The photograph arrived at the North Carolina Museum of History on a rainy Monday afternoon in March, carefully wrapped in acid-free tissue paper and accompanied by a brief handwritten note.
My great great grandmother’s family, 1901.
Thought you might want this for your collection.
Helen Morrison, the museum’s chief archivist and photo restoration specialist, gently unwrapped the image and placed it under her examination lamp.
The sepiaone photograph measuring 8 by 10 in showed six people posed formally in what appeared to be a professional photography studio likely in the Pont region of North Carolina based on the studio’s decorative style.
Heavy velvet curtains served as a backdrop and an ornate carved chair typical of portrait studios in the era sat prominently in the center of the frame.
The image quality was remarkably good for its age, suggesting the photographer had used quality equipment and proper exposure techniques.
A black man in his early 30s stood at the back left of the composition, wearing a dark wool suit with a high-colored white shirt and narrow tie.
His posture was upright, dignified, one hand resting protectively on the shoulder of a black woman seated in the ornate chair.
She wore a high- necked dress with delicate lace trim at the collar and cuffs, her hairstyled in the Gibson girl fashion, popular at the turn of the century.
Her expression was serious but composed, her eyes looking directly at the camera with quiet determination.
Around the couple were four children, carefully arranged according to the formal conventions of the period.
Three were clearly the biological children of the couple, two boys and a girl, ranging from approximately 5 to 12 years old.
They wore clean, well-maintained clothing.
The boys in matching dark suits with short pants, the girl in a white dress with a ribbon in her hair.
Their features clearly reflected their parents, their postures mimicking the formal dignity of the adults.
But it was the fifth child who immediately captured Helen’s professional attention.
Seated directly in front of the mother, positioned between her knees in a spot typically reserved for the youngest or most vulnerable child, was a white boy of perhaps 9 years old.
He was noticeably thinner than the other children.
His cheekbones prominent beneath pale skin, his eyes carrying a quality that Helen could only describe as haunted, even across more than a century, even in a static photograph.
He wore a simple cotton shirt, plain and unadorned, and dark trousers that seemed slightly too large for his slight frame, suggesting they might have been handme-downs or borrowed for the occasion.
What struck Helen most profoundly, however, was the positioning of the mother’s hands.
Instead of resting them naturally on the arms of the chair or folding them in her lap, as was customary in formal portraits of the period, she had reached forward deliberately and wrapped them completely around the white boy’s hands, which were folded against his chest.
Her fingers curved protectively, almost possessively around his small hands, concealing them entirely from the camera’s view.
The gesture appeared intentional, carefully staged, not the casual arrangement a photographer might suggest for compositional balance or aesthetic purposes.
Helen had examined thousands of family photographs from the early 20th century during her 15 years at the museum.
And this hand positioning was highly unusual, even anomalous.
Helen carefully transferred the photograph to her digital scanner, adjusting the settings to capture the maximum possible detail without damaging the fragile original.
As the highresolution scan processed, she examined the handwritten note more carefully.
The return address showed a Charlotte suburb and the signature read Thomas Brennan.
The surname immediately caught her attention.
It was Irish, not typically associated with black families in turn of the century North Carolina, though interracial adoption and guardianship arrangements, while rare, were not entirely unknown.
She opened the museum’s genealological database and cross reference the photograph’s estimated date, 1901, based on the clothing styles and photographic techniques with census records from North Carolina’s Pedmont region.
The search parameters were specific.
black families with both black and white children in the household, living in areas with textile manufacturing, which was the dominant industry in that region during that period.
The database returned 43 possible matches.
Helen began the painstaking process of elimination, looking for families where the age ranges matched the children in the photograph, where occupational records suggested sufficient income to afford a formal studio portrait, a significant expense for working families at the time, and where residential records showed stability rather than the transient patterns typical of sharecroers or migrant workers.
After 2 hours of methodical research, she had narrowed the possibilities to seven families.
