Hugh Mangum
Hugh Mangum (June 3, 1877 - March 12, 1922) was an American photographer who worked in the American South from the 1890s through 1922 at the height of Jim Crow laws mandating racial segregation and discrimination. Like a few other photographers in the South at the time, Mangum seemed to have maintained an open door policy in his itinerant and studios, and welcomed blacks and whites alike. His glass plate negatives, found in a family barn slated for demolition, were brought to light almost fifty years after his death. Biography Hugh Leonard Mangum was born June 3, 1877, on Main Street in Durham, son of Presley J. Mangum, a Durham postmaster, and Sally Mangum nee Farhting. In 1891, wishing to escape the bustle of a growing Durham, Mangum's father bought a house six miles North of the city, on a property of mills and tobacco barns, known as the McCown House at West Point on the Eno. The family used the house as a summer home for two years and moved to this more rural spot permanently in 1893. As told by his brother Leo, who outlived Hugh by more than four decades, Hugh was invited at the age of