Snapshot History : Archives: Members of L.A.’s black community are being asked to dust off family photo albums to help fill in a gap in the Central Library’s visual record of the city.

When a request came in last year for images of life in Watts before the 1965 riots, Carolyn Kozo searched through the files she maintains as curator of the Los Angeles Central Library’s photograph collection.

She found one picture--of an old Red Car trolley station that was built in the predominantly black South-Central Los Angeles community decades ago.

“That’s all we had,” the curator said. “We had nothing on churches or schools or houses. It was terrible.”

The gap that Kozo discovered is not unusual. The Central Library’s photo archive contains 2.5 million pictures and is considered a major visual record of Los Angeles history. It not only neglects one of the city’s longstanding black communities, but in general it pays scant attention to the contributions of African-American, Asian-American and Latino residents--glaring omissions for a public collection, Kozo said.

On Saturday, Kozo and a small group of volunteers will launch an unusual effort to correct those deficiencies by tapping a hitherto overlooked resource: family photo albums.

Photo Friends of the Central Library, a nonprofit library support group organized by Kozo, is inviting members of the local African-American community to dust off family snapshot collections and take them to the Vernon Branch Library in South-Central Los Angeles on Saturday between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. Trained volunteers will review the albums for pictures that have historical value and will make copies of them on the spot to add to the library’s archives.

“We’re asking people to bring (photos) that are of value to them, that stir up memories about Los Angeles at a particular time,” said Kozo, who is a senior librarian in the Central Library’s history and genealogy department in addition to being the photo curator.

The library project, which is being funded with a $9,000 grant from Security Pacific Bank, is seeking black-and-white photographs that illuminate aspects of the social, cultural and political history of three of the city’s oldest ethnic groups, spanning the period 1860 to 1960.

Additional sessions in the African-American community are scheduled to be held Nov. 2 at the California Afro-American Museum at Exposition Park, Nov. 9 at Watts Towers Art Center and Nov. 16 at the Museum of African-American Art at the Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw Plaza.

According to Kozo, the effort will expand to the Latino and Asian communities on dates to be announced next year.

The project already has stirred enthusiasm in the black community.

“I think it’s a wonderful idea. So many people destroy their personal pictures and they shouldn’t,” said Los Angeles resident Verna Williams, who recently contributed several snapshots that Kozo considers valuable. These include pictures of Williams and her husband at a segregated beach in Santa Monica in 1924 and a bathing beauty contest held at the opening of a blacks-only country club in 1928.

Other recently donated photographs show local black jazz musicians and the lively nightclub scene along South-Central L.A.’s Central Avenue in the 1940s, including a rare interior shot of the famous Club Alabam.

The bulk of the Central Library’s photograph collection came from the archives of Security Pacific Bank and the now-defunct Herald Examiner, according to Kozo. Researchers, including scholars writing books or articles about Los Angeles and filmmakers who want to accurately portray the look of the city during particular eras, used the collection more than 700 times last year.

But Kozo, who has overseen the collection since 1984, said she often has run into difficulty trying to fulfill requests for pictures relating to aspects of ethnic history, a prime example being the dearth of photos about Watts.

“Most of the people who document ethnic groups weren’t in the mainstream,” said Kozo. “My main responsibility is to get as much as possible into a public collection and make it accessible.”