Arts & Culture

Mr. Pruitt’s Possum Town Photos

October 12, 2022

See this incredible collection of photographs of a segregated town and sharecroppers protesting in 1939. Photos also show Cropperville, a cooperative created to provide homes and farmland to tenant farmers who participated in the protest.

Photo courtesy of State Historical Society of Missouri.

Catch a book signing and curator talk with the man who put together the exhibition, Mr. Pruitt’s Possum Town: Trouble and Resilience in the American South, now through Nov. 5 at the State Historical Society of Missouri (SHSMO) Art Gallery. You can see 100 images, with 75 at SHSMO, and then another 25 at the nearby Reynolds Journalism Institute on the MU campus. A curator talk and book signing with Berkley Hudson, a professor emeritus who put together the free exhibition, will be Oct. 13, 11 a.m. at the SHSMO Art Gallery, 605 Elm St., Columbia. Following the talk and tour of the exhibit, Hudson will be signing his recent book O. N. Pruitt’s Possum Town: Photographing Trouble and Resilience in the American South, available at the bookstore inside the Center for Missouri Studies at SHSMO.

The exhibition focuses on photographs produced by photographer Otis N. Pruitt, who worked in the small, segregated town of Columbus, Mississippi. With the help of journalism school students and faculty, Hudson has researched some 88,000 negatives that Pruitt made from the 1920s through the 1950s. The State Historical Society of Missouri has created a related but smaller exhibition of art from its own collections to tie Missouri to the Possum Town photos. Picturing Missouri Sharecroppers: Finding Counterparts to Pruitt’s Images in Missouri shows images of rural southeast Missouri produced by editorial cartoonist Daniel Fitzpatrick and photojournalist Arthur Witman while on assignment for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. They documented the Sharecropper’s Protest of 1939 as well as the community of Cropperville, a rural Missouri cooperative created to provide homes and farmland to former tenant farmers who participated in the protest. Both exhibitions capture the joy, sorrow, and suffering of the times but also the hopefulness and resilience of people who persevered and challenged the status quo. You can visit the exhibitions and bookstore during regular visitor hours at the SHSMO Art Gallery Tuesday through Friday from 10 a.m.–4:30 p.m. and each Saturday from 10 a.m.–2 p.m. Learn more at SHSMO.org. For more events, visit our Missouri Life calendar here.