African American Education Dallas Family Photographs and Booker T. Washington High School Graduation Material, 1925

African American Family

Archive

African American family archive. Dallas photographs and Booker T. Washington High School commencement material, circa 1925, documents Black education, friendship, courtship, and family life in segregated Dallas through four vernacular photographs and two graduation-related booklets. Booker T. Washington High School opened under that name in 1922 and was then Dallas’s only public high school for Black students, drawing pupils from African American neighborhoods across the city. The archive records a 1925 graduating class of thirty-nine students, including thirteen young men, while the accompanying portraits preserve the informal social relationships surrounding school-age life beyond the classroom. Together, these primary materials support research into African American education, youth culture, gender, domestic settings, and community formation under Jim Crow.

Dallas, Texas, circa 1925. Six pieces as described: four sepia-toned black-and-white photographs and two printed Booker T. Washington High School booklets, comprising a commencement program and a separate class-roll booklet; the original inventory’s stated total of five items should be verified. The photographs measure between 2½ by 3 inches and 3 by 4½ inches. They show a young couple posed together, a young man identified in manuscript as “my sweetheart,” a girl seated outdoors beside a house, and friends perched along a stone wall beneath the caption “a happy moment of my life.” These images document formal and informal modes of self-presentation, including romantic identification, domestic surroundings, and collective recreation. The printed material names the class motto as “Solidarity,” identifies the class flowers as the white carnation and fern, and lists thirty-nine graduates, twenty-six young women and thirteen young men. The commencement address was delivered by J. F. Williams of Paul Quinn College, the African Methodist Episcopal institution then located in Waco; available institutional chronologies place Williams in the college presidency during the mid-1920s, although the exact beginning of his term varies among secondary accounts.

[1–4] Unidentified photographers. Four family and student-life photographs. Dallas, Texas, circa 1925. Individual images depict a couple, a young man captioned “my sweetheart,” a girl seated outside a residence, and several friends atop a stone wall captioned “a happy moment of my life.” Their association with the graduation papers suggests a shared family or student provenance, but the sitters’ identities and exact dates remain unverified. [5] Booker T. Washington High School. Commencement Program. Dallas, Texas, 1925. Program for the graduation exercises of Dallas’s segregated public high school for Black students, recording the class motto “Solidarity,” the white carnation and fern as class flowers, and an address by J. F. Williams of Paul Quinn College. [6] Booker T. Washington High School. Class Roll. Dallas, Texas, 1925. Separate booklet listing thirty-nine graduates, including thirteen male and twenty-six female students, providing a named record of educational attainment within the city’s Black community three years after the school assumed the Booker T. Washington name. Photographs removed from album leaves, with residual adhesive on the versos; other individual defects are not supplied, overall good. A closely associated group joining official evidence of Black educational achievement with intimate vernacular photographs of the young people and social relationships surrounding a 1925 Dallas graduating class.

Item #19421

Price: $385.00