6,000 digitized portraits of Black history now available and free to the public for the first time

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An NAACP flyer campaigning for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, but was filibustered to defeat in the Senate. Dyer, the NAACP, and freedom fighters around the country, like Flossie Baily, struggled for years to get the Dyer and other anti-lynching bills passed, to no avail. Today there is still no U.S. law specifically against lynching. In 2005, eighty of the 100 U.S. Senators voted for a resolution to apologize to victims' families and the country for their failure to outlaw lynching. Courtesy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Some Exhibits to Come – One Hundred Years of Jim Crow

Bibliography – One Hundred Years Of Jim Crow

Claude, age 23, just months before his 1930 murder. Courtesy of Faith Deeter.

Freedom’s Heroes During Jim Crow: Flossie Bailey and the Deeters

Souvenir Portrait of the Lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp, August 7, 1930, by studio photographer Lawrence Beitler. Courtesy of the Indiana Hisorical Society.

An Iconic Lynching in the North

Claxton Dekle – Prosperous Farmer, Husband & Father of Two

Ancient manuscripts about mathematics and astronomy from Timbuktu, Mali

Some Exhibits to Come – African Peoples Before Captivity

Shackles for Adults & Children from the Henrietta Marie

Some Exhibits to Come – The Middle Passage

What I Saw Aboard a Slave Ship in 1829

Life After Hate: A Former White Power Leader Redeems Himself

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August 8, 2026

Jessica Holdman, South Carolina Daily Gazette

Portrait of young woman with bobbed hairstyle and floral print dress (Photo courtesy of USC libraries/Richard Samuel Roberts collection)

COLUMBIA — A young boy looks directly into the camera with his arms wrapped around his pet rooster.

A boxer crouches in a fighting stance, gloves up in front of his face.

Nurses dressed head to toe in white in front of the home of Dr. Matilda Evans, the first Black woman licensed to practice medicine in South Carolina.

These images, featured in a collection of nearly 6,000 historic pictures by photographer Richard Samuel Roberts of Columbia’s Black families and community, are all available free to the public online for the first time.

“What we are seeing when we look at these pictures is African Americans the way they wanted to be seen and remembered,” said Rachel Young, a historian at the Center for Civil Rights History and Research at the University of South Carolina.

“We are also seeing people and places that have been erased, forgotten, or ignored by a broader historical record.”

Read about the decades-long effort to digitize the images.

Discover Black history in our online galleries.

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