Henry Martin, the Clan Barbecue, and the Power of Photography

Hey, friends. It's been a minute! This is the first time I've posted on this blog since 2017. (I used to be very active here. It's my 399th post.) I'm not sure what's moved me to log in and do some writing. I think it's the confluence of the Juneteenth holiday and the 110th anniversary of a photo that's has been haunting me for a couple years. That makes this a pretty special day. The post is about that particular photo. It's one that I chose not to display in an exhibition that I curated in 2022, "Visions of Progress: Portraits of Dignity, Style, and Racial Uplift," at the University of Virginia, even though it fits the theme perfectly. (The exhibition closes on June 24th, so there's still time to see it.) I left the photo out because it's disturbing, at first glance, and at second glance, too. I am, however, going to include it in an essay that I'm writing for the exhibition's catalog, which will be published in the fall. What follows is me trying to make sense of "1908 and 1913 Clan Barbecue."

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Let me begin by quoting an old, anonymous blues lyric. Please keep it in mind as you read this post:

Got one mind for the white folks to see,
Another for what I know is me.

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It's unsettling, this photo. It is to me, at least, and I hope to everyone who sees it. But to be troubled by it, a viewer has to remember the historical context. A photographer from Charlottesville's Holsinger Studio made it on June 19th, 1913, a time when racial oppression, Jim Crow segregation, and white supremacy were at their worst in Central Virginia and the nation. Aspects of that context infuse the seen and unseen elements of the image. "1908 and 1913 Clan Barbecue" would have seemed perfectly ordinary, however, to most people, Black and white, 110 years ago. History -- in this case, the long African American freedom struggle -- has changed how we see the world around us, thus, what we see in photos.

1908 and 1913 Clan Barbecue, 19 June 1913: Holsinger Studio. (Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia. Click on the image to see a larger version.)

The occasion for the photo was a barbecue during a reunion of University of Virginia [UVA] alumni. It's not clear why one group of alumni, the Class of 1908, referred to themselves as a "clan." The word appears just once in the book that the class published to memorialize the reunion. It occurs in an innocent passage that speaks about what the class, "our little clan," owed to the university that had educated them so well. Yet it would have been as obvious to Americans in 1913 as it is to us that the distance between "clan" to "Klan" is quite short. I'm not sure what to make of this.

The setting for the barbecue was Sunnyside, the estate of the politically and socially prominent Duke family, whose enslaved laborers had once worked the land. In the picture, a large gathering of white men face the camera in broken rows. They're an elite group. Most are members of the UVA's class of 1908, back in Charlottesville for their fifth-year reunion. Others are university alumni from different years and friends of the Dukes. Some of the men, dressed in suits and ties, stand at the rear. Others, particularly those near the front, have loosened their ties and shed their jackets, perhaps feeling the effects of the heat or the brown ale that flowed liberally or the roasted lamb and suckling pig, or, most likely, all of the above. Incongruously, many of the younger men wear sailors' uniforms. They are not seamen. The uniforms are costumes that members of the Class of 1908 have donned for the occasion. A few of the men, but only a few, smile.

Two elderly Black men interrupt the sea of white faces. They would not have been the only African Americans at the barbecue. Nearby, but outside the frame, Black cooks tended the roasting meat and prepared Brunswick stew. Black waiters served the food and drink. A Black string band provided some of the entertainment. The Duke family's locally famous Cool Springs barbecues, named for a nearby spring's unusually cold water, were utterly dependent on the labor of Black men and of Black women, too, who sometimes worked at these otherwise all-male affairs. Think of the barbecues as celebrations of white supremacy, patriarchy, and class domination.

1908 and 1913 Clan Barbecue, 19 June 1913 (detail): Holsinger Studio. (Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia. Click on the image to see a larger version.)

The elderly Black men would have been born well before the Civil War, that is, they would have been born into slavery. One of the men sits on the ground in the center of the frame, between the legs of a portly, middle-aged white man. It's a disturbing scene, far too reminiscent of how a pet dog might sit at the feet of its master. Although the Black man, whom I haven't been able to identify, shows no other signs of subservience, a twenty-first-century viewer wants to look away.

Update, 21 June 2023: My friend and fellow historian Jane Smith has helped me to tentatively identify both the Black man and the portly white man. The elderly African American was probably Humphrey Shelton, who was born in 1831 or 1832, enslaved by the Peyton family, and who served Confederate Major Moses Green Peyton as a body servant during the Civil War. After the war, he worked as a "servant" of the university for many years. The white man who loomed above him is likely to have been James Woods Garth, Jr., who was born in 1875 and was a member of what had once been one of the largest land- and slave-owing families in Central Virginia.

Update, 25 June 2023: Jane has also convinced me that I misidentified one of the Dukes. I've rewritten the following paragraph to reflect my new understanding.

The second Black man also sits in the front row, separated by only two men from one of the event's hosts, the lawyer and politician William Richard Duke. Duke had served in the Confederate Army and, in the 1920s, became a member of UVA's Board of Visitors. (Front row, second and fifth from the left.) His younger brother, R.T.W. Duke, Jr., a lawyer and jurist who appears in the photo near the rear, was a leading member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, having founded a lodge that was named in honor of his and William's father, R.T.W. Duke, Sr., a former Confederate colonel. Both of the younger Dukes were staunch white supremacists and ardent advocates of the myth of the Lost Cause. The myth, a southern interpretation of the Civil War, dismissed slavery as a cause, insisted that the Confederate cause was just, and stressed the honor and valor of Confederate soldiers. The enslaved people of the South, it asserted, were well treated and contented. Indeed, many were devoted to their masters and mistresses, or so the story went. The myth was one of the ways that white southerners coped with defeat. At the same time, it provided an ideological prop for Jim Crow segregation.

