Hey to Your Mama N'em

Beaufort, South Carolina. Group of men, women and children on J.J. Smith’s plantation, 1862

Timothy H. O’Sullivan, photographer

Civil War glass negative collection, Library of Congress

When President Abraham Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in 1862, the men, women and children on J.J. Smith’s cotton plantation were among the first slaves to be liberated.

Two African American men sitting on stoop, Charleston, South Carolina, 1962

Toni Frissell, photographer

Library of Congress

(Source: loc.gov)

Woman going out to plant corn on a large farm near Moncks Corner, South Carolina

March 1941 

Jack Delano, photographer

A Fourth of July celebration, St. Helena Island, S.C., 1939

Marion Post Wolcott, photographer

Hanover, Pinopolis vic., Berkeley County, South Carolina, 1938

Frances Benjamin Johnson, photographer

Published in: Stoney, Samuel Gaillard, Plantations of the Carolina Low Country. Charleston, S.C.: Carolina Art Association, 1938.

Forms part of: Carnegie Survey of the Architecture of the South (Library of Congress)

Slave quarters on a plantation, possibly in Beaufort, South Carolina

c. 1862

Mathew B. Brady, photographer

Library of Congress, Gladstone Collection of African American Photographs 

“One of the smallest negro oyster shuckers that I found on the Atlantic Coast. Usually they do not work the negro children. Varn & Platt Canning Co. Location: Bluffton, South Carolina.”

February 1913

Lewis Wickes Hine, photographer

National Child Labor Committee Photographs

Advertisement for the Mayesville Institute, ca. 1920

Mayesville, South Carolina

Mayesville Institute was a small boarding school established by a former slave, Emma J. Wilson, in 1886. The school, influenced by Booker T. Washington’s industrial education model, provided courses in agriculture, domestic and mechanical arts (farming, brick-laying, sewing, shoe-making, tailoring, housekeeping, nursing). One of the most notable graduates of the institute was Mayesville native Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of Bethune-Cookman College.

Harvey Gantt Leaving the Clemson Registrar’s Office, 1963

Brian Scott, photographer

Harvey Gantt was the first African American student to enroll in Clemson University. He graduated with honors, earning a degree in architecture. In 1970, Gantt was awarded a master’s degree in city planning from MIT. He went on to become a successful architect, businessman and politician and in 1983, became the first African American mayor of Charlotte, NC.

In October 2009, the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African American Arts + Culture opened in Charlotte, named in the former mayor’s honor.

African American school house near Summerville, South Carolina, 1938 

Marion Post Wolcott, photographer

Main building of Claflin University, Orangeburg, South Carolina, 1899.

Founded in 1869, Claflin is the oldest historically black college/university in South Carolina.

Photographed for the 1900 Paris Exposition.

Elise Forrest Harleston, painted by Edwin Harleston (date unknown). She was South Carolina’s first black female photographer.

Overshadowed by her husband, Elise’s work has rarely been exhibited. She gave up photography after his death in 1931. She remarried the following year and eventually moved to Southern California, where she spent the rest of her life.

Elise never mentioned her first husband or her work as a photographer, but she saved all of Edwin’s letters and nearly two dozen of he glass-plate negatives. These items were discovered after her death.

Edwin A. Harleston; The Harleston Painting Studio; 118 Calhoun Street, Charleston, S.C. (1923).

Source: Simms’ Blue Book and National Negro Business and Professional Directory; James N. Simms, compiler and publisher, 1923.