Transcripts For CSPAN3 Newly Discovered Black History Photographs 20180115

This possible. To those of you joining us for the first time, a warm welcome, and an invitation to explore the wide range of programs here. Before we begin, now is the perfect time to turn off your cellphone or anything else that might make noise during the program. Thank you for doing that. A team ofy of 2016, New York Times staffers discovered dozens of unpublished photos in the papers archives. Some were published in a multimedia series, unpublished black history. The monthlong series covered the history behind the photos and garnered 1. 7 million views and thousands of comments. We are thrilled to welcome two of the authors involved with creating the book inspired by their discovery unseen , unpublished black history from the New York Times archives, which is available for purchase and signing following the program. Darcy eveleigh is a contributing photo editor at the new york editor of creator and gue. Timely mor Rachel Swarns is a journalist and author who writes about race and Race Relations and is a contributing author for the New York Times. She is the author of american tapestry, which was published in 2012. Moderating the conversation is rea combes, the curator of film and photography at the Smithsonian Museum of African American culture. She also serves at the head of the center for African American media arts. Please join me in welcoming darcy, rachel, and rea. [applause] i would like to echo laurens wonderful comments and say thank you so much for joining us tonight. I think we are in for a delightful conversation. I am so thrilled to be here with these two dynamic women. I wanted to start off by asking you to give us the context, situate how you were able to uncover and find so many photographs that have not been published before. Well, our coauthor, dana kennedy, another writer of the book, had come to me can you hear . Ok. Is that better . More. Ok. How are we doing . Ok. Everyone can hear me now . Sorry. My coauthor dana kennedy approached and asked if there was something we could do from the New York Times Photo Archives that would be of interest to young africanamerican readers. Immediately, i thought of an idea. A couple years prior, the former New York Times picture editor, john morris, who was 95 years old, came to visit the times. I had the opportunity to sit with him for an hour. I asked john, is there anything in the archives i should be going back to look for . John immediately grew agitated and said go back and reedit everything. He said they didnt let us run the right pictures. They had to edit for space constraints for the print newspaper. They had to edit for the style of the times of the day a , stiffer picture, somebody clearly looking at the camera. John knew what was left behind. The idea stuck with me. So, when dana approached and said is there something in there, i said yes, there is something in there. Rachel, dana, damien, and i started with a list of names. Who could we name that the times might have covered . We started with Martin Luther king, rosa parks, all the familiar names you would expect us to start with. But what happened was the discovery beyond that, the accidental finds, the names we never in a million years expected, the ordinary people. That is really what drew us in. Eventually, the book started to take shape because we wanted to include those unknown people. How long did this process take . How many photographs are we talking about . Havehe times knows they 10 million print photographs in the archives. Of the 10 million in the archives, one third are from Staff Photographers, one third are from wire agencies like Associated Press and getty images, and another third are publicity type images. So if you have three and a half million staff photographs, they had the negatives stored from those. So if one print got made, there are potentially 35 frames left over. Or more in some cases. We will show you some examples in the book. Some photographers shot hundreds of rolls of film for one or two pictures. And we are talking early 20th century through present . Restarted i think we hired the first Staff Photographer in the i believe it was the 1920s. 1920s. The negative collection is pretty well intact from the late 1940s on. There was a culling in the early years, unfortunately, but from the 1940s on. So with this call to do something for black History Month or related, you had this thought in your mind from your conversation, and then a team of colleagues came together and went through 3 million photographs . [laughter] i get asked how many i went through. I dont really know. It was a lot. I spent months on the floor with stacks of negative on a loop going, what is this . We started with the idea that we would look at we would have an image or a series of images every day for the month of february. That was our idea. We thought there would be amazing images that had never seen the light of day before. Which is awesome and you will get to see that. But it was also an opportunity for us to look at the New York Times as an institution, and how we covered and didnt cover africanamericans. So basically, it was kind of a scramble in that first month or so, the first few weeks. Darcy started in november. We were sitting around the table in january and literally going through images and afterwards for the book. But the initial intention was for it to just live online. And in print. For interactivity and social engagement. That is right. I think we realized very soon after that this could be more than that. Because there was such an incredible response to these images. People saw themselves in some of these images, some of the parade photos. We asked people to engage with the images. Right away, people said how can we get them . We were realizing, goodness, we have to make these available. I would like to ask how you went about