Documenting the Dynamic Black Community of 1940s Seattle – The New York Times

The image appears in “Seattle on the Spot: The Photographs of Al Smith,” an exhibition at the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle, a city that played only a modest role in American jazz history. Mr. Smith’s photos tell a compelling story, not just about the city’s jazz scene but also about the complexity of life in an African-American community cloistered within a largely white, and for many decades, de facto segregated city. Organized by Howard Giske, the museum’s curator of photography and a friend of Mr. Smith’s, the exhibition is accompanied by a catalog with essays by Mr. Giske and the historians Jacqueline E. A. Lawson and Quin’Nita Cobbins; the jazz critic Paul de Barros; and the photographer’s son, Al Smith Jr., known as Butch.