New home for Wayne F. Miller’s Black Life photographic work
September 9, 2024. Wayne F. Miller’s seminal photographic work exploring Chicago’s South Side community in 1946-1948 has found a permanent home. The National Museum of African American History and Culture acquired the work in 2023, making the institution the primary steward of this material. The gift includes both fine and press prints, some transparencies as well as book layouts and working materials for what would be published as Chicago's South Side in 2000.
Chicago’s South Side 1946-1948 mostly focuses on everyday life within families, people on sidewalks, kids playing, the social life on front stoops, and bar social scenes. Several celebrities are included in the book.
In addition to the Chicago materials, the Wayne F. Miller estate donated work relating to a segregated all-Black unit assigned to the Naval Supply Depot on Guam in 1944-1945, photographs of Black cotton pickers in California in 1949, Black musicians performing at an inter-racial club in San Francisco in 1953, and work shot in 1966 of Reverend Thomas Gilmore, the second Back sheriff in the state of Alabama.