‘From the Dustbin of History,’ a Photo Archive of the Jim Crow South

A younger Black “manservant” for a white household, who referred to as him “Humpy” due to a again deformity. A Ku Klux Klan march down Fundamental Avenue circa 1922. General-clad males on the development web site of the Magnolia Bowl soccer stadium in 1933. Minstrel exhibits, baptisms, carnivals and lynchings. In his portrait studio and out on the earth, Otis Noel Pruitt used his digital camera to bear witness to the soul and soullessness of Columbus, Miss., within the first half of the twentieth century.

Curated from the 88,000 negatives the writer Berkley Hudson rescued “from the dustbin of historical past,” O.N. PRUITT’S POSSUM TOWN (College of North Carolina, $49.95) is a “‘photobiography’ of a time and a spot”: a Southern city, east of the Tombigbee River and west of the Alabama border, weathered by Jim Crow and the Melancholy. The locals referred to as Columbus “Possum City,” a nickname bestowed by Choctaw and Chickasaw inhabitants who thought one early white settler regarded like a marsupial.

Pruitt spent most of his life in Columbus, the place his white pores and skin allowed him to maneuver freely in each white and Black areas: houses, church buildings, rivers, fields. Many photographs, particularly these of Black topics, lack identification or context. Are these the injured boy’s mother and father beside him on the porch? What ails the previous lady in mattress, being tended to by an unnamed caretaker? “Regardless,” Hudson writes, “the visible report is highly effective, enabling readers to provide their very own captions.” With ethnographic rigor and the intimacy of a neighborhood, Pruitt’s eye roves matter-of-factly between scenes of gilded refinement — the crafted splendor of privilege — and the ugly violence that makes that privilege potential.