conceptualizing, because when you have such a vast amount, and the initial thought was unpublished work, can you talk us through either how you had to triangulate the fact that it was unpublished, and or how you conceptualize what got in . You already mentioned that it was like one a day. But for the book. We had amazing images, but what was interesting to us in process, too, were the images we cannot find and the people who were not there, and perhaps why they were not there. Most of our photographers were based in new york. We had some in washington, too. But we are talking about a time where we have most of the images from the 1940s on but we have yet to find bearden, the artist. Richard wright, w. E. B. Dubois. You know. Surprising. One of the first things we went to look for was Martin Luther king. Low hanging fruit. That. We know we shot him. I started with the most popular photo that i knew of him, which was a portrait that the times ran hundreds of times. I went back to reedit that film expecting to see a portrait series. When in fact, that was not the case. It turned out he was at a round table events. He was speaking. He left the event, and he was attacked, egged. The next day, there was a page one story at the top of the page about the attack. It happened in brooklyn and , there was no photo. The photograph they showed that day was the portrait. It didnt make sense for the story. It didnt run. When i opened up the pictures, it wasnt even a series of portraits. It was some distant shots of this roundtable event that the press photographer took. At the end of the event, they went home. And then the attack took place, and they were not there. They were not there. They had gone home already. I got my shot, im leaving. Epitomizes, sort of what happens when the press isnt there. I was going to say, in a way, that speaks to what at the time perhaps was deemed newsworthy. This was not a newsworthy picture. They probably rushed that portrait out. It was such a beautiful portrait. They rushed out, and it became o for 50 years. Were you able to find surprises even within what we would consider low hanging fruit . Part of what we wanted to look at was to think about how the choices were made. After all, these were amazing photos that had remained unpublished. Why . So, we have some photos of prominent people, and then we looked and we talk about well, why didnt this and we will show you some of these that was a lot of the exercise. Well why . , and there are many, many reasons why. We were a newspaper that was dominated by text. It was not the kind of newspaper that we are now. I think thats what the photo editor was saying. They were limited sometimes. Sometimes it was just practical, you only had so much space. Sometimes it was issue with getting film. And there were harder questions where we did wonder. Darcy is a photo editor. Researchers, reporters saying, why wasnt that person there . Were looking at the one that was published and saying, hmm. We were the institution at a time when american institutions were marginalizing people of color, so there was some of that. As you are speaking, i was wondering, did your research allow you to look as you were theorizing as to why some images were in and some were not, did you look at other publications like the Washington Post, l. A. Times, or others and see if they ran a different image of the same story . I did some research with the daily news imagery and amsterdam news imagery. The amsterdam was a black and white newspaper that covered everything and they had wonderful pictures. The daily news was a picture paper. I did not go through the Washington Post archives. I was looking more at the locals because we covered local stories. It was a different time. Again, the gray lady. Their stories were 400 words. Our stories were 1500. Their pages were stories. Hours was stories and ads. The advertising was taking up the art space on the page. Fascinating. I would love to see if we could go through some of the images and there may be some stories. Before we get into that, i would ask each of you, is there an image in this cooperative experience where you are working as a team, trying to get selections for the book, was there one that each of you would have loved to have in there that didnt make the cut that you would love to share with us . I know you talked about music. Its not a singular image, its a category for me. We had amazing coverage of music and jazz at the New York Times. They spent a lot of Energy Sending photographers to these events. And at the end of our ordering this book, we realized we had so much music that i had left some behind. I didnt want it to be strictly a book about that genre, but the collection of music photography is spectacular. That does beg the question, how did you go about ordering, organizing, figuring out . We didnt want a book that was going to be like, politics, music, sports. We did not want that. Part of the experience that was really wonderful for us as journalists was the discovery, really. We were looking. Sometimes we found stuff, sometimes we didnt. Sometimes we thought we didnt have it and then darcy did find it. I think we really wanted readers and viewers to have that sense of surprise. Each page you wanted something different. That is exactly how we found it. So, not chronologically. Not chronologically. We worried it would be too heavy in the 1960s if it was chronological. The point was really, i found this today, i found this today. I found nothing today, but tomorrow we will find something. I wanted the reader to experience that. I want the pages to turn and for people to be surprised. So, tell us what you found. Show us some of the things we found. Here we go. So, this is the opening of the book. This is 1971. This is an organization that was based out of new york. I am forgetting the acronym. They were doing good work in the new york area. They were angry with the New