tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/black-history-month-2019-65663/articles
Black History Month 2019 – The Conversation
2019-10-21T15:07:30Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/124911
2019-10-21T15:07:30Z
2019-10-21T15:07:30Z
Britain is still failing to acknowledge the legacy of slavery – memorialising its victims would be a start
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/297904/original/file-20191021-56194-d6hm83.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=23%2C43%2C2184%2C2028&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A statuette of a proposed memorial that has yet to find full funding.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Memorial 2007</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The sound of the water flowing from the fountain that now stands towering in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall creates a calming softness in contrast to the cold, hard concrete floor on which I sit trying to take in the 13-metre-tall monument before me.</p>
<p>The sculpture is both calming and distressing: presenting painful histories of the black Atlantic slave trade in the “delightful family-friendly setting” of a public art museum. The characters of Venus, The Captain and Queen Vicky stand or sit around the monument’s plinth. A mother directs her young son’s gaze up to the water gently pouring down from above them. She does not point to the trunk of a tree planted on the side of the monument where these characters do not rest. It is not so pretty, not so easy to delight in. It is a tree without life: no branches, no leaves, only ghostly bodies hanging from an empty noose.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1179111205300051969"}"></div></p>
<p>Painted on the Turbine Hall wall, the text for Kara Walker’s sculpture, <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/kara-walker-2674/kara-walkers-fons-americanus">Fons Americanus</a>, calls visitors to “<a href="https://twitter.com/wendy_mcglashan/status/1181532932638482432/photo/1">Gasp Plaintively, Sigh Mournfully and Gaze Knowingly</a>” at her recasting of the Victoria Memorial which stands outside Buckingham Palace. This monument featured in my own undergraduate dissertation. In that, I explored representations of black British women’s history in London’s urban landscape by walking the city.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/297099/original/file-20191015-98653-5mtahx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/297099/original/file-20191015-98653-5mtahx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/297099/original/file-20191015-98653-5mtahx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297099/original/file-20191015-98653-5mtahx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297099/original/file-20191015-98653-5mtahx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297099/original/file-20191015-98653-5mtahx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1130&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297099/original/file-20191015-98653-5mtahx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1130&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297099/original/file-20191015-98653-5mtahx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1130&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Queen Victoria memorial.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/queen-victoria-memorial-75250675?src=Z0uFvBpgzM6dUo_uAtE-mw-1-6">Maran Garai/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The only representations I found around the city placed imaginary women of “Africa” at the base of columns which celebrated Britain’s empire. I don’t think I particularly noticed then the absence of references to the slave trade. I focused on <a href="https://www.ucl.ac.uk/equianocentre/projects/black-londoners">bringing to light</a> the presence of the black Victorians who were nowhere to be found in the memorial fabric of the city in which I walked and this has remained the focus my research ever since.</p>
<p>Tate curator, Clara Kim, hopes that the work <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/sep/30/tate-modern-fountain-tells-jarring-history-of-british-empire">will stimulate a debate</a> around the representation of difficult British histories in the urban landscape. It is a conversation that is sorely needed, but has been called for for some time.</p>
<p>In 1807, the Act for the Abolition of the British Trade in Slaves from any part of the coast or countries of Africa was enacted. As <a href="https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/tradeindustry/slavetrade/overview/parliament-abolishes-the-slave-trade/">the bicentenary</a> approached in 2007, discussions about how this bicentenary would and should be commemorated – rather than celebrated – heightened. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.memorial2007.org.uk/about">Memorial 2007</a> launched a campaign to memorialise not the white parliamentary abolitionists, but <a href="http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/slavery/research-guides.htm">the Africans</a> who were victims of and fought against the institutions of British slavery. The intention was for the sculpture, chosen by public competition, to be unveiled during the bicentenary year in 2007. Twelve years on, Walker’s intervention at Tate Modern is a stark reminder that <a href="https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/the-slave-trade-and-abolition/sites-of-memory/ending-slavery/slave-trade-memorials/">no such memorial on a national scale</a> has yet found a place in the capital.</p>
<p>Chaired by <a href="https://windrushfoundation.com/community-champions/oku-ekpenyon/">Oku Ekpenyon</a>, Memorial 2007 has been campaigning since 2002 to raise funds to complete its mission, but that campaign is now nearly out of time. The group have secured planning permission for a space in the Rose Gardens in Hyde Park, but this expires in less than a month, on November 7, 2019. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/297479/original/file-20191017-98636-1yqfnt8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/297479/original/file-20191017-98636-1yqfnt8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/297479/original/file-20191017-98636-1yqfnt8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=853&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297479/original/file-20191017-98636-1yqfnt8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=853&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297479/original/file-20191017-98636-1yqfnt8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=853&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297479/original/file-20191017-98636-1yqfnt8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1071&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297479/original/file-20191017-98636-1yqfnt8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1071&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297479/original/file-20191017-98636-1yqfnt8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1071&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Side view of the Memorial 2007 statuette with measurements for the real thing.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.memorial2007.org.uk/the-sculpture">Memorial 2007</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Every prime minister since the group formed <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/04/slavery-memorial-london-dropped">has been asked</a> to support the memorial, but no funds have been forthcoming. Although Boris Johnson, then Mayor of London, hosted <a href="https://www.standard.co.uk/news/mayor/boris-backs-hyde-park-slavery-memorial-6808931.html">an unveiling of a statuette</a> of the memorial sculpture at City Hall, letters to Number 10 since he became prime minister have been met with silence. A <a href="https://www.change.org/p/ministry-of-housing-communities-and-local-government-uk-government-build-memorial-to-remember-the-victims-of-the-slave-trade">petition to ask the government to fund the memorial</a> before the deadline has been gaining momentum. </p>
<p>The state’s failure to acknowledge the pain and suffering of the victims of the British transatlantic slave trade through memorialisation is reflective of its failure to acknowledge the legacies of enslavement in contemporary Britain; its legacies of financial and social capital for <a href="https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/">those who benefited from it</a> and the ongoing marginalisation of the descendants of those who were enslaved, as the recent <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/windrush-52562">Windrush Scandal</a> painfully exposed. For Ekpenyon, the campaign to bring a memorial into being has been an exhausting 17 years of frustration, disappointment, anger and sadness. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/black-history-is-still-largely-ignored-70-years-after-empire-windrush-reached-britain-98431">Black history is still largely ignored, 70 years after Empire Windrush reached Britain</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>When I visited Tate’s Turbine Hall, visitors were walking around Walker’s fountain, craning their necks skyward to its peak, angling to get as much as possible of it in frame for a picture. I stood alone looking into the stricken face that appears from the sculptured folds of the Shell Grotto at the hall’s entrance. Here, the flowing water is a silent, steady stream of tears.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/124911/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Caroline Bressey is a supporter of Memorial 2007, but does not sit on its committee.</span></em></p>
Despite the millions used in the transatlantic slave trade and Britain benefitting from their forced labour, a national memorial is proving difficult.
