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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview C-0298, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
This is the second of two interviews with African American photojournalist
Alexander M. Rivera. In this interview, Rivera focuses in more detail on certain
events and issues he addressed in his first interview, which traced the
trajectory of his career as a photojournalist, notably during his years with the
Pittsburgh Courier. He describes in greater detail his
work as a reporter covering the Briggs v. State of South
Carolina desegregation case. In addition, he discusses more fully the
impact of the Brown decision (and the eventual demise of legal
Jim Crow segregation) on African American businesses. Rivera also describes his
favorite photographs from this time period. Finally, Rivera talks about his work
at North Carolina Central College in the late 1960s and 1970s. He describes how
he was able to bring Gerald Ford to speak at the school's fiftieth anniversary
celebration and the impact of desegregation on the school's academics and
athletics.
African American photojournalist Alexander M. Rivera describes the civil rights
movement and its aftermath. In particular, he describes some of his photographs,
as well as the impact of the Brown decision (and the demise of
legal segregation) on African American businesses and African American schools,
including North Carolina Central College.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
Courier and the kind of changes you saw in terms of stories
you were reporting on after Brown.
Well, my last years with the Courier, I worked with
Thurgood Marshall on the cases that he was interested in. The big case
of course was the Clarendon County case. It was named because it was in
the Clarendon County that everything originated. The legal name was Briggs versus the State of South Carolina, whatever it
was. In law, they take the name of the case alphabetically, and there
were twenty-some defendants in the case, and being Briggs, he was one of
the first. So they named it the Briggs case. That's all. But they had
twenty-some odd defendants. The case was started before the NAACP got
into it. A lawyer named Harold Boulware out of Columbia, South Carolina,
had the first case, and he lost it on a technicality that he didn't
bring it in the correct court. So it was thrown out because they said it
was not in the jurisdiction of the court that he brought it in.
So then these people got very much disgusted and went to the NAACP and
asked them if they would take the case. Well, Boulware was also an NAACP
lawyer. So he remained with the case, but Thurgood Marshall said, ‘Well,
yes, we will take the case if you can get as many as a dozen’—I think he
asked for—‘defendants, plaintiffs.’ He was surprised. They got over
twenty. They got over twenty-some odd people. He was surprised because
it was a hotbed of racial prejudice, but these people were determined.
They knew that they were going to lose. Well, they knew, first, they
were going to lose their jobs. They lost their jobs, and then they lost
their farms, and their churches were
Now, I think that was the last large case or story that I had with the
Courier, large one. I had several smaller stories,
but because of my location, I was on the front page of the Courier every week. See I was assigned to North Carolina,
South Carolina, and Virginia. But there was always something happening
in these three states. Then the Courier because I did
write and take pictures, the Courier sent me
everywhere. They sent me outside of my territory to cover cases. They
sent me as far as Florida and then I went to Africa with Nixon.
What was in Florida? What stories did you cover there? Would you remember? You wouldn't have been there for the Tallahassee rape case?
No, this was a case where a black woman killed a white doctor. She was
going with him and they were, or at least they had an affair, whatever
it was. When he decided that the affair was over, she decided that it
was not over. She killed him. I'd have to look that case up, but it was
a very outstanding case. It was a man and the doctor had two waiting
rooms, white waiting room and a colored waiting room, but he had this
black woman that he was having an affair with. When he wanted to call it
quits, she wouldn't let him. She killed him. I had to go down for that.
I covered that case. I don't remember the dates. I'd have to look it up.
The case, the Clarendon County case or the Brown versus
Topeka Board case changed everything. It changed everything for
everybody in this country because up until that time we had been the
strictly segregated, Brown versus Topeka Board made Plessy versus Ferguson case unconstitutional.
Of course, the court knew what the law should be. But they were troubled about what affect their decision would have on the country in general because they knew it was going to be such a tremendous change in everybody's life, lifestyle. In the decision they hedged because they said, ‘Well, we're going to rule.’ Then they ruled against segregated, all segregation based on race, but they ruled that it must proceed with all deliberate speed. You remember that. All other cases ought not, not all other cases but most cases as soon as the law was passed, there was immediate change right immediately. The law became law immediately. But in this case because of the situation the court said, ‘We will move in all deliberate speed.’
Well, this changed everything. Black newspapers went out of business
because they were, by and large, they were protest organizations. They
didn't have the same things to protest. The strife, racial strife wasn't
over, but legally it was over. So black newspapers went out of business.
The Courier was one of them. They struggled for a
while.
When was your last year with the Courier?
It was in late '60s. I don't remember, late '60s. I went from The Courier then back to working with the North Carolina
Central University. I went with them in '74. I remember that very
distinctly.
Now, would some of the Courier employees have gotten
work at say the Philadelphia Inquirer or other of the
mainstream papers once desegregation took effect.
