Media Contact: Carmen Ramos Chandler, carmen.chandler@csun.edu, (818) 677-2130
Her photos captured life in Black Los Angeles during the 1940s and ’50s. Vera Jackson, the only woman who worked in the 1940s as a staff photographer for The California Eagle — the oldest Black newspaper — captured images of weddings, society events and protests, chronicling every-day life in a community that was largely ignored by the rest of the city.
The John Randolph Hayes and Dora Hayes Foundation has awarded California State University, Northridge nearly $70,000 to digitize Jackson’s work and make it available to the public through the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center’s digital collection in CSUN’s University Library.
“The Vera Jackson Collection includes both photographic images and personal papers that document, from the perspective of a Black female photographer, important events and people in the Black community of Los Angeles during the 1940s and ’50s,” said journalism professor José Luis Benavides, director of the Bradley Center. “This project will make these unique and rare images digitally available to the public and support research that enhances understanding of Los Angeles history.”
Benavides said the Haynes Foundation grant will support the Bradley Center’s efforts to digitize, research and create metadata for 2,550 items — photographs, film reels and personal and professional papers — from the Jackson collection.
“This number represents 25 percent of the total items in the Vera Jackson Collection,” Benavides said. “Most of this work will focus on Jackson’s negatives and prints from her days as a press and studio photographer in the 1940s. We plan to add items from her personal and professional papers so the public can learn more about her unique professional and personal life as a Black female photographer in Los Angeles.”
Charlotta Bass, the legendary publisher and editor of the Eagle, hired and assigned Jackson to work primarily with the society editor of the paper, Jesse Mae Brown. As a photojournalist, Jackson captured images of the African American elite and celebrities such as Hattie McDaniel, Dorothy Dandridge, Jackie Robinson, Philippa Schuyler, Jane McLeod Bethune, Lena Horne, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Hazel Scott. She also photographed families, personalities in the Black community, businesses in South Los Angeles, and political and civil rights activities in the city.
Jackson’s photographs have been exhibited at the UCLA Gallery; the Riverside Art Museum; the Black Gallery; the National Museum of Women in the Arts; the Los Angeles County Public Library; the California Museum of Afro-American History and Culture, now the California African American Museum; and the Museum of Art in San Francisco. Jackson’s work was featured in Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe’s book “Viewfinders: Black Women Photographers” and in Stanley Nelson’s documentary “The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords.”
“Vera Jackson’s images are much more than a photographic record,” Benavides said. “They are also a form of artistic expression of a pioneer photographer helping us appreciate and better understand life in Black Los Angeles. To make them available digitally is a wonderful opportunity to extend that understanding to people all over the world.”
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