To research and write the stories of Black and white southerners is to undertake almost two entirely different tasks. Black artifacts and records have long been systematically destroyed and marginalized. Like water fountains and public schools, the creation of historical archives was once racially segregated. Archives are usually supported by state governments or private institutions and include a wide range of personal, organizational, and government documents. Extant collections typically reflect the prejudice of past white southern archivists who didn’t believe that the Black people who shared their society lived lives worth studying. When white archivists set out to collect documents they thought future historians would find most important, they often gathered only the photographs, ledgers, diaries, and letters produced by wealthy, white citizens. Most of these archivists didn’t think someone might someday want to study the lives of African Americans. Their racism prevented them from imagining that someone like me could ever exist.
Black people were also erased by the newspapers of the past. Many mainstream papers in the Jim Crow South didn’t mention African Americans unless they were arrested or killed. Sure, there were occasional features on church functions or sporting events, but in general Black communities received far less coverage than their white counterparts. Black southerners in Hattiesburg and elsewhere responded by starting their own newspapers. But many of those papers have been lost to time. While Hattiesburg’s Black community published several newspapers before World War II, only a single issue of one paper remains available today. When it comes to traditional sources, the historical record of Hattiesburg and many other Black communities is meager.
Environmental factors also conspire against researchers of Black history. Like many Black neighborhoods of the Jim Crow South, Hattiesburg’s Mobile Street District was built over a tenuous landscape. The neighborhood sits in a floodplain near the confluence of two rivers. Even if Black people had managed to save their own historical records, their neighborhood—and the materials housed within it—remained susceptible to destructive weather events. If a Black business created a ledger in, say, 1910, any number of minor or major floods over the ensuing decades could have destroyed it. The same is true of family Bibles, wedding photographs, community newspapers, and an endless number of other heirlooms that might have provided rich clues into the history of Black life.
Active racism, exclusion, and environmental injustice have systematically destroyed or buried whole sections of Black history. Many of those who gripe about “erasing history” of Confederate monuments and other symbols in the South have no idea how much history has already been erased. This erasure is part of the reason why the picture of the distinguished Black men in the window stopped me in my tracks. You don’t see many old pictures of Black people from that neighborhood.