Sometimes, a picture captures a story that words alone cannot tell.
On Monday evening in the City Hall reception room, University of Missouri associate professor of media history and author Berkley Hudson flipped through just a few of the 88,000 photos taken by Columbus-based photographer O.N. Pruitt between the 1920s and 1940s.
The packed room fell silent, taking in these historical photographs.
“That’s what I’m inviting you into,” Hudson said. “It is a meditation on memory, on place, on race, on religion, on beauty, on joy, on horror. All of that is in these images, just as it is in our lives today.”
Hudson displayed portraits of white and Black Columbus residents, baptisms of white and Black church groups, a young girl with a live rattlesnake around her shoulders, the Ku Klux Klan marching through downtown and a photo of Tupelo buildings torn to shreds by a 1936 tornado.
All of these photos and more appear in Hudson’s book, “O.N. Pruitt’s Possum Town: Photographing Trouble and Resilience in the American South.” A few of the photos also appeared in an exhibition on Pruitt displayed around the room.
Hudson, a Columbus native, has been studying the O.N. Pruitt collection for decades, ever since he and his childhood friends Jim Carnes, David Gooch, Mark Gooch and former Dispatch publisher Birney Imes III acquired the collection to preserve it in 1987.
The photographs were originally stored in five different locations, Hudson said, but they needed a more permanent home to prevent water damage. Concerned about the “hundreds of years longevity” of the photos, Hudson brought them to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
In 1994, Hudson told The Dispatch, he started working on proposals to create a book, though he didn’t start going through images one by one until the 2000s. So far, he has gone through about 20,000 of the collection’s negatives.
“I still learn by looking at a single picture,” he said.
While Hudson said he wanted to allow the audience to “experience the images for themselves,” leading the room to fall into silence, a few photos could not be allowed to pass without further explanation.
One photo taken by Pruitt on Christmas Day 1953, Hudson said, features his own family. Others feature notable names like Tennessee Williams, Jack Dempsey, Madame Flozella or Truman Capote’s father.
Still, others feature Columbus citizens whose stories feel larger than life.
One photo of a Black man named Sylvester Harris posing next to a mule in front of his house appears relatively ordinary. But knowing the story behind it, Hudson said, changed his perspective on the photo.
“Sylvester Harris and his brother couldn’t make the mortgage payment on the farm down in Plum Grove,” Hudson said. “And so he came into town, got on the phone… it took him 90 minutes to reach President Roosevelt, and he said ‘I can’t make my payments,’ and the president said ‘I’ll save your house.’”
Pruitt’s photographs also display times of horror, Hudson said, including photographs of lynchings and a parade by the Ku Klux Klan through downtown Columbus. Other photographs show destruction through natural disasters, like the 1936 Tupelo tornado and the Tombigbee River flooding.
While Pruitt’s photographs tell stories like this, his photographs also depict ordinary life throughout both the Black and white communities in Columbus, Hudson said. Many of the people in Pruitt’s photographs he has not yet identified. But whenever he comes back to Columbus, Hudson often gets the chance to have conversations that uncover those otherwise lost identities.
Hudson said anyone with identifying information about photographs who was not at the talk can email [email protected].
Pruitt photographs on display
In 2022, Hudson displayed an exhibition including about 100 photographs by Pruitt at the Columbus Arts Council, before the exhibition started traveling nationally.
In 2023, the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library System announced it had collaborated with Hudson to create a smaller pop-up exhibit, which includes six free-standing panels displaying Hudson and Pruitt’s work, “Mr. Pruitt’s Possum Town: Photographing Trouble and Resilience in the American South.”
This smaller exhibition was the one on display in City Hall throughout the month of February, Mayor Keith Gaskin said, in honor of Black History Month.
“I think the way that Mr. Pruitt was able to move in and out of the Black and white communities in Columbus is very unique,” Gaskin said.
The six-panel display was funded by the Friends of the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library, CLPLS archivist Mona Vance-Ali said. It is free to use for institutions in the state of Mississippi, she said.
“We have it available for people to have at their own institution, as well, so you can host it if you know someone that might be interested,” Vance-Ali said.
In the future, Gaskin said, he hopes to further acknowledge Pruitt’s work by having a Mississippi Department of Archives and History state historical marker installed in front of The Globe building on Main Street, where Pruitt’s original photography office used to stand.
The marker will cost about $3,000, Gaskin said, and he said he is planning to talk with groups in town about raising the funds to purchase the marker.
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