York Times that they were not covering the progress they were making in the community. They accused the New York Times of only writing stories about the negative, crime, violence, to some extent politics, but leaving out the positive contributions that black new yorkers were making. So, a big protest gathered at the old New York Times building on 43rd street. And a massive gathering happened out there. As the day went on, unfortunately, things turned violent. They lit trucks on fire. Police came. There were dozens of arrests. And this was all taking place in front of the office. The next day in the paper, there was a big two column remember, the times back then was a broadsheet, oversized paper. There was a big twocolumn story and no photograph. Yet nearly every single one of the Staff Photographers had gone out there that day. This blew my mind. There must have been 40 or 50 rolls of film from this event, and not a single image made the paper. And it was so unbelievably violent. After this whole thing, a dialogue happened between the times and the organization, there were promises to be better, and change was at least promised at that point. But it was fascinating that something so violent happened and the public never got to see it. They got to read about it, and the story that was written was very, very detailed about the events of the day, i will give them that. It was true to the visuals, but why not the pictures . Do you suspect they did not want to read inscribed some sort of idea around urban decay and violence and that sort of thing . Actually, you could have run the first picture. Sometimes, Media Outlets were sensitive about criticism. There was an interesting debate to talk about this. There is always a protest in front of the New York Times or in front of the post, or any news organization. Does the times today run out there and cover it because they are protesting they dont like what the times said about israel and the middle east . No. Is that the same thing that happened back then. But the turn of events made it striking. I think today if they lit trucks on fire, we would go out there. I hope so. Who was the photographer . This, i believe, was artie brouwer. So, we are looking at lena horne in her apartment. For those of us who were writers, this was a really interesting project to work on, because normally at a newspaper, the photos come after. You know, we go out, we report, we say ok, we need this person photographed or this covered, this image or whatever. Sometimes it is a working collaboration with reporter at a photographer at the same time, but often the photographer comes after we have done some leg work. This photograph was the main event. This was the point of departure. We had these images and had to look at them and say, what story is there here. This was an article that ran about lena horne and her new variety show that was coming up. So it was an interview with her, and the photo that ran was a little headshot photo of her. Her face looking straight on. There is this wonderful photo, what is the story to tell here . In the article, she mentions it was around christmas time, and she was talking about how hard it was to find an apartment. It was hard for lena horne to find an apartment . I want to report on that. No, i do. I did. It was the 1950s, 1960s, and lean award, one of the most celebrated actresses and singers in the country, was a black woman who was having a hard time finding an apartment in new york city. How she found it was a great story. It started with harry belafonte, who could also not find an apartment in new york city, even know he had broken every record, even though he was the first black artist to break one million albums. He was so fed up he sent his white publicist to sign the paperwork, and when he arrived, the building manager was really mad. He told them, you guys have got to leave. So harry got really mad and he bought the building. And he invited his friends in, lena ended up with the apartment. [laughter] rachel that is what a lot of these stories were like. It is the image, but the history told us something about rhea rachel, what was your inclination to do a deeper dive . Rachel we wanted to tell the story behind the photo. We were trying to tell the story of the moment in the photo. In this photo, she looks at ease. She does not look like she is performing in any way. She looks at home, and running this photo with the print, you think it would have been the natural choice. But they said they went with the headshot because they did not have enough space. Darcy this is a contact sheet that i found. James baldwin was on our list. We ran frame number 19, the third column down, they ran it as the headshot. When i found this object, i saw it not as a singular photograph, i saw it almost as a movie. I brought this with me, and immediately the idea was, we are going to depict this whole thing. If you look, it is just amazing. You can imagine the photographer, click, click. It is like a mini motion picture. The many moods of baldwin. It is beautiful. Rachel it shows his animated passion and personality through this whole thing. Darcy i wanted to give readers of the series the opportunity to see the photos the way the photo editor saw them. Why did they choose frame 19 . I wouldve gone for the one down in the bottom, where he has the cigarette in his mouth. It is so expressive. They went with the one smiling, the second column, that is the one they ran. Rachel no, it is the third one, first row. [laughter] darcy right, first row. His eyes are shut, to me, it said the photographer had three minutes with him and was determined to capture him. I think he captured him better in this contact sheet more than any singular frame. And so in doing the research about which story to tell, i started reading. His face captured me and i started doing research. I realized that he had grown up with this complicated