An Illinois archivist digitizing a routine family photograph at Chicago’s Dusable Museum of African-American History made a discovery that had been hidden in plain sight for 92 years. Dr. Marcus Webb was cataloging a 1932 portrait of the Harris family when a high-resolution scan revealed something impossible in the reflection of an ornate mirror hanging behind the subjects: the family’s patriarch, James Harris, standing calmly for the camera, had his hands bound behind his back. The October 2024 discovery launched an investigation that unearthed a buried story of police corruption, murder, and a family driven into permanent exile.
Working with his colleague, historian Dr. Patricia Foster, Webb traced the photograph to May 1932, a period of intense volatility for Black residents of Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood. The handwritten note on the back of the photograph dated it to May of that year, a time when restrictive housing covenants, police brutality, and violent intimidation were commonplace. Census records identified the family as James Harris, a 34-year-old porter; his wife Ruth, a domestic worker; and their three children.
The portrait had been taken by Elijah Morrison, one of the few Black photographers working on 47th Street, at the family’s home at 3247 South State Street. Newspaper archives from the era showed the area had recently been shaken by violence. In April 1932, Samuel Green, a Black merchant who owned his building four doors from the Harris home, had been brutally beaten in his store. Witnesses reported seeing two white men fleeing the scene.
The case became even more significant when researchers found that Green had died from his injuries on May 2, 1932, just days before the photograph was taken. Police made no arrests. The investigation yielded another crucial clue: a church ledger recorded a farewell gathering for the Harris family on May 15, 1932, only two weeks after Green’s death, noting they were departing for Detroit. The family abandoned their home and vanished from all Chicago records.
Further digging uncovered evidence that the officers who failed to investigate Green’s murder may have been involved in it. Property records showed that in June 1932, Green’s building was sold to the Southside Development Corporation, a front company owned by three Chicago police officers and a city alderman. Researchers concluded that James Harris had likely witnessed the murder and that police, desperate to control a liability, terrorized his family and forced them out of the city. The key to the entire story lay in the photographer’s actions.
Morrison, who arrived at the home on May 12, 1932, for the scheduled portrait, immediately noticed two police vehicles parked outside and officers inside. He observed that James Harris’s hands were bound, though positioned to hide this from direct view. Ruth Harris, the family matriarch, asked Morrison to proceed with the photograph exactly as planned, an emphasis that he understood as a deliberate signal. Morrison then positioned the living room mirror to capture the father’s bound hands in the reflection, creating a covert piece of evidence while making the portrait look like a normal family image to the officers watching.
After the session, police came to Morrison’s studio demanding the negative. He claimed he had destroyed it. Instead, he kept it, along with a journal entry documenting what he had witnessed, writing that it might serve as evidence someday. Tracing the family after their departure revealed a long and painful aftermath.
Church records confirmed they arrived in Detroit in June 1932, but they did not live openly. By 1935, the family had begun using Ruth’s maiden name, Coleman. Even hundreds of miles away, they remained so afraid of being tracked down that they changed their names. James Harris wrote to a friend in Chicago in 1935 asking if it was safe to return; the reply warned that police were still asking about them and making threats.
They never returned. The researchers eventually located Daniel Coleman, the grandson of James Harris, living in rural Wisconsin. Daniel revealed that he had grown up with the story, having been told by his father, Robert, that James had witnessed two police officers beating Samuel Green to death over a property dispute. When James attempted to report the crime, police came for his family instead, binding his hands and forcing the family to pose for the portrait as a thinly veiled threat.
During that session, Daniel’s father remembered his mother squeezing his shoulder so hard it hurt, silently commanding him to stay calm. James Harris’s personal journal, kept under his assumed name, documented a life of exile and guilt. An entry from 1945 reflected on his son’s return from service in World War II, lamenting the irony that his son had fought to defend a system that had terrorized his own family. James died in Detroit in 1955 at age 57, of a heart attack, carrying the burden of a murder he witnessed but could never report without endangering his family.
Ruth lived until 1971. Members of the Harris family remained scattered across Detroit, Cleveland, Wisconsin, and California, but all carried a sense of unexplained fear connected to Chicago. None had ever known the full story. At a press conference held at the museum in December 2024, the first time any Harris descendant had returned to Chicago in 92 years, the family’s history was publicly presented.
The evidence included the photograph with its mirror revelation, Morrison’s journal and business records, James Harris’s personal journal, property records tying police officers to the property theft, and correspondence referencing the plan to displace the family. The Chicago Police Department, responding to public pressure, officially reopened Samuel Green’s murder as a cold case and issued a formal apology to the Harris family, acknowledging the corruption that pervaded the force during that era. Three officers identified as part of the front company, Frank Walsh, Thomas Brennan, and Joseph Kelly, were publicly named. One had risen to police captain before retiring with honors, another became a precinct commander, and the third left the force under unclear circumstances.
A historical marker was installed at the site of Green’s store, noting his murder and documenting that his death went unprosecuted due to police corruption. The Dusable Museum opened an exhibition titled “Hidden in Plain Sight,” focusing on the photograph and the broader patterns of police corruption and violence against Black families in 1930s Chicago. The exhibition drew thousands of visitors and later traveled to Detroit, Cleveland, and Wisconsin. A new field of historical inquiry emerged from the case, with academics examining old photographs using modern technology to reveal suppressed truths.
Descendants of the Harris family, brought together by the investigation, held their first family reunion in Chicago, with more than 50 relatives attending from across the country. They established the James Harris Scholarship for students studying history, photography, or journalism, aimed at uncovering hidden truths. Reflecting on the discovery, Webb said the photograph had waited 92 years to reveal its secret, and he resolved to keep looking for other truths still hiding in plain sight.