In 1987, a circle of boyhood friends from Columbus acquired 88,000 photo negatives comprising four decades of daily life in Lowndes County — images they first discovered by happenstance in the early 1970s and never forgot.

Now, 35 years later, a selection of these photographs will be revealed in Berkley Hudson’s new book “O.N. Pruitt’s Possum Town,” published by UNC Press this month. Additionally, the Columbus Arts Council will launch an exhibit Thursday.

Hudson is part of the group preserving the photographs, which includes Jim Carnes, brothers David and Mark Gooch and former Dispatch publisher Birney Imes.

Otis Noel Pruitt maintained a studio at 413 ½ Main Street. He was born in 1891, and his collection spans the 1920s to his retirement in 1960. He died in 1967.

Longtime Columbus residents may remember being photographed by “the picture man.” Indeed, Hudson recalls seeing himself as a young boy in family portraits taken by Pruitt.

Pruitt is notable for his images of subjects across racial lines during the segregation era. Hudson elaborated on how this distinguished Pruitt’s work, while acknowledging that Black artists would not have had the same opportunities, in the following interview with the Dispatch.

To kick off the book and exhibit, the Columbus Arts Council will hold a reception on Thursday from 5-8 p.m. and a panel on Saturday at 10:30 a.m.

On Feb. 17, Friendly City Books will hold a signing at 2 p.m. prior to Hudson’s lecture at Mississippi University for Women at 6 p.m.

The exhibit will be on view until April 23.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

 

 

Discovering the Pruitt collection in the 1970s

Mark [Gooch] got a youth grant from the NEH, the National Endowment for the Humanities, to do oral histories. … As part of that, he ended up going up to Calvin Shanks’ studio, which was Pruitt’s old studio.

[Mark saw] wooden boxes filled with negatives and asked what those were. He said that’s Pruitt’s negatives.

Mark showed it to Birney. Then they told me about it and showed it to me.

We weren’t able to persuade Calvin to let us buy them from him.

His family and his widow, they sold most of the negatives to Billy Frates, who had a hardware store on Main Street. We realized that’s where they’d gone, and so we’d talk to Billy off and on for four years. Eventually he got tired of them.

That’s when we acquired them with the goal to preserve, to research, to exhibit and to publish the photographs. At that point, though, we had no idea the stories that we would uncover in the process.

The “viral” image of Sylvester Harris

There was a print of a Black man, a farmer, in overalls with his mule standing outside a farmhouse that had no caption, no information.

The research that we were doing was all before Google or even hardly the internet at that point. I’m saying just showing pictures to people and saying, “Do you recognize anybody?” Going around town and saying, “Here’s a picture of a man with a mule, do you recognize him?”

We discovered Sylvester Harris had a farm in the Trinity community on Plum Grove out in western Lowndes County in the prairie. He along with his brother owned the farm. They couldn’t make their mortgage payment to the Federal Home Loan Bank in New Orleans.

He heard the fireside chats from President (Franklin) Roosevelt, who wanted to help the working man and working people. … After 90 minutes of calling the White House, he reached President Roosevelt on the phone, who told him that he’d help him save his home from foreclosure.

Right after that, the Commercial Dispatch had a story and ran Sylvester’s picture with Jesse, his mule, on the front page. The Associated Press picked that up, and Sylvester then went viral nationally.

His picture appeared in newspapers all over the country. It appeared in the Black press as well: the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier. Newsreels came from Memphis: Fox, Movietone and Paramount.

Millions of people heard about Sylvester and his mule and how the president helped him save his farm.

That took me about 10 years to find out that story.

Executions and lynchings

Pruitt made pictures of two of the last executions by rope hanging in the country in the mid-1930s on the courthouse grounds here, the Lowndes County courthouse grounds, 1933-1934. John C. Stennis was the prosecuting attorney, who would later become a U.S. senator.

Pruitt also photographed a horrific image of two men, Bert Moore and Dooley Morton, two young Black farmers from Lowndes County who were hanged after being accused of assaulting a white woman. They were taken to jail, and then they were taken for — what used to be a term — “safekeeping” to another jail.

They were being taken to Aberdeen and the deputy sheriff was overtaken by a mob of three dozen white men who then brought Bert Moore and Dooley Morton to Columbus, took them south of town and took them to a Black church yard and hanged them. Many people, both Black and white, ended up seeing those bodies there for a number of hours before they were cut down.

Crossing the color line

Understand that he was a white man working in a highly racial, segregated society at that time, and he was unusual for a white photographer in that he did document some, but not all, aspects of Black community life.

Now, because he was a white photographer, he could move into the Black community easily enough, whereas if he were a Black photographer, he wouldn’t have been able to move in the white community.

What he created was a body of work that allowed you to see with more complexity and more layers than a lot of photographers at that time, aside from certain photojournalists like in the Farm Security Administration: Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Russell Lee, Gordon Parks. They were doing a specific kind of thing at that time, but Pruitt’s photographs compare favorably with some of those.

Pruitt’s approach to photography

He might only take one or two exposures of a picture. There are different reasons for that. Some had to do with economy, saving money. But also it had to do with just the process.

He was making very sure about how he composed his image. The result of that is these beautiful photographs that he made. He made beautiful pictures of people with very dark skin and very light skin.

He knew how light functioned, and he knew how it illuminated peoples’ faces or places, and how then to expose for that, whether it’s bright sunlight or dark shadow. And then he knew how to print for that situation, also.

He wasn’t the only photographer in Columbus, but he really was the only one who was out and about everywhere taking the range of photographs that he took.

Emily Liner is the owner of Friendly City Books, an independent bookstore and press in Columbus.