Allen E. Cole

Allen E. Cole was born on the first of September 1883 in Kearneysville, West Virginia, a son of Allen and Sara Cole. Educated at Storer College in Harpers Ferry, from which he graduated in 1905, he carried the discipline of that schooling into a working life that began far from the darkroom — as a waiter, a railroad porter, and a cook — before his path turned toward the craft that would define him.

Cole settled in Cleveland, Ohio, where, while employed as a waiter at the Cleveland Athletic Club, he was drawn to photography through his acquaintance with Joseph Opet of the Frank Moore Studios. He apprenticed and assisted for some six years, and in 1922 he opened a studio in his own home. From that modest beginning he became the foremost portraitist of Black Cleveland, enlarging his premises over the years and, through the lean seasons of the Depression, taking commercial and commission work while his images appeared in the Cleveland Call & Post.

Across the 1920s through the 1960s, Cole documented the religious, social, and civic life of the city's African American community — its families, its churches, its clubs, and its public figures, among them Judge Perry B. Jackson, Ohio's first African American judge. His enterprise ran under the motto "Somebody, Somewhere, Wants Your Photograph," and by his life's end he had produced more than twenty-seven thousand negatives.

He was, moreover, a builder of institutions: a founder and treasurer of the Progressive Business League, an officer of the Dunbar Life Insurance Company, a member of St. James A.M.E. Church, and long the only Black member of the Cleveland Society of Professional Photographers. Allen E. Cole died on the sixth of February 1970. In the tens of thousands of faces he preserved with dignity, an entire community endures — honored, remembered, and seen.