Last Chance to See "Hope and Dignity"
Vera Jackson in the California Eagle; Donny Hathaway captured by Roland Charles
Happy New Year! Our exhibition Hope and Dignity: The Farmworker Movement will close on January 26. You can still visit the Museum of Social Justice before we close the exhibition (Thursdays to Sundays). Also, we are learning more about Vera Jackson’s photographs by researching the California Eagle to help us identify people and events. We give you two examples of how we research to create accurate metadata. Plus, we share new findings of historical photographs by Roland Charles of the Donny Hathaway Live Album performance at The Troubadour in 1971.
You can still visit our exhibition Hope and Dignity: The Farmworker Movement at the Museum of Social Justice until January 26. The exhibition features over 400 images of the digital Farmworker Movement Collection by photographers Emmon Clarke and John Kouns and cartoons by Andy Zermeño juxtaposed with photos of El Teatro Campesino's early performances. Dr. Kent Kirkton, Marta Valier, and Joseph Silva curated it. You can download the exhibition catalog from the museum’s webpage or get one in person before we run out of them. The catalog includes QR codes for our website on the Farmworker Movement and for the more than 6,000 photographs digitized and with bilingual metadata at the University Library’s digital collection site.
Vera Jackson and the California Eagle
By José Luis Benavides
We have been researching the California Eagle archive for clues about some photographs by Vera Jackson in preparation for applying for funding to digitize this important collection. We use preliminary research about the subjects and events portrayed in the images to create the most accurate and rich metadata possible. “Max the Printer,” for example, is the title of the following photograph by Jackson featured in the 1983 exhibition catalog The Tradition Continues: California Black Photographers. We discovered that California Eagle reporter Phyllis Scott wrote the story of Max Williams, with a photo of Williams uncredited to Jackson but clearly part of the same photo session. In the article, we learned that Williams moved to Los Angeles from New Orleans in 1925, became the first African American to graduate from Jefferson High with linotype training, and began working for the California Eagle print shop after graduating in 1929. A trailblazer.
Jessie Mae Brown was the editor of the society pages of the California Eagle in the 1940s, and in 1949 she started a long career as society editor of the Los Angeles Sentinel. Using a photo by Vera Jackson, the front page of the Eagle publicized Brown’s wedding to LeRoy A. Beavers Jr. at the Second Baptist Church. A page of the paper with seven photos by Jackson, including the one below, chronicled the church wedding and the reception at the house of John and Vada Somerville. Thanks to the captions published in the newspaper, we can now identify the church and all the women in the photograph, including Dorothy Dandridge, who at the time was married to Harlod Nicholas.
Roland Charles’s Music Photography
By José Luis Benavides
Before the end of last year, my colleague Keith Rice sent me an email message as he was doing research for what we are hoping will become a book on photographer Roland Charles: “I came across negatives and contact sheets of images he [Roland Charles] took at what I consider one of the greatest live concerts ever recorded, and released as an album, Donny Hathaway Live. Side one of the album was recorded in West Hollywood and side two in New York in 1971 and released in 1972…. I could not believe Roland [Charles] was there.” Keith also shared some contact sheet images of the concert. We identified one image marked by Roland Charles to be printed. The same image was published by the New York Times in 2019 with no credit to the photographer, Roland Charles, but with credit to the famous Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images. If you are curious about the concert, Keith recommends scholar Emily J. Lordi’s short book on the Donny Hathaway Live Album. To learn more about Roland Charles, check the guide to his collection and a blog entry on his work documenting Bobtown, Louisiana.
