"Photographs from the Memphis World, 1949-1964" continues through Jan. 5 at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. Call 544-6200.

We'll never know how much history got tossed out after the estate sale.

Had a historian showed up at the home of Jewel Gentry Hubert as strangers made off with her worldly possessions in 2003, there might have been an emergency call to a museum.

But how would anyone, especially a casual collector, know the real value of her stuff?

Her brief obituary in The Commercial Appeal said only that she was a retired schoolteacher.

It didn't mention that her late husband had been the last editor of The Memphis World, a small, black-owned newspaper that folded in 1973. The entire legacy of the defunct paper was there, stored away in boxes.

An anonymous collector riffled through a stack of old news photos, choosing a few hundred that looked important. Some of them bore the stamp of Ernest Withers, the most famous name in Memphis photojournalism.

And the rest of the pictures ...

Marina Pacini, curator at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, winces slightly as she imagines what else might have been in those archives.

But then she surveys the museum's current exhibit and appreciates how much survived.

"Thank goodness we have this much," she

said. "These photos are not just great documentary photos of history, they are wonderfully artistic as well."

Two years ago, the museum bought them from the discoverer for an undisclosed sum.

After extensive research and cataloging by the museum and Rhodes College students, the exhibit, "Photos from the Memphis World, 1949-1964," sheds new light on a side of Memphis history that was almost completely ignored by the mainstream media.

Life in a different era

At first glance, the pictures are sedate and impeccably posed snapshots of society events, parades, beauty pageants, funeral gatherings, scholarship winners and community figures.

But the skin color of the subjects gives these photos their mystique and poignancy. They speak of another universe, an alternate history still being documented by contemporary scholars.

Throughout the segregated South of the 1940s and '50s, the mainstream media rarely carried positive images of black people. Major newspapers like this one and the now-defunct Memphis Press-Scimitar would have ignored black debutantes and Boy Scouts.

The Memphis World, like the Tri-State Defender, highlighted the achievements and successes of the black community.

One picture in the collection is a lineup of doctors from the Bluff City Medical Society. Another is of an elegant fashion model. One shows the interior of an empty grocery store.

Pacini says that these ordinary images took on extraordinary significance once the photos were put in context.

Student researchers scanned through years of the Memphis World on microfilm at the public library and matched the pictures that ran in the newspaper with the 222 in the museum's collection.

Using the captions to identify the subjects, Pacini and her staff then tried to track down the people who were in them.

Numerous personal interviews added greater perspective to the pictures. As New York University's Deborah Willis writes of the exhibit, the collective images "create a new historical consciousness."

For example, the Bluff City Medical Society was organized because black physicians were banned from larger public and private hospitals.

Fashion model Dorothea Towles was one of Christian Dior's first black models in Paris. In the U.S., she brought high fashion to black communities by way of a trunk show. It was the only way many had access to high fashion.

One interviewee, Alma Roulhac Booth, said her sorority brought Towles to Memphis for a fundraiser. She remembered how difficult it was for black people to shop in Memphis.

"At Goldsmith's and Levy's, (you) had to go in the back to try on the hats, you couldn't go out front," she said. "At Goldsmith's you couldn't eat in the dining room, but you could eat downstairs in the basement where the maids and all ate."

A photo of an empty grocery store documents a more dramatic episode in the struggle for voting rights. In 1958, when poor residents of Haywood and Fayette counties tried to register, many sharecroppers and tenant farmers were evicted from their homes.

A black farmer turned his land into a tent city while local civic leagues tried to feed the families. White-run distributors retaliated by cutting off shipments to black-owned grocery stores. Their grocery stores were soon bare.

"I want people to see these photos as art objects," Pacini said. "But I also want them to learn about the city of Memphis and its history. We can't move forward into the future without really coming to terms with our past."

Lasting images

Mark Stansbury, 66, was a regular photographer for the Memphis World.

He learned photography from his mentor, the late Ernest Withers, and now works for the University of Memphis.

"Mr. Withers told me that everybody who is a picture taker is not a photographer," he said. "It was very different back then. Usually we would just go to events and take pictures. Then we went to the newspapers and asked if they needed a picture from it."

In a way, the photographers turned spontaneous situations into formal events.

"It's not like that today," he said. "People don't have time to pose for a picture. I do a lot less formal photography today."

Pacini says that there is a growing academic interest in African-American photojournalism of the 20th century. She thinks this exhibit will have life beyond Memphis after it closes.

"We certainly have a unique relationship to the pictures," she said. "These are people who lived here and are part of our history. But the pictures also reflect what was going on all over America."

-- Christopher Blank: 529-2305