< Previous page

Rivera says he was sure, in that moment, that he would be the next lynching victim in that isolated Georgia county. But after talking with the widow, the sheriff let him go.

Rivera realized only later that he had been wearing a cap and bow tie, which made him resemble a chauffeur.

"If you're a chauffeur, it means you belong to somebody," Rivera says. "And they won't do nothing to you, because they don't know who you work for."

Son of an advocate

Rivera was born in Greensboro in 1913, the son of a prominent dentist. His father, not beholden to a white man for a job, became an advocate for his fellow blacks. Whenever someone was mistreated, Rivera says, they came to see his father.

But Rivera says that when he took his first newspaper job in the 1930s, he wasn't thinking much about racial equality. He just needed a paycheck.

It was the Depression. His father had lost his property, and Rivera, lacking money, had been forced to drop out of Howard University in Washington.

At the time, a host of black newspapers covered the black society news that the mainstream press refused to carry. He started out writing about black athletes, band leaders and actors.

Eventually, he was offered a better-paying job with the Pittsburgh Courier. He says he took it with little thought for the danger he would encounter. Eventually, he learned to fill up with gas as soon as he arrived in a new town and to travel alone. That way, he says, he could make a quick escape.

Rivera doesn't claim activist motivations for his work. "I didn't have good sense," he says.

But his old articles, which often strayed into opinion, seem to tell the story of a reporter outraged at the hypocrisy and cruelty of the times.

A 1947 story about two North Carolina radio stations that had hired black announcers begins: "The great American hope, so often dimmed in the South by fanatical preservers of Jim Crow, mouthy bigots and mob violence, is being fought for ... ."

'Tell them I was a fool'

Robert Lawson, the campus photographer at N.C. Central University, says he met Rivera in 1958, just after Rivera had left newspapers to start a photography business in Durham.

He said Rivera stood out as a man who had risen above the station prescribed for most blacks. Lawson, one of 10 children born to sharecroppers, remembers being deeply impressed by Rivera's pigskin gloves and full-length overcoat.

He says Rivera mentored him, first hiring him to sweep his sidewalk and eventually taking him under his wing as a photographer. He taught Lawson a skill that ensured he would never have to rely on the good graces of whites for a job.

But he doesn't remember Rivera as a racial crusader. Rivera rarely mentioned his work as a journalist, Lawson says. He accepted racial slights with little protest. And he even threatened to fire Lawson after Lawson was jailed for participating in lunch-counter protests in the early 1960s.

"He was trying to make a living and support his family," Lawson says.

Now, Lawson says, he has to coax Rivera into talking to reporters and museum curators. Rivera has refused several requests to write a book. And once, when Lawson asked how he should introduce him at an event at N.C. Central University, where Rivera was public relations director from 1974 to 1993, Rivera said, "Tell them I was a fool and I wouldn't do it again."

Rivera said he doesn't think modern audiences will understand his images. He said museum visitors will see them as ancient history, rather than as part of a continuing struggle for equality.

"Look at him," Rivera says, pointing to a young black student walking through the museum one day this week. "He don't know anything about all this. He don't even believe it."

In Rivera's eyes, the boy has only narrowly escaped the world he once covered, in which blacks were reminded of their place with signs and billy clubs and, sometimes, with shotguns.

< Previous page