Caroline Bressey, Reader in Historical Geography, UCL
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/111695
2019-02-28T22:44:18Z
2019-02-28T22:44:18Z
Collective of Black dancers created lasting impressions in Canada
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260471/original/file-20190222-195873-8e8xh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Collective of Black Artists (COBA) has been supporting African and Caribbean dance in Canada for 25 years. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">COBA/Yosseif Haddad</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Skin <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kendrick_Brown/publication/254616468_Skin_Tone_and_Racial_Identity_Among_African_Americans_A_Theoretical_and_Research_Framework/links/570e82c208aecd31ec9a7e19/Skin-Tone-and-Racial-Identity-Among-African-Americans-A-Theoretical-and-Research-Framework.pdf?origin=publication_detail">symbolizes identity</a> — its colour, shade and texture influences cultural currency and, by extension, self-identity. When we know who we are, we can honour where we come from and we can dance in our own skins with pride and passion. </p>
<p>The Collective of Black Artists (COBA) is a Toronto-based professional dance company that works to extend this pride and passion through performance, education and research.</p>
<p>I was one of four Black dancers with roots in the Caribbean who birthed COBA in 1993 to perform our physical and social realities. We worked to create a platform for Black dancers who were under represented in mainstream professional dance companies in Canada at the time. My fellow co-founders and dancers were: Bakari I. Lindsay (formerly Eddison B. Lindsay), Charmaine Headley and Mosa Neshama (formerly Kim McNeilly).</p>
<p>COBA injected new artistic blood into the dance scene in Toronto. It was the ‘90s, during the time <a href="http://publications.gc.ca/collections/Collection-R/LoPBdP/CIR/936-e.htm">multiculturalism was actively promoted within the city</a>; it was the city’s response to the federal government’s attempt to promote unity within diversity by encouraging people to learn about other cultures despite differences in ethnicity, religion, social class. This government mandate helped to create an audience for COBA both in schools and in theatres. </p>
<p>COBA positioned itself as a diasporic family within the Canadian dance establishment. As a cultural membrane, COBA embraced over 50 dancers, drummers, singers and artists from Africa, the Caribbean, Canada and Europe in the rigour necessary to perform appropriate representations of African and Caribbean dance traditions. </p>
<p>With <a href="https://www.cobainc.com/history">reviews</a> in <em>The Globe and Mail,</em> which said it was “a company that makes you sit up and take notice for all the right reasons,” COBA was a hit. </p>
<p>I am a dancer and PhD candidate in education and I am interested in artistic vulnerability. As part of my research, I conducted interviews with some of the COBA founders and members on the significance and history of COBA. On a personal level, I wanted to explore the idea of COBA as a cultural life-line to African and Caribbean dance heritage in Canada. What does it mean to have been part of this dance company? </p>
<p>It means remembering, reclaiming and honouring my ancestry and working with peers who took ownership of their history with boundless energy. </p>
<h2>COBA’s challenges</h2>
<p>COBA faced challenges as an under-resourced collective.</p>
<p>Initial funding applications were denied because an appropriate <a href="https://www.toronto.com/community-story/60914-collective-of-black-artists-making-african-dance-mainstream/">funding category for COBA’s dance form was non-existent at that time</a>. After years of petitioning and convincing arts councils of COBA’s artistic relevance, the arts councils eventually revised their funding categories. COBA was finally able to secure grants. Still, hiring dancers full-time, year round was not an option. Dancers still had to earn a living outside the company.</p>
<p>However, working within a collective is not easy. The reality in collectives is that conflicts arise amongst members. Personalities clash. Egos bruise. Some performers anchor and stay a while. Others move on to different artistic ventures, and professional pursuits. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260295/original/file-20190221-195892-tlc2cz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260295/original/file-20190221-195892-tlc2cz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=965&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260295/original/file-20190221-195892-tlc2cz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=965&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260295/original/file-20190221-195892-tlc2cz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=965&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260295/original/file-20190221-195892-tlc2cz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1212&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260295/original/file-20190221-195892-tlc2cz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1212&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260295/original/file-20190221-195892-tlc2cz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1212&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A 2003 poster for a COBA event, celebrating its first decade.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">COBA Photography, David Hou. Graphic Design, Eric Parker</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>However, despite personnel changes and professional challenges that surfaced within the group, COBA persisted and maintained its integrity and mission. The key principles we followed were: Knowledge, co-operation, authenticity and endurance. </p>
<p>Artistic director, Bakari Lindsay described the COBA process as challenging: “Robust work demands a certain amount of consistent authority — with flexibility — in order to sustain a vision.” </p>
<p>The repertoire, created by Lindsay and Headley, allowed dancers to work with contemporary dance vocabularies, strengthening dancer’s physicality and technical ability. International guest choreographers were invited to stage work allowing the company to expose dancers to new movement aesthetics and fuelling COBA’s artistic growth. </p>
<h2>Honouring African History Month</h2>
<p>Rehearsals began in a humble studio. We carted costumes, props, drums on buses and subways enroute to perform at school assemblies, most notably throughout the month of February, <a href="https://www.tdsb.on.ca/News/Article-Details/ArtMID/474/ArticleID/1270/February-is-African-Heritage-Month-at-the-TDSB">when teachers and principals needed to fulfill the national African History mandate</a>. </p>
<p>Canada is a diverse country and breaking down social and cultural barriers between communities makes a difference in how we see each other and respond to each other’s differences. </p>
<p>COBA’s performances sparked student’s imagination and raised student’s social awareness.</p>
<h2>Keeping stories alive</h2>
<p>When the drummer’s rhythms split the air and heat of the spirit rises in the performers, dances take on a life of their own, as if driven by spiritual powers. The energy of warrior spirits in the West African dances, <em>Doun doun ba</em> and the healing shaman in the <em>Kakilambe</em> come alive and transport the dancers beyond the physical realm. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/261529/original/file-20190228-106365-b0hurh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/261529/original/file-20190228-106365-b0hurh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261529/original/file-20190228-106365-b0hurh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261529/original/file-20190228-106365-b0hurh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261529/original/file-20190228-106365-b0hurh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261529/original/file-20190228-106365-b0hurh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261529/original/file-20190228-106365-b0hurh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A dance performance of ‘Saraca’ by COBA.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">David Hou</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The social and historical significance of dances COBA performs demonstrates the importance of remaining flexible and adapting to new environments. Keeping stories alive through dance and drumming provides connection and memory for the things we leave behind either by choice or urgency.</p>
<p>While COBA’s current repertoire includes a wide variety of contemporary dance work, earlier dances were the foundation for the quality of COBA’s social and artistic exploration. </p>
<p><em>Saraca</em> (1994), a thanksgiving ritual pays homage to the African nations who settled in the Caribbean and contributed their rites and dances to the cultural mosaic. </p>
<p>Non-traditional dance performance such as <em>Portrait</em> (1994), addresses themes of race and the human condition, underlines the problem of colourism. <em>Griot’s Jive</em> (2002) draws attention to gun violence which remains an acute social problem. </p>
<h2>African perspectives for youth</h2>
<p>The company established COBA Youth Ensemble (1994) for older/elite dancers in the children’s dance program. Together COBA and Ballet Creole created <a href="https://www.cobainc.com/about-us">Nu-DanCe Training Program</a>, a diverse professional dance training program grounded in an Africanist perspective.</p>
<p>Educating the younger generation in Africanist dance culture preserves the culture. That said, in a fast-moving dance-world social relevance is key. The invasion of hip hop and other urban dance styles commanding the global dance younger generation of dancers within the African diaspora and outside the community must know the origins of the dances they perform. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFcEwS_HNI8">Gwara Gwara dance,</a> for example, performed in Childish Gambino’s video hit <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYOjWnS4cMY"><em>This is America</em></a>, is originally from South Africa.</p>
<p>Classes in Hip Hop and Afro-beat COBA provides, ensures a new generation of dancers enjoy the dances that endorse their social relationships while promoting self-discipline and positive self-image. They will understand that the urban dances they learn and love stand on the shoulders of African dance traditions, allowing students to make connections between their past and present.</p>
<h2>Skin imprints</h2>
<p>Although all of the other original founders are no longer part of COBA, Bakari Lindsay and Charmaine Headley have led COBA for the past 25 years, blazing a trail from its humble beginnings to chart new ground within Canada’s dance milieu. Touring across Canada, the U.S. and the Caribbean, COBA touched, even transformed many people’s lives.</p>
<p>Currently COBA’s adult dance company is on hiatus. The younger generation is at the helm charting a new course for the youth. I feel privileged to have been a member of COBA. It was my diasporic family. It taught me when we dance in our own skins, we radiate our personal, spiritual and social currency.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/111695/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Junia Mason does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
COBA, the Collective of Black Artists has been working to introduce Canadian audiences to African and Caribbean dances for 25 years.
