Exhibit - Behold the People: R. C. Hickman’s Photographs of Black Dallas, 1949–1961

Human Rights Dallas presents Behold the People: R. C. Hickman’s Photographs of Black Dallas, 1949–1961, an exhibition by the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at The University of Texas at Austin in partnership with Humanities Texas, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

R. C. Hickman was a Dallas photographer whose thousands of images produced from 1949 to 1961 document aspects of life in an African American community in Texas. His photographs depict a community largely invisible to white Americans—thoroughly a part of mainstream America by virtue of accomplishment and lifestyle but excluded from it because of race.

Mr. Hickman worked as a commercial portrait photographer, a photojournalist for several black newspapers in Dallas, a freelance photographer for national black publications such as Jet, Sepia and Ebony and a photographer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His images reveal his awareness of a community within which individuals survive, grow and understand themselves.