By Tom Dodge
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kera/local-kera-879917.mp3
Dallas, TX –
Calvin Littlejohn's wonderful photographs, consisting of 70,000 negatives and 55,000 prints, are archived at the University of Texas at Austin's Dolph Briscoe Center for American History. They document how it was to live in racially segregated black urban North Texas from the late depression years into the early 1990s. The uniqueness of his photos, apart from their obvious artistry, is their abiding, never faltering theme. It can be stated in a single word: dignity. He photographed black people participating in life's important moments, the simple rites of human togetherness and mutual support, parades, church and fraternal events, business openings, high school sports and yearbooks, weddings, births, burials. And when a national leader or respected celebrity, black or white, came to Fort Worth, Littlejohn was there with his camera to memorialize it.
As a boy, still in his teens, Calvin Littlejohn saw something that sent him on this mission in life. It was a signboard showing the face of a young black boy, his front teeth missing, his mouth agape, eating a slice of watermelon. That's when he determined that he would do something, he said, to "show the best side of these people that's been rejected so." With his camera, he did that very thing. Now TCU Press has come out with Calvin Littlejohn, Portrait of a Community in Black and White, a 200 page book of his photos with text by Bob Ray Sanders.
We went over, wife Brenda and myself, to Fort Worth's I.M. Terrell school for a book-signing party honoring the author. I've known of him for a long time as he is a veteran journalist, senior editor and columnist with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He also has a long and illustrious association with KERA and Channel 13, dating all the way back to Newsroom in the early 1970s. As he is a 1965 graduate of I.M. Terrell, the parking lot was full and the auditorium packed with his classmates, fans, and family. "This can't be right," I told Brenda. "Authors don't attract crowds like this." Well, this one did, and he's the perfect writer for this book. He is proud of his school, his city, Fort Worth, and to have grown up in the "black" Riverside neighborhood bordered by the Trinity River, Riverside Drive, South Sylvania, and East First. And most paramount, no Texas writer understands the meaning and importance of the Littlejohn photographs more and has done more through his writing to promote this same dignity.
There is one of many such iconic photographs, dated 1950 and showing a parade honoring the opening of the 18th National Sunday School and Union Congress in Fort Worth. A teenager rides on the front fender of a car, holding aloft an American flag. The picture appears two-thirds of the way into the book but in the second paragraph of his introduction Sanders anticipates it and others like it by writing, "Even those folk who were born with black faces, during times of segregation and discrimination and bad economics, had reasons to be happy and thankful for family, opportunity (although limited), and well-connected (though struggling), communities."
As for me, I can't describe the boyish joy I felt seeing the photo on page 44, that of the favorite after-date hangout for me and my Cleburne High School classmates, so long ago that it seems never to have existed. But there it is in all its glory, and ironically named, Little John's Bar B-Q, on East Rosedale in Fort Worth.
Tom Dodge is a writer from Midlothian.
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