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Portrait of a Community in Black and White
Texas Christian University Press
September 2009
On Sale: September 14, 2009
216 pages
ISBN: 0875653812
EAN: 9780875653815
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Photography
In 1934, the year Calvin Littlejohn came to Fort Worth, the
city was a sleepy little burg. This was the Jim Crow era,
when mainstream newspapers wouldn’t publish pictures of
black citizens and white photographers wouldn’t take
pictures in black schools. In Fort Worth, Littlejohn began what would become a lifelong
career of documenting the black community. And there would
be nothing remotely related to the white culture’s
depictions of Amos ‘n’ Andy or black kids grinning over a
slice of watermelon in Littlejohn’s portrayal of his adopted
home and the people he came to appreciate and love.
Littlejohn’s natural aptitude for drawing had been honed by
correspondence courses in graphic design and a stint in a
photo shop where he learned about the camera, lighting, and
the use of shadows. When Littlejohn was assigned to be the official photographer
at I. M. Terrell—the city’s only black high school at the
time—his professional career was launched. Unlike many segregated cities, where blacks lived only in
one section, blacks in Cowtown lived in every quadrant of
the city. There was a thriving black business district, with
hotels, restaurants, a movie theater, a bank, and a major
hospital, pharmacy, and nursing school. And of course, there
were the schools and churches. All would eventually be seen
through Littlejohn’s lens. Although he never set out to be the documentarian of Fort
Worth’s black community, he did what he set out to do: to
capture the best of a community, focusing on its good times. This book features more than 150 shots Littlejohn captured
over the course of his career.
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