and used the skills she learned there to embellish her husband’s photos by coloring and tinting them. This breathed life into the otherwise black and white photos and surely contributed to the popularity of Headley & Reed and especially Reed when he struck out on his own. His wife also worked on Tiffany style lampshades for the famous Pairpoint Company of New Bedford. It seemed at this point in Reed’s life perhaps his passion for photography – as a business anyhow – had waned as he moved on and became the first Photostat Operator for the Massachusetts State Archives, a position he held until he retired. James E Reed left an abundance of photos behind capturing the city and region for three decades giving us a window to the past. So many photos that the Newbedford Whaling Museum had an exhibition in 1991 titled, 'James E. Reed: Pioneer Black Photographer.' [Info and Photo: Newbedfordguide.com, by Joe Silvia] Lorenzo Dow Turner Papers, Anacostia Community Museum, Smithsonian Institution, gift of Lois Turner Williams

Allowed to purchase his freedom, Thomas Arthur Brown was the son of a Scottish woman who owned a Maryland plantation and the plantation's Black overseer. He was well educated and at some point became known as 'Mr. Brown, the walking encyclopedia.' He along with his wife, also formerly enslaved, was actively involved in the Underground Railroad. His daughter, Hallie Q Brown earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Wilberforce University and later became Dean of Women at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. She helped found the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), was elected Secretary of Education of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1900 and served as the 7th National President of the NACW. Her parents commitment to the cause would later influence the organizations Brown founded and participated in. Ohio Historical Society

Henry W Spradley, Civil War Veteran of Company G, 24th United States Colored Troops, who is buried in the former Lincoln Cemetery. When Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers on April 14, 1861, one of the men who signed up was Henry W. Spradley. Spradley was 31 and Black. Born enslaved near Winchester, Virginia in 1829 or 1830, he and his family had fled north. When he enlisted in the 24th United States Colored Troops in 1864, the Civil War was still raging, and although Abraham Lincoln had freed the slaves through his Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, the Southern states refused to recognize the act. Spradley took up arms and risked a return to slavery if he were to be captured to fight for a country that did not fully recognize him as a citizen. Prior to the Civil War, Spradley was a stone mason, likely a trade he learned in slavery. After the war ended and he returned to Carlisle, he became a janitor at Dickinson College, a post he held until his death. When he died on April 9, 1897, 32 years to the day after the war which earned him his freedom his funeral services had to be moved from the West Street A.M.E. Zion Church to Bosler Hall, on Dickinson's campus, because the expected crowd of people could not fit into the church's hall. Classes at the college were cancelled for the day and half the attendees at Spradley's funeral service were professors or students at the college. Part of the funeral services included a rendition of "Safe In the Arms of the Lord," by the college quartet and the A.M.E. Zion choir. Source: Sentinel Reporter, article by Lauren Maclane (April 16, 2011); Dickinson Archives

Cabinet card of Napolean P. Drue, taken at the Richmond Photo Company in Richmond, Virginia, circa 1880s. There was a note attached that indicated he purchased land in 1867 and was "the first colored person in Powhatan County, Virginia to record a deed for property bought after emancipation by one of his race." Drue was born enslaved in Belmead, Virginia in 1843 and served as a house servant for the Cocke family until 1863 when he was emancipated. Following the Civil War, he purchased 33 acres near Belmead and worked at St. Emma's. He died in 1925 and is buried in Belmead Historic Cemetery. [ Library of Virginia ]

An 1849 daguerreotype of Judy Telfair Jackson and her granddaughter, Lavinia. Both were enslaved and owned by the Telfairs, a prominent Savannah, Georgia family. Judy Telfair Jackson worked as the maid and cook and Lavinia was Mary Telfair's maid. Its noted that both women are well dressed, as was typical for those enslaved working in the main house. Sources: Georgia Historical Society; 'Women in Atlanta' by Staci Catron-Sullivan, Susan Neill and 'Slavery and Freedom in Savannah' by Leslie M. Harris and Daina Ramey Berry

