It’s been an exciting few weeks in North Carolina politics! Not only did last Tuesday’s primary inspire huge numbers of new voter registrations and shatter voter turnout records, for the first time in seemingly forever, it appears the state may have played a very important role in determining the Democratic nominee for President. I suspect these events would have thrilled Morton—a lifelong, committed Democrat and onetime gubernatorial candidate.

So it seems like a good time to share these two Morton slides, scenes from the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, showing supporters of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson, respectively. Despite heated clashes between the two during the primaries, Kennedy and Johnson ended up forming a joint ticket (with Kennedy on top), which went on to (narrowly) defeat Richard Nixon in the general election.

Here’s an interesting quote from the Wikipedia page about the 1960 election:

Kennedy was initially dogged by suggestions from some Democratic Party elders (such as former President Harry Truman) that he was too youthful and inexperienced to be president; these critics suggested that he agree to be the running mate for a “more experienced” Democrat. Realizing that this was a strategy touted by his opponents to keep the public from taking him seriously, Kennedy stated frankly ‘I’m not running for vice president, I’m running for president.’

As I near the end of my initial sort through the Morton negatives, I am forced to confront that evil category: “miscellaneous.” Most archivists hate that word, and try to avoid using it in their descriptions, because it is so very useless in terms of letting people know what a collection or grouping actually contains. But the fact is, some images just don’t fit into any of the subject categories I’ve established. Photos of car accidents . . . unidentified living rooms . . . a piece of needlework . . . half a sandwich and a cup of soup. How to classify these? I’ll have to figure that out at some point, but for now they’re resting under the nasty M-word.

Also under the M-word (for now) are images I’m unable to identify well enough to know whether they might fit into one of my existing categories. The intriguing image below is one such case. It dates probably from the early 1950s, is in an envelope labelled “Atom Artillery Bn.,” and shows men in uniform boarding a large ship. I’m guessing it has something to do with atomic artillery (first tested in 1953), but what does “Bn.” stand for? (Battalion, perhaps)? Where was it taken? Does anyone know the 1,000 words behind this one?

It’s another of those “1,000 word” moments, where a Morton image sends me off on a journey of discovery. On my recent visit to Grandfather, Hugh’s wife Julia told me the following story: she and Hugh got a speeding ticket in 1945 while driving through Columbus County, NC, on the way back home after their honeymoon. A few years later, Hugh was assigned to photograph the arrest of a supposed K.K.K. leader in Columbus County—Morton went to the jail, and to his surprise the man being arrested turned out to be the same man who had given them the speeding ticket. Mrs. Morton couldn’t quite recall his name, but thought it was “Early Bird” or something odd like that.

So, when I saw the negative envelope labeled “K.K.K.,” I thought to myself, maybe these are the negatives Mrs. Morton mentioned . . . and indeed, they do show a man being fingerprinted. I noted that the calendar on the wall read Whiteville, NC (in Columbus County), February 1952.

To my surprise, a quick web search for the K.K.K. in this time and place returned a bounty of fascinating information. First I learned that the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in Journalism had gone to the Whiteville News Reporter and Tabor City Tribune, two weekly newspapers, “For their successful campaign against the Ku Klux Klan, waged on their own doorstep at the risk of economic loss and personal danger, culminating in the conviction of over one hundred Klansmen and an end to terrorism in their communities.”

Then I read about something called the Carter-Klan Documentary Project, being run right in our backyard at the UNC Center for the Study of the American South. This is an effort begun in 2003 to create a documentary film and other multimedia elements about the work of W. Horace Carter (then editor of the Tabor City Tribune) and others to combat the early 1950s Klan insurgency in Columbus County, led by Grand Dragon Thomas Hamilton. The timeline on the project’s detailed website describes the events of February 16, 1952, when “more than 35 FBI agents, working in close coordination with state and local law enforcement officials in Columbus County, N.C., arrest 10 Klansmen for the kidnapping and flogging of Ben Grainger and Dorothy Martin on October 6, 1951,” and says that several other area Klansmen were arrested from February to May of 1952.

Far down on the Thomas Hamilton page, I found a photo (below, from the Raleigh News & Observer) and description of Early Brooks, a former Fair Bluff policeman who led “the most vicious and active klavern” in Columbus County. “Eureka!,” I exclaimed to myself, a former policeman named “Early”—this has to be the guy. But when I compare the photos, I actually don’t think it is the same person. What do you think? If it’s not Early Brooks, who is it? And who is the arresting officer?

One last note about all this: in searching the UNC libraries catalog for information about W. Horace Carter, I found an oral history interview conducted with Carter in 1976 as part of the Southern Oral History Program (available online, both audio and transcript). Turns out Carter and Hugh Morton went to UNC-Chapel Hill at the same time—Carter was editor of the Daily Tar Heel in 1944, and Morton took photos for campus publications . . . surely they knew each other. Did Carter give Morton the assignment in 1952? Was the photo published? I hope someone can fill in the details.

