G. Dwoyid Olmstead: 1940s Black Portraits in Pittsburgh and Los Angeles

February 24, 2026

G. (Gilbert) Dwoyid Olmstead was a Black photographer born in 1914 in Steubenville, Ohio who lived and worked in Pittsburgh and later in Los Angeles. Olmstead started as a self-taught industrial photographer, and his most significant works in Pittsburgh were documenting the Hill District’s urban Black community and his wide-ranging assignments for the Pittsburgh Courier, a popular African American weekly newspaper from 1907 to 1966. After moving to Los Angeles in the late 1940s, he studied photography at Fred Archer and Ansel Adam’s Art Center. He worked for the Los Angeles Sentinel and Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Olmstead’s collection contains mostly 4x5 and 120mm negatives and documents several notable Black individuals during changing times from World War II to the verge of the civil rights movement.

Photographed in 1944, New York-born Lena Horne, of multiracial descent, had recently signed a trailblazing multi-year contract with MGM Studios and would go on to become a famous singer, actor, and dancer. However, she was also a lifelong staunch advocate for civil rights who participated in the 1963 March on Washington, was a decades-long NAACP member, and demanded integrated audiences during her 1940s USO Tour. Olmstead captured Horne while likely participating in charitable work at a church with Lem Googins.

Cecil Poole received a JD from Harvard Law School in 1939. Admitted to the Pennsylvania State Bar, he pursued private practice in Pittsburgh. He was briefly a member of the National Labor Relations Board in Washignton D.C., but ultimately served in the US army until 1945. After the war, he picked up his law career in Northern California, where he climbed up the ranks with  appointments in 1961 as U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California (the first Black U.S. Attorney in the continental U.S.), in 1976 as the first Black Federal Judge in Northern California, and in 1979 as the Judge to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (later becoming Senior Judge). As U.S. Attorney, his time coincided with the high-profile protests against the Vietnam War in the Bay Area. Olmstead photographed Poole in a military uniform sitting with his siblings and parents.

The Urban League is a historic civil rights and urban advocacy organization founded in New York in 1910, with the Pittsburgh chapter founded in 1918. Olmstead photographed the Pittsburgh Urban League in the early 1940s. Edwin “Bill” Berry came to Pittsburgh after graduating from college and acted as the chapter’s Group Work Secretary. Berry later acted as Executive Director for the Portland chapter in the late 1940s and Executive Director for Chicago starting in 1955.

Born in Philadelphia in 1895, P. L. (Percival Leroy) Prattis was a famous journalist and editor. Initially based in Chicago, he was the city editor for the Chicago Defender and then the Associated Negro Press in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1936, he started working for the Pittsburgh Courier and eventually became editor in the late 1950s. Olmstead included for the negative’s description, “1st Black White House Correspondent,” possibly referring to his committee-appointed membership in 1947 to the Senate and House press galleries as the first African American journalist to receive that permission. Olmstead photographed Prattis in suit and tie, possibly at the Pittsburgh Courier where they both worked.

One of Olmstead’s most documented assignments in the collection is S. P. (Simon Peter) Johnson at his personal residence at 3700 Adams St. in West Adams, Los Angeles. S. P. Johnson was co-director of the Black funeral home Connor Johnson, founded in 1918 and located at 1400 E. 17th St. and later 4700 S. Avalon Blvd. Black funeral homes proliferated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, after Black Civil War soldiers were tasked with burying deceased soldiers, and because white funeral home directors refused services to local Black communities. Johnson was an active business and community leader, acting as superintendent of the Second Baptist Sunday School, an officer of Broadway Federal Savings and Loan, a director of Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Co., and a member of Phi Beta Sigma fraternity and 28th Street Branch YMCA.

Many other significant business, community, political, and cultural leaders can be found in other Bradley Center photographers’ collections who were contemporaries of Olmstead, including Charles Williams, Harry Adams, and Bob Douglas.

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Post tagged as: bradley center, photographs, los angeles, united states