RALEIGH,
NC (AP).- A haunting 150-year-old photo found in a
North Carolina attic shows a young black child named John, barefoot and
wearing
ragged clothes, perched on a barrel next to another unidentified young
boy. Art
historians believe it’s an extremely rare Civil War-era photograph of
children
who were either slaves at the time or recently emancipated. The photo,
which may
have been taken in the early 1860s, was a testament to a dark part of
American
history, said Will Stapp, a photographic historian and founding curator
of the
National Portrait Gallery’s photographs department at the Smithsonian
Institution.