Behold The People

This remarkable book reproduces more than one hundred photographs taken by R. C. Hickman, a professional photographer whose work provides a fascinating visual record of life in Dallas’s black community during the three decades following World War II.

The 109 striking duotone photographs reproduced in this book are taken from the three thousand photographic negatives in the R. C. Hickman Photographic Archive at the Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin. This book is designed and printed by the award-winning Wind River Press.

Born in Mineola, Texas, in 1922, Hickman moved with his family to Dallas, where his father worked at the Baker Hotel as a cook. While in the army during World War II, Hickman acquired his knowledge of photography by watching a fellow soldier develop official pictures of combat. He learned quickly and soon became an official army photographer

After the war, he returned to Dallas and joined the staff of the Dallas Star Post. He also worked as a freelance photographer for Jet magazine, for several newspapers in the East, and for the NAACP. His work led him to photograph notables such as Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall, Ella Fitzgerald, Joe Louis, and others when they visited Dallas.

Hickman’s work as an NAACP photographer is invaluable evidence of racial segregation and the struggle to end it in North Texas—evidence that Dallas’s major news media generally refused to report. He sometimes worked under hostile, even dangerous conditions. On one occasion, Hickman’s picture-taking ended abruptly when a carload of angry segregationists chased him from Mansfield to Fort Worth.

Hickman also served as the unofficial community photographer for black Dallas throughout the 1950s. He recorded the events, large and small, that marked the lives of ordinary people as they worked and played and yearned for their own fair share of the American dream.