For this episode, I’m speaking with Dr. Robert Cochran. Professor in the Department of English here at the University of Arkansas. His research and teaching interests include American Studies, American Literature, Folklore, and contemporary literature, and he has numerous publications and awards to his name, including a 1989 Guggenheim Fellowship. We speak about Cochran’s book, A Photographer of Note: Arkansas Artist Geleve Grice, and many memories of Mr. Grice during the making of the book, photographs, and his legacy.
Geleve Grice was born on January 16, 1922, in Tamo, a small farming town located fifteen miles from Pine Bluff. At thirteen, Grice moved with his parents, Toy and Lillie, to Little Rock, where he graduated from Dunbar High School in 1942. An accomplished sportsman, Grice made the all-state football team his senior year of high school and later played for a service team during his four-year stint in the Navy. Grice entered the U.S. Navy immediately after graduation in the heat of World War II, eventually serving in the Pacific, where he guarded Japanese prisoners.
Grice began his photography career as a high school senior. L. C. and Daisy Bates, publishers of the Arkansas State Press newspaper, encouraged his journalistic interests by creating a column that featured his images and writings about fellow Dunbar classmates. While in the Navy, Grice was stationed at Great Lakes Naval Air Station in Illinois and went to Chicago on leave, where he took photos of the city’s nightlife, capturing unique images of famous black Americans like Joe Louis, Louis Armstrong, and famed guitarist T-Bone Walker.
After completing his military service on April 23, 1946, Grice enrolled at Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical, and Normal College (AM&N College), later to be known as UAPB, the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff where he majored in psychology. He also played football for the Golden Lions, served as yearbook photographer, and was eventually hired in 1947 as the campus photographer. In September 1949, Grice married his college sweetheart, Jean Bell of North Little Rock, a singer who became the first black graduate student in the music department of the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. They had one son, Michael.
When he graduated in 1950, Grice had already opened the professional photography studio to earn his living for the next forty years. He frequently worked outside the studio for the Arkansas State Press and various local television stations. Grice’s photos also appeared in such national publications as Ebony, Jet, and Life magazines.
One of the highlights of Grice’s career came while still a college student in 1948, when he was asked to document the integration of the University of Arkansas Law School in Fayetteville. As a result, Silas Hunt, accompanied by attorneys Wiley Branton and Harold Flowers, became the first black student to enroll at an all-white Southern university since Reconstruction.
In 1958, Grice photographed Martin Luther King Jr.’s commencement address at AM&N College. Because Grice was often called upon to chronicle significant happenings in the black community, his collection includes images of other notable black Americans, such as Mary McLeod Bethune, Ray Charles, Thurgood Marshall, and Muhammad Ali.
In 1998, the UAPB art department sponsored an exhibit of his work, Those Who Dare to Dream: The Works of Arkansas Photographer Geleve Grice. The Old State House Museum in Little Rock followed in 2003 with a more extensive exhibition of his work, A Photographer of Note: Arkansas Artist Geleve Grice. In 2003, the University of Arkansas Press published a book of the same title by Robert Cochran, featuring many of Grice’s most captivating photos.
Grice died on August 17, 2004.
https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/geleve-grice-1161/
https://digitalcollections.uark.edu/digital/collection/Civilrights/id/157
https://news.uark.edu/articles/9559/diane-blair-and-geleve-grice-papers-donated-to-mullins
https://arkansasresearch.uark.edu/a-photographer-of-note-arkansas-artist-geleve-grice/
https://fulbright.uark.edu/departments/english/directory/index/uid/rcochran/name/Robert-Cochran/
https://youtu.be/bUqlnPFeFew