A new Temple University project will allow people to tour the historic Pyramid Club, decades after it closed

On a recent Wednesday morning, a dozen 8-by-10 black-and-white glossy photographs of Black history giants Muhammad Ali, Billie Holiday, and W.E.B. Du Bois were fanned out on a table in Temple University’s Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection.

They are among the hundreds of images and 300,000 negatives captured by mid-20th century photographer John W. Mosley at the original Pyramid Club, a social network of Philadelphia’s prominent Black men who, from the late 1930s through the early 1960s, met regularly in a Girard Avenue brownstone.

Blockson Collection associate archivist Leslie Willis-Lowry has spent hours scanning, captioning, and uploading Mosley’s negatives into a digital repository of his work that lives on the Temple University’s Library website.

Across Temple’s cobbled Polett Walk in the Charles Library, digital librarian Jasmine L. Clark is using the same images to build a prototype of Virtual Blockson, an effort to “gamify the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection in virtual reality.”

The monumental digital photo project is funded by a $250,000 grant Temple received from the Getty Foundation’s Black Visual Arts Archives program, which provides library, museum, and university archivists resources to digitize collections that center Black history. The effort will make photos, correspondence, and artifacts more widely available to students and scholars on and off campus.

As federal funds are pulled from arts institutions, especially those with a focus on Black art and history and their impact on the American experience, Getty’s funding offers hope that such scholarship will be able to continue.

For centuries, cultural and academic spaces have had boxes of important records documenting the stories of Black Americans, said Miguel de Baca, senior program officer at the Getty Foundation. Those archives have been difficult to research because they haven’t been formally processed.

“These records of Black history are important to local communities who want to tell their own story,” de Baca said. “The reality is these archives have long been under-resourced. We are excited that we can help these records become more visible, accessible, and discoverable.”

Mosley, who was born in 1907 and died in 1969, was one of America’s first Black syndicated photographers, whose photos appeared in Ebony, Jet, and America’s Black press.

“He captured the beauty of Black life,” Willis-Lowry said, pointing to an image of boxer Joe Louis in 1952 on Atlantic City’s segregated Chicken Bone Beach. “He deconstructed stereotypes of African Americans and showed Black joy, Black rest, and Black play.”

In 1988, Temple received more than 300,000 of Mosley’s prints and negatives from his widow, Teresa, a descendant of abolitionist William Still. Eight years ago, Willis-Lowry worked with Blockson Collection curator Diane Turner and Blockson himself to mount the “A Million Faces: The Photography of John Mosley” exhibition at Chestnut Hill’s Woodmere Art Museum.

About 2,000 of the collection’s photos have made it online, Willis-Lowry said. However, most of the 300,000 negatives are packed in dozens of gray boxes — labeled politics, sports, military, and funerals, as well as fraternities and sororities — sitting on shelves in Willis-Lowry’s office.

“The breadth of Mosley’s photographs serve as a window into historic Philadelphia moments,” Willis-Lowry said. “So many of which have never been seen.”

Getty distributed funds to Temple two years ago as part of a then-pilot program. Through the grant, historians are connecting to the city’s past and helping Gen Z-ers and the Alpha Generation prepare for their futures in higher education.

Clark’s Virtual Blockson rewards students for developing archival research skills. Players enter the gamified research space — complete with a wraparound desk and burgundy carpet — and are introduced to a digital archivist who teaches them research basics like requesting files and the difference between primary and secondary sources.

Throughout the game, players are introduced to the Pyramid Club, one of the few places in Philadelphia where Black artists could show their work to an integrated audience. They are introduced to the art of Laura Wheeler Waring — known for her oil-on-canvas portraits of Du Bois and renowned singer Marian Anderson — and master printmaker Dox Thrash.

The final level is an online visit to the Pyramid Club to get a full sense of what the space looked like in its heyday. The new researchers take multiple-choice tests to advance levels. Virtual Blockson, Clark said, could be available to play by mid-2026.

“It’s a known problem that students are intimidated when they first encounter archives,” Clark said. “With this grant we can further Blockson’s mission of making our material accessible to the community and help students learn how to use archives, what they are, and why they are important.”

Blockson died in 2023.

In August, the Getty Foundation announced $2.6 million in grants for 12 projects at 11 institutions including Lincoln University, which received $150,000 to begin digitizing its archives. Parts of the collection date to the school’s founding in 1854 as the nation’s first historically Black university and include unpublished manuscripts by poets Langston Hughes and Gil Scott-Heron, as well as early sketches by artist Romare Bearden.

“This is the first step in establishing a Black Arts archive at Lincoln University,” said Michael K. Wilson, assistant professor of art history and Pan-African studies. “Lincoln understands the value of these documents; however, our lack of resources has impacted our ability to activate our collection in such a way they have become a canon of American history.”