The graphic record of African-American life begins with the pictures published in the new illustrated newspapers that started up in the 1850's. The Civil War was recorded in these sources, from beginning to end. African Americans are pictured coming into Union lines in small bands - by artists there to report the war to the folks at home. There are scenes of black men in work crews aiding the war effort, and, after 1862 pictures of black men in uniform, training and fighting.

After the war, African-Americans continue to be in the news, but the scene shifts. Men and women work together in the fields, growing rice, sugar cane, and cotton. Stevedores work the docks. Black men go west to be cowboys and pony(buffalo) soldiers, families go west for a new start. There are many domestic scenes. People at home, out gardening, caring for livestock, doing chores inside their homes. Street scenes were popular too, incidents of everyday life. So was the church - preachers and people congregating to sing, pray and hear the word of God.

This is the people's art. It records and celebrates what ordinary people did on an ordinary day. It sees this as the heart and soul of the American experience. People liked the pictures. Millions subscribed to the illustrated news of the time. Current issues of Harper's Weekly, Leslie's, and their competitors were on sale at the news stands and hawked in the streets. These pictures of African-Americans permeated the cultural life of the nation in the decades after emancipation. Black folks and white folks get the same treatment. These are people at home in the world, comfortable in their surroundings, at ease with each other. Black people in these scenes are engaged in life - absorbed in their work, going places, involved in what was happening.

The pictorial history isn't the whole story, of course. But it's a part of it, and real as far as it goes - a unique historical record with its own truth to tell. For all the distance and differences between now and then, remember, this isn't so long ago. These people are great-grandparents of today's african americans. The lives recorded here are something they made for themselves - something to enjoy, to savor and sustain. The lives they led were not experienced by black people back then as something to throw off, get beyond, or leave behind. They had it in them to deal with reality, and to appreciate things as they came.