Roberts, Richard Samuel

Impact on the world

A self-taught photographer who honed his craft during off-hours from work as a stevedore and firefighter in Fernandina, Florida, Roberts moved to Columbia in 1920, worked overnight shifts as a U.S. Post Office custodian, and spent his afternoons in a small, poorly lit rented studio on Washington Street photographing thousands of Black Columbians — bankers, teachers, embalmers, magicians, and ordinary families — with a technical care and dignity that set his work apart. Roberts’ negatives sat forgotten in his family’s crawl space for more than four decades after his 1936 death until University of South Carolina researchers located his children in 1977 and recovered some 3,000 glass-plate negatives; conservation work led by art professor Phillip Dunn and archivist Thomas Johnson culminated in the 1986 Columbia Museum exhibition A True Likeness, which then toured nationally, and the accompanying book A True Likeness: The Black South of Richard Samuel Roberts, 1920-1936 established Roberts posthumously as one of the most important documentarians of the segregation-era Black South.

Life & background

Born in 1880, Roberts worked as a stevedore and laborer in Fernandina, Florida, before teaching himself photography well enough to open a portrait studio there; he and his wife, Columbia native Wilhelmina Pearl Selena Williams, moved to Columbia, South Carolina, in 1920. He operated his Washington Street studio from 1922 until his death in 1936, and though his work was little known outside his immediate community during his lifetime, the 1977 rediscovery of his negatives brought posthumous national recognition through museum exhibitions and the book A True Likeness.

Sources

1. South Carolina African American History Calendar; University of South Carolina; Columbia Museum of Art; African American Registry