The Geleve Grice Photograph Collection

Summary

The Geleve Grice Photograph Collection consists of 23 boxes of unorganized photoprints and unprinted negatives (totaling some 70,900 images), billing records, advertisements, college yearbooks, and 15 hours of audio interviews. This project focuses on processing the 6,500 photoprints and creating a finding aid that is web-accessible and web-searchable through EAD conversion. Taken between 1942 and 2002, the photographs document the social and cultural lives of African Americans in Arkansas, the Mississippi River delta, Texas, Chicago, and elsewhere. The African American photographer Geleve Grice (1922-2004) was born southeast of Little Rock, Arkansas. He lived most of his life in nearby Pine Bluff, owned a photography studio and made a living photographing graduations, funerals, parades, etc. He was also the photographer for the state’s historically black college at Pine Bluff. Some photos are of pre-integration events at black high schools; others are of small, rural black schools before school consolidation. Photos of Silas Hunt, the first African American to enroll in a professional school in the South, are also included. The collection goes beyond important local and state subjects, with photographs of Louis Armstrong, Joe Louis, and Eleanor Roosevelt. The collection is the epitome of a hidden collection and is nationally significant in its contribution to the scarce archival quality photographic record of African American life in the southcentral region of the U.S.