Overview:
The African American Museum in Dallas is hosting an immersive photographic exhibition, "People Who Make the World Go 'Round: The Legacy of Sepia Magazine," which showcases the publication's role as both a cultural mirror and political instrument. The exhibit features iconic figures such as Maya Angelou, Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali, Aretha Franklin, James Baldwin, Pam Grier, and Nina Simone. The magazine's focus on Southern Black life is highlighted, and the exhibition is organized into thematic sections, including Styling the People, Celebrity Portraiture, Global Politics, Feminism, and Breaking Barriers.
The newest exhibition at the African American Museum of Fair Park does not simply revisit Black history. It places visitors inside the rooms, movements, fashions, and flashpoints that shaped modern America.
People Who Make the World Go Round: The Legacy of Sepia Magazine, which debuted May 11 and runs through August 11, 2026, is an immersive photographic experience drawn from the museum’s vast archive of more than 40,000 images connected to the groundbreaking Black publication Sepia. Featuring iconic figures such as Maya Angelou, Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali, Aretha Franklin, James Baldwin, Pam Grier, and Nina Simone, the exhibit explores the publication’s role as both cultural mirror and political instrument.
The result is refreshingly candid. Through portraiture, editorial spreads, and archival magazines, Sepia reinforces a truth too often debated in contemporary America: Black history is American history.
The magazine that documented a nation
As Ebony and Jet were becoming household names, Sepia was also building a photographic archive of Black American life.
The publication traces its roots back to 1942, when Black clothing merchant Horace J. Blackwell launched The World’s Messenger, later renamed Bronze Thrills, in Fort Worth. This true Confessions- type magazine was written in a relatable tone and style for working-class southern Black families.
By 1946, the publication evolved into Negro Achievements, a photojournalism-centered magazine dedicated to documenting Black success stories. Following Blackwell’s death, Fort Worth plumbing merchant George Levitan purchased the publication and renamed it Sepia in 1950.
Unlike many northern Black publications of the era, Sepia focused heavily on Southern Black life. Fitting, seeing as the publication was based in Dallas’s sister city to the West.
Curator Lakeem Wilson explained that distinction was central to the exhibition’s storytelling.
“Ebony and Jet were more focused on the North and Chicago,” Wilson said. “Sepia magazine brought those narratives to the southern sector of society or America.”
That regional perspective gives the exhibition its emotional weight. Visitors are not only seeing celebrities. They are seeing Black America document itself in real time.
A gallery curated like a vinyl record
Wilson approached the exhibit with the sensibility of a music archivist.
“I came across a great collection of vinyls, and I saw how they put attention into the covers, the track list, and just told the story through music,” Wilson said. “These reminded me of vinyl album covers, just in photograph form.”
That influence is immediately visible throughout the exhibit’s layout. Rather than presenting photographs chronologically, Wilson organizes the collection into thematic “tracks” or visual movements:
- Styling the People
- Celebrity Portraiture
- Global Politics
- Feminism
- Breaking Barriers
Each section creates its own emotional cadence.
Downstairs, visitors encounter glamorous fashion photography, candid celebrity moments, and politically charged editorial spreads. Upstairs, the tone becomes more reflective, centering activism, Black womanhood, and institutional breakthroughs.
The arrangement transforms the museum into something resembling a family archive crossed with a political newsroom.
More than celebrity photography
Though the exhibit features no shortage of legendary faces, its greatest strength lies in its quieter editorial moments.
A photograph of Ella Fitzgerald laughing alongside Marilyn Monroe captures an intimacy absent from mainstream depictions of Black celebrity during the mid-20th century. Elsewhere, visitors encounter articles discussing voting rights, Pan-Africanism, Vietnam, and global solidarity movements.
One featured line bluntly declares: “The Black Vote Is Yet to Earn Respect.”
Another issue’s headline tells readers: “How You Can Help the Third World.”
Even decades later, the themes feel painfully current.
“The photographs show you the thread that’s woven in the fabric of America,” said museum president and CEO Lisa Brown Ross. “This is not Black history. This is American history.”
Ross described the exhibition as particularly timely ahead of the museum’s upcoming Nelson Mandela exhibition and the international spotlight expected during FIFA events in Dallas.
“We’re going to have 30,000 people come through Fair Park,” Ross said. “So this will be a global opportunity, global exposure for the African American Museum.”
The politics of style and visibility
One of the exhibit’s strongest sections, Styling the People, examines Black fashion not merely as aesthetics but as cultural assertion.
Sepia’s photography of Black models, entertainers, and designers challenged white Eurocentric beauty standards long before “representation” became a mainstream conversation. The magazine framed Blackness as aspirational, stylish, intellectual, and modern.
The photographs still carry that power.
Pam Grier’s portraiture radiates command. Nina Simone’s gaze feels confrontational and elegant all at once. Images of Black families, churchgoers, musicians, and activists collectively form an alternative American visual canon.
Ross recalled seeing magazines like Sepia displayed in Black households growing up.
“I remember these magazines on our coffee table,” she said. “The coffee table in the room you couldn’t go in with the plastic on the couch.”
That memory echoes throughout the exhibit itself. Walking through the gallery feels like stepping into a grandparent’s living room where history sat quietly between family albums and Sunday conversations.
Breaking barriers in plain sight
Upstairs, the Breaking Barriers section shifts from glamour toward confrontation and achievement.
Here, segregation-era America collides with Black excellence. Portraits of athletes, actors, activists, and political figures demonstrate how Black Americans entered spaces historically closed to them while simultaneously reshaping those institutions.
“This is not Black history. This is American history.”
African american Museum president and CEO Lisa Brown Ross
One particularly striking image features Louis Armstrong performing at the State Fair of Texas before a predominantly Black audience during the Jim Crow era. The photograph quietly references the complicated legacy of “Negro Achievement Day,” once the only day Black Texans were permitted to fully attend the fair.
The image functions as both celebration and indictment.
That duality defines much of Sepia’s legacy. Its pages embraced glamour and aspiration without ignoring the racial realities surrounding its readers.
An archive still speaking
Only 80 photographs and artifacts from the museum’s archive are currently on display, but the scope feels immense.
“Every one of these photographs is a story,” Brown drove home.
The museum is currently digitizing the entire collection through grant funding, preserving an archive that remains essential not only to Black history but to American cultural history at large.
For Dallas audiences, the exhibit carries another layer of significance. Sepia was born in Fort Worth. Its stories emerged from Texas soil.
And now, decades later, those images return home.