Richard Samuel Roberts Photograph Collection

The Richard Samuel Roberts Photograph Collection preserves one of the most significant visual archives of African American life in early twentieth-century South Carolina. The photographs represent a vast cross-section of Black life, from farmers to socialites, students to stage magicians, and children to civic leaders. Offering a glimpse into southern Black communities through the eyes of an artist, the nearly 6,000 images in this collection present a record of working and middle-class African Americans as they wanted to be seen and remembered.

Richard Samuel Roberts (1880-1936), from Fernandina, Florida, moved to Columbia, South Carolina in 1920 with his wife, Wilhelmina Pearl Williams Roberts, and their children: Gerald, Beverly Nash, Cornelius, and Wilhelmina. Their youngest, Miriam, was born shortly after they moved. The family purchased a home on Wayne Street in Arsenal Hill, an African American neighborhood near downtown Columbia. Roberts was a loving husband and father, a photographer, a member of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, and a fireman-custodian for the U.S. Postal Service. Roberts’ devotion to his family, faith, and community shines through his work.

In 1921, Roberts opened a photography studio at 1119 Washington Street, part of Columbia’s vibrant Washington Street Black Business District. His wife, children, and assistant ran the studio while he worked at the post office. After working from 4:00 am until noon, Roberts went to his studio, a single room divided into dressing and waiting areas, a dark room, and a workspace where people posed in front of his gelatin dry plate camera. He designed special equipment to diffuse light, produce different-sized pictures (8 x 10, 5 x 7, and 3 1/2 x 5-inch formats), and retouch negatives. In studio and across the state, Roberts made thousands of photographs of individuals, families, pets, homes, businesses, schools, football games, graduations, funerals, and more. His pictures appeared in postcards, scrapbooks, yearbooks, and newspapers, including the Palmetto Leader, an early to mid-twentieth-century Black newspaper in Columbia, and the State, one of Columbia’s white newspapers. 

For decades after Roberts’ death in 1936, his family stored 3,500 glass plate negatives containing nearly 6,000 photographs under their home on Wayne Street. In the 1970s, his children worked with the University of South Carolina to preserve and share them. Since then, efforts to identify the people, places, and events in these photographs have included oral histories, community identification sessions, and comparisons with historic newspapers. In 1986, the book, A True Likeness: The Black South of Richard Samuel Roberts, 1920–1936, edited by Philip Dunn and Thomas Johnson, and an exhibition at the Columbia Museum of Art, Richard Samuel Roberts: A True Likeness, brought about 200 of these pictures to the public, inspiring historians, artists, and countless others.