If there’s one thing “A View to Hugh” has made clear, it’s that every photograph has a story behind it—especially if it was taken by Hugh Morton. My recent visit with Hugh’s wife Julia, daughters Judy and Catherine, and grandson Crae really impressed this point upon me. Mrs. Morton could barely finish telling me one story before launching into another (I tried to take notes, but eventually gave up). I do remember one set of photos she mentioned, of the “Cat Girl,” a New Orleans burlesque performer Hugh went to see on one of his trips to the Sugar Bowl with the Charlie Justice team in 1947. Here she is:

The website FrenchQuarter.com has a tidbit about “exotic dancer Lilly Christine the Cat Girl”—that must be her! According to Mrs. Morton, Hugh didn’t care for cheesecake photography, and “wasn’t good at it”—he was apparently pressured, against his will, to go see the Cat Girl by a group of friends that included then-mayor of Chapel Hill, Robert W. Madry.

This is just one example. As great as the stories are, the difficulty is that 500,000 images in the Morton collection equals a heck of a lot of stories—a lifetime’s worth, from a very full lifetime. (Using the “1,000 words” estimate, that’s 500 million words!!) Uncovering and documenting all these stories is one of the major processing challenges we face.

Fortunately, we have people to draw on, like Hugh’s family, friends, acquaintances, and other readers of this blog. And we have other sources, too, like one I just got around to looking at—that fabulous magazine The State (now known as Our State), in which Morton photos were very frequently featured. Here in the North Carolina Collection, we’re lucky enough to have not only the entire run of the magazine, but also subject indexes, and (thanks to some wonderful guy named Robert M. Topkins) a 1976 index to pictures appearing in The State.

Morton was friends with the original publisher Carl Goerch, as well as his successor Bill Sharpe, whom Morton has described as “the one person who most whetted my interest for making pictures of and for the state [of North Carolina].” This photo of Goerch, Sharpe, and Sharpe’s wife appeared on page 7 of the August 19, 1950 issue of The State, along with the text quoted below.

As you look at this picture you can almost guess the words that might have been spoken:

Says the lady: “You numbskull! You nit-wit! You’ve got no business on this beach. Now get yourself away from here just as quickly as you can, before I call a policeman. Git, I tell you; git!”

Says the man in the bathing trunks: “But lady, I didn’t mean any harm! Goodness knows I didn’t. When you were stooping over, picking up shells, I thought you were my wife. That’s the reason I spanked you.”

Says the lady: “I don’t want to hear anything further from you. On your way before I call a cop!”

Says the man with the marine cap, the dark glasses, the checkered shirt, the rolled-up trousers and the slightly protruding stomach: “That’s tellin’ him, mamma: that’s tellin’ him!”

The lady happens to be Mrs. Bill Sharpe. The man in the bathing trunks happens to be the editor of this publication. The man with the marine cap and all the other accessories, including the slightly protruding stomach, happens to be Bill Sharpe. And Hugh Morton of Wilmington just happened to be around just in time to take the picture.

I guess if you don’t know the story behind a picture, you can always make one up . . .

One of the many titles bestowed on Hugh Morton over the years is “the father of North Carolina photojournalism education.” He was a charter member of the National Press Photographers Association and president of the North Carolina Press Photographers Association. Appealing to a broader audience, Morton founded in 1952 the annual Grandfather Mountain Camera Clinic for amateurs and professionals, and the Nature Photography Weekend, also hosted by Grandfather Mountain.

Perhaps most notably, Morton was a founder and the first chairman (1950-1965) of the Southern Short Course in Press Photography. Now known as the Southern Short Course in News Photography, this training program for students and professionals is the country’s longest-running seminar in photojournalism. The images below are from the early years of the Short Course, probably 1951-1953, when it was held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The first image shows Joseph Costa (left, in bow tie), well-known American newspaper photographer, photography lecturer at Ball State University, and a founder of the National Press Photographers Association; the other man presenting (back to camera) appears to be Hugh Morton. Since most audience members are wearing name tags, this image is handy for identification purposes. (Few of the names are legible, however, and none at the resolution presented here.)

The next image shows unidentified instructors presenting about darkroom procedure. (Sharp-eyed readers of this blog might notice Burlington photographer Edward J. McCauley in the third row, third seat from the left—see Patrick Cullom’s recent post, A Contemporary of Morton).

Our blogging compatriot over at the Blue Ridge Blog says, “I’ll always remember Hugh Morton as a photographer’s photographer. He understood the needs of a working photojournalist and went out of his way to make the job easier for us.” Do you have any photojournalism- related memories of Morton to share? Can you provide any information about these early Short Course images?