Portrait of a newly freed African American family --- names and exact location unknown. Bullwhip Days: The Slave Remembers, An Oral History, edited by James Mellon

One day while staff members were looking over a collection of carte-de-visites to be displayed at the National Portrait Gallery in the Nation's Capital, they came across an image of an African American man named Abraham. After some research here is what they found: It was discovered that he was a slave who was literally blown to freedom. Union soldiers tunneling below Confederate defenses in the siege of Vicksburg (1863) had detonated powerful explosives that buried in debris seven enslaved workers used by Confederates to dig counter shafts, but lofted an eighth—identified only as Abraham clear across the Union lines, where he recovered from his injuries and joined the Union war effort. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Photographer unknown . (1863)

"Aunt Jemima" Victim of Auto The Daily Herald (Chicago, Illinois) October 12, 1923 Colored Mammy of Pancake Fame Crushed to Death in Chicago; Born in Kentucky Chicago ----- Pancake season is here, but in some Chicago households the sizzling of the griddle will bring memories tinged with sadness. "Aunt Jemima" is dead. The aged negro woman whose ability to make "flapjacks" was capitalized by millers, whose bandanna-wreathed smile forms a mental picture for thousand of lovers of a "plate of wheats" and whose skill with the pancake turner furnished amusement for and drew the envy of those who attended expositions and fairs ever since the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, fell a victim to an automobile in Chicago recently. Her death marks the passing of an interesting character who will be mourned not only by the negro race but by numerous wealthy Chicago families as well. For Mrs. Nancy Green will live longest in memory as "Aunt Jemima." "Aunt Jemima" was born in Montgomery County, Kentucky in 1834 and came to Chicago as a nurse for the Walker family. She nursed and made pancakes for the late Circuit Judge Charles M. Walker, chief justice of the Municipal court, and his brother, Dr. Samuel, now a leading North side physician, when they were boys. They spread her fame among their boy chums, and before long "Aunt Jemima's pancakes" became a common phrase in Chicago when good things to eat were discussed. A milling company heard of her, searched her out, obtained her recipe and induced her to make pancakes at the World's Fair. After that she went from one Exposition to another demonstrating her skill. There was one, however, that she refused to attend the Paris Exposition. All inducements that could be made were put forward, but "Aunt Jemima" refused to budge. "No, suh," she said. "They ain't no man gonna git me on th watah. I was bo'n in this country an' I'm gonna die heah, not somewheah 'twixt heah an' somewheah's else." She was one of the first colored missionary workers and one of the organizers of the Olivet Baptist church, now the largest colored church in the world, with a membership of over 9000. She is buried in Oak Woods Cemetery in Chicago Cook County, Illinois. Source: On December 12, 2017, Lesley Martin, a reference librarian at the Chicago History Museum Research Center, found an actual image of Mrs. Green as it appeared in The Daily Herald in an article on her death.