Junia Mason, PhD candidate, Department of Education, York University, Canada
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/109709
2019-02-27T11:42:05Z
2019-02-27T11:42:05Z
What Catholic Church records tell us about America’s earliest black history
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260032/original/file-20190220-148533-1tvovv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption"> St Augustine Catholic Church Archive.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">David LaFevor</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>For most Americans, black history <a href="https://www.nps.gov/jame/learn/historyculture/african-americans-at-jamestown.htm">begins in 1619</a>,
when a Dutch ship brought some “20 and odd Negroes” as slaves to the English colony of Jamestown, in Virginia. </p>
<p>Many are not aware that black history in the United States <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Black_Society_in_Spanish_Florida.html?id=6KByoQgXZEcC">goes back at least a century before this date</a>.</p>
<p>In 1513, a free and literate African named Juan Garrido explored Florida with a Spanish conquistador, Juan Ponce de León. In the following decades, Africans, free and enslaved, were part of all the Spanish expeditions exploring the southern region of the United States. In 1565, Africans helped establish the first permanent European settlement in what is St. Augustine, Florida today.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://slavesocieties.org/">Slave Societies Digital Archive</a> which I direct <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Black_Society_in_Spanish_Florida.html?id=6KByoQgXZEcC">as a historian</a> at Vanderbilt University includes Catholic Church records from St. Augustine. </p>
<p>These records date back to the 1590s and document some of the earliest black history of the U.S. </p>
<h2>Catholicism and runaway slaves</h2>
<p>These Catholic Church records show that everyone was treated in theory as <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674062047">“brothers in Christ”</a> and that the Church helped incorporate Africans into Spanish communities. It also helped free some slaves. </p>
<p>St. Augustine’s Catholic records show that after English Protestants established a settlement in what became South Carolina in 1670, their African slaves began to flee southward <a href="https://essss.library.vanderbilt.edu/islandora/object/essss%3A246118">seeking admission into the “True Faith”</a> – which to the Spaniards meant Catholicism.</p>
<p>Florida’s Spanish governors sheltered them and saw to their religious conversion, seeking royal approval of their actions. After some deliberation, in 1693, Spain’s monarch ruled that all slaves fleeing Protestant lands to seek conversion in Catholic colonies should be freed. Word of the fugitives’ reception in St. Augustine spread quickly through South Carolina, generating bitter complaints among planters and encouraging additional southward escapes by their slaves. </p>
<p>By 1738, the number of slave runaways reaching Florida had <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Black_Society_in_Spanish_Florida.html?id=6KByoQgXZEcC">grown to approximately 100</a>. Based on Spain’s religious sanctuary policy, Florida’s Spanish governor freed the runaways and established them in a town of their own called <a href="https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/histarch/research/st-augustine/fort-mose/">Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose</a>, two miles north of the Spanish city of St. Augustine. Mose was modeled after the nearby Indian towns where Catholic priests were also assigned to teach the “new Christians” the principles of the Catholic faith. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260034/original/file-20190220-148513-2sly8t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260034/original/file-20190220-148513-2sly8t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260034/original/file-20190220-148513-2sly8t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260034/original/file-20190220-148513-2sly8t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260034/original/file-20190220-148513-2sly8t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260034/original/file-20190220-148513-2sly8t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260034/original/file-20190220-148513-2sly8t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A museum presents the stories of Mose’s people.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jane Landers</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The site is now a National Historic Landmark, listed on the <a href="https://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/underground/fl2.htm">National Park Service Underground Railroad Route</a>, and has been nominated for a UNESCO Slave Route designation. A museum based on both archaeological and historical studies <a href="https://www.floridastateparks.org/parks-and-trails/fort-mose-historic-state-park">presents the stories of the Mose townspeople</a>. </p>
<h2>African heritage in church records</h2>
<p>The records in St. Augustine’s church <a href="https://essss.library.vanderbilt.edu/islandora/object/essss%3A246118">reveal the multi-ethnic and multi-lingual nature of Mose</a>. </p>
<p>Its leader and captain of the town’s militia, Francisco Menéndez, was of Mandinga ethnicity and came from the Senegambian region of West Africa in modern-day Senegal. He probably spoke a variety of languages but learned Spanish as well and wrote petitions to the Spanish King. Others at Mose came from the Congo nation, that is today in West Central Africa. </p>
<p>Pedro Graxales, the Congo man who was sergeant of the Mose militia was married to a slave woman of the Carabalí nation, from what is today southeastern Nigeria. The couple chose godparents from Congo for their children. </p>
<p>Florida’s priests noted that some people from Congo had undergone previous Catholic baptisms in Africa and that even as they learned Spanish, some of them still prayed and blessed themselves in their native language of Kikongo, a Bantu language spoken throughout large areas of West Central Africa.</p>
<h2>Creating a black Catholic family</h2>
<p>Baptism into the Catholic faith was important because it cleansed black converts of the “stigma of original sin.” It also brought them into the “Christian brotherhood” of the church. Baptism also served an important social function. Families were linked in a <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Slavery-and-Abolition-in-the-Atlantic-World-New-Sources-and-New-Findings/Landers/p/book/9781138633810">system of reciprocal obligations</a> between the baptized and his or her godparents, as also between the parents and godparents. </p>
<p>For example, <a href="http://fxsanchez.blogspot.com/">Francisco Felipe Edimboro</a> and his wife, Filis, were African-born slaves of Florida’s wealthiest planter, Don Francisco Sánchez. The couple had their three-year-old son baptized on the same day that their master and his mulatto consort baptized their natural son. Edimboro and Filis eventually had 10 more children baptized in St. Augustine’s church. On July 15, 1794, they were themselves baptized and married. </p>
<p>Their Catholic baptism and marriage coincided with their suit to buy their freedom and likely contributed to the successful outcome of that litigation. </p>
<p>As a free man, Felipe Edimboro became a landowner and sergeant of St. Augustine’s free black militia. He also served as godfather to 21 black children born in St. Augustine whose baptisms were recorded in its Catholic Church.</p>
<h2>What these records say about families</h2>
<p>These and other records allow scholars to track the history of several generations of the large Edimboro family to the present day. </p>
<p>One of Edimboro and Filis’s free daughters, Eusebia, had a child with an enslaved man named Antonio Proctor, described in the records as “the best translator of the Indian languages in the province.”</p>
<p>Edimboro and Proctor served on the Spanish frontier together and Proctor’s valuable military service earned him his freedom.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260035/original/file-20190220-148517-fp0onf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260035/original/file-20190220-148517-fp0onf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260035/original/file-20190220-148517-fp0onf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260035/original/file-20190220-148517-fp0onf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260035/original/file-20190220-148517-fp0onf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260035/original/file-20190220-148517-fp0onf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260035/original/file-20190220-148517-fp0onf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Proctor Memorial signage.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jane Landers</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Eusebia and Antonio’s freeborn son, George Proctor, became a master carpenter and builder in territorial Florida and George’s son, John Proctor, served in the Florida House of Representatives in the 1870s and in the Florida Senate from 1883 to 1886.</p>
<p>More than 100 descendants recently commemorated <a href="https://www.tallahassee.com/story/life/home-garden/2018/11/01/hidden-history-reveals-new-marker/1835915002/">their family’s rich heritage</a> in a public ceremony in Tallahassee, Florida where they mounted a memorial plaque in the Old City Cemetery.</p>
<p>These records show that black history in United States begins much earlier than previously thought. They also show that men, women, and children once thought forgotten left rich histories in these little explored sources.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/109709/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jane Landers receives funding from
National Endowment for the Humanities
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
American Council of Learned Societies
John Simon Guggenheim Foundation
Historic S. Augustine Research Institute</span></em></p>
Catholic Church records document the earliest black history in the US, going back to the 1590s. These records tell the histories of Africans, free and enslaved, who were part of Spanish expeditions.
