The University of South Carolina Libraries recently debuted an online historical archive featuring thousands of images taken by African American photographer Richard Samuel Roberts.
“The Richard Samuel Roberts collection is an astounding repository of African American History, certainly in the twentieth century,” said Bobby Donaldson, executive director of the Center for Civil Rights History and Research and associate professor of history at the University of South Carolina. “The preservation, archiving and digitization of the Roberts collection literally enables us to recreate and reconstruct lost chapters in the history of Columbia and South Carolina.”
The Richard Samuel Roberts Collection features more than 5,000 glass plate negatives detailing African American life in some of Columbia, South Carolina’s oldest neighborhoods in the early twentieth century. The collection was first brought to the University of South Carolina in the 1970s and officially acquired by the university in 2020. In 2024, a team of student researchers began digitizing the images with support from the Center for Civil Rights History and Research.
Roberts moved to Columbia, South Carolina, in 1920. While working as a custodian at the U.S. Post Office, Roberts rented a photography studio in the heart of segregated Columbia’s Black commercial district. His photos include portraits of community members as well as snapshots of the aesthetics of African American life in the segregated Jim Crow south.
“I tell people that Richard Samuel Roberts was not simply a photographer, he was an artist and he was also a historian,” said Dr. Donaldson. “He understood that one of his assignments was to tell a complete history of African American life in Columbia and in South Carolina, and he knew that he was telling a story that was against the prevailing narrative and stereotypes surrounding Black people.”
Roughly a century after they were first taken, Roberts’ photographs are now accessible to the public. The collection includes a feature for viewers to submit identifications or notes that go along with the images they see, making the work an ongoing collaboration between the university and the local Columbia community.
