The collection consists of 890 black-and-white photo negatives produced during the course of Winfred Moncrief's career as a photographer in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, in the 1950s and '60s. The photographs cover a variety of topics, including civil rights activities, the 1953 Vicksburg tornado, Paul B. Johnson Jr.'s successful 1963 gubernatorial campaign and 1964 inauguration, a 1964 Tatum Salt Dome nuclear test, and an October 1965 Ku Klux Klan rally.
Mr. Moncrief's negatives have been digitized by MDAH and are presented as positive, black-and-white images accompanied by bibliographic and descriptive information. Twenty-three photographs attributed to Jim Ellis, a student photographer with whom Mr. Moncrief worked at the Hattiesburg American, are included in the photograph collection and may be viewed in the William F. Winter Archives and History Building Archival Reading Room but are not available in electronic format.