Russell Lee, "Home of resident of Mound Bayou, Mississippi. All-Negro town" (1939)

A house, and the federal government’s own phrase for the town it stands in.

Rights verified 2026-07-31 against the LOC JSON API. Public domain, FSA/OWI Black-and-White Negatives, free to use and reuse. Credit line as recorded on the item.

The caption is the evidence here, not just the label. The title is the government’s own, written by or for the FSA in 1939: “Home of resident of Mound Bayou, Mississippi. All-Negro town.” The phrase All-Negro town is how the federal record classified the place. Mound Bayou was not described as a town; it was described as a kind of town, and the kind was the point.

That is a naming operation of exactly the sort this archive documents, and unusually it runs the other way. NAMING MACHINE recorded a word that erased a neighborhood’s name. Here the classification attaches to a town whose existence was the achievement, and the federal caption still cannot say town without qualifying it.

⚠️ Period term. Negro is the document’s language and appears in the title as filed. Reproduce it in citation, never adopt it in our own prose. This is the same discipline UNNECESSARY applies to the flat unaccented Santeria: keep the record’s word in the record, and let the flattening be the subject.