A few did. Wendell Smith was the sports editor, and he was employed in
Chicago, by Chicago Herald-Tribune, and there were
some others that were hired by dailies. I didn't want to work for a
daily. I had been offered a job with the Herald many,
many times, but of course, the salaries were not as good.
Lower than at the black papers.
Yeah.
Is that right?
Yeah. They used to ask me all the time said, as good as a photographer as
you are, why don't you work for the Herald-Sun? I
said, ‘Well, the Herald Sun doesn't pay what the Courier was paying.’ So it was, then I was trained, I
was trained for a weekly. A weekly and a daily are altogether different.
So I went from the Courier to North Carolina Central.
I came back.
Is there a photograph, a picture that you took during your time with the
Courier that stands out as either your favorite or
one that is still very vivid in your memory, one you're particularly
proud of?
Yeah, that was the concert, the Marian Anderson concert, and that was on Easter Sunday in 1938 or '39. That was my favorite. I have that picture in my file.
Can you describe it?
I can show it to you.
Sure.
I wouldn't want to go—these are the pictures. These are the pictures. They are the plaintiffs in the Clarendon County case.
Would you know if Reverend Delaine is one of these?
He would have been gone by then.
No, he wasn't gone. He tried his best to be aloof from it. He felt that he could work better in the background than he could out front. He tried his best to stay aloof from it.
Was it he felt he was too much of a lightening rod?
Yeah, he just felt that he in the background he could be more effective. Of course, it didn't last.
Well, he finally became the pivotal figure in the case. They burned his house down.
But he was one from the beginning, right, he was one of the real—
Yeah, he was one of the—
Instigators and real fighters.
What happened, I'm trying to remember these names. I'm glad you got this (card?) because I'll think of them. I might think of them, and I might not. This was the church where everything, where all the strategies took place and where they were studying it.
Now, when you were covering these stories, did you get to know somebody like Reverend Delaine well, or was it just kind of in passing? You'd be down there for one day a week and then you were back up.
Now. We stayed down. I was, Reverend Delaine had a niece who was a student in North Carolina College, then it was called. I knew her then. I knew her, and it was through her, that's me with the president.
How did you meet, this is President Ford. How did you meet President Ford? What were the circumstances?
I happened to have been responsible for bringing him here to speak. It was our, I think it was seventy-fifth anniversary.
This is to Central.
Seventy-fifth anniversary. He came here.
It says 14th November 1975.
Seventy-fifth anniversary. Now, I hope I've got on the back of here because here's the, yeah, thank God, because I couldn't think of the name. You see that guy sitting here in the middle?
Yeah. Who's that?
James M. Hinton. He was the focal point of the whole thing. He started it
all. He was one that got Delaine excited about the whole case. You can
put this on
Yeah.
Reverend, his name was James M. Hinton, who was in Columbia, South
Carolina, and he was the chairman of the NAACP there. No, he was
president of the South Carolina district. He was president of the NAACP
in South Carolina. He was a man that was as fierce as I've ever seen. He
made, when I was in his presence, I was nervous because I just didn't
ever know what he would do next. But he gave a speech. It
That's beautiful.
I took that down in Alabama.
Do you know where in Alabama this was taken?
In Birmingham.
In Birmingham.
Yeah.
Just to describe for the tape what is it we're looking at?
This is a mother who was riding on the bus, and it shows a sign "for colored patrons only". This sign had pegs in it, and it was on a bar, and when a person got on, if the white person wanted to sit where you were seated, then they'd pick up the bar, pick up the sign and move it to another, and you'd have to move. You always had to move behind that sign. So the reason I liked the sign so much is because it shows a mother and child, and it shows the kind of country that this little child was being born and reared in, brought up in. That's the reason why I like it so much.
Do you know if this ran in the Courier? Did they run
this one?
Oh, it ran everywhere. I don't know. That's me. That's a picture of me and—
The Vice President Richard Nixon.
Vice President Richard Nixon.
You seem very comfortable with him.
I was. We were good friends.
He seems about as comfortable as Richard Nixon gets.
Yeah. Well, for some unknown reasons, he liked me. I don't know what it was about it. I don't have that picture with me, but it's a picture of—
Yeah, describe the—
It's a picture of Marian Anderson in concert at the Lincoln Memorial.
She's singing there on Easter Sunday morning. Easter Sunday afternoon
around four o'clock it was. She had been denied by the Daughters of the
American Revolution, she'd been denied a concert at the Constitution
Hall. Nobody ever thought that she'd be denied, and nobody ever thought
that these people would deny her. That was in '39. I think it was '39,
'38 or '39. But at any rate, these members of the DAR, Daughters of
American Revolution decided that she couldn't sing there because she was
black. So what happened was Mrs. Roosevelt got interested in it.
