Voices United members visit the Black Photojournalism exhibit at the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth. From left: Vicki Baker, Rebecca Elsen, Elaine Kushmaul, Peggy Thomas, Jackie Ford, Jane Scholz (tour leader), Joy Pashby, and Chris Laffey.
Jane Scholz
Voices United (VU) members saw photos most white folks missed for most of the 20th century.
Today we are used to seeing the faces of people of many different skin colors in our media—TV shows, Facebook posts, YouTube, and TikTok videos, but this was not the case before the mid–to-late 1980s.
Voices United members visited the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth to see the exhibit Black Photojournalism, an exhibit of photography that appeared in black newspapers in the U.S. from about 1915 to 1985.
The tour was led by Voices member Jane Scholz, who is also a docent at the Carter.
During the tour, she talked to the group about four of the more than 250 photos on display taken by African American photographers and published in the Black press. This included pictures of a Black family taken in a small town in Alabama and published in Life magazine in 1956. They learned how members of that family suffered reprisals and discrimination as a result and the impact that had for decades.
She also asked members to imagine how not seeing images of people who look like us in media now would affect our lives and the way we think about our community.
The exhibit is on display at the Amon Carter, 3501 Camp Bowie Blvd., Fort Worth, Monday to Saturday, through July 5.
Voices United is a non-partisan group of Robson Ranch women who share progressive values, perform community outreach, provide civic awareness and social contact for members and have a good time! We’re a 501(c)(3) group. Our annual dues are $25.
For more information or to join, go to www.voicesunitedrr.org.