Reposted from @blackstory1619 This dramatic portrait was made by P.H.Polk in 1932, when he was Official Photographer at the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee Alabama. It was part of a series that Polk called the“Old Characters,” depicting elderly African Americans in Alabama in the early years of the Great Depression.These were individuals who had been born into slavery in the 1850s and who had lived through the Civil War and Emancipation, through Reconstruction, and into the eras of Disenfranchisement and Jim Crow discrimination.The images are intended specifically to counteract negative stereotypes of rural blacks and to show the subjects with respect and dignity. Henry Baker, the subject of this portrait, was born in 1854, and his story recorded in 1938 in an oral history by the pioneering African American Agricultural Scientist Thomas Campbell is at once typical and remarkable. Baker’s mother died shortly after child birth, and he was raised apart from his father who lived on a neighboring plantation. As a childhe was tasked with being a water boy to the field workers. Virtually orphaned, he was looked after by the white Mistress of his plantation, who regularly brought him to church with her. After the Civil War, Baker worked as a tenant farmer but always with the goal of acquiring his own land, which he succeeded in doing despite many forces working against him, including white tenant farmers who bitterly resented a black man owning his farm, when they did not. He and his wife of 60 years, Sally, had a large family, whose many descendants can be found today. #blackpeople #blackimage #imancipation #blackman #blackfarmers https://www.instagram.com/p/CLWcIOTlF_-/?igshid=1sozoqmuyvfce
