Some of them show the men and women who were born into slavery and worked at the University – the very people being honored at that site. All of them were taken at the height of the Jim Crow era in Charlottesville and the South.
But for Mason, the portraits’ greatest power lies in showing how those men and women “refused to allow racial oppression to define them.”
“Instead of visual stereotypes, the images show each individual’s strength, resilience and purpose,” Mason said in a press release.