Portrait of an Ex-Slave: My Great Grandfather

[HamdenRice]

Recently, I came across about 40 negative files of photos I had taken when I was between 12 and 14, when I was an avid amateur photographer. To see these pictures, I bought a negative scanner. Since beginning to scan these pictures, I have been fascinated by this window into daily life in the early 1970s.

One of the pictures, which I never had printed, was a photo of a photo (ie copy). From the context, my grandfather had probably asked if I could copy this portrait that hung on his wall. It was him and his brothers as very young men, next to their father.

In one part of my mind, I knew the story of my great grandfather having run away from slavery in Virginia to Brooklyn, but I never connected it with the picture that hung on my grandfather's wall until today.

The old man seated, surrounded by his sons, was John Henry Sykes. He is old in this photo, which probably was taken around 1915-1920, which would indeed place his birth date before 1865:



The young man standing just to the right of the seated man is my grandfather. Here is how I remember him so many years later, seated in his Brooklyn brownstone:



He died around 1979, during a snowstorm.

Time is so very strange, isn't it? We think of slavery as the distant past, but we are really only one degree of separation from those evil times.

[Karenina]

1. Not even one degree...

Beautiful pictures.

[undergroundrailroad]

2. Pristine, priceless and untouchable. Thank you so much for sharing those

beautiful photos.

:hi:

[Bunny]

3. Those are beautiful. The top picture is so touching.

Your great grandfather must have had a very interesting life. We really aren't so removed from that time, are we?

[wildeyed]

4. It must have been wonderful to find those negs after so many years.

Have you had a chance to go through them all? And do you still have the original of the first portraits?

[HamdenRice]

5. Plugging away ...

I have looked at the negatives, but it is sometimes hard to figure out what they are pictures of. I have scanned about 6 rolls.

I think my aunt may have the original of the picture of my great grandfather -- I'll call her tomorrow.

[kwassa]

6. and many still living experienced the evils of Jim Crow

and to some degree are all still experiencing it. It didn't just all end with emancipation.

I've been making mental parallels lately between the insurgents in Iraq and the nightriders/Klan in the post Civil War era as forms of terrorism. Of course, no one called them terrorists back then, though that was exactly what they were.

[Old Mouse]

7. I remember being shocked

when my grandfather started telling me of his experiences. We are so close to the worst of it, but I think that generation dealt with it by not talking about it.

These pictures are wonderful.

[HamdenRice]

8. Thank you all for comments -- I think I will repost in GD

I am going to post this in GD. I wonder what the reaction will be?

Also, I found some oldies pics from the 1950s (before I was born) and wondered whether we could start a thread here in AAIG for pictures, something like "pictures of the African American experience" just for us to share images outside the stereotypes the world portrays us as?

What do you think?

[kwassa]

9. here is some more info

I personally have had great luck tracing my own family geneology on the Internet, but then I'm white. I also benefited greatly from the research of others, particularly a craze for geneology that happened in the US in the late 1800s.

My wife is African-American and has spent time researching her own, and has trouble getting back much before the Civil War, because slaves showed up in the census as having a designation like "Sarah, a Negro slave" with no last name.

One of the best sources for any genology is run by the Latter Day Saints, because they believe that they have to save their pre-Mormon ancestors, they've created the greatest database of ancestry in the US. It can be found at http://www.familysearch.org/