relationship with his own face, he grew up being told he was ugly. Rachel he really internalized that and struggled with it for a lot of his life. It is so hard for me, when you see James Baldwin that is the last thing you think of. And it spoke to me about africanamericans and how we internalize some of these ideas about how we look. Standards of beauty, which he wrote about in many of his essays and grappled with. Here you see all of the beautiful expressions in his face and life. Darcy the next series i wanted to show you was by our first africanamerican Staff Photographer hired by the New York Times. In 1964, he came on staff. He was a harlem resident. These images, he was sent on assignment over a weekend to cover harlem life in 1966. He was a pretty rough part of town at that time. The times wanted to show a different side of it. By monday morning, six photographs were on the cover of the metro section. That must have been the biggest photo essay to hit those pages. I cannot even imagine. He shot more than 100 rolls of film that weekend in his community. 36, 3700 frames. Six made the paper. There were many more that were left behind. He certainly captured it. We could do a book just on this weekend in harlem. I love this. No ball playing permitted on the wall there, and the kids are going for it anyway. A dominoes game on the street. And this was a view from one of the local buildings. This is what you saw when you looked out from the cathedral. Rachel there was this understanding, real or perceived, that harlem was this very rough area. We are seeing quite the contrary herein quite the contrary. Darcy the pictures that ran were very true to what he shot. When there is only six images to run, it still took up one third of the page. They were not running six column for graphs the way the times does today. The pictures were three or four inches. So editors were going for tighter photographs. If you go back to this, that would look like mud in the paper at this time. It is understandable why they left it, but it is so beautiful now for a book. Rhea these works remind me of something i read in the book, a reclamation. Thats what this feels like in terms of reclaiming. Throughout the book, as you mentioned, darcy, is the ordinary. How you are already looking at photos of what we know, but also goes that are less familiar. It seems like it is a reclamation of these stories, as well as the people behind the stories, that is so poignant to the project and maybe this book. Darcy it was very important for me as the photo editor to put the voice of photographers in it. I really wanted to see what i would edit. We edit very differently now. We edit not for space, not so much to match visuals to text perfectly. We now edit to tell a secondary story that can run parallel to the words the writers are writing. Rhea is this going to be the same for something that is running online and only lives online . Darcy we often do edit very differently. There was an example that the times did last week. I am no longer a step picture editor there, but they had a cover of harvey weinstein. It was one image. Online, they ran a different image. It is because of how the images would be perceived. Yes, we do edit to the extent today. The slideshow. How are the people looking at it . On a mobile device . Those kinds of things are affecting the editing these days. Rhea still these questions are being made. Who is in it, who was not in it. Thats what these images bring. It is not just a historical question, it is a question that we grapple with, who are we showing, what are we showing, what are we not showing. Rachel when you look at some of these images and you think about the choices that were made, harlem from his lens is a very different place from the forbidding harlem that we described in the 1960s. If we are true to ourselves, we have to think about, how are we doing it now . Where are those blind spots . Rhea i am also struck by the theory in the three or four photos that you showed us, he took 3600 photographs over the course of the weekend, and what he is capturing, just from this ordinary daily life, a photographer not from the community or neighborhood might have overlooked some of this. Darcy and probably, just as important, might have not been able to approach. Rhea right. That goes without saying. Darcy he got into the community center, a bowling alley. He knew the people. He probably had been photographed, it was not a surprise to see him walking down the street with his camera. Rachel next in the series, this was one of my favorite in terms of the subject. Rhea it seems awfully timely. [laughter] rachel this is the same time that the big battle over the Confederate Flag was going on in south carolina. We were so shocked when we saw this. This is reverend kendall smith, who was annoyed that the Confederate Flag was still being flown in parts of new york city. It was either part of a display or series of flags. So he went down to city hall, with the Confederate Flag, waved it around and got all mad about it. Then he took the flag outside to City Hall Park across the street and lit it on fire. Looking at this picture, this is City Hall Park, not too many people standing around. This was three or four weeks after the big protest in central park about the end of the vietnam war, where there were hundreds of thousands of White College students burning the american flag. Kendall smith was arrested for inciting riot. Not much of a riot going on there. What is even more fascinating, and i dont have any arrest records from the previous event, but i cant recall reading the paper and seeing hundreds of white students being arrested for burning the american flag. The next time, the times had a big article about it. But no photos. Not a single photo. They continue to write stories about his legal problems, never ever publishing photos that show there was a riot. The text of the