Jane Landers, Professor of History, Vanderbilt University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/109493
2019-02-25T11:37:37Z
2019-02-25T11:37:37Z
Wyatt Tee Walker: Chief strategist for Martin Luther King Jr. in the struggle for civil rights
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/258847/original/file-20190213-181589-olya0u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker during a news interview in 2004.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Associated-Press-Domestic-News-New-York-United-/6f8f7c7be4e6da11af9f0014c2589dfb/6/0">AP Photo/Frank Franklin II</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Much of the civil rights movement is remembered through the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. There were a number of people who also made valuable contributions but aren’t known as well.</p>
<p>Among them was Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker – hailed as “<a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/walker-wyatt-tee">one of the keenest minds of the nonviolent revolution</a>” by none less than King himself. </p>
<p>Walker worked closely with King and was the chief strategist for the 1963 Birmingham campaign, which turned out to be one the most influential moments for the civil rights struggle.</p>
<h2>Before Birmingham</h2>
<p><a href="https://blackpast.org/aah/walker-wyatt-tee-1929">Born in 1929 in Brockton, Massachusetts</a>, Walker attended Virginia Union University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and physics. He later went on to do graduate studies in theology at the university, setting him on his future path as a minister. </p>
<p>He met King <a href="https://richmond.access.preservica.com/uncategorized/digitalFile_30fa411f-427f-418f-bad0-07b73ffc9030/">at an interseminary group</a> in 1952, an organization that planned meetings between students of various seminaries. At the time, King was <a href="https://mlk.wsu.edu/about-dr-king/">president of the student body</a> of Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. They soon became personal friends.</p>
<p>This friendship lasted until King’s assassination in 1968. It would inform much of the crucial civil rights work that the two would do together.</p>
<p>While working as a minister at Gillfield Baptist Church in Petersburg, Virginia in the 1950s, Walker began <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/wyatt-tee-walker-civil-rights-leader-and-top-assistant-to-martin-luther-king-jr-dies-at-89/2018/01/23/35ad4686-0075-11e8-9d31-d72cf78dbeee_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.f05fa8dd3488">organizing large-scale civil rights protests</a>. King assisted Walker in some of this work, including <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/wyatt-tee-walker-1">sending recorded remarks of support</a> for a demonstration in Richmond in 1959 protesting Virginia’s decision to shut down schools rather than integrate them.</p>
<p>Walker was also involved in several civil rights groups, including the <a href="https://nationalsclc.org/about/history/">Southern Christian Leadership Conference</a>, which was founded by King and other civil rights leaders. In 1960, Walker took charge as <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/walker-wyatt-tee">the first full-time executive director</a> of the conference – a position from which he would oversee some of the most important moments of the civil rights movement, including one of the most significant campaigns – <a href="http://www.pbs.org/black-culture/explore/civil-rights-movement-birmingham-campaign/">Project C</a>, or Project Confrontation.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/258848/original/file-20190213-181604-e48ggt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/258848/original/file-20190213-181604-e48ggt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=463&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258848/original/file-20190213-181604-e48ggt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=463&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258848/original/file-20190213-181604-e48ggt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=463&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258848/original/file-20190213-181604-e48ggt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=581&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258848/original/file-20190213-181604-e48ggt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=581&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258848/original/file-20190213-181604-e48ggt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=581&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">King with civil rights leaders, including Rev. Walker (on his left).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Watchf-AP-A-GA-USA-APHS348638-MLK/85dfbb307699441da21948cb76ee55a5/11/0">AP Photo</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Popularly known as the Birmingham campaign, Project Confrontation was a series of coordinated boycotts and demonstrations supporting the ongoing efforts against segregation in the city. Demonstrations included marches, sit-ins, and <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-r-haynes/kneel-in-and-the-last-segregated-hour_b_2199312.html">kneel-ins</a> in white churches by black protesters.</p>
<p><audio preload="metadata" controls="controls" data-duration="57" data-image="" data-title="Wyatt Tee Walker recruits volunteers for Project Confrontation" data-size="1380423" data-source="Audio courtesy of the Dr. and Mrs. Wyatt Tee Walker Collection, Boatwright Library Rare Books and Special Collections, University of Richmond." data-source-url="" data-license="Author provided" data-license-url="">
<source src="https://cdn.theconversation.com/audio/1485/wyatt-tee-walker-made-by-headliner.m4a" type="audio/mp4">
</audio>
<div class="audio-player-caption">
Wyatt Tee Walker recruits volunteers for Project Confrontation.
