Rufus Cornelius Hickman
Mineola, Wood County, Texas
Marker Inscription
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. .
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Rufus Cornelius Hickman was born in Mineola in 1918 and learned photography while serving as an Army photographer in the Pacific during World War II. Settling in Dallas, he spent decades documenting African American life under Jim Crow and the unfolding Civil Rights Movement — from the NAACP Youth Council's 1955 protest of the segregated State Fair to the violent 1956 resistance to desegregation in Mansfield. His images recorded both the everyday humanity and the hard struggles of Black Texans.
Why it matters
Hickman's camera preserved a Black view of segregation and civil rights in Texas that the mainstream press often ignored, making him an essential witness to the era.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Rufus Cornelius Hickman was born in Mineola in 1918, into a Texas — and a nation — governed by Jim Crow. Segregation was not merely custom; it was law, dividing schools, restaurants, theaters, and public life into separate and profoundly unequal halves. For a Black child in East Texas, the boundaries of daily life were drawn early and enforced hard.
Yet within those boundaries, African American communities built rich worlds of their own. This very site was one of them: Hickman's mother, Cora Hickman, ran a popular Black social spot here called the Bar 20 through much of the twentieth century — a gathering place, a business, a piece of community life that existed because segregation forced Black Texans to make their own spaces and thrive inside them.
Hickman came of age just as the country entered the Second World War and, soon after it, the long struggle that would become the modern Civil Rights Movement. His life bridges those two eras: the war that pulled a generation of Black Americans into national service, and the postwar decades when many of them came home determined that things would change.
People & events
Hickman's path ran from Mineola outward and back into history. He attended Tillotson College — later Huston-Tillotson University — and in 1942 enlisted in the Army. Stationed on Saipan, in the Pacific, he learned photography and served as an Army photographer, discovering the craft that would define the rest of his life.
After the war he used the G.I. Bill to enroll in the Southwest School of Photography and Mortuary Science, then turned professional, working for newspapers including The Dallas Express and the Kansas City Call before beginning his career in earnest with the Dallas Star-Post. Between 1945 and 1970 he trained his camera on African American life across the Dallas–Fort Worth area — the ordinary days and the extraordinary moments alike.
He was there for the turning points. He photographed the NAACP Youth Council's 1955 protest of the segregated Texas State Fair. After the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision struck down segregated schools, the NAACP enlisted him to document the stark inequalities between white and Black schools in Texas. In 1956 he captured the failed desegregation of the Mansfield schools — and even as white Texans tried to harm him, he managed to photograph effigies of Black students strung up in mock lynchings. He did not look away, and he made sure the record could not either.
Its place in the American story
For much of the twentieth century, the mainstream press told the American story through white eyes. Black life — its dignity, its grief, its triumphs — was often invisible in those pages, or shown only as caricature. Photographers like Hickman filled that void. Working for the Black press and for the NAACP, he built an archive of a world that the dominant media largely ignored.
That work sits at the heart of the national civil rights story. The movement's victories were won in courtrooms and streets, but they were also won in the mind's eye of the public — and photographs were the evidence. An image of children in a broken-down Black school beside a gleaming white one made the abstract word inequality impossible to deny. An image of effigies hanging in a town that had refused to integrate showed the country exactly what desegregation was up against.
Hickman's decades of images did something even larger than document injustice. By recording everyday Black life alongside the crises, he insisted on the full humanity of his subjects — not victims or symbols, but neighbors, workers, families, citizens. That is the deeper national significance: a Texan who made sure the American record was more complete, and more honest, than it would otherwise have been.
If you visit
Stand here and remember what this ground was before it was a memorial: the site of Cora Hickman's Bar 20, a lively Black social spot in Mineola. This is where Hickman came from — not the Dallas newsrooms where he made his name, but a mother's business in a small East Texas town. The marker deliberately roots the great photographer in his home place.
So let the visit be about beginnings. The images Hickman is remembered for were made a couple of hours away in the Dallas–Fort Worth area, but the eye that made them was formed in a community like this one. Reading his story on the very spot where his family built a gathering place gives it a rare intimacy.
If you are traveling with an interest in civil rights history, treat this as a starting point rather than a museum. From here you can carry Hickman's story toward the larger Texas landscape he documented — the fairgrounds, the schools, the towns like Mansfield where the fight over integration turned ugly. Bring your curiosity; the marker gives you the outline of a remarkable life, and the rest of the state fills it in.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
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