Making Reflections



Reflections main label, before all the vinyl letters were all added, May 2015

I've spent parts of the last 4 years thinking about the history of Wilmington in the 1950s and 1960s  for an exhibition project. And on May 15, 2015, Reflections in Black and White opened to the public. 

Reflections asks a seemingly simple question:  "What does looking at informal images of black and white Wilmington tell us about the 1950s and 1960s?"

The exhibit showcases 4 collections of photographs that date from 1950s and 1960s Wilmington. These black and white photographs were taken by black and white residents of the Port City.



Photographer Herbert Howard

First, in 1992, Henrietta Adams donated a collection of more than 1,000 photographs to the Museum.  They were taken by her brother, Herbert Howard, who was a postal worker and semi-professional photographer.  His rich collection documents many black families' rites of passage - weddings, graduations, church events, and the more day-to-day events.



Artist Claude Howell
 

In 1997, local artist Claude Howell died, and left his scrapbooks to the Cape Fear Museum.  These scrapbooks contain all sorts of ephemera and contain some wonderful photographs of Claude's friends, and of the North Carolina coast.  Claude's images came to mind because he took (or included) a compelling set of images that show African American longshoremen on the Wilmington waterfront.  These images seemed to both speak for themselves and speak to each other about race relations at the time.











Student Nurse Elizabeth Ashworth (left)



As I was looking through the Museum's photographs, I kept coming back to the photographs that Elizabeth Ashworth Horne donated to the Museum in 2001.

Elizabeth attended James Walker Memorial Hospital's School of Nursing between 1945 and 1948.   At the time, the nursing school was segregated, and only women attended.

In some ways, Elizabeth's photographs capture the flip side of the world represented in Herbert Howard's photos.  Elizabeth's nursing school images captures some of the experiences of  a tight knit group of white friends, just as Herbert Howard's images seem to capture a sense of the deep connections between local African Americans.




Camera Shop Envelope

The final set of photos were a collection of photo envelopes that were left behind at the Camera Shop, a local photo store.

The Camera Shop collection was donated to the Museum in 2012 by Michelle Masson.  It is made up of more than 150 envelopes of images of both black and white Wilmingtonians. 

So what do these four disparate sets of photographs have in common? 


Well, as I looked through them, I couldn't help notice that black and white Wilmngtonians were doing the same things - eating, hanging out, having parties, taking pictures of children, houses, loved ones - but they weren't doing those things together. 

So putting these collections on the wall together seemed to be an intriguing way to ask people to think about what it was like to live in a segregated world.

Top left and middle - Camera Shop photos; top right - Elizabeth Ashworth snapshot; bottom left - Herbert Howard image; bottom right - Claude Howell and his friends

I hope that people who visit the exhibit will reflect on the past they'll see on view, and think more deeply about how race has shaped Americans' lived experiences.