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Audio courtesy of the Dr. and Mrs. Wyatt Tee Walker Collection, Boatwright Library Rare Books and Special Collections, University of Richmond.</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span><span class="download"><span>1.32 MB</span> <a target="_blank" href="https://cdn.theconversation.com/audio/1485/wyatt-tee-walker-made-by-headliner.m4a">(download)</a></span></span>
</div></p>
<p><em>Wyatt Tee Walker recruits volunteers for Project Confrontation at a Birmingham mass meeting on April 12, 1963. This audio was made available courtesy of the Dr. and Mrs. Wyatt Tee Walker Collection, Boatwright Library Rare Books and Special Collections, University of Richmond.</em></p>
<h2>Walker and the Letter from Birmingham Jail</h2>
<p>What Project Confrontation is perhaps best remembered for is the <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/letter-birmingham-jail">Letter from Birmingham Jail</a>, an open letter authored by King while jailed in Birmingham due to his participation in the protests.</p>
<p>The letter was written in response to a <a href="https://swap.stanford.edu/20141218230016/http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/kingweb/popular_requests/frequentdocs/clergy.pdf">public statement</a> by a group of eight ministers criticizing the Birmingham campaign. These ministers believed that the direct action of boycotts and demonstrations were too disruptive to daily life and should be stopped in favor of peaceful negotiations.</p>
<p><a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=9RGqzXX2I2wC&pg=PA238&lpg=PA238&dq=%22Begun+on+the+margins+of+the+newspaper+#v=onepage&q=%22Begun%20on%20the%20margins%20of%20the%20newspaper&f=false">Handwritten on the few scraps of paper</a> that King was allowed in his cell, the letter was smuggled out piecemeal by his lawyers. </p>
<p>In order for the letter to be published, it had to be typed, but first, it had to be read.</p>
<p>Walker claims in <a href="https://richmond.access.preservica.com/uncategorized/deliverableUnit_e5162d2f-c43f-4d1e-ac3a-7a280569f609/">a 2016 oral history</a>, conducted by the University of Richmond where <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/taylor-mcneilly-662020">I am the reference and processing archivist</a>, that this role fell to him because he was “the only one in Birmingham who could understand and translate King’s chicken-scratch writing.” </p>
<p>Walker goes on to say that <a href="https://richmond.access.preservica.com/uncategorized/digitalFile_268ea40f-94ae-493f-b7fc-a240a3cd4f76/">his secretary typed the letter</a> while he read it aloud to her. When his secretary fell asleep working on the letter late at night, <a href="https://richmond.access.preservica.com/uncategorized/digitalFile_2acf8bad-1727-4ba8-96eb-1d6f390c7913/">Walker finished the typing</a>. </p>
<p>Walker also claimed credit for the title, turning down the Friends Committee’s suggestion of “Tears of Love.”</p>
<h2>Walker and Project ‘C’</h2>
<p>Walker’s role in Birmingham was not limited to guiding one of the most famous pieces of 20th-century writing to publication. </p>
<p>In fact, Project Confrontation was <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/news/remembering-wyatt-walker-august-16-1929-january-23-2018">designed and organized</a> by Walker. </p>
<p>“Dr. King gave me the assignment to go to Birmingham and plan it out. And that ended up becoming Project C,” Walker states in <a href="https://richmond.access.preservica.com/uncategorized/digitalFile_2acf8bad-1727-4ba8-96eb-1d6f390c7913/">the same 2016 oral history</a>. </p>
<p>Explaining his strategy, <a href="https://richmond.access.preservica.com/uncategorized/digitalFile_268ea40f-94ae-493f-b7fc-a240a3cd4f76/">he says</a>, “I knew that two things would move Birmingham: Mess with the money and make it inconvenient for the white community. That was the way to make change come.”</p>
<p>The demonstrations were specifically timed to make it onto the evening news, creating national attention for what had been considered a regional concern. <a href="https://richmond.access.preservica.com/uncategorized/digitalFile_2acf8bad-1727-4ba8-96eb-1d6f390c7913/">Walker’s work</a> included everything from high level strategy, such as the timing of demonstrations, to the detailed work of counting seats in restaurants and churches to coordinate the sit-ins and kneel-ins.</p>
<h2>Birmingham 56 years later</h2>
<p>Project “C” went on to be a major success for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The methods and strategies became a template for future campaigns.</p>
<p>As Walker <a href="https://richmond.access.preservica.com/uncategorized/digitalFile_30fa411f-427f-418f-bad0-07b73ffc9030/">states</a>, “the Birmingham campaign led to the 1964 Public Accommodations Act, which desegregated America.”</p>
<p>Birmingham showed that nonviolent, direction action focused on disrupting the economy and doing things that were <a href="https://richmond.access.preservica.com/uncategorized/digitalFile_268ea40f-94ae-493f-b7fc-a240a3cd4f76/">“inconvenient” for the white community</a> could generate positive results. </p>
<p>Wyatt Tee Walker had a key role to play in this change.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/109493/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Taylor McNeilly does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Rev. Walker worked closely with King and would be the one to bring King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail to public attention. He was the only one who could understand King’s handwriting.
Taylor McNeilly, Reference and Processing Archivist, University of Richmond
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/111027
2019-02-24T15:27:18Z
2019-02-24T15:27:18Z
Black Canadian activists pressured to be ‘quiet’ leaders
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/259852/original/file-20190219-43281-9rw86p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Rosemary Brown, then a member of the B.C. legislature, speaks at a protest against pornography in downtown Vancouver in 1984. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(CP PHOTO/ Chuck Stoody)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 1971, the Yale professor Robin Winks wrote that Black Canadians wanted “nothing more than to be accepted as quiet Canadians.”</p>
<p>In <a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=Eeh4L1CulqYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=robin+winks+blacks+in+canada&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjHzpOJwMXgAhXF8YMKHTLmCSsQ6AEIKjAA#v=onepage&q=robin%20winks%20blacks%20in%20canada&f=false"><em>The Blacks in Canada</em></a>, Winks claimed that Black Canadians were “unlikely to organize militant, noisy, pushy protests.” He considered Daniel Hill, the first full-time director of the Ontario Human Rights Commission in 1962, to be an <a href="https://works.bepress.com/danielmcneil/20/">exemplary model of quiet leadership.</a> </p>
<p>Hill returned the compliment by praising Winks’ history of Blacks in Canada as a powerful tool in his campaigns against serious <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Sex-and-Race-in-the-Black-Atlantic-Mulatto-Devils-and-Multiracial-Messiahs/McNeil/p/book/9780415872263">discrimination in housing, education and employment.</a> Hill’s study of human rights in Canada for the Canadian Labour Congress in 1977 also denounced “aspiring leaders” in militant organizations who did not propose what he considered to be constructive action. </p>
<p>Yet whereas Winks was a rather unabashed elitist who had little time for “<a href="https://books.google.ca/books/about/The_age_of_imperialism.html?id=B3xxAAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y">simple minds</a>,” Hill translated the work he gleaned from <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Sex-and-Race-in-the-Black-Atlantic-Mulatto-Devils-and-Multiracial-Messiahs/McNeil/p/book/9780415872263">“obscure historical journals”</a> into popular histories. He would work closely with his friend Alan Borovoy, the longtime general counsel for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, who defined his anti-racist campaigns against “<a href="https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1962/10/20/the-counterattack-on-diehard-racism">ineffectual intellectuals with no concept of action.”</a></p>
<p>Hill and Borovoy may be described as Canadian “shy elitists.” They were uncomfortable with anything that they considered too elitist or radical for Canadian tastes. Yet they also encouraged the public to celebrate and defer to prominent, “respectable” figures in elite institutions. </p>
