Richard S. Roberts: Race, Cultural Capital, and Visual Politics

“For various reasons the average, struggling, non-morbid Negro is the best-kept secret in America. His revelation to the public is the thing needed to do away with that feeling of difference which inspires fear and whichever expresses itself in dislike.”

--Zora Neal Hurston, 1950

David M. Potter writes, “Southern history, more than most branches of historical study, seems to point up the anomalous relationships between the past, or our image or legend of the past, and the present, or our image of the present” (150). It is within the contested terrain of the past and perceptions of the past that myth becomes a relevant factor. This point seems most evident when discussing the American South. As an integral component of Southern mythology, black identity falls prey to the stereotypes that emerge from Southern myth-making and cultural recollection. Racial segregation, reliance upon stereotypes, and white American cultural investment in Southern mythology created a sense of historical knowledge about Southern black people of the early twentieth century, suggesting that they were simply products of social pathology, ambiguously influenced by the pressures of white society. Such an assessment privileges the notion that Southern blacks existed as objects, not subjects of the socio-historical and cultural forces around them. It obscures the richness and value of African American culture “secreted” in daily life.

The value of early twentieth-century African American studio photography stems from its status as a form of “secreted” cultural production that affirmed the substance of African American life, presenting it in a manner that often collides with popular constructions of blacks—especially Southern blacks. This study focuses on the photographic work of Richard Samuel Roberts (1880-1936) of Columbia, South Carolina, and the limited public discourse on his photography. It examines how the cultural politics of memory and recollection operate to make an indelible impression of how Southern blacks from that era are perceived and interpreted through Depression era photography, and how this cultural framework influences the understanding of Roberts’s photography. In so doing, this study not only argues that Roberts allowed his patrons to engage in a form of black self-imaging that created a cultural barrier against structures of oppression by emphasizing the integrity of family, community, and black personhood, but he also provided a means for black people to produce and acquire cultural capital.

Although Richard S. Roberts spent the last sixteen years of his life in Columbia, South Carolina, and most of his photographic work that has become publicly known comes from that period, Roberts was a native Floridian. He came from the heavily black seaport town of Fernandina on Amelia Island, which is situated in the southern part of Cumberland Sound near the Florida-Georgia border. Fernandina was the place where his interest in photography began, and it was the site of his first photography studio, The Gem, opened in 1910 (G. Roberts). The unique history of this small community and the environment it fostered greatly shaped Roberts and arguably in turn influenced his photographic work. Fernandina blacks exercised a remarkable degree of autonomy and collective activism from the period of Reconstruction to the dawning of the twentieth century (Kharif 161-73; Shofner 397-408). This activism did not emerge from a black elite; rather, it stemmed primarily from the efforts of former slaves and their descendants, who comprised the black working class. The majority of laboring blacks in Nassau county found employment not as agricultural laborers, but as longshoremen, loggers, and sawmill workers—vocations that were perceived as “black jobs” that did not encroach upon the “preserves of whites” (Irish 234). Roberts, too, was a member of the working class, in spite of his entrepreneurial activities. His studio work supplemented his salary with the US Postal service as a fireman/ custodian in Fernandina and in Columbia.

By 1920 Roberts relocated his family of six—soon to be seven—to Columbia. For the first two years after the move to Columbia, Roberts worked out of a small building on his property, but no photographs were taken in that structure; instead, he traveled to people’s...