articles is very detailed, saying it was a small crowd of reporters and a photographer or two. The author got funny, writing about there being pigeons there. [laughter] do you recall what the headline was . Craig it was pretty straightforward. It was pretty straightforward. Text was clear in describing the scene clearly, but there were no pictures. Kendall smith got off on a technicality, it was not actually illegal to burn a flag. He was acquitted. He took a sheet from a nearby hotel, i do not know if he stole it or paid for it, but he made that she wore it to emulate a ku , and was arrested for inciting a riot. The pictures were so clear, the photographer had moved the camera around and i think at one point there is a picture of three people behind him, sitting on a bench. [laughter] i wonder if the times had put this image in the paper the next day, would it have gone away this afternoon . Hard to say. Rhea and your theory around editorial choices of size and space, how does that sort of fit in . Darcy it is a mystery. They had a few columns. It is not like they had no space. Why would they not put anything . It does not make any sense. Rhea no, it doesnt. Darcy it could have been that some sort of bar needed to be reached to have a picture there. Rhea maybe they needed a riot. [laughter] rachel what i do recall is how many pictures the times had about the central park issue. Rhea there are a slippery slopes that make us that the question about what subtext is taking place . We can write to pages about this situation and fan the flames of this being a horrible antiamerican act. So, i want to pause. The way in which we are seeing these wonderful images in this range of stories, is that the same that we will expect from the book . Rachel yes. A little bit all over the place. Rhea but there is a throughline as well. When you are dealing with so many years, how did you determine darcy with each image we found, there were three ways we could research archives. We could see actual physical copies of the paper. Then there are two other ways internally to look. An internal Search Engine and proquest to search. Eventually, i did a search on the names, you can google the name and New York Times and see where they appear together. Finally, maybe six weeks before i handed content over to the publisher, i clicked on every single image in the page. I panicked and said i had to look at every single page of the New York Times. But it is important to know, and there is a section in the book that does address this. Proquest, all of the copies in the library, there is a very remote possibility that an image could have appeared in a First Edition paper but there is no electronic record of it. So we addressed that challenge in the book and figured we would continue anyway, because they would be no way for anyone in this audience to see it. We had one other way of checking it. If a name is famous, we can go into the clipping files in the library. Images that were not famous. Its a whole series of parade pictures. We were not have clipped generic parade, so i searched for famous names in that, to make sure. The hardest part was the vetting of content, not the finding of content. Rachel a photograph can tell you as much on the front as it can on the back. Rhea you used the back of the image as well. How much of that was critical in terms of doing research or useful in determining a selection . Rachel this photo, which we believe is the only photograph that the New York Times took of dgar evers cameme from the lens of a reporter. A civil rights correspondent who spent a lot of time with medgar evers and others. His notes are a lot of what i relied on to tell the stories. He was writing notes on the back of these images. They were really conversations in a way with his editor, telling him, i saw this guy and here is where i was and this is who this person was. He did have photos that appeared in the New York Times. He was a writer but he talked about issues about light and shadow and, oh, i wish there had been better light. It was really remarkable to see his notes. And it gives you some insight into what was going on in the field. I did not see anything in the series where he said, run this. Darcy he apologized to his editors, saying, the light is too light and the skin tone is too dark, i dont know if you will run these. Some of them did run, but many of them didnt. He used these photographs as reporting notes. He was out in the field and he would use his camera, get the film developed, and right stories from the contact sheet. And described in great detail what the scene looked like, what people wore. Image as text. In some instances, in some of these photos, you can see where the story was connected. But he was writing about white nationalists and we never could find a story that was in. He took these photos but there was not a story we could find. I believe he wanted a record of it so he could go off and describe it in detail later. Rachel they were also talking about snail mail, and the process. How some of these things might not have made it to the editor in time. Darcy here is a good example of that. This is merle evers at medgars funeral. George was primarily shooting for the magazine at that time. George was at that funeral and at the casket. He had 30 or 40 rolls of film. One spectacular photo after the other. I could tell that he had freedom to roam and he walked the room. The next day, the times wrote beautiful photographs from the Associated Press that showed the enormity of the procession. It is a wellknown picture. But why would they have chosen an ap photo when ap was stuck in the back, and george was in the front. Unknown. That george was doing this for a magazine feature that never ran . That is a possibility. Was it that the film did not get back to new york in time . Why did it not get there in time . Why was it not in the paper . Rhea this is your