<p>Since we have not ended our dependence on shy elitism, there remains an understandable interest in celebrating Black men and women who have achieved recognition from the Canadian state. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260292/original/file-20190221-195879-1sd2eyy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260292/original/file-20190221-195879-1sd2eyy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=577&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260292/original/file-20190221-195879-1sd2eyy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=577&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260292/original/file-20190221-195879-1sd2eyy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=577&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260292/original/file-20190221-195879-1sd2eyy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=725&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260292/original/file-20190221-195879-1sd2eyy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=725&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260292/original/file-20190221-195879-1sd2eyy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=725&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Rosemary Brown on a Canadian stamp.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Canada Post</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>However, we also need to recognize that Black Canadians are not problems when they do not conform to the model of a quiet leader. They are people who confront the problem of shy elitism in Canada.</p>
<p>Consider some of the challenges faced by the politician, social worker, human rights advocate and academic Rosemary Brown. </p>
<h2>Introducing Rosemary Brown</h2>
<p>Rosemary Brown moved to Canada in 1951 from Jamaica to study social work at McGill University. She became the first Black woman elected to a provincial legislature in Canada in 1972 and the first Black person to run for leadership of a federal political party in 1975.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260283/original/file-20190221-195876-ab9yji.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260283/original/file-20190221-195876-ab9yji.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=340&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260283/original/file-20190221-195876-ab9yji.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=340&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260283/original/file-20190221-195876-ab9yji.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=340&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260283/original/file-20190221-195876-ab9yji.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260283/original/file-20190221-195876-ab9yji.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260283/original/file-20190221-195876-ab9yji.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ed Broadbent and Rosemary Brown are seen at a 1975 meeting of candidates for the federal New Democratic Party leadership. Broadbent was the eventual winner.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(CP PHOTO/Ryan Remiorz)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Featured in a profile in the <em>Toronto Star</em> on Jan. 9, 1973, Brown was introduced as a “McGill University graduate, wife of Vancouver psychiatrist and mother of two.” Aside from the sexism of highlighting her marital and parental status, such descriptive remarks reminded Canadian readers that Brown was educated at McGill, an institution known for training young people to become the next generation of quiet Canadian leaders. </p>
<p>In other words, Brown was portrayed as a solid, respectable member of the middle class who defied North American stereotypes of Black cultural pathology and single mothers raising children outside of nuclear families. </p>
<p>Brown responded to these media profiles by pointing to her upbringing in Jamaica in the 1930s and ‘40s. Unlike Blacks in Canada in the 1960s and '70s, she could claim that she grew up in an environment in which the <a href="https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1973/6/1/last-tango-in-prince-george">“governor was Black, judges were Black, the police were Black, anyone who was anyone was Black.”</a> </p>
<h2>Exoticizing Rosemary Brown</h2>
<p>In the British Columbia legislature, politicians like Pat Jordan, the conservative-populist Social Credit Party MLA, asked why Brown did not move back to Jamaica to solve its problems of “slave labour and poverty.” </p>
<p>Media profiles questioned Brown’s socialist credentials by pointing to her comfortable upbringing and privileged status in Jamaica. Stories in <em>The Vancouver Sun</em> highlighted her expensive home in the fashionable Point Grey area and her Parisian wardrobe. <em>Chatelaine</em> magazine depicted Brown as “deliciously minority and yet so chic.” </p>
<p>Brown’s dismissal of these sneers about radical chic did not go unnoticed by Canadian commentators. Journalist Allan Fotheringham identified a certain haughtiness in Brown’s public demeanour. Bob Hunter, the public intellectual, eco-theorist and founder of Greenpeace, said that Brown had to pass through hoops that were understandably frustrating to someone with her intelligence and potential to become Canada’s “Philosopher Queen.”</p>
<h2>Domesticating Rosemary Brown</h2>
<p>In her <a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=rvgRAQAAIAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s">autobiography</a>, Brown conceded that she increasingly felt the need to communicate her message in the “safest, most acceptable and bland” terms to the Canadian voter. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260281/original/file-20190221-195864-c2bkd7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260281/original/file-20190221-195864-c2bkd7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=485&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260281/original/file-20190221-195864-c2bkd7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=485&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260281/original/file-20190221-195864-c2bkd7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=485&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260281/original/file-20190221-195864-c2bkd7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=610&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260281/original/file-20190221-195864-c2bkd7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=610&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260281/original/file-20190221-195864-c2bkd7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=610&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Brown is congratulated by Gov. Gen. Romeo LeBlanc after receiving the Order of Canada at a ceremony in Ottawa in 1996.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(CP PHOTO/Tom Hanson)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This did not mean that she shied away from controversial issues. It did mean, however, that her campaign to become the federal leader of Canada’s left-leaning New Democratic Party would repeat Canadian platitudes. It was claimed, for example, that the candidacy of a Jamaican-born feminist offered voters an opportunity to live up to Canada’s claim to be a multicultural “nation of immigrants.” </p>
<p>Brown also stressed that responsible, quiet human rights organizations had “<a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=rvgRAQAAIAAJ&q=inauthor:%22Rosemary+Brown%22&dq=inauthor:%22Rosemary+Brown%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjj_MihkbfgAhVF0oMKHXDhAiYQ6AEIKjAA">more lasting impact on the quality of life</a>” of Black Canadians than more prominent or newsworthy radical organizations. </p>
<p>Although she would not win the NDP leadership, Brown would emerge from the contest with a national profile as a dynamic speaker who could convey the realities of racism and sexism in a manner that was palatable to “ordinary, fair-minded Canadians.” </p>
<p>Brown was increasingly portrayed in the media as a responsible Canadian who encouraged minorities and women to achieve major social change by working inside formal institutions. </p>
<h2>Unsettling shy elitism</h2>
<p>Brown upheld the legacy of Daniel Hill as chief commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Agency between 1993 and 1996. She also became an Officer in the Order of Canada in 1996 after she lamented the failure of academics and critical theorists to do anything that might appear “<a href="https://books.google.ca/books/about/Racism_in_Canada.html?id=ggAVAAAAYAAJ">commercialized, common or ordinary</a>.” </p>
<p>Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose? </p>
<p>To unsettle the system of shy elitism in Canada, we need to contest oversimplified solutions to the so-called problem of Blackness in Canada. </p>
<p>We must also generate critical questions about when and why a Canadian state recognizes Black activists.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/111027/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Daniel McNeil received funding from SSHRC for research on "Migration/Performance/Stereotypes"</span></em></p>
Do Canadians like their activism to be communicated in the safest and blandest manner possible?