She pulled the corresponding census records, studying them carefully.
Most showed straightforward family structures with detailed relationship annotations.
Son, daughter, nephew, ward.
But one entry made her pause.
The 1900 census for Durham County listed a family of five.
James Fletcher, age 32, occupation carpenter.
Adah Fletcher, age 29, occupation seamstress, and three children, Samuel, age 11, Martha, age 8, and David, age six.
All were listed as black or mulatto in the race column using the terminology of that era.
However, the 1902 city directory for Durham, published just after the probable date of the photograph, listed the same address with six residents.
The Fletcher family now included a Thomas Murray ward, age nine.
The annotation ward indicated a formal or informal guardianship arrangement, and the Irish surname suggested the boy was white, though race was not specified in city directories as it was in census records.
Helen made careful notes and pulled additional records.
Durham in 1901 was a rapidly industrializing city, home to several textile mills that employed hundreds of workers, many of them recent immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and Eastern Europe, seeking economic opportunities in the New South.
The mills were notorious for their working conditions, particularly their employment of children as young as six or seven years old, whose small hands could navigate the tight spaces between machinery and perform delicate tasks that adult fingers found difficult.
She found marriage records for James and Ada Fletcher from 1888, property tax records showing James owned a small house on the east side of Durham near the textile district, and business licenses indicating Ada operated a small dress making business from her home, serving both black and white clientele, unusual for the period, but not impossible in Durham’s relatively more progressive atmosphere compared to the deeper rural south.
What she could not find was any record of how or why a white child named Thomas Murray had come to live with this black family or what had happened to his biological parents.
The historical record, as was often the case with marginalized communities and informal arrangements, remained frustratingly silent on these crucial details.
Helen returned to the highresolution scan, now fully processed and displayed on her large monitor.
She opened the image in professional restoration software and began the careful work of digital enhancement, adjusting contrast, sharpening details, and removing the inevitable artifacts of age, minor scratches, dust particles embedded in the emulsion, slight fading in certain areas of the image.
As she zoomed in on different sections of the photograph, examining faces, and clothing for any identifying details, she kept returning to the mother’s hands wrapped around the young white boy’s hands.
The positioning still struck her as deliberate, protective, but also concealing.
She increased the magnification on that specific area, adjusting the contrast and brightness to reveal every possible detail.
What she saw made her breath catch.
At the very edges of the mother’s fingers, where her hands didn’t quite completely cover the boy’s wrists, there were marks.
At standard resolution, they had been invisible, lost in the general shadows and grain of a century old photograph.
But at high magnification, with digital enhancement, they became unmistakable.
dark linear marks encircling both wrists approximately a quarter inch wide with slightly irregular edges suggesting they were not tattoos or birth marks but rather scars or discoloration caused by external pressure.
Helen had seen similar marks before, though not in photographs.
During her graduate work in public history, she had studied medical photographs and documentation from the progressive era reform movement, particularly the records compiled by Lewis Hine and other photographers who documented child labor conditions in American factories.
Those photographs had shown children with rope burns on their wrists and ankles, restraint marks from being tied to machinery to keep them from falling asleep during 16-our shifts, injuries from cords used to bind them in place while performing dangerous tasks.
She zoomed in further on the boy’s visible forearms, adjusting the enhancement settings to reveal maximum detail.
There, barely perceptible, even with digital processing were additional marks.
Small circular scars on the backs of both hands concentrated around the knuckles and the webbing between fingers.
These were consistent with puncture wounds or burns from textile machinery.
Specifically, the kind of injuries sustained by children who worked as dooffers in cotton mills, changing the bobbins on spinning frames while the machines were still running.
Helen sat back from her monitor, her heart racing.
This photograph was not simply a family portrait.
It was evidence, deliberate, carefully staged evidence designed to present this white boy as part of a respectable black family while simultaneously hiding physical proof of abuse or exploitation that could have raised dangerous questions.
