1940s Photo Album of a Student at Stowe Teachers College, a St. Louis HBCU.
Missouri, Utah, and Hawai’i: c. 1940s. 10 x 12 ½ inch photo album containing approximately 225 photos measuring approximately 5 x 7 ½ inches and smaller, with some later photos (including later prints of older photos) unaffixed. Album excellent. Conditions of photos vary; generally good to excellent. Overall very good to excellent. Item #List3503
Stowe Teachers College was established by the St. Louis public school system in 1890 as Sumner Teachers College, a Black-only teaching school, alongside the white-only Harris Teachers College. In 1929 Sumner was renamed after abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe. The two colleges merged in 1954 when St. Louis schools integrated, and became the HBCU Harris-Stowe State University.
Offered here is a photo album from the mid-1940s belonging to an unknown student at Stowe. Shots include students looking up at and posing in front of the school’s lintel, and young men and women posing together, carrying schoolbooks, sitting at desks studying, and spending time outside of what appear to be campus buildings. Also included is an invitation to the school’s 1944 spring prom, held in Kiel Auditorium. There are also portraits of the photographer’s girlfriends, shots of the friends spending time in and around 1940s St. Louis, and shots likely from the photographer’s childhood in Missouri, which would be around the 1920s. Later photos look to be from military training—dated around 1943—in Utah and Hawai’i.
Of interest to historians of Stowe, HBCUs, and education shortly prior to integration.
Price: $1,500.00