Daniel McNeil, Associate professor, Carleton University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/111954
2019-02-21T22:19:57Z
2019-02-21T22:19:57Z
A must-read list: The enduring contributions of African American women writers
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260101/original/file-20190221-148520-ceix1w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston and Nella Larsen are on this short list of enduring must-read writers.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Left to right: Nobel Prize, U.S. Library of Congress, Yale archive</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In <em>Mules and Men</em> (1935), anthropologist, creative writer and Harlem Renaissance upstart Zora Neale Hurston relays the evocative folktale “Why the Sister in Black Works Hardest.” Fatigued after the work of Creation, God casts a massive bundle onto the earth. Intrigued by the mysterious object, a white Southern woman during the antebellum era asks her husband to retrieve it. <a href="http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7Ema01/grand-jean/hurston/chapters/Chapter4.html#3">Reluctant to tote the load himself, the master instructs a slave to fetch it</a>. </p>
<p>Soon wearied of the task, the slave then commands his wife to shoulder the burden. She does so, excited at the prospect of exploring the contents. When she opens the package, however, what leaps out at her and Black women for all posterity is none other than hard work.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260033/original/file-20190220-148523-19d3cyi.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260033/original/file-20190220-148523-19d3cyi.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=451&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260033/original/file-20190220-148523-19d3cyi.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=451&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260033/original/file-20190220-148523-19d3cyi.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=451&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260033/original/file-20190220-148523-19d3cyi.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260033/original/file-20190220-148523-19d3cyi.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260033/original/file-20190220-148523-19d3cyi.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ann Petry (right) was interviewed after she won a fiction award for ‘The Street.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.loc.gov/item/2018600204/">All-American news 4 / All American news IV / All-American news reel no. 4/Library of Congress</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>African American women writers have tackled the hard work of representing a diverse spectrum of lived and imagined experiences, including and especially their own. This labour occurs against the backdrop of centuries-long struggles with racist oppression and gender-based violence, including — but not limited to — slavery’s culture of endemic rape, forced or interrupted motherhood, infanticide, concubinage, fractured families and egregious physical and mental abuse. </p>
<h2>Hard work as groundwork</h2>
<p>Renowned abolitionist Frederick Douglass recalls in his 1845 slave narrative how witnessing the serial whippings of his Aunt Hester impacted him “with awful force.” He explains, <a href="http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/abolitn/abaufda3t.html">“it was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass. It was a most terrible spectacle.” </a> </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260041/original/file-20190220-148542-13szrjh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260041/original/file-20190220-148542-13szrjh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260041/original/file-20190220-148542-13szrjh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260041/original/file-20190220-148542-13szrjh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260041/original/file-20190220-148542-13szrjh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1151&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260041/original/file-20190220-148542-13szrjh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1151&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260041/original/file-20190220-148542-13szrjh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1151&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>These ordeals also emerge in slave narratives by women. Harriet Jacobs’ <em>Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl</em> (1861) emphasizes such travails. A target of relentless sexual harassment by her much-older master, Jacobs laments, “When they told me my new-born babe was a girl, my heart was heavier than it had ever been before. <a href="https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/jacobs.html">Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women.”</a></p>
<p>Once emancipated, African American women still faced staggering impediments when pursuing educational, entrepreneurial and employment opportunities. Political participation meant restrictions on voting rights both as women and as people of colour. Racist caricatures impugned everything from a woman’s intelligence and moral capacity to <a href="https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mfsfront;c=mfs;c=mfsfront;idno=ark5583.0022.105;g=mfsg;rgn=main;view=text;xc=1">her skin color, texture of hair and body shape</a>. Stereotypes like the docile Mammy, the Tragic Mulatta, the clownish Topsy, the oversexed Jezebel, the greedy Welfare Queen, the amoral Hoodrat and the Mad Black Woman (still prevalent today) remain testaments to a history of disrespect and erasure. </p>
<p>Hurston’s tale symbolizes the enduring social struggles Black women have faced living in what feminist critic bell hooks has termed <a href="http://imaginenoborders.org/pdf/zines/UnderstandingPatriarchy.pdf">white supremacist capitalist patriarchy</a>.</p>
<p>In addition to influential autobiographers like Maya Angelou, dramatists like Lorraine Hansberry and poets like Gwendolyn Brooks, fiction writers have consistently demonstrated how imaginative art can simultaneously inform, persuade, entertain, catalyze social change and address individual as well as collective concerns. </p>
<p>Here is a short list of pivotal texts by African American women from the past century. These writers are but a small sample of the artists and intellectuals whose output resisted the force of what contemporary feminist critic <a href="https://www.moyabailey.com/">Moya Bailey</a> has termed <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14680777.2018.1447395">misogynoir</a>, or the corrosive fusion of anti-Blackness and misogyny prevalent in popular culture today. These women have completed the groundwork — and hard work — of envisioning a more just, inclusive society going forward.</p>
<h2><em>Quicksand</em> (1928) and <em>Passing</em> (1929) by Nella Larsen</h2>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260026/original/file-20190220-148513-1wjuxxp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260026/original/file-20190220-148513-1wjuxxp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260026/original/file-20190220-148513-1wjuxxp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260026/original/file-20190220-148513-1wjuxxp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260026/original/file-20190220-148513-1wjuxxp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260026/original/file-20190220-148513-1wjuxxp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260026/original/file-20190220-148513-1wjuxxp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>These novellas follow mixed-race women whose uneasy status on the colour line (including the lure of passing as white) complicates their lives in dangerous, even fatal ways. <em>Passing</em> is revolutionary for its depiction of homoerotic tension between two upper-middle-class Black women. <em>Quicksand</em> offers insight into the exoticization of African American women abroad and the contest between art and domesticity as viable avenues for a fulfilling life.</p>
<hr>
<h2><em>Their Eyes Were Watching God</em> (1937) by Zora Neale Hurston</h2>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260024/original/file-20190220-148536-1iwujpi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260024/original/file-20190220-148536-1iwujpi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=930&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260024/original/file-20190220-148536-1iwujpi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=930&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260024/original/file-20190220-148536-1iwujpi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=930&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260024/original/file-20190220-148536-1iwujpi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1169&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260024/original/file-20190220-148536-1iwujpi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1169&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260024/original/file-20190220-148536-1iwujpi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1169&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This story is the lyrical account of thrice-married Janie Crawford who finds a mature vision of love and fulfillment amid incessant gossip and a difficult family history. The all-Black township of Eatonville, Fla., and the rich “muck” of the Everglades contribute to a portrait of community health, daily striving and resolute self-awareness.</p>
<hr>
<h2><em>The Street</em> (1946) by Ann Petry</h2>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260027/original/file-20190220-148533-1h74vkc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260027/original/file-20190220-148533-1h74vkc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=994&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260027/original/file-20190220-148533-1h74vkc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=994&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260027/original/file-20190220-148533-1h74vkc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=994&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260027/original/file-20190220-148533-1h74vkc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1250&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260027/original/file-20190220-148533-1h74vkc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1250&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260027/original/file-20190220-148533-1h74vkc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1250&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This social realist novel follows single mother Lutie Johnson as she attempts to make a life for her young son in a predatory urban space. Weathering sexism, racism, classism, poverty and intense personal frustration, Lutie attempts to resist the brutality of the environment that gives the novel its loaded name.</p>
<hr>
