BUFORD, GA.- Slotin Auction’s annual February sale this year is a tale of two auctions.

The “Southern Folk Pottery & Quilt Extravaganza” auction, much anticipated every winter by collectors of these art forms, unfolds on Saturday, February 10. But Sunday, February 11, brings something entirely different: “The African American Experience Collection” of the late Illinois collector Richard Harris, 156 lots in all.

Documenting the long history of the African American struggle, it’s a fascinating, powerful collection that spans from slavery to the Great Migration, through the Jim Crow South to the Civil Rights Movement and all the way to Black Lives Matter.

“It’s not like a ‘trophy collection,’” says Steve Slotin, auction house co-owner with his wife Amy. “It’s a thoughtful, in-depth collection powered by inarguable historical facts. It includes great artifacts that should not be ignored and certainly should not be erased. It’s like preserving a part of history in case someone ever tries to deny it or downplay it or whitewash it.”

In Slotin’s online catalog for the collection, Amy Slotin pointedly writes, “In this new era of book bans and white-washing of history, Richard put together this collection to keep us from looking away.”

The Slotins knew Richard Harris (who died at age 85 last March) as a now-and-then customer who purchased African-American folk art or items relating to Black history that popped up in their folk art sales.

“Occasionally we’d sell Richard a history-related art piece, and it would be rough” in terms of what it depicted, Steve Slotin recalls. “I mean, who wants a carving of a hanging? But he did. And he bought all those pieces.”

But the Slotins had no idea that Harris, whose deep collection of art and artifacts on the subject of death was exhibited several times in the Chicago area, was quietly building his own museum-worthy Black history collection.

The Slotins have previously handled auctions of historical Black collections, such as furniture, quilts and other crafts from Charleston’s Old Slave Mart and the Acacia Collection in 2017. But Richard Harris’ African American Experience Collection is heavily weighted toward history – heavy history at that.

It includes books (such as a 1789 title with a fold-out engraving of the enslaved in the bottom of a slave ship), photographs (including an original silver gelatin print of the horrifying 1930 Indiana double lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith that inspired the song “Strange Fruit”), posters, periodicals, newspapers, broadsides, scrapbooks, leaflets, “colored only” signs and shackles. There are also collections-within-the-collection of snapshots by Civil Rights protesters; and of photos of the Black Panthers and the KKK.

“Rarely do you come across this much material from one collector,” Steve Slotin says. “Richard’s collection is really a deep dive that covers a lot of time periods in American history. These are real artifacts that confirm that African American history is American history. There is no separating the two.”

The African American Experience Collection is followed and complemented by a strong selection of Black folk art (137 lots, including works by Mose Tolliver, Jimmy Lee Sudduth and Roger Rice) culled from other prime private collections.

So, even longtime Slotin Auction customers may be wondering what’s the connection between the Southern folk pottery (highlighted by an array of works by Lanier Meaders and his extended pottery-making clan and B.B. Craig) and quilts auction on February 10 and the African American history and art sale on February 11.

It turns out, they are separate and distinct.

“I separated the two days into two different flipbooks on our website so that no one gets confused,” Steve Slotin says. “They’re two different sales. They just happen to be on the same weekend.”