She needed to understand more about textile mill conditions in turn of the century Durham, about child labor practices, and most importantly, about what would have motivated a black family to take such an enormous risk.
In 1901, North Carolina, a black family harboring or claiming guardianship over a white child without proper legal documentation could face severe consequences, accusations of kidnapping, criminal charges, violence from white supremacist groups, or forced separation by authorities who would never accept such an arrangement as legitimate.
Helen pulled up academic databases and began searching for research on child labor in North Carolina textile mills during the 1890s and early 1900s on guardianship laws and practices and on the rare documented cases of interracial adoption or fostering during the Jim Crow era.
She also made a note to call Thomas Brennan, the man who had sent the photograph to learn what family stories might have been passed down through the generations.
The following morning, Helen drove 40 mi to Durham to access the archives at the Durham County Libraryies North Carolina collection, which housed extensive records from the city’s industrial era.
She had called ahead, and the research librarian, an elderly man named Mr.
Patterson, who had worked there for 30 years, had already pulled several boxes of materials related to textile manufacturing in the early 1900s.
The records were extensive but fragmented.
Mill owners had not been required to maintain detailed employment records for child workers, and what documentation existed was often deliberately vague to avoid scrutiny from early labor reform advocates.
However, Helen found payroll ledgers from the Imperial Cotton Mill, one of Durham’s largest textile factories, covering the years 1898 through 1903.
The ledgers listed workers by first initial and last name only, along with their weekly wages and position.
Children’s wages were marked with an asterisk and were significantly lower than adult wages, often just $2 or $3 per week for 60 to 70 hours of work.
She scanned through the entries for 1900 and 1901, looking for the surname Murray.
On the October 1900 page, she found it tur week.
The entry appeared in the ledger consistently from March 1900 through September 1901.
The asterisk confirming the worker was a child.
Then abruptly, the name disappeared.
There was no notation of termination, no indication of why Thomas Murray stopped appearing in the mills employment records.
Helen cross referenced this timeline with the census and city directory records.
Thomas Murray appeared in the Fletcher household directory listing in early 1902, suggesting he had left or been removed from the mill sometime in late 1901, which aligned with the probable date of the family photograph.
She turned to another set of records.
Mr.
Mr.
Patterson had pulled Durham City death certificates from 1899 through 1901.
She searched for the surname Murray and found two entries that made her pulse quicken.
Patrick Murray, age 34, cause of death, tuberculosis and complications from milust inhalation.
Date February 18th, 1900.
And just 6 weeks later, Katherine Murray, age 32, cause of death, tuberculosis, date, April 3rd, 1900.
The death certificates listed their address as a boarding house on Factory Street, just two blocks from the Imperial Cotton Mill.
In the space for surviving relatives, both certificates listed one son, Thomas, age 8.
Helen sat back, the pieces beginning to come together.
Thomas Murray’s parents had both worked in the textile mill.
This was common for immigrant families with multiple family members employed in the same factory.
They had contracted tuberculosis, likely from the cotton dust and poor ventilation that plagued such facilities.
After their deaths, their eight-year-old son had been kept on as a worker, probably to work off any debts the family owed to the mill for company housing or goods purchased on credit from the company store.
This practice, known as debt penage, was technically illegal, but widely practiced in southern industrial settings.
Children were particularly vulnerable to such arrangements because they had no legal standing to contest them and no family to advocate for them.
Thomas would have been entirely at the mercy of the mill owners, working brutal hours in dangerous conditions with no way to escape.
But somehow between September 1901 and early 1902, he had escaped.
Or more accurately, he had been rescued, and the Fletcher family had taken him in.
Despite the enormous risks such an action entailed, Helen returned to the museum and began researching Ada Fletcher specifically, hoping to understand what kind of woman would have taken such a risk.
She found Ada’s name in several unexpected places.
First, in the records of the St.
