“Despite emancipation, African Americans continued to provide most of the labor that operated the plantations and docks of the South, and to experience the mockery and derision of white photographers and publishers, and their audiences.” Brian Wallis (2005), Curator of the International Center of Photography.
The fund-raising materials in this section spotlight the white gaze of Penn Normal Industrial and Agricultural School (PNIAS) board of trustees and educators, cast down on Gullah and Geechee students. These fund-raising materials are accompanied by the text of scholars and literary authors, juxtaposing different interpretations of the Negro Problem and the New Negro from the perspectives of black and white writers. The conversations that occur between the captions and the images are at times harmonious and at times incongruous.
“Through having had to appeal from the unjust stereotypes of his oppressors and traducers to those of his liberators, friends and benefactors, he has had to subscribe to the traditional positions from which his case has been viewed.” Alain Locke, The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925) (p. 4)
Without the aid of the requested funds on this booklet cover, this depicted black child is presented as symbolizing the entirety of the Negro Problem; but with funds, this same black child will grow to become a farmer, successfully transformed into a New Negro, grounded in the American South, and less likely to migrate to the North. The message conveyed on this cover likely appeased the missionary mentality of white Northern philanthropists that received this booklet by mail.
“They go to land-grant colleges, normal schools, and learn how to do the white man’s work with refinement: home economics to prepare his food; teacher education to instruct black children in obedience; music to soothe the weary master and entertain his blunted soul." Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (1970) (p. 83)
Applying Toni Morrison's quote to this photo, it becomes clear that the power within this picture doesn't reside with the two young black women performing manual labor; instead the power resides with the white photographer and the school administrators who would eventually contextualize this image. The level of transparency Penn School administrators or visiting photographers shared with Penn School students of their photographs is unclear from the documentation within the Penn School Papers. Like all archives, Penn School Papers preserved only a portion of history.
Within the 1907-1908 annual report to the Penn School board of trustees, Alfred Collins Maule in his role as Secretary and Publicist announced the goal of white administrators and educators for the school year: “We wish to develop a feeling among the race that each individual has a definite responsibility, that of helping his neighbor, and the sooner the whole Negro race realizes the importance of this point, the sooner will the ‘Negro problem’ be solved.” Maule's anodyne to the "Negro Problem" remains deeply prejudiced and self-serving to white Northerners interested in keeping Southern black Americans in the South.
“He was capable of an almost pathetic loyalty to old associations. Moreover, he was contended under conditions which would have made a more sensitive race miserable. He knew how to dance and sing in the midst of physical distress.” Francis Butler Simkins PhD and Robert Hilliard Woody PhD, South Carolina During Reconstruction (1932) (p. 26)
This "objective" history, authored by two highly educated white scholars in Reconstruction, functions simultaneously as an attempt to provide the justifications for why black populations were best fit to perform manual labor. This example of objectivity slipping into objectification poses the question: As a researcher seeking objective history within archives and secondary sources, how do you glean the prejudice from the truth?
If researchers of archives continually rely upon bigoted primary and secondary sources as uninterrupted pieces of history, we are doomed to perpetuate the bigoted beliefs contained within those materials. Following the words of Howard Zinn in 1963: “We have too long treated what we have done with the Negro in this country as a kind of an aberration on the part of what is otherwise a normal, healthy American society. And this is completely false" (p. 3).