Archivist of black history finds own rare family photo
COVINGTON, Tenn. — Hattye Yarbrough still has the old-fashioned box camera her mother used when she was in high school.
She also has a Canon camera that one of her cousins sent her for Christmas in 1938. It took wonderful photographs until 1968 when she dropped it and it broke.
“I have always collected pictures,” Yarbrough says, remembering back through her 96 years. “All of my life.”
She calls the sitting room in her Tennessee home organized chaos. Frames fill every surface. Boxes overflow with news clippings. Family snapshots and her paintings cover the walls.
There’s a picture signed by former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Joe Biden affixed to the wood paneling of her kitchen. It reads: To Mrs. Yarbrough, Our success is due to your dedication, friendship and support. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts.
As a keeper of photographs, magazines and pieces of black culture, Yarbrough has been recognized nationally. Her collections of World War II history are featured in the National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.
But there is one photograph of significance — taken more than a century ago — that Yarbrough discovered only recently. It is a portrait of her Aunt Sybil.
Elegantly dressed in a white blouse, long dark skirt and a fancy hat, Annie Sybil Thomas Jarrett poses in front of a studio backdrop, looking off into the distance.
The picture was taken in the early 1900s. And the man who snapped it was James P. Newton, the first black professional photographer in Memphis. He gained acclaim for elevating the achievements of black Americans. Very few of Newton’s early works exist today.
For Yarbrough, a long-retired teacher and collector of the past, the photo represents another chapter in a lifelong quest — one that began when she was a teen living with her Aunt Sybil so many years ago.
“I told myself there would never be a child growing up around me who would not know that we’ve made a difference as African-Americans in this country,” Yarbrough says.
Where they came from you would never imagine
Aunt Sybil’s story began in the bottomland of Saulsbury, Tennessee.
The land was swampy, covered in trees and surrounded by a creek. The roads were made of shifting sand. And tucked back as far as a person could get was Old Pruitt Place, the family farm roughly 60 miles east of Memphis.
Jarrett lived there with her parents, both former slaves, and her siblings.
“You didn’t know the farm was back there — unless you were trying to get back there,” Yarbrough remembers. “To see where they came from ... you would never imagine.”
Jarrett learned to read and write from her mother, who came by an education at the home where she worked. She hid outside under an open window and listened as the family’s children had their lessons.
Then, tucked away with a piece of chalk and a slate, she would practice what she heard.
That value for education carried down through the generations, first to Aunt Sybil and then to Yarbrough.
The lesson of her life
Yarbrough describes her aunt in one simple, yet powerful, phrase. “A second mother,” she says. Yarbrough moved in with her aunt’s family in Paris, Tennessee, in 1937 to attend high school.
There, Yarbrough inherited her cousins’ bedroom and tall bookcase with three shelves full of books by AfricanAmerican authors.
There were works by poet Langston Hughes, scholar W.E.B. Du Bois and civil rights leader James Weldon Johnson, and copies of magazines and newspapers such as Negro Digest.
They opened up a new world for Yarbrough.
“I was reared by my aunt, who told me you can do anything anyone else can do — and sometimes you can do it better,” Yarbrough says. “All I had to do was work at it.” As she read her new books, questions formed. Why hadn’t she learned of these men in school?
Yarbrough remembers one night her freshman year asking her aunt that very thing. She sat on one end of the dining table doing school work; Aunt Sybil, a teacher, sat on the other end preparing lessons.
“She gave me the lesson of my life,” Yarbrough says.
That night Aunt Sybil told her all about their family’s history. About her grandparents working on a Tennessee plantation, about how her grandmother and namesake, Hattye Jane, learned to read and write, about “where we got our color from.”
“Aunt Sybil told me, ‘We have been left out of the records, that’s why you don’t know these things.’ ”
Yarbrough cried, but, as her aunt comforted her, she said all you have to do is share what you learn with somebody else.
“I told myself that night never ever would there be a black child growing up around me that would not know African-Americans, colored folks we were then, have contributed to every piece of history in America.”
A teacher, like Aunt Sybil
Yarbrough graduated from Central