Joseph’s African Methodist Episcopal Church in Durham, where Ada was listed as a member of the Women’s Missionary Society and had served as Sunday school superintendent for the primary grades from 1897 through 1905.
More revealing were advertisements in the Durham Recorder, a blackowned newspaper that had operated from 1895 through 1910.
Several editions from 1900 and 1901 carried small advertisements.
Mrs.
Adah Fletcher, fine dressmaking and alterations, reasonable rates, all clientele welcome.
The phrase all clientele welcome was significant.
It indicated Ada served both black and white customers at a time when most businesses strictly segregated their services.
Helen found corroborating evidence in the account books of several prominent white Durham families preserved in their estate papers.
The Carr family, wealthy tobacco merchants, had paid Ada Fletcher, seamstress, for services in 1900 and 1901.
The Blackwell family, textile mill owners, ironically, had similar entries.
Ada had built a reputation that crossed racial lines, which would have given her unusual mobility and access to information about both black and white communities.
Through church records, Helen discovered something else crucial.
Adah Fletcher had lost a child.
Burial records from Glen View Cemetery showed baby Fletcher, still born July 1899, interred in the Fletcher family plot.
The timing was significant.
Just months before Thomas Murray’s parents had died, Ada had experienced the devastating loss of what would have been her fourth child.
Helen began to construct a psychological and emotional portrait.
Adah Fletcher was a skilled craftswoman with her own business, a respected church member, a mother who had experienced profound loss, and someone whose work brought her into contact with the textile district where she would have witnessed the conditions child workers endured.
She was also someone with enough social capital and courage to maintain relationships across racial lines in a deeply segregated society.
But witnessing suffering and feeling moved to act were very different things.
What had specifically driven Ada to intervene in Thomas Murray’s situation? And how had she managed to remove him from the mill’s control? Helen found a potential answer in an unexpected source, a report published in 1902 by the North Carolina Bureau of Labor Statistics, which had conducted investigations into working conditions following pressure from progressive era reformers.
The report included testimony from workers and brief descriptions of incidents at various mills.
One entry dated September 1901 referred to Imperial Cotton Mill.
Incident reported of child worker approximately nine years of age who collapsed at spinning frame after reportedly working 18our shift.
Milforman claimed child was merely tired and sent him back to work.
Anonymous complaint filed by witness suggested child was malnourished and showed signs of physical restraint.
Investigation inconclusive due to lack of cooperating witnesses.
The timing aligned perfectly.
Helen suspected Ada had been that anonymous witness, or at least had heard about the incident through her network of clients and church members.
Helen shifted her research focus to James Fletcher, the father in the photograph.
As a carpenter, James would have had skills that were in high demand in rapidly growing Durham, which meant he likely had more economic stability and independence than many black workers who were trapped in agricultural labor or employed directly by white-owned businesses with strict racial hierarchies.
Property records confirmed that James owned his home outright, a significant accomplishment for a black man in 1901, North Carolina.
The deed recorded in 1895 showed he had purchased the property for $320, a substantial sum that indicated years of savings and financial discipline.
The house was located on Pine Street in the Haiti neighborhood, Durham’s thriving black business and residential district.
Citybuilding permits revealed that James had worked on numerous construction projects throughout Durham, including contracts for commercial buildings, churches, and private homes.
His client list was diverse, including both black institutions like churches and schools and white owned businesses.
This suggested James had a reputation for quality work that transcended racial barriers, similar to his wife’s dressmaking business.
But taking in a white child was categorically different from conducting business across racial lines.
Helen found evidence of just how dangerous such an action could be in newspaper archives from surrounding counties.
An 1897 incident in Orange County, just 20 m away, had resulted in a black family being violently expelled from their home after they were accused of harboring a white child who turned out to be a neighbor’s child they were simply watching for an afternoon.
In 1899, a case in Wake County had resulted in criminal charges against a black woman who had taken in an orphaned white child whose mother had been her employer.
