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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 Office of War Information (OWI). From the agency’s office in Washington, D.C., 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.
Melton McLaurin is professor emeritus of history at UNC Wilmington. He is the author of ten books and numerous articles on the American South and race relations. Among his best know works are Separate Pasts, Growing Up White in the Segregated South, winner of the Lillian Smith Award; Celia, A Slave , a 1992 New York Times notable book of the year; The Marines of Montford Point: America’s First Black Marines; and writer/director of the PBS documentary The Marines of Montford Point: Fighting for Freedom. He resides with his wife, Sandra, in Wilmington, NC.
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