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.

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.