Call Number:

C1689

Repository:

Princeton University Library: Manuscripts Division

Extent:

• 49 linear feet
• 24 boxes

Language:

English

Date:

circa 1955-2005 (inclusive) and 1970s-2005 (bulk)

Creator:

Broadway, Romus, 1939-2020

Form:

Collages (visual works) -- 20th century, Color negatives -- 20th century, photographs -- 20th century., and Slides (photographs) -- 20th century

Abstract:

Consists of 90 photograph collage boards, 30,000 photographic negatives, 760 color slides, and several hundred loose photographic prints, comprising Romus Broadway's body of work documenting the history of the Black community in the Witherspoon-Jackson neighborhood of Princeton, New Jersey, from the late 1950s through the early 2000s.

Romus Broadway was an African American photographic and social historian who documented the Black community living in the Witherspoon-Jackson neighborhood of Princeton, New Jersey, from the mid-20th through early 21st century. Broadway was born in 1939 in Belle Mead, New Jersey, to Jossie and John Broadway. His family relocated to a home on Birch Avenue in Princeton's Witherspoon-Jackson neighborhood in 1942. Like many other African American, Italian American, and Irish American residents of the neighborhood, Broadway's parents worked in the food service industry, his mother at Princeton University and his father at the Lawrenceville School. Broadway attended the Witherspoon Street School for Colored Children, Valley Road School, and Princeton High School, where he graduated in 1956. After high school, he joined the United States Air Force and later worked for American Airlines until 1969. In the 1970s, he attended college in Massachusetts and began making collages from his photographs. Following graduation, Broadway returned to Princeton and began researching his family's history, as well as regularly photographing and chronicling people and events in the Witherspoon-Jackson neighborhood and displaying his collages in the community. Broadway spoke regularly as a local history expert at Princeton churches and community centers up until his death in 2020.

Consists of 90 photograph collage boards, 30,000 photographic negatives, 760 color slides, and several hundred loose photographic prints, comprising Romus Broadway's body of work documenting the history of the Black community in the Witherspoon-Jackson neighborhood of Princeton, New Jersey, from the late 1950s through the early 2000s.

Broadway began practicing photography in the mid-1950s and collaging in the late 1970s. As a lifelong resident of Witherspoon-Jackson, he became the neighborhood's local photographic historian from his home on Birch Avenue. Broadway's images document the neighborhood's residents going about their daily lives and include candid and posed shots taken of community members at family gatherings, parties, social halls, churches, school dances, weddings, sports games, and other social events, as well as socializing on the neighborhood streets. As Broadway described the impetus behind his work in a 2016 article by Lea Kahn, "The reason I started doing it is because the only pictures that many children had was the school picture. I wanted to catch them in their setting, with their friends, so they could see themselves."

Broadway's collages often combine dozens of individual portraits, and many are arranged thematically or commemorate specific events. Some also combine his own photographs with historic photographs and clippings found in yearbooks and newspapers. Broadway displayed these collages widely throughout the neighborhood at various community programs, church services, schools, and family reunions. This collection includes Broadway's completed collages, as well as negatives, photographic prints, and slides he used as their source material.

Broadway's collection provides a social history of the neighborhood's working-class African American, Italian American, and Irish American communities whose labor built and sustained Princeton University and the surrounding town throughout the 20th century. Broadway also documented Black students and alumni at Princeton University, who are also represented in several of the collages.

For Broadway's own description of his collection, researchers may refer to the following video interviews: "Romus Broadway: In His Own Words" and "Romus Broadway at the Arts Council of Princeton".

Materials remain in the groupings in which they were received, which is mostly by format. The negatives follow a numerical (and largely chronological) organizational scheme implemented by Romus Broadway.