opportunity, darcy, as a contributing photo editor to sort of reedit with hindsight being 2020. You have this opportunity to say, they did not run it then, but i am running it now. Darcy i feel so much for the photographers than. This book is really for them. They did all of this work, and so few of these amazing images were shown. This is truly a tribute to the great work you did. Rachel i think this idea now, it is another way of reading and diving deeper into the ways we understand things. Rhea it seems like text was king. Versus this kind of relationship between the way in which someone can understand the story and the complexities of the story. Fascinating. Wonderful stuff. I love this picture. That a local School Working with the jazz foundation. The school was holding a was recipient of some of the funding. He came up to jam with the kids. The next day, a photograph of dizzy holding his horn and staring at the camera. I looked and saw this picture and was so mad at the photo editor, how could you not run this picture . Darcy i understand it, he had his eyes closed, it was too big. You could not run this photograph. The version they ran was of a cropped moment where he is looking straight on and holding the horn. I think it is a shame that this one was left. It was a space restraint. This great series of photos in the book, a photographer went to detroit after the 1957 riot and he shot 40 or 50 rolls of film. It was a roll of film marked destroyed. So of course i went for that. [laughter] rhea i was so excited. Darcy i found this one. It is an incredible story when you see what was happening. The family in the photo was left homeless by the riot. We tried to find the mom but she had a common name and we could not find her. In the back room, you see the bamboo show bar, which back then was the hottest nightclub in to in the 1950s. John coltrane played there. All these big, big names. You are seeing detroit at its best and worst. It broke my heart. It is my favorite photo and the most beautiful photo in the book. There is so much happening in that picture. To me, it is the kind of thing i would frame and put on my wall. It is a work of art. And somebody wanted to throw this out. Rachel you have the car there, the children there, it is a promise of tomorrow. The riots, what they were about, there is so much that this photograph embodies. Darcy i hope that in this book, that one of the children or the mom comes forward and identifies who they are. Rhea have you had any sort of stories like that . Rachel yes. One of the things we wanted to do when the project was launched was for it to be an interactive experience. We did not just want to show photographs. We wanted people to connect to them and to tell their stories. So this image is not one where we thought initially that this would happen. This is an image of a school in new jersey that had been recently integrated. We presented the photo and readers said, ok, what happened to the kids . So we were like, we do not know. So we asked Readers Online and on social media, does anyone know who these children are and where they are now . Several came forward. One woman, someone had been posting about these photos and share them on facebook and said, evelyn, isnt that you . And she said, oh my gosh. That is me. She remembered the experience of being so excited, and she talked about growing up in a part of princeton in what people would have described as the ghetto. But she said it was a golden ghetto. She said teachers and all kinds of working people lived there and she said it was a porch community. It was a wonderful place to grow up. And she remembered going to went going to an integrated school for the first time and what that was like. She talked about how there were challenges in it, about how for a while kids are just kids, and then things changed as they got a little older. She talked about the influence. She became an educator herself and talked about the influence of the educators in her life and the excitement and joy of learning. That is what she recognized in that first photo. Rhea what a fantastic story. Rachel we were so excited. [laughter] so if anybody recognizes any of the people, we want to hear the story. Darcy this is a picture, the photographer was the first one to win a pulitzer prize. Won for the photograph of karen a scott king at the funeral of Martin Luther king with her son on her lap. Greg happened to be touring colleges, i found a stack of negatives the talked about diversity on college campuses. I did not see anything of interest in the film but i came across a note to the photo editor that said, i read to ran into at the photo shoot today and he says hi. What was fascinating is we wanted to include him in the original but we could not find it in the archives. Everything was from ebony magazine or an ap photo. When i found this, i wanted to include it because to me this is an example of the enormity of the collection. The collection is so enormous and it is impossible for them at this point to get a count, but there were hundreds of millions of photographs. Rhea you mentioned that he is with his son on a college tour. When these flashpoints around africanAmerican History are told, there are these kind of stock stories. It is going to be harlem or riots or destruction or the homeless mom. But these kind of everyday moments, a father and son walking across a college campus. This is as relevant to the africanamerican story as the others. I think the ordinariness of the photograph really resonates for me in that way. Darcy one of the pivotal photos was brown versus board of education. Rachel he is outside, smoking his pipe in his westchester suburb. It was a predominantly white suburban. It was just him at home. It was such a great image. It was also an opportunity to think about, how did this guy who pioneered this on the harmful effects of segregation live out his life . It was really