Despite documentation that the dying mother had requested this arrangement, the woman was charged with kidnapping, spent six months in jail, and the child was removed to an orphanage where, according to follow-up records, he died of disease within a year.
These incidents would have been well known in Durham’s black community, circulated through churches, newspapers, and word of mouth as cautionary tales, James and Ada Fletcher would have understood precisely what they were risking by taking Thomas Murray into their home.
The question remained, how had they justified that risk, and how had they managed to formalize an arrangement that protected both themselves and the boy? Helen found a possible answer in Durham’s city court records.
In November 1901, James Fletcher had filed a petition for legal guardianship of Thomas Murray, orphan child, age 9 years.
The petition was brief, stating that the child’s parents were deceased, that he had no other known relatives, and that he had been employed in hazardous occupation unsuitable for a child of tender years.
Most significantly, the petition included a supporting affidavit from Dr.
Robert Fitzgerald, a black physician who operated a practice in Durham and who was known for treating both black and white patients.
Dr.
Fitzgerald’s statement testified that he had examined Thomas Murray and found evidence of malnourishment, exhaustion, and injuries consistent with industrial labor, including rope burns on the wrists, and puncture wounds on the hands from textile machinery.
The guardianship petition had been approved by Judge William Gaston, a white judge known for a relatively progressive views on labor issues, though not on racial matters.
Helen now understood that the 1901 photograph was not simply a family portrait.
It was a legal and social document carefully constructed to serve multiple purposes.
In an era before extensive government documentation and standardized identification systems, photographs served as crucial evidence of family relationships, residential stability, and social respectability.
The formal studio setting, the family’s carefully coordinated clothing, the dignified postures, all of these elements communicated to viewers that this was a stable, respectable, god-fearing family.
The inclusion of Thomas Murray, positioned protectively between Ada’s knees, visually established him as a member of the family unit, not a servant or temporary ward.
But Ada’s hands concealing Thomas’s hands, served a dual purpose.
On one level, it was protective.
Hiding the physical evidence of abuse that could have prompted questions about how the boy had acquired such injuries while supposedly in the Fletcher family’s care.
Any visible scarring might have led authorities to suspect the Fletchers themselves of abuse rather than understanding they had rescued Thomas from those conditions.
On another level, the concealment may have been strategic in a different way.
If the photograph was intended to be shown to mill owners or their representatives as proof of Thomas’s new family situation, hiding the evidence of his injuries might have made it harder for them to reclaim him on the grounds that they needed to investigate how he had been harmed.
Helen found supporting evidence for this theory in a follow-up document from January 1902, a letter from the Imperial Cotton Mills manager to Judge Gaston objecting to the guardianship arrangement on the grounds that Thomas Murray owed the mill $47 in outstanding debts from his parents account and should be returned to work off this obligation.
Judge Gaston’s response preserved in the court file was tur.
The child is 9 years old and has been working in your mill since age 8 following the deaths of both parents.
The debt you site represents housing costs charged to a child who had no ability to negotiate or contest such charges.
Debt penage is illegal under North Carolina law.
The guardianship will stand and you will not approach the child or his guardians further.
This exchange revealed several crucial points.
The mill had indeed tried to reclaim Thomas.
The Fletchers had needed legal protection to maintain custody, and Judge Gaston had been willing to rule against a powerful textile manufacturer on a matter of principle.
Though Helen suspected his ruling might have been different if Thomas had been placed with a white family rather than a black one, as the racial dynamics would have been more politically charged.
The photograph then represented a moment of triumph and consolidation.
By early 1902, the legal situation was resolved and the Fletchers could publicly claim Thomas as their ward.
The photograph documented this new reality and created evidence that could be shown to skeptical neighbors, officials, or anyone who questioned the arrangement.
Helen finally reached out to Thomas Brennan, the great great grandson who had sent the photograph.
He answered on the second ring, his voice warm and curious.
