The woman is holding her infant carefully, almost reverently, but she cannot shield him from the reality etched above their bus seat: "For colored patrons only."

Alexander M. Rivera Jr. took the photograph more than half a century ago, but when he sees it on the museum wall, he pauses to look at it once again.

"This is the kind of world that this kid was born into," says Rivera, 94. "That's what they had to look forward to."

That photograph -- along with dozens of others that Rivera took as a journalist covering the civil rights struggle during the 1940s and 1950s -- went on display Friday at the N.C. Museum of History. Rivera's work will remain a part of the museum's collection until early next year.

Rivera, a North Carolina native who lives in Durham, spent nearly 30 years writing and photographing for black newspapers, including the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the nation's most prominent at the time. He traveled the Southeast, documenting lynchings, wrongful prosecutions and the push for integration.

He wrote stories that the mainstream media avoided, covering both the accomplishments of black athletes and performers and the suffering of the families of lynching victims. He wrote about a 14-year-old boy sentenced to a 30-year prison term for stealing a flashlight, and a sharecropper arrested for "unlawfully looking" at a white girl.

He recorded the stark trappings of segregation. One photograph shows the audience at a 1948 spring dance in Rocky Mount. Whites and blacks sit on the same expanse of bleachers, but a wire strung from the ceiling neatly divides the races. The dividing line, in Rivera's day, was no metaphor.

Rivera says he had little sense at the time that he was recording history. He says he was just supporting his family, doing "a job that needed to be done."

Shirl Spicer, the museum curator overseeing the exhibit, said Rivera was a pioneer, one of the South's most prolific and respected black journalists. He earned national awards and in the 1950s struck up a friendship with then-Vice President Richard Nixon, who invited Rivera along on a 1957 diplomatic trip to Ghana.

But in the years since, she said, his work has been largely forgotten, with only a handful of photos permanently displayed in the N.C. Central University library.

"We have, in our midst, a living legend," Spicer said. "But very few people know it."

Rivera's work often drew ire rather than respect. He was jailed in Lumberton in 1948 for photographing the three separate entrances to a movie theater, one for whites, one for blacks and one for Indians.

And on a rural road in Montgomery County, Georgia, Rivera feels sure that his life was saved only by the chauffeur's cap he happened to be wearing. He was on his way back from interviewing the widow of Isiah Nixon, who was shot in his front yard in 1948 after angering whites by voting.

Sallie Nixon told Rivera that a group of men lured her husband to the fence, and then shot him while his children watched. When the gun went off, she told Rivera, "my children scattered like a covey of birds."

He snapped a picture of Nixon on the porch of her wooden shack -- the kind that has become emblematic of rural Southern poverty. She is surrounded by her six children, one of whom is only a few weeks old. The face of one child is clenched in a sob.

As Rivera drove the winding road away from her house, he rounded a curve and found a car blocking the road, he remembers. The sheriff was one of several white men inside. The sheriff got out and demanded to know what Rivera had been doing.

Next page >