Which way, so is Lincoln in the background?
Yeah.
Or are you taking it from behind her?
No, Lincoln was in the background.
I see.
I have it here, but it must be in that display. If you needed it or you would need to copy it or something, I would be glad to get it for you. But then that was, we're jumping now from '39 to '54.
Of course, '54 was the decision that changed, as I say, changed everything. Black newspapers went out of business. A lot of black schools closed. It was just what we had, we were working for desegregation and when we got it, it meant the end of our jobs.
I'd imagine a lot of black businesses—
Yeah, a lot of black businesses.
Went out of business, insurance companies.
Well, not so much the insurance companies.
They did all right or better.
No, they didn't do better. Before the Brown versus Topeka
Board, the banks and insurance companies, businesses of that
stature had already come to conclusion that black business was good
business. Now a lot of them had a differential, and that is I was
That was an indication that
It was straight, sound. Well, it was sound because it had the backing also of the Mutual Life Insurance Company.
Of which one?
Of North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company. But I tried after the
[interruption].Courier, I tried some other little jobs. I started
doing some work as a school photographer, and then I sold school jewelry
to see what I could do to make some money. Then some friends from the
North Carolina College came to me one day and said, ‘We'd like to have
you to come work with us.’ I said, ‘Well, it doesn't look like it
because you haven't made me an offer.’ So then they were testing me and
I was testing them. So I said, ‘You make me an offer.’ They said, ‘Well,
the reason why we haven't made you an offer is because what we have to
offer now is’—
You asked me about Ford. We were having our celebration. It was 1975, the
anniversary. We started in 1925. So in '75, that would be fifty years,
wouldn't it? That was our fiftieth anniversary as a college, university.
So the president asked me one day (Reverend?) Whiting. Albert N. Whiting
was president, chancellor. He was the last president and first
chancellor. He asked me said, ‘Well, who do you think we ought to get to
speak for our anniversary?’ I said, ‘Get the president.’ He said, ‘The
President, what president?’ I said, ‘We don't have but one that I know
of. That's President Ford.’ So he said, ‘You think we can get him.’ I
said, ‘I can get him.’ I wasn't too sure, but I
Security.
So when they came in and they came in and told the chancellor that Ford was coming. The chancellor was on his way to New Jersey for a meeting or something. So he had to turn everything, a good thing for him, he had to turn everything over to me and Dr. Simmons, a guy named Dallas Simmons who was vice chancellor for university relations. We met with him, but the team, they told us he was coming and what to do, what to repair and all of this. So he came in and spoke.
How is it that, who did you contact to get the President? Did you just call up the President's people? How did you make this happen?
Well, Charlie Hill asked me the same thing. Dr. Friday asked me the same thing. He said, ‘How did you do it?’ I really don't know how we did it. We had some people behind the scenes pushing some buttons, and I don't even know who they were or what buttons they were pushing, but I do know that Nixon liked me a lot. He thought let me show you—[getting something]
Oh yeah.
We were in—
This is 1955.
Yeah, 1955.
And it's a plaque from the Global News Syndicate.
He was being honored, and we were being honored at the same time.
You got the award for journalism achievement.
He got the humanitarian award. So we got a chance to sit in the group together. We both were recipients of award and so forth. So we became friends. When he got ready to go to Africa, he wanted me to go to Africa with him and all that.
Now, did you keep in touch with the President after say Watergate?
Oh yes. Yes.
Is that right?
Yeah, kept in touch with him. I had more contact with him as Vice
President than after he was President. He had more time than anything
else. We corresponded when he was Vice President, had very little when
he became President. He wanted to know about a job if I wanted, offered
a job. Nope. I didn't want it. The job, the experience that I had when
we went to Africa cooled me to working in the White
Well, I know that E. Frederic Morrow who was Eisenhower's special assistant.
Yeah, I know him.
He died pretty young.
Yeah, I know him.
And was not altogether happy about his years in the White House the way they treated him.
Well, I wasn't, Nixon didn't indicate that he wanted me to work in the White House. He just wanted to know if I wanted a position or something, liaison office somewhere nearby. He didn't indicate that it was—
But something in government. Now, you worked as a portrait photographer, right? Did you have a studio that you ran or—
No.
How did you, you went to people's homes or how did that work?
I was never a portrait photographer as such. But I had a friend who had a
studio, and I used to play around in the studio. He studied, this guy's
name was Charles Stanback, and he studied at Tuskegee at the Eastman
School of Photography. It was the only black school for photography in
the country. He studied there, and we became
His name was Charles Eastman?
No, his name was Charles Stanback.
Stanback, I'm sorry.
George Eastman put the school down—George Eastman—
Eastman is the school, right?