Miss Morrison, I’ve been hoping you’d call.
Have you discovered anything about the photograph? Helen explained her research carefully, outlining what she had found about the Fletcher family, the mill records, and the evidence visible in the photograph itself.
There was a long silence on the other end of the line.
Finally, Thomas spoke, his voice thick with emotion.
I knew some of this story, but not the details.
My great-grandmother, Thomas Murray’s daughter, told us that her father had been saved by a black family when he was a child, that they had risked everything to protect him.
But she didn’t know all the specifics.
She just knew that her father always said he owed his life to the Fletchers, and that when he grew up, he took their name as his middle name, Thomas Fletcher Murray.
“Did your great-grandmother know anything about how Thomas came to live with the Fletchers?” Helen asked.
She said that her father never talked much about his time in the mill.
It was too traumatic.
But he told her that one day a black woman came to the mill to deliver mending for the manager’s wife.
She saw him collapse at his machine and she picked him up and carried him outside, telling the foreman that the boy needed immediate medical attention.
She took him to a black doctor who documented his injuries and contacted her husband.
Together, they decided they couldn’t send him back to that place.
Thomas paused.
My great-grandmother said her father told her, “Mrs.
Mrs.
Fletcher looked at me like I was her own child who had been hurt and she decided right then that I was going to be safe no matter what it cost them.
He said Mr.
Fletcher told him we already lost one baby.
We’re not going to watch another child die when we can prevent it.
Helen felt tears prick her eyes.
Your great-grandfather lived with the Fletchers until he was grown until he was 17.
By then he was working as an apprentice carpenter with Mr.
Fletcher.
In 1910 he married a woman named Sarah from the black community.
Yes.
He married a black woman, which was illegal in North Carolina at the time.
So, they went to Pennsylvania, where interracial marriage was legal.
They had four children, including my great-grandmother.
“So, your family is mixed race?” Helen asked.
“Yes, Thomas Murray fully integrated into the black community, partly because that’s where his family and loyalty lay, and partly because in that era, any white person who chose to marry across racial lines was essentially exiled from white society.
” Anyway, he and Sarah lived in Philadelphia, where the racial climate was slightly better than in the South, though still far from just.
Helen’s research took a new direction as she sought to understand how the Fletcher children, Samuel, Martha, and David, had experienced their parents’ decision to bring Thomas into their home.
She found fragments of their stories in various records, piecing together a picture of how this unconventional family unit had functioned.
Samuel Fletcher, the eldest, had become a teacher and had written several articles for black newspapers in the 1920s and 1930s about education and civil rights.
In a 1927 essay titled Lessons My Parents Taught Me, he briefly mentioned, “My mother and father showed me that family is not defined by blood alone, but by love and sacrifice.
They taught me that protecting the vulnerable is not optional, but obligatory, even when doing so brings risk to oneself.” Martha Fletcher had married and moved to Washington DC where she became involved in women’s suffrage activism.
Church records from her congregation in DC included a testimony she had given in 1915 about her upbringing.
I grew up in a household where my parents demonstrated daily that the principles of Christianity and justice transcend the artificial boundaries of race.
My brother Thomas was white, but he was my brother in every way that mattered.
David Fletcher, the youngest of the original three children, had remained in Durham and taken over his father’s carpentry business.
In a 1935 interview with the Durham Recorder, marking the business’s 40th anniversary, he stated, “My father taught me carpentry, but more importantly, he taught me courage.
When I was 6 years old, he and my mother brought a white boy into our home, knowing they could be arrested, or worse.
They did it because it was right, and they never regretted it.” These testimonies revealed that the Fletcher children had not only accepted Thomas but had embraced him as a sibling and that they had understood even as children the significance and danger of what their parents had done.
This suggested that James and Ada had been intentional about explaining their actions to their children and instilling in them the values that motivated such a decision.
Helen also found evidence that the expanded Fletcher family had maintained close relationships across generations.
