Rescued photo album is a trove of World War II African-American life

PHILADELPHIA — Just before Christmas, Deveta Johnson saw something in the trash in Norristown, Pa., that looked like an old pile of grocery bags.

She looked closer and found a tattered photo album with hundreds of World War II-era snapshots of African-Americans, in wartime Europe and going about their daily lives in rowhouse Philadelphia.

"Wait a minute," mused Johnson, who had listened to her grandfather's countless war stories. "This shouldn't be in the trash."

Her decision to take the album home and show it to her mother, Valoree Nelson, has preserved for posterity what might have been lost to a landfill. In mid-January, Nelson turned the album over to the Historical Society of Montgomery County, Pa.

"I walked there in the rain with my grandson," said Nelson, a retiree from Norristown.

Experts on historic collections who have seen the photos called the album a rare find and remarkable portrait of African-American life in the mid-20th century.

"African-American history has been for so many years neglected," said Jeffrey R. McGranahan, the historical society's collections manager. "You really get the sense that these were real people who went places and had family gatherings."

The snapshots so intrigued McGranahan that he began searching for clues to the identity of the tall man who seems to be the thread that holds the album together.

The man appears in khaki uniform mostly in wartime France, surveying rubble, standing outside cathedrals, and climbing atop downed Nazi airplanes as though they were souvenirs. In one photo taken on VE-Day, he's in Paris with his G.I. buddies near lines of smiling women.

Museum experts believe the man was likely a first sergeant with the 389th Engineer General Service Regiment, Company E. They know that because the man and two G.I.s are posed with a telltale U.S. Army sign.

The 389th Regiment, a racially segregated unit, landed in England in December 1943 and went to France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany before departing from France in August 1945. It was deactivated that November, according to military records.

The 389th began as a battalion. When reformed as a regiment in 1943, it supplied skilled labor to build hospitals, camps, roads, bridges, and railways. It also laid pipelines for water and gasoline.