When the Wright State Library restored and digitized the first editions of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s dialect poems, they found a thread back to 1899 — and they saw a new story about how the Dayton poet embraced the new medium of photography instead of traditional ink illustration by white artists.
When Dunbar wrote his dialect poems, he walked a tightrope.
Many of the poems entertained white audiences with racist stereotypes of the Old Plantation South. Yet many Black readers took pride in the poems because they knew people who spoke like that.
Karen Brame is a historian of African American studies at the Dayton Metro Library. She explained Dunbar’s dilemma: “And so it becomes a question for Dunbar, 'Am I wrong in representing that because they too should have a voice?' And you also have that other crowd that’s really working hard to advance, to really, you know, remove those linguistic shackles.”
The illustrations in Dunbar’s two books of short stories didn’t help. They were by E.W. Kemble, who had illustrated Huckleberry Finn. The images presented enslaved people as comical weak figures.
It’s the 1890s, and a group at what is now known as Hampton University in Virginia saw the danger in E.W. Kemble’s drawings. Hampton is a Historically Black College and University established after the Civil War.
Ray Saperstein, a professor of media history, read a quote from the Hampton group: “It is to be regretted that the illustrations have not received more sympathetic treatment at the hands of Mister Kemble. The sketches are caricatures and must seem unsatisfactory to both author and reader.”
Hampton also had an amateur camera club of white faculty and their spouses. One member of the club had connections to Paul Laurence Dunbar’s publisher. The Hampton Camera Club believed in the power of photography for African Americans.
So did Black leader Frederick Douglass, Saperstein said.
“Frederick Douglass thought photography was going to change perceptions of African Americans by having a standard of realism," he said. "W.E.B. Dubois believed that as well.”
Brame agrees. She says the camera club’s photos in the five books helped people see Dunbar’s truth.
“These images show Black people as they really were,” Brame said. “And I think that’s the thing of authenticity that Dunbar is constant in trying to get visible to the public.”
Some of the photos add to Dunbar’s meaning, Saperstein said. In the poem “When Malindy Sings,” the speaker tells Miss Lucy, a trained musician, she will never sing as well as Malindy, a naturally gifted Black singer. The camera club’s photos show a white girl seated at a piano while a young black man in a suit stands by the piano.
“It’s the camera club that specifies that this woman is white,” Saperstein said. “It’s not in Dunbar’s poem. So it’s one of the classic examples of Dunbar signifying on white culture, saying that white musical traditions are not as good as Black musical traditions.”
When the camera club illustrated Dunbar’s love poems, they featured African American couples in fine clothes. This was new for the time, Brame said.
“And to just see them together as a couple, or that they celebrate Black love, it’s really powerful and inspiring because you really don’t get a whole lot of people up until that time period who are reflecting on that, and creating that, and publishing it,” she said.
The camera club’s choice of Black couples in modern dress on one side of the page opposite Dunbar’s love poems in dialect moved the poems out of slavery, Saperstein said, and into the 20th century.
“As people are modernizing and getting jobs, joining the middle class and wearing nice clothing, they speak in African American dialect," he said. "They retain their African American culture.”
Paul Laurence Dunbar always knew this. And the Hampton Camera Club helped readers see it.
