By Mike Templeton
Research for the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition depends on a wide mix of sources. From oral histories to the old-fashioned history book, members of the Research Committee and others continually build and expand our understanding of urban Appalachian history and culture. One powerful resource is photography. A collection at the University of North Carolina Asheville has opened a window into the history of African Americans in the Appalachian region and into urban Appalachian life from an unlikely lens. The Isaiah Rice Photograph Collection contains the images from the camera of Isaiah Rice, an ordinary man who just happened to take his camera everywhere he went.
One of the most crucial insights we gain from Isaiah Rice’s photographs is the tremendous influence and overall impact of African Americans in urban Appalachian regions specifically, and in the southern Appalachian region more generally. There has long been a perception that the role and impact of African Americans in the culture and history of the Appalachian region was small. Rice demonstrates the outsize role of African Americans in the daily life and culture of the Ashville regions. An essay on the impact of Isaiah Rice’s work in the journal Southern Cultures explains: “Even as African Americans made up a sizable percentage of the population in cities like Knoxville and Asheville, outside of urban centers African American populations were smaller. This aided a general perception that the African American presence in Southern Appalachia was minor, which neatly elided into the view that the social impact of African Americans in Appalachia was minor.” People such as Isaiah Rice form a crucial part of the story of African Americans in Appalachia, and also the story of urban Appalachians in general.
Born in 1917 in Asheville, North Carolina, Rice had only a high school education, and spent most of his adult life working as a delivery man for a beverage distributor. Rice served in the Army in World War II and after the war became extremely active in his church. In and around the African American neighborhoods of Asheville, he was frequently known as “the picture man” due to his ever-present camera. Upon his death in 1980, Isaiah Rice’s daughter, Marian Waters, found boxes containing hundreds of photographs and negatives from her father’s years of snapping photos. She told people that she knew her father took photographs of family and friends, but she had no idea the extent of his work. Isaiah Rice’s grandson, Darin Waters, who happens to be a scholar of American and African American history, immediately saw the tremendous value of the photographs and donated the collection to The University of North Carolina Asheville where they are held as the Isaiah Rice Photograph Collection.
Isaiah Rice was not a professional photographer. He carried his camera around simply because he loved taking pictures, and what he documents in his photos are ordinary people and ordinary moments in life. However, in focusing his attention on the common and the ordinary, Rice inevitably created one of the most powerful and important documents of African American and Appalachian life of the post-war period. Rice’s photos reveal African American businesses, baseball teams, local events which never reach beyond a neighborhood. These images reveal the way life unfolded at this time in stunning detail. Some people refer to Rice as a “folk photographer,” and this title could not be more appropriate. Isaiah Rice’s photographs are a study of “the folk” over nearly three decades.
Rice’s photographs document the immediate post-war period from the 1950s up through the 1970s. His photographs of the everyday life of African Americans in urban Asheville provide a powerful view of the life of ordinary people during a time when segregation was still firmly in place both legally and in common practice. His images also serve as a counter to a narrative that largely erased African Americans from Appalachian studies until the publication of the important anthology Blacks in Appalachia in 1985. Rice’s photographs clearly show us a world where Appalachian African Americans make up a large portion of the cultural life of an urban area such as Asheville, North Carolina. Just as important is the fact that Rice’s photographs serve as a crucial part of the story of urban Appalachian as well and the tremendous influence of African Americans on the larger history of urban Appalachian life.
Sociologist William H. Turner observes “that the failure to study African American history in the region has left us with an incomplete picture.” Dr. Turner was profiled recently on this blog by Core member Pauletta Hansel. The incomplete picture Dr. Turner describes extends to urban Appalachian experiences as well. However, as we have demonstrated in a previous post, much of the early work of advocacy in greater Cincinnati involved the building of alliances with others such as activists in the early civil rights movement. One could make the assertion that the development of the study of urban Appalachian cultural history has developed hand in glove with the emergence of the study of the influence of African Americans on Appalachian history and culture. We can look at a similar body of photographs in the current exhibit by the Over-the-Rhine Museum which currently provides access to a collection of polaroid photographs of Over-the-Rhine from 1970s through the 1990s.
The history of African Americans within the wide picture of Appalachian history keeps unfolding as historians and other scholars continue to find sources and artifacts that expand our understanding. As we continue to shape and re-shape our knowledge of urban Appalachian history and culture, we find that the discoveries in important work on African American history serve to expand our understanding of Appalachian and urban Appalachian history. The photographs of Isaiah Rice offer compelling documents of African American life in the Appalachian region in the mid-twentieth century. What could have been written off as little more than family snapshots has now taken its place as a central piece of African American and Appalachian history. Rice’s images of life in the urban center of Asheville, North Carolina also offer some stunning windows into urban Appalachian life of the same period. Connecting these pieces makes up a good part of the research conducted by the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition. These documents help provide the primary sources for our understanding of urban Appalachian history and culture.
You can view the Isaiah Rice Photograph Collection at this link: https://southernappalachiandigitalcollections.org/browse/collections/isaiah-rice-photograph-collection.
This article makes reference to: Waters, Darin J., et al. “In-Between the Color Lines with a Spy Camera: The Appalachian Urban Folk Photography of Isaiah Rice.” Southern Cultures, vol. 23, no. 1, 2017, pp. 92–113. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26391680
Citation for the photograph: Rice, Isaiah. “Singer Store in Downtown Asheville, NC.” The Isaiah Rice Photograph Collection. https://southernappalachiandigitalcollections.org/browse/search/singer-store-in-downtown-asheville-nc. Accessed 12/19, 2024.
Michael Templeton is a writer, and independent scholar. He is the author of The Chief of Birds: A Memoir published with Erratum Press and Impossible to Believe, forthcoming from Iff Books. He is also the author of Collected Apoems, forthcoming from LJMcD Communications and the awaiting of awaiting: a novella, with Nut Hole Publishing. Check out his profile in UACC’s Cultural Directory. He has published numerous articles and essays on contemporary culture and works of creative non-fiction as well as experimental works and poetry. He lives in West Milton, Ohio with his wife who is an artist.