“You Feel So Out of Place”: Germantown's J. Gordon Baugh and the 1913 Commemoration of the Emancipation Proclamation

Abstract

A fragile album of photographs made in 1913 by an African American resident of the Germantown section of Philadelphia may seem an unlikely addition to a collection of essays on the Emancipation Proclamation. Yet, J. Gordon Baugh Jr.’s A Souvenir of Germantown Issued during the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation at Philadelphia, PA, September 1913 not only offers an illuminating glimpse of African American life in the half century after the Civil War—it explores the memories of emancipation. In ways both commemorative and journalistic, the 1913 souvenir album gives valuable insight into a sector of Germantown’s community frequently left out of its well-documented historical memory—and, one might fairly extrapolate, an indication of blacks’ thinking about the meaning of emancipation in the early twentieth century.