African American Photographs of the World War II Home Front

For less than eighteen months in 1942 and 1943, a young African American photographer named Roger Smith was the sole photographer for the Negro Section of the segregated United States Office of War Information (OWI). From the agency’s office in Washington, DC, he worked in a rigidly segregated city and in an equally segregated federal government civil service. Despite the handicaps under which he labored, in that brief time Smith created a remarkable photographic record of the African American home front in and around the nation’s capital. His photographs, many of them arresting candid shots, provide a vivid record of African Americans supporting and contributing to the war effort of a nation that deemed them inferior and continued to treat them as second-class citizens. While Smith himself, about whom we know little, slipped from the pages of history, his photographs remain to attest to both African American support for the war and to a people’s continued hope that the nation would someday redeem its promise of equality for all. Despite his accomplishments, the rules of segregation that governed the society in which he lived restrained Smith and his work for the OWI has gone largely unrecognized. The primary history of the OWI to date mentions neither the Negro Section nor Smith. Yet during his time with the OWI, Smith encountered any number of talented white photographers, many of whom would go on to exceptional careers, some to fame. In the exact period Smith worked with the OWI, the Farm Security Administration (FSA), one of Roosevelt’s Depression era agencies, was merged with the OWI until it was eliminated at the end of 1943. The cadre of photographers in the FSA photographic unit headed by Roy Stryker had gained a national reputation presenting the American public with graphic images of the human suffering endured during the Depression, images that still loom large in the public recollection of that era. Among their ranks were Stryker, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Jack Delano, Arthur Rothstein, and the African American photographer Gordon Parks. As the Negro Section’s sole photographer, Smith produced the photographs the OWI sent to some 240 black-owned newspapers located in every region of the country. Among the largest African American-owned papers at the time were the Atlanta World (the nation’s only black-owned daily) and the large weekly papers with circulations in the hundreds of thousands, including the Pittsburg Courier, the Chicago Defender, and the New York Amsterdam News, each enormously influential and each reaching numerous subscribers beyond their city. Papers with a more local circulation in cities such as Boston, Baltimore, Cleveland, Dallas, and Los Angles each reached an additional audience of tens of thousands. The Negro Section also sent its stories and photographs to the few black-owned papers published in Southern cities, including Nashville, Tennessee, and Greensboro and Wilmington, North Carolina, all of which found a small local readership.