Eastman-Kodak company. George Eastman put the school down in Tuskegee.
How did coming to Central in the early, mid '70s, how did the effects of desegregation affect Central? Did you see any effects in terms of the student body or over the long term how did it affect the institution?
No, not. It didn't affect them at all.
No. Did it, I don't know, drive up competition for students with say UNC?
A certain quality. See UNC said that those top students that they could offer tremendous scholarships. They said they belong with us. In other words UNC said, well, the law says we've got to have a certain amount of black students, but it doesn't say we have to have any of the dumb ones. We've got the money. It was a period of buying students, and they had the money to buy what they wanted. They did. In fact they still do. We didn't have scholarship money and don't have it yet, but we're getting some under this new man that's in now.
How about in terms of the athletic programs at Central? Do you think those
Oh yeah, all suffered.
That's suffered.
You take Phil Ford and all those people that you've got
over at Carolina. They would've, we were getting all those people from
Rocky Mount came into North Carolina College. We would've gotten, we
were getting the cream of the black athletes. When you look around and
see your, I look at the University of Mississippi the other night
playing basketball. Everybody on there was black. I said I was shocked.
It's Mississippi. When teams came in here to play, Duke and Carolina if
they had a black star on the team, their black star stayed over in the
black neighborhood with somebody because he couldn't stay in the hotel
and couldn't stay at the school.
You must've been one of the few professional black photographers from the state or certainly a pioneer.
I was a pioneer photojournalist. There were some other, there were photographers. Very few of them were writing. See now I almost never took a picture that I wasn't taking it for a story to illustrate a story, almost never. Right now, people associate me as being a photographer, and they want to compare me with other photographers, but they don't realize that I was a photojournalist and different all together from a photographer.
So in some ways a writer first, then you'd take the pictures to—
I don't know which, I started out. I don't know which came first. I
started out, I think, taking pictures first. I was recognized taking
pictures back in '39. Back in the '30s, early '30s photography was
crude. I mean, you had your film was not developed. We had chromatic
film. The highest ASA speed was thirty-two. You'd take
You were part of a PBS documentary on photojournalists in the civil rights movement.
That's been everywhere.
I don't think I've ever seen that. What was the name of it?
It was about civil rights, and it was about civil rights photography. It was more about, there was a bunch of us. I've got a copy of it somewhere around here.
You don't remember the name of it or anything?
No, I just remember what it was about. I don't remember the name of it. It was a PBS film. This guy came in, and he photographed. He went around. He photographed me, and he went down to South Carolina and went down to Georgia and photographed those who had worked in civil rights photography.
Did interviews as well?
Huh?
Did he do interviews as well?
Yeah. But he had us all up to Charlotte. Had the whole bunch, after he did the film, he had a whole bunch up to Charlotte to the University of Charlotte. But the other guys who, they might have had one or two experiences in civil rights, but they were not the whole thing. That was my whole thing.
I know there was a younger generation that came on like Matt Herron and Charles Moore and some of the people that were down in Mississippi, but they don't have the kind of range that you have going back into the '40s. I don't know that anybody has the kind of range you have. Was there anybody else working those stories, I mean other than the mainstream white papers? There was nobody that did the kind of thing that you did.
No. No. Nobody else was writing and taking pictures. No. That Willie Earle thing that I let you see, that was the lynching in South Carolina. Then of course, the very next year I had one out there Isaiah, Isaiah, what the hell. It was another lynching. That was in Georgia. I can't think of Isaiah's name now. But no, I didn't have anybody when I had to go on those cases. I went alone because I didn't want anybody with me because if I had to run, I didn't want to have to leave somebody because see I was making my own decisions and my own everything, time of arrival and time of departure. I didn't want to wait around for somebody to say, uh oh so and so's back there. He's tough luck. So I traveled alone. Isaiah Nixon was his name. But then when I just started working for school in 1934, it was all PR. Nothing exciting about it, but Ford's visit was, I guess, kind of exciting.
Highlight, sure. How about after, when did you retire?
'93.
So considerably, you stayed past the normal sixty-five retirement age.
Oh yeah. Nobody knew how old I was. I was waiting to get a good pension. So I could've stayed on because they didn't want me to go anyway. Nobody wanted me to go.
What have you been doing since then?
As much of nothing as I can possibly do. Nothing. I was playing golf until I had the stroke. I haven't been able to get my coordination back to do that. I think that's attributed to the stroke and to age. I feel I'm lucky just to be here.
Now you've done some, I know you've spoken to some schools right and some community groups—
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
Couple of years ago, huh?
Um hmm.
I think that's pretty much it for my questions. Is there any thing that you think we haven't covered that's important that you want to add to the historic record? Think we got most of it?
Yeah, I think so.
All right. Great. Thanks a lot.
END OF INTERVIEW