interesting and complicated. And i agree and echo it in the thought that, this is a photographer who knew. You can feel that. Rhea and the access that you are saying, there was a sort of ability to take these pictures and capture these moments and have unfettered access that sometimes now, there are so many layers that photographers have to go through to get pictures. Darcy i want to get to the last one in here. This is the interior of malcolm xs home after it was firebombed. Don got into the house because he was friends with the family. The next day there was a picture of malcolm x fleeing the home. It is a wonderful picture. But don had access inside the house and the times never ran a picture the next day. I think he was the only photographer inside the home. To me, why did they not run this . I still go back to maybe an inability to make the photo clear in newsprint. The quality was not particularly good, it is a dark image and it is hard to see. Was that the reason the image got left behind . Rhea and if you could have shown two darcy this is so powerful. Rhea this is his table. Everyone in the world can relate to this. Everyone in their imagination can think they know how malcolm x felt, but an interior shot of a living room that was bombed out is going to resonate with anyone. Darcy heres a picture of his wife in the kitchen. Why would they not run that . Maybe because it is the back of her head. There was a standard of what people needed to look like at the time. And i wanted to get to this one. This is Grady O Cummings, who claims to be the second africanamerican man to ever run for president. We did not put that in the book because we could not confirm it. He was a little too young to run for president. Regardless, he was an interesting fellow. He ran a newspaper and was written about many times as being this upandcoming politician who is supposed to be this dynamo. One day, i came across this picture this tragic obituary, Grady O Cummings dropped dead of a heart attack at 35. But then, 10 years later, his name popped up in an article. I thought this was weird. So we wrote a story and ended the story with the obituary. It was a beautiful, two column obituary. We were trying to come up with some more things and we did not have enough information. So we thought, lets go back and research this guy. We discovered that he faked his death. [laughter] darcy he faked his death in the New York Times. He hoodwinked the company into running his obituary. He did it because he was in trouble with the black panthers. There were Death Threats so he took his family and escaped to canada for a few months. Then he reappeared and told the press. He invited the press and they showed up and covered it. They said the New York Times did not cover it. After the book closed, we had run a quick article about this in the times. I got a call from a former times man in his 80s who was living in london. And he remembered. I have it here in the story. He called the executive editor and said, it was all fake. I faked the whole thing. The executive editor came running down into the newsroom and said, i just got this call from a guy named radio cummings who said he faked the whole thing. That he faked his obituary and was very much alive. The journalist said, dont believe a word he says, he cannot be trusted. [laughter] darcy so it was never run. We ran a short piece on it in february and corrected it 48 years after the fact. [laughter] darcy when we discovered the whole thing, we ran into the editor. Rachel we had the oldest correction ever. We were so excited. We were thinking, what do we do . Do we run a correction . Rhea when did he die . Darcy we brought up his death certificate. He really has died. It was a fascinating discovery. He is apparently only the second known case of a faked obituary. I hope to discover more. [laughter] rhea thank you, ladies. This is fantastic. [applause] rhea i wanted to leave room for a few questions, if anybody has some questions. Yes. Thank you for a fascinating program. As you are talking, i was thinking about the cost of all of those rolls of film. You mentioned somebody who shot 100 rolls in a weekend, and i was thinking, that is thousands of dollars. Darcy i came to the times in the digital age so it is very different, but i would imagine that the paper was stacked with ads and there was plenty of money. I imagine to that the Companies Got a discounted rate. Rhea that begs the question for me in terms of the photographers having to turn in all of this material. Did you come across any correspondence from them . They knew these are work for hire kind of things, but did they ever want some of the photographs . Have you come across any where they were published in any other ways by the photographers . Darcy not really, but a hit come across, there was a time when papers were calling this sort of thing and many photographers were worried. So they sold their film. Over the course of many years where we have been working on these projects, many of the photographers have reached out and said, i have 800 rolls of film that belong to you. I will give them back. So it is good thing that they preserved them. There was also a time where this stuff was stored in a place where there was a lot of traffic and prints would get lifted. A print of Marilyn Monroe . I will take that. Rhea i have so many questions but i want to hear from the audience. Was there anyone else . I am always concerned about storage. Film is very fragile. But condition where these in . Darcy they are in excellent condition. They are in a sub basement that has a constant temperature. The negatives are in two or three different spaces. The more modern collection is on a different floor. But it is locked in a room and well taken care of by curators. It is not in any sort of white sleeved container. It is packed in so tightly and rarely touched and we think that has helped reserve