A 1945 obituary for Ada Fletcher, who died at age 74, listed her survivors as three sons, Samuel, David, and Thomas, one daughter Martha, 14 grandchildren, and seven great-g grandandchildren.
Thomas was included without qualification or distinction from the other children.
Similarly, when James Fletcher died in 1952 at age 84, his obituary in the Durham Sun listed Thomas as one of his pawbears and noted that Mr.Fletcher was known for his integrity, his craftsmanship, and his unwavering commitment to family and justice.
These public acknowledgements were significant.
In an era when many interracial family relationships were kept hidden or minimized due to social stigma and legal restrictions, the Fletchers had consistently claimed Thomas as a full member of the family in legal documents, church records, obituaries, and family histories.
Three months after receiving the photograph, Helen organized a small exhibition at the North Carolina Museum of History titled Hidden in Plain Sight, a story of courage and family in 1901 Durham.
The centerpiece was the Fletcher family photograph displayed alongside the enhanced images showing Thomas’ concealed injuries, the mill records, the guardianship documents, and testimonies from descendants.
Thomas Brennan attended the exhibition opening, bringing with him more than 30 family members, descendants of all four of the Fletcher children, representing a family tree that was thoroughly multi-racial and that had spread across the country to Pennsylvania, New York, California, and back to North Carolina.
Standing before the photograph, Thomas addressed the small gathering of museum staff, historians, and family members.
This photograph was taken to protect a child and to establish the legitimacy of an unconventional family.
But it also documented something profound.
The willingness of ordinary people to risk everything for a principle, to extend their definition of family beyond the boundaries society tried to impose.
He gestured to the enhanced image, showing the rope burns on young Thomas Murray’s wrists.
My great-grandfather carried these scars for the rest of his life.
But he also carried something else.
The absolute certainty that he had been loved when he was most vulnerable, that he had been chosen and claimed by people who had no obligation to him except their own sense of what was right.
Helen spoke next, addressing the historical context.
In 1901, the Jim Crow system was calcifying across the South.
Segregation was becoming more rigid.
Racial violence was commonplace, and the boundaries between white and black communities were being enforced with increasing brutality.
In that context, what James and Ada Fletcher did was not just generous, it was revolutionary.
They refused to accept that a child should suffer simply because helping him crossed racial lines.
She pointed to Aida’s hands in the photograph, wrapped protectively around Thomas’s hands.
This gesture, which seemed so simple, contained multitudes.
It was protective, concealing evidence that could have endangered them all.
It was possessive, claiming this child as hers to protect.
And it was defiant, asserting that a black woman’s love and authority over a white child was legitimate, at a time when such a claim could have resulted in violence or death.
The exhibition remained open for 6 months and became one of the most visited in the museum’s history.
Teachers brought students to discuss themes of justice, family, and courage.
Descendants of other Durham textile workers came forward with their own family stories, many of which involved similar acts of cross-racial solidarity and protection that had been kept quiet for generations out of necessity and fear.
The photograph itself, that simple studio portrait from 1901, became something more than a historical artifact.
It became a teaching tool, a conversation starter, a piece of evidence that the past was more complicated and more inspiring than simplified narratives suggested.
It showed that even in the darkest periods of American racial history, individuals had made choices that defied the prevailing injustice, often at great personal risk.
Helen often stood in the exhibition hall during public hours, watching visitors examine the photograph, reading their reactions as they noticed the positioning of Ada’s hands, as they read about Thomas Murray’s injuries and the Fletcher family’s intervention.
She saw recognition in their faces, the understanding that heroism often looks like an ordinary family making an extraordinary choice, that love and justice sometimes require risks that cannot be calculated or guaranteed.
The photograph had hidden Thomas’ hands to protect him in 1901.
More than a century later, revealing what had been hidden allowed his story and the story of the Fletcher family who saved him to finally be fully known and honored.
