Rufus Cornelius Hickman

The Briscoe Center and Wikipedia put Hickman's birth in Mineola in 1922. The center says he donated his photographic archive to the university in 1985, after which it published Behold the People, a 1994 book of his photographs of Black Dallas from 1949 to 1961, which includes Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall, Ella Fitzgerald and Joe Louis. UT News says that on August 30, 1956, sent to Mansfield for the NAACP, he photographed effigies of Black students hanging in the playground trees, was chased by the mob toward Fort Worth and escaped into a funeral home.

What the plaque says

Rufus Cornelius Hickman African American photographer, Rufus Cornelius Hickman (1918-2007), photographed African American life in Dallas in the Jim Crow and Civil Rights Movement eras. His mother, Cora Hickman, ran a popular African American social spot called Bar 20 at this site in the 20th century. Born in 1918 in Mineola, Texas, Hickman attended Tillotson College, later Huston-Tillotson University, and then enlisted in the army in 1942. While stationed in Saipan, Japan, Hickman learned photography and became an army photographer. After World War II, Hickman enrolled in the Southwest School of Photography and Mortuary Science under the G.I. Bill. After graduating, Hickman worked for several newspapers, including The Dallas Express and the Kansas City Call. Hickman began his professional career as a photographer with the Dallas Star-Post. He photographed African American's everyday life and significant moments in the Civil Rights Movement in the Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) area between 1945 and 1970. He photographed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Youth Council's protest of the Texas State Fair in 1955. After Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka (1954), the Supreme Court decision that declared segregated schools unconstitutional, the NAACP enlisted Hickman to document the inequalities between white and Black schools in Texas. In 1956, Hickman captured the failed desegregation of the Mansfield schools. While white Texans attempted to harm Hickman, he managed to photograph the mock-lynching of effigies of African American students in Mansfield. Because of Hickman's photographic work, he captured several decades of DFW African Americans' struggles, successes and everyday life, highlighting their humanity and documenting their history. 2017. .

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Governor Hogg Shrine — 9.4 mi
  Quitman's 27-acre city park, once a state historical park, where two houses tied to James Stephen Hogg's marriage stand beside an arboretum, a nature walk and the grounds of the Old Settlers Reunion.
• Tyler State Park — 17 mi
  A 985-acre park eight miles north of Tyler, built by the Civilian Conservation Corps from 1935 to 1941 around a 64-acre spring-fed lake, with more than 13 miles of trails.
• Camp Ford Historic Park — 22 mi
  A free county park north of Tyler on the site of the largest Confederate prison camp west of the Mississippi, with a kiosk, an interpretive trail and a historical society museum downtown.
• Goodman-LeGrand House and Museum — 24 mi
  A Tyler house begun in 1859 as four rooms, enlarged by the Goodman family over 73 years, and left to the city in 1939 with its furnishings, in a garden that fills a city block.

More markers nearby

• Mineola Black Spiders — 0.2 mi
• C. W. Raines — 0.3 mi
• Jack Rhodes — 0.3 mi
• Railroads in Mineola — 0.3 mi