it. There was a leak in the building a year ago and there were so many boxes stacked on top and it was packed in so tight that almost nothing got damaged. There were a few that were stuck together but we just hung them up to dry and put them back. Its very fortunate. Everything that is left is safety film. There is no flammable film left, that deteriorated long ago. [indiscernible] these pictures internalize what you saw. Did it alter any of your perception of what you thought you knew. Darcy no doubt. I had no idea what to expect, and i did not expect such a broad history. I only knew what i saw. I knew of rosa parks the pictures we have seen of rosa parks. I did not know when you look at these pictures and you understand why people did what they did, that was the biggest discovery for me. Absolutely. Rachel i think it was interesting for me to think about how we as journalists did these. That was interesting to me. There were many discoveries for me in terms of doing the research and finding out more about people who i knew. But i think what was interesting was to think about the institution and the role we play in making people visible or not. I think that is the thing that really stuck with me. Beyond your self reflection about the times responsibility of keeping things unseen, it seems there are two dimensions and want to hear about. One, just seeing photos of medgar evers at the funeral, there was a huge interest in historians to go even deeper than what we capture. Same with malcolm x. The question is, are people going to now come to you saying they want to gain access to the archives a little more quickly . And the other big question is, how many other unseen histories of integration or some other topic are just waiting to be drawn upon . Rachel this project, which was such a huge success, immediately spawned other projects. Darcy can talk more about that. I think, a lot of regional i am actually curious, i dont know, are archives are not necessarily open to the public, so i do not know what the response would be if a historian came knocking. Darcy there is one historian who response to calls individually. But he is one person. The important thing that we did with this project and others that followed is that, for a long time, organizations come to the New York Times and offer to buy the collection. Thankfully, the times had good sense to never get rid of their collections. That never seemed to work. They held onto it. I think that they are understanding the value. By creating books like this, using it for their own journalism, by using it for future stories, i think they see that it will now pay off. It is a enormous and costs them money to keep it. It is not free to keep it in the basement or to pay employees who have to work with it. But i think the utilization of the collection is the best thing possible that could happen to it. Rhea any other questions . I thought i saw a question up here from the young lady. How did he get the word out that he was dead . Darcy that is a good question. And for those of you who have not guessed, this is my daughter sydney. He wrote what they call a press release and he sent it to the writers of the times and he convinced them. It was early fake news. And the writers believed it. [laughter] darcy that is exactly how that happened. That is a good question. Rhea i think you all have done a remarkable job and i want to give you another round of applause. [applause] rhea a phenomenal book that is just a fraction of the archives and discovery. It sounds like there are multiple opportunities for more to be uncovered. So thank you so much. [applause] rhea thank you all. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2018] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] a tweet from mad men across the water asking about an issue that still resounds today. How manytion is about people were fathered by gis in vietnam and how were they treated 45 years after . Announcer you can join the conversation on facebook and on twitter. This coming monday, a class on Martin Luther king jr. s early years. The lecture took place at Ebenezer Baptist church in atlanta. Here is a preview. Lets just look at these documents. One of the things that we find is, how was he born . One of the things the birth certificate indicates that there ,as a midwife and the doctor and the doctor also lived on auburn avenue. So what does that tell us about Martin Luther king . That this neighborhood was diverse. Live on thisd neighborhood, but there were also working class People Living in this neighborhood. But also the fact that there was a midwife at the birth. His familyates that was somewhat privileged, at least there was a doctor also attending. Thate can see from that Martin Luther kings early upbringing was kind of a mixture of i guess what i would call the striving for middleclass status and the people who were predominate in this neighborhood, that is working class families. So we can also see from this document that at that time, his father is a preacher. Where . Right here. We can see that there is another person in this household, and who is that . That is, at that time of his birth, you have oath of the grandparents who are still alive. And his grandfather is also the minister of ebenezer church. So a lot of these things that we can find by looking at both the birth certificate, looking at the autobiography of religious development, looking at we can see that this was these were the forces that shaped him. You can watch the entire lecture on dr. Martin luther king jr. s early years this coming monday at 8 00 p. M. Eastern, here on American History tv. X up next, on the presidency, host three Group Authors who discussed various aspects of abraham lincolns life and career. This is an hour and 15 minutes. Welcome to the december meeting of the Lincoln Group of the district of columbia. The Lincoln Group was formed in the 1930s to honor