Saluting Philadelphia Photo-Journalist Extraordinaire Phyllis Sims

by Thera Martin

We are celebrating outstanding women throughout Women's History Month, which is this month of March. This week, we're shining the spotlight on Phyllis Sims, photographer extraordinaire.

Whenever I think about Phyllis Sims, I can see her in my mind, and she always has a photography camera in her hands. She's a short little lady with a bright, positive attitude, and she is a consummate professional. Phyllis Sims couldn't help but be professional in her demeanor and in every way because her mother instilled in her everything she needed to meet with success.

Sims says, “prior to taking on photography as a fulltime career, I worked for my mother for many years, in her public relations firm, Juanita Sims and Company, located in Center City. For a Black person to own a business in Center City back in the 50s and 60s, that was a big deal. I also worked for a number of years for Dr. Keith Anderson, a well-known African American Dentist who was located in the Germantown area of Philadelphia. He was also the Director of Surgery for Temple University School of Dentistry. While working for Dr. Anderson, I juggled my budding photography career.

“I really started taking photos while working for my mother is when. I just didn’t realize back then that it was going to turn into a career for me. The first photograph I took of famous people, I was working for my mom. We were at Chicken-Bone Beach in Atlantic City, and I was asked to snap some shots of Carmen McCrae and Sara Vaughn with the little brownie camera. Vera Gunn and my mother were good friends, and she had been observing my photography work for a little while. When my mother passed, Vera Gunn really took me under her wing, and she encouraged me to pursue photography, telling me I had a “good eye.” She’s the one who put it in my head to check in with the Editor of the Philadelphia Tribune to see if they could use my services. I did, and the Editor at the Tribune at that time was pleased with my work. Lynn Washington was one of the editors I worked with at the Tribune.”

According to Sims, Sonny Driver (the founder and first owner of the SCOOP Newspaper) had her working in the SCOOP office when she was fifteen. “The SCOOP office used to be located right around the corner from my mother’s public relations business in Center City,” said Sims. 'One of the most exciting PR campaigns I worked on with my mother was the first time Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to Philadelphia for an event. At that time, Martin King was still a student, working on earning his doctorate from Crozer-Chester Theological Seminary, in Chester, Pennsylvania, and to tell you the truth, at that time in history, a lot of ministers, not just in Philadelphia, weren't really feeling Rev. King. They were acting a little jealous of him--if you want my opinion. My mother had two partners working with her on the PR for the King visit. Her PR partners were from Washington, D.C., Al Fisher and Al Lockhart. Fisher and Lockhart handled all the official PR for Rev. King and Mrs. Coretta Scott King for years. They connected with my mother because they knew that having a local PR person in the mix would be a good thing. Rev. King was doing a book signing to promote his book, “Strive Towards Freedom,” about the Montgomery Boycott.“ Phyllis Sims recalls that things were definitely pretty tense back in the early 1960s. Everybody was trying to get what they could get and do what they could do to assist in the movement. The movement was trying to integrate and desegregate whatever we could. She stated, “I remember Vera Gunn became president of another group, The National Association of Market Developers. My mother was one of the founding members. They would meet once a month. It included all the top executives for the corporate companies. Their purpose was to try and integrate other companies that were not hiring people of color with talented, African American executives who were qualified.

If the targeted companies wouldn’t comply, the National Association of Market Developers would show the statistics of how much money Blacks spent with their companies. If that didn’t work, certain companies got boycotted.

I actually became the first African American female photojournalist in Pennsylvania. Along with the photographs I would take, I wrote the stories that went along with the pictures. Initially, I would submit photographs and articles to the Philadelphia Tribune, then also to the New Observer, which eventually went out of business. I would submit photographs to the SCOOP and the Philadelphia Sunday Sun since that paper has been in existence. There were also national and international magazines that welcomed my work, some of which Philadelphia people might not be familiar with. Aside from some of the famous people I got to photograph through working for my mother’s PR firm and working for the Philadelphia Tribune and some of the other papers, I was also very proud of the photography work I got to do, as the official photographer for the late Samuel Evans, Founder of the Family of Leaders. He and his business partner Ethel Barnett, kept me busy, documenting many special events they sponsored through pictures.

Phyllis Sims acknowledges how much photography has changed over the years, and she commented, “Actually, I’m very happy with the way photography is now. It is amazing how we can now have an interactive digital experience with photography. I love the fact that now I can take a photograph and turn around and send it to a newspaper or some other publication in two seconds flat, right then and there. I was so happy when cell phone manufacturers came out with a decent camera/phone.”

Sims added a bit of advice as she closed out on her interview. “I would tell up and coming photographers and photo-journalists, whether your “subject” is a superstar, or a neighborhood block captain, treat everyone with dignity, don’t stare at them like you’ve lost your mind, and once you get the photo shot(s) you need, get out of the way. Don’t try to stay up in someone’s face, just because they’re a famous entertainer, sports figure, or elected official. The other thing is this: Whenever I would be invited to a private party where celebrities were going to be, I never would write anything negative about any of them, even if I did witness them misbehaving. In my five-hundred articles that are now included at the Dr. Charles Blockson Collection on the campus of Temple University, there is not one negative story that anyone can find that I wrote about anyone. My mother was my number one teacher. Before she opened her PR firm, she used to write for the Philadelphia Tribune. Years later, when she moved to the Bahamas, she had her own column with the Bahamian Times.

See “Women’s History Feature” page 10

theramartin10@gmail.com

Phyllis Sims, Pennsylvania’s first African American woman photo-journalist

Continued from page 7

Phyllis Sims shared one other thing with me that made me sit up in my seat. She talked about the Tri-State Media Coalition, which she founded in 1994. 'It was an off-shoot of the National Black Media Coalition in Washington, D.C. headed by Plurial Marshall. Sonny Hopson and Gus Lacy were instrumental in helping me to start a Philadelphia chapter. We helped all the African Americans who were working for radio and TV back then to keep their jobs. Pretty Much, all the local TV stations for example, back then, were lying to the Federal Communications Commission, (FCC). The FCC trained me to be a watchdog for them here in Philadelphia. When I would do visits to all of the TV stations and demand to look at their FCC reports, I discovered that all of them were lying on their EOO reports. They were saying they had X number of Blacks working at their station and didn't. Managers who filled out the EOO reports at the TV stations back then (in the mid-1990s) were putting down secretaries' names and janitors’ names as if they worked in the newsroom. Once we started challenging the television station licenses, of course, that's when they started straightening up. Now when you turn on the local TV news, you see so many black faces, as it should be. I love it.

A native of South Philadelphia, one of the other very important things that Phyllis Sims is well-known for is being the resident-curator for the Marian Anderson House and Museum in South Philadelphia, founded by Blanche Burton Lyles. Sims attended Rutgers University in New Jersey for several years but always says her best education was taught via hands-on experiences and from her beloved mother.

This week we salute Phyllis Sims for all her years of labor as a professional photographer capturing history through pictures of great things that happened in Philadelphia, in Pennsylvania, and elsewhere around the nation.