“The Photographer of Your Town”: Recovering a Community Through the Photographs of Richard Samuel Roberts

From 1921-1936, Richard Samuel Roberts took thousands of photographs from his studio in Columbia, South Carolina’s Black business district. For decades after his death in 1936, his family kept his glass plate photograph negatives under their Columbia home until his children contacted the library at the University of South Carolina in the 1970s. Fifty years later, the process of preserving, identifying, and digitizing the nearly 6,000 photographs continues, utilizing sources including newspapers, census records, city directories, oral histories, and community identification sessions. This poster will use photographs, newspaper clippings, and a map to showcase the process of identifying people, places, and events; the importance of these identifications; and the ways that collections like the Richard Samuel Roberts Photograph Collection expand the historical record to recover and reconstruct histories that have been erased from public memory.

From Reconstruction until the mid-twentieth century, Wheeler Hill, Ward One, Waverly, and parts of downtown Columbia were among the city’s vibrant Black communities and business districts. Black-owned professional offices, restaurants, stores, schools, hospitals, and theaters served the people who lived there. Since the 1950s, processes of urban renewal, university expansion, and gentrification have erased many of these spaces. Richard Samuel Roberts photographed people and places who have been forgotten or ignored, and his pictures appeared in private and public spaces: homes, ads, yearbooks, and newspaper articles.

Richard Samuel Roberts lived and worked in communities that were built during Reconstruction and displaced under urban renewal. His pictures include infants, graduations, workers, weddings, businesses, and funerals. They not only reveal individual stories but also reflect the lifecycle of many southern Black communities. As Tonnia Anderson has argued, Roberts photographed his community as his own creative action, not as a reaction to white portrayals of African Americans. While many early twentieth-century portrayals of African Americans advanced specific narratives, Roberts represented Black South Carolinians as they wanted to be seen and remembered, treating farmers and janitors with the same dignity and respect as doctors and lawyers. By preserving their “true likeness,” Richard Samuel Roberts created a window into communities that were mostly erased.

Identifying the people and places Roberts photographed, in conjunction with tracing businesses and residences in Columbia’s Black communities, helps fill gaps in the archives and historical record by recovering hidden stories and ignored communities. This project does not just put names to faces; it puts faces to a community that has been left out of larger historical narratives. Its impact is individual and national in scale, both allowing people to find their own histories and family members and revealing the stories of Black communities, highlighting people who became civil rights activists, local union leaders, and nationally acclaimed artists. This process connects space and history to create a fuller representation of local Black history.