And it ends with the likelihood that pictures of Lincoln residents from the early 1900s — black Lincolnites featured in the work of a black photographer — will hang in the new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.

“It’s one of those ‘Antiques Road Show’ kind of stories. Even better,” said Doug Keister, a Lincoln Southeast graduate who, for decades, saved heavy boxes of glass negatives he bought in Lincoln as a teenager. 

They turned out be an artistic and historic treasure.

In May 1999, former Journal Star reporter Clarence Mabin wrote a story about 36 glass negatives, beautiful photographs of Lincoln’s black community in the early 1900s, taken by an unknown photographer.

“I was expecting some amateur work, and these pictures just knocked me for a loop. So well proportioned, such a brilliant use of space and sense of composition, such amazing rapport with his subjects,” John Carter, historian for the Nebraska Historical Society, said in that story. 

“It’s obvious he’s doing more than just taking a picture. He’s doing portraiture. And social commentary.”

Mabin’s article led to the discovery of Keister’s collection of several hundred pictures, taken in Lincoln roughly between 1910 and 1925 by photographer John Johnson.

Keister, a photographer, author and Lincoln native, has donated 60 large-scale prints made from that collection to the new museum, due to open on the National Mall in 2015.

“They speak to a time and a place where African Americans were treated as second-class citizens but lived their lives with dignity,” museum curator Michele Gates Moresi said about the exhibition in an article in the February 2013 Smithsonian Magazine.

For decades, the photos were simply a heavy load that Keister carted from house to house, taking up valuable storage space.

Keister got the glass negatives from friend Doug Boilesen and his father, Axel, who bought the negatives from a Lincoln family during their search for antiques, including an Edison phonograph, the “holy grail of phonographs,” Keister said.

One of the negatives was of a girl standing beside an Edison phonograph.

Keister bought the boxes for $15.

Keister printed some of the negatives — O Street, construction of the Miller & Paine building and the post office (now the Grand Manse) — and sold them to local history buffs like Jim McKee, years before anyone recognized the value of the entire collection.

And Keister took the boxes with him when he moved to California, continuing to cart them around the state as he moved.

In 1999, Keister’s mother, Kay Keister, clipped and sent the Journal Star story about the 36 negatives to her son. She remembered he also had some glass negatives, so she thought he might be interested.

Keister realized his were likely the work of the same photographer.

He brought his boxes, containing almost 280 glass plates, back to his hometown and met with Lincoln historian Ed Zimmer.

Since then Zimmer, a historical sleuth, has identified  the photographer, put names to some of the faces and Lincoln locations, and found more negatives and pictures, 400 to 500 of them: the Keister collection plus others, many saved by descendants of those photographed.

History Professor Jennifer Hildebrand has used the pictures as examples for an article on the New Negro Movement, a precursor to the Harlem Renaissance.

In an era when black Americans faced severe discrimination, “new Negroes evinced pride in self, in their African heritage, and in the color of their skin. Often the images that they shaped convey a great sense of confidence, strength and determination,”  Hildebrand, an associate professor of history at the State University of New York, Fredonia, wrote in a 2010 Nebraska History Quarterly.

 “The beauty of the black race and the shared goals and aspirations of white and black Americans were at the heart of the NNM,” she wrote.  

The 36 plates that were the focus of Mabin’s story were discovered  as University of Nebraska-Lincoln graduate student Kathryn Colwell was researching historic black landmarks in the city and interning with Zimmer.

Ed Wimes, now an executive vice president at UNL, told her about the plates, owned by the McWilliams family, information she passed on to the Historical Society’s Carter.

Carter went to the home of Victor and Juanita McWilliams to see the negatives.

They were in a Harley-Davidson boot box, he remembers, the negatives carefully separated by kitchen towels.

Carter picked up the first one, he said: “And it wasn’t a good photograph, it was a phenomenal photograph. The hair stood up on the back of my neck.

“I picked up the next one — and next one — all were just phenomenal.” 

Mabin, who now works in the Legislature’s performance audit office, had seen prints of some of the pictures when he interviewed Art McWilliams Sr. in 1989 for a story about the McWilliams family’s long history in Lincoln. He remembers instinctively knowing that they were extraordinary pictures.

The photographer, Zimmer concluded, was John (Johnny) B. Johnson, an 1899 graduate of Lincoln High School who briefly attended the University of Nebraska, where he played football.

In an era when black Americans were not hired by white businesses for anything other than menial labor, Johnson was a janitor at the federal building, drove a wagon and photographed Lincoln’s small black community.

Johnson was born in 1879 to Harrison, a Civil War veteran, and Margaret Johnson, both former slaves. He married late and lived most of his life in a home built by his father at 1310 A St.

Some of the photos appear to be commissioned portraits. Others feature co-workers, family and friends. And some show Lincoln architecture, construction sites and the men who worked there. 

Some are elegant portraits, with the families of Lincoln’s black leaders at the time — the McWilliamses, Malones, Deans, Talberts, Burckhardts, Williamses — among the subjects.

In addition to their beauty, the photos have historical significance because there are so few photographs from the era depicting African Americans in small- and medium-size towns taken by a black photographer.

Keister calls them a “rare glimpse into the everyday lives of an African-American community on the Great Plains.”