Far from being eccentric, Duke's beliefs were nearly universal among white men and women of his time. Locally, professors and alumni of UVA were among the creators and most influential proponents of Lost Cause mythology.

In the company of sons and grandsons of slave owners, devotees of the Lost Cause, and defenders of white supremacy sits Henry Martin, our second elderly Black man. He was 87 years old when he posed with the white men and within two years of his death. He had been born enslaved, in 1826, at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's plantation, just outside of Charlottesville. Jefferson enslaved his mother, as he did scores of other men, women, and children. Martin had spent virtually all of adult life working at or near UVA. From the age of nineteen, while enslaved, he worked at a boarding house for university students, hauling wood, doing other manual labor, and waiting tables in the dining room. After the Civil War, the university hired him as the janitor and bell ringer at the Rotunda, its physical and symbolic heart. There his imposing physical presence, impeccable manners, personal dignity, and devotion to his duties won the affection of generations of UVA students, professors, and alumni. As the Daily Progress, Charlottesville's white newspaper, put it on the occasion of his death:

...there will be sadness and real sorrow in the hearts of ten generations of old boys who knew and respected him. He was part of the legends of their youth. He bound them with the great traditional past of things.

The genuine respect that white people felt for Martin can't be separated, however, from their belief that he was, as the Daily Progress had put a few years earlier, "the personification of the qualities that go to make the faithful servant." For the newspaper, and for his white admirers, he was a "splendid old colored man whose honesty, sobriety and industry have perhaps never been equaled by one of his race." Affection, on the one hand; condescension and racism, on the other: The white gaze.

When I look at Henry Martin in this photo, I see much more than a faithful servant. The way that he presents himself reminds me of something that The State, the leading white newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina, said about him in 1902:

...one could not help thinking that the old man was more than the janitor, more than the faithful servant, more than the industrious, simple citizen and unquestioning and undoubting believer...."

The State was right. There was much more to Martin, and he wanted anyone who saw this photo to know it.

There was nothing accidental about Martin's pose. As I'll show in my catalog essay, he had a remarkably sophisticated understanding of the ability of photography to speak powerfully, yet silently, on his behalf. He was unlettered and couldn't put his own words on paper, so he used photography to challenge the white gaze, striving to control how he was seen whenever he could. (The dignified, magisterial bearing with which he carried himself was also part and parcel of his efforts to control his image.)

Many photos of Martin -- those over which he had little control -- visually reproduce the notion that he was a perfect servant, placing him at the university and showing him wearing his janitor's apron. On at least two other occasions, he commissioned studio portraits that speak in a very different register, divorcing him from the university and picturing him in the same manner as a banker or distinguished professor. "1908 and 1913 Clan Reunion" falls somewhere in between. Martin had not commissioned it. Yet the circumstances under which the photo was made allowed him to choose where he would sit and how he would show himself to the camera. That is, he used the occasion to speak silently on his own behalf.

In the photo, Martin wears a dark suit and his posture is ramrod straight, in great contrast to the white men surrounding him. He seems to be enjoying himself. His poise and what might be a twinkle in his eye suggest that he is at ease in the company of elite white men. Far from resenting his presence, the white men seem to accept him as part of the group. Indeed, a white man who sits behind him, peers over his shoulder, straining to be seen by the camera. Significantly, he has not asked Martin to move. Did the white men accept him because they saw him as R.T.W. Duke, Jr., saw two of his barbecue cooks: "'white folks niggers'...respectable, willing, respected & obliging?" Probably so. But Martin wants viewers to see something else.

Except for the color of his skin and his upright posture, there is little to distinguish Martin from the other men in the photo. That's how he planned it. The image is an assertion of moral equality, of being rightfully at home in this company. He may have spent his life serving white men like these, but the photo declares that he was much more than a servant. It asks us to look beyond what white people saw and look instead for other sides of Henry Martin.

In the exhibition, Visions of Progress: Portraits of Dignity, Style, and Racial Uplift, we devote a fair amount of space to Martin. That's because he was complicated and thoughtful in ways that haven't been fully appreciated and because he used photography so well. My research shows that his work as a servant of the university only partially shaped his sense of himself. He was also the patriarch of a large extended family, with children who had found success in places as distant as Cincinnati, Boston, and California. He served as a deacon at his church for many decades. He and his wife, Patsy, had built their home on property that they owned. Not least, he and his family believed that Thomas Jefferson, president, enslaver, and founder of the University of Virginia, was his father. So he said to white reporters and alumni. So it says on his death certificate.

We can't literally see these things in "1908 and 1913 Clan Barbecue." But Martin surely wanted us to look for them.

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Comments

[Rashaad Bey]

What a peculiar institution... Virginia the start location for this experiment Bacon's rebellion, slave codes, integrity act, loving, Wilder, Gregory.

[Sue Morrow]

Wow. I spent a lot of time with this today. Thank you.

[John]

Thanks very much for reading, Sue!

[Ivan Davis]

Very much appreciated this careful and rich historical reading of the photograph, and look forward to learning more on the exhibition site!