Frederick Douglass presented this portrait to Susan B, Anthony as a gift. Legacy: Treasures of Black History edited by Thomas C Battle and Donna M Wells, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center "The white man’s happiness cannot be purchased by the black man’s misery." Frederick Douglass stood at the podium, trembling with nervousness. Before him sat abolitionists who had travelled to the Massachusetts island of Nantucket. Only 23 years old at the time, Douglass overcame his nervousness and gave a stirring, eloquent speech about his life as a slave. Douglass would continue to give speeches for the rest of his life and would become a leading spokesperson for the abolition of slavery and for racial equality. The son of a slave woman and an unknown white man, "Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey" was born in February of 1818 on Maryland's eastern shore. He spent his early years with his grandparents and with an aunt, seeing his mother only four or five times before her death when he was seven. (All Douglass knew of his father was that he was white.) During this time he was exposed to the degradations of slavery, witnessing firsthand brutal whippings and spending much time cold and hungry. When he was eight he was sent to Baltimore to live with a ship carpenter named Hugh Auld. There he learned to read and first heard the words abolition and abolitionists. "Going to live at Baltimore," Douglass would later say, "laid the foundation, and opened the gateway, to all my subsequent prosperity." Douglass spent seven relatively comfortable years in Baltimore before being sent back to the country, where he was hired out to a farm run by a notoriously brutal "slavebreaker" named Edward Covey. And the treatment he received was indeed brutal. Whipped daily and barely fed, Douglass was "broken in body, soul, and spirit." On January 1, 1836, Douglass made a resolution that he would be free by the end of the year. He planned an escape. But early in April he was jailed after his plan was discovered. Two years later, while living in Baltimore and working at a shipyard, Douglass would finally realize his dream: he fled the city on September 3, 1838. Travelling by train, then steamboat, then train, he arrived in New York City the following day. Several weeks later he had settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, living with his newlywed bride (whom he met in Baltimore and married in New York) under his new name, Frederick Douglass. Always striving to educate himself, Douglass continued his reading. He joined various organizations in New Bedford, including a black church. He attended Abolitionists' meetings. He subscribed to William Lloyd Garrison's weekly journal, the Liberator. In 1841, he saw Garrison speak at the Bristol Anti-Slavery Society's annual meeting. Douglass was inspired by the speaker, later stating, "no face and form ever impressed me with such sentiments [the hatred of slavery] as did those of William Lloyd Garrison." Garrison, too, was impressed with Douglass, mentioning him in the Liberator. Several days later Douglass gave his speech at the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society's annual convention in Nantucket-- the speech described at the top of this page. Of the speech, one correspondent reported, "Flinty hearts were pierced, and cold ones melted by his eloquence." Before leaving the island, Douglass was asked to become a lecturer for the Society for three years. It was the launch of a career that would continue throughout Douglass' long life. Douglass was a firm believer in the equality of all peoples, whether black, female, Native American, or recent immigrant. He was also a believer in dialogue and in making alliances across racial and ideological divides, and in the liberal values of the U.S. Constitution. When radical abolitionists, under the motto "No Union With Slaveholders", criticized Douglass' willingness to dialogue with slave owners, he famously replied: "I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong." Despite apprehensions that the information might endanger his freedom, Douglass published his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written By Himself. The year was 1845. Three years later, after a speaking tour of England, Ireland, and Scotland, Douglass published the first issue of the North Star, a four-page weekly, out of Rochester, New York. Ever since he first met Garrison in 1841, the white abolitionist leader had been Douglass' mentor. But the views of Garrison and Douglass ultimately diverged. Garrison represented the radical end of the abolitionist spectrum. He denounced churches, political parties, even voting. He believed in the dissolution (break up) of the Union. He also believed that the U.S. Constitution was a pro-slavery document. After his tour of Europe and the establishment of his paper, Douglass' views began to change; he was becoming more of an independent thinker, more pragmatic. In 1851 Douglass announced at a meeting in Syracuse, New York, that he did not assume the Constitution was a pro-slavery document, and that it could even "be wielded in behalf of emancipation," especially where the federal government had exclusive jurisdiction. Douglass also did not advocate the dissolution of the Union, since it would isolate slaves in the South. This led to a bitter dispute between Garrison and Douglass that, despite the efforts of others such as Harriet Beecher Stowe to reconcile the two, would last into the Civil War. Frederick Douglass would continue his active involvement to better the lives of African Americans. He conferred with Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War and recruited northern blacks for the Union Army. After the War he fought for the rights of women and African Americans alike. PBS/WETA, WGBH, PBS Online; The Anti-Slavery Movement, A Lecture by Frederick Douglass before the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society (1855)

This gentleman was identified not by a name but by what America imposed on him ... slavery. A formerly enslaved human being sits beside a portrait of his mother. Name and photographer unknown. Source: A Saga of the Black Man; by Rosetta Lucas Quisenberry