<h2><em>The Bluest Eye</em> (1970) by Toni Morrison</h2>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260028/original/file-20190220-148506-nawre3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260028/original/file-20190220-148506-nawre3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1010&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260028/original/file-20190220-148506-nawre3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1010&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260028/original/file-20190220-148506-nawre3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1010&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260028/original/file-20190220-148506-nawre3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1269&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260028/original/file-20190220-148506-nawre3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1269&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260028/original/file-20190220-148506-nawre3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1269&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This book is a searing portrait of a young girl’s coming-of-age and eventual undoing in the years following the Great Depression. Tumultuous family dynamics, psychological trauma and incest, the quest for compassion and self-love, and the toxic myth of Black ugliness coalesce in this first novel by the Nobel Laureate and author of neo-slave narrative <em>Beloved</em> (1987).</p>
<hr>
<h2><em>Kindred</em> (1979) by Octavia Butler</h2>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260029/original/file-20190220-148539-11osntp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260029/original/file-20190220-148539-11osntp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=878&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260029/original/file-20190220-148539-11osntp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=878&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260029/original/file-20190220-148539-11osntp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=878&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260029/original/file-20190220-148539-11osntp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1104&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260029/original/file-20190220-148539-11osntp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1104&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260029/original/file-20190220-148539-11osntp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1104&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Oscillating between the 1970s and the early 19th century, this science fiction odyssey (re)connects a contemporary Black woman writer and her white husband with her ancestors on a Maryland plantation. The novel is buoyed up by the dramatic tension of time travel and the juxtaposition of the pre-civil War <a href="https://www.historynet.com/antebellum-period">Antebellum-era</a> with Civil Rights-era racial attitudes, including those about interracial love and allyship.</p>
<hr>
<h2><em>The Women of Brewster Place</em> (1982) by Gloria Naylor</h2>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260030/original/file-20190220-148530-1244zgb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260030/original/file-20190220-148530-1244zgb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260030/original/file-20190220-148530-1244zgb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260030/original/file-20190220-148530-1244zgb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260030/original/file-20190220-148530-1244zgb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1155&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260030/original/file-20190220-148530-1244zgb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1155&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260030/original/file-20190220-148530-1244zgb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1155&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Structured like a narrative quilt, these interconnected experiences of seven women span different generations, professions, class backgrounds and understandings of their place in the world. The eroded apartment complex that links them is the backdrop for unbearable pain as well as the promise of transformation and reconciliation.</p>
<hr>
<h2><em>The Color Purple</em> (1982) by Alice Walker</h2>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260031/original/file-20190220-148545-7dl5qu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260031/original/file-20190220-148545-7dl5qu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260031/original/file-20190220-148545-7dl5qu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260031/original/file-20190220-148545-7dl5qu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260031/original/file-20190220-148545-7dl5qu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260031/original/file-20190220-148545-7dl5qu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260031/original/file-20190220-148545-7dl5qu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A tale of two sisters, Celie and Nettie, this novel constellates their love and longing via letters and imagined conversations across the Atlantic. Unsparing in its critique of domestic violence and toxic masculinity, yet tender in its treatment of various human weaknesses, the novel underscores Black women’s need for self-regard and mutual care. Not only are these acts revolutionary, but they also offer a glimpse of the divine.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/111954/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nancy Kang has received grant funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). This research was undertaken, in part, thanks to funding from the Canada Research Chairs program. </span></em></p>
Here is a small list of pivotal texts by African American women from the past century.
Nancy Kang, Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Canada Research Chair in Transnational Feminisms and Gender-Based Violence, University of Manitoba
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/111028
2019-02-19T22:10:33Z
2019-02-19T22:10:33Z
I am not your nice ‘Mammy’: How racist stereotypes still impact women
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/259814/original/file-20190219-43270-goswo8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=66%2C8%2C1120%2C758&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The historical depiction of 'the mammy' is a racist stereotype, with an enduring impact. Hattie McDaniel (right) won an Oscar for her role in 'Gone with the Wind' with Vivien Leigh (left). </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Selznick International Pictures</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>How does a 100-year-old racist stereotype still impact Black women in North American institutions? </p>
<p>When I was a PhD student, a white woman professor was interested in my research, even though I was not her student. After I voiced concern about the similarities between her work and mine, the professor reprimanded me over email. Like “the mammy” who was often punished if she did not appear warm and nurturing, I was told to stay in my lane and to remember my PhD status.</p>
<p>When Black women are treated like this, we can sometimes feel disempowered to do anything about it. Instead, through the act of what one scholar has called “<a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00957984980242009">Mammy-ism</a>,” we might feel the need to accommodate white people by acquiescing to their needs and assuming an inferior position. </p>
<p>In my opinion, Mammy-ism is often a response to the problem of niceness. </p>
<p>In a recent article for <em>The Guardian</em>, critical whiteness expert Robin diAngelo says that <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/16/racial-inequality-niceness-white-people">white people assume that niceness is the answer to racial inequality.</a> She explains that niceness is conveyed through a light tone of voice, eye contact accompanied by over-smiling and pointing out some similarity or affinity between a Black person and white person.</p>
<p>But this creates a racial dynamic where people of colour are required to maintain white comfort to survive. </p>
<p><a href="https://drhyman.com/blog/2015/12/17/stop-being-nice-and-do-this-instead/">Therefore, niceness can be a form of manipulation</a>. According to wellness experts, <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/marcia-sirota/too-nice_b_946956.html">there is a difference between kindness and niceness</a>. Where kindness emerges from someone who is compassionate and comfortable in their own skin, niceness is often about feelings of inadequacy, a tactic used to get something from the other person — be it approval, acceptance or <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/5ea9f140-f722-4214-bb57-8b84f9418a7e">emotional labour</a>. </p>
<p>Being a nice white person helps to reinforce <a href="https://www.christiancentury.org/article/critical-essay/ten-myths-white-people-believe-about-racism">one of the myths about racism — that racism is only perpetrated by mean self-proclaimed white supremacists</a>. A nice person cannot be racist because they don’t have bad intentions, or so the argument goes.</p>
<h2>‘Controlling images’</h2>
<p>In the 2011 film <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1454029/"><em>The Help</em>,</a> when Cicley Tyson as Constantine Jefferson, the mammy to Skeeter Phelan (Emma Stone), is abruptly fired by her “nice” white family despite decades of loyalty, and at the expense of her own family, many Black women likely said “hmmhmm” out loud because we have either seen, heard or experienced similar abrupt dismissals.</p>
<p>In 1991, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/800672?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins coined the term “controlling images”</a> to describe how the dominant ideology of slavery created socially constructed depictions of Black womanhood. In addition to <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10875540903489447">“the welfare mother,”</a> and <a href="https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/jezebel/index.htm">“the Jezebel,”</a> “the mammy” has had a tight grip on how Black women are viewed and treated in western institutions. </p>
<p>The names <em>mammy</em> and <em>aunt</em> were both used in southern antebellum fiction to describe both a person and a role within the plantation home. Real mammies did exist, but they did not look or act like the fictional mammies created on stage, in novels, advertising, film and television who were rotund, dark-skinned and always happy to please with a smile. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/259339/original/file-20190215-56212-1j9rhfe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/259339/original/file-20190215-56212-1j9rhfe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=462&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259339/original/file-20190215-56212-1j9rhfe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=462&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259339/original/file-20190215-56212-1j9rhfe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=462&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259339/original/file-20190215-56212-1j9rhfe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=580&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259339/original/file-20190215-56212-1j9rhfe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=580&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259339/original/file-20190215-56212-1j9rhfe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=580&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hattie McDaniel, left, is given the Academy Award for the best performance in a supporting role in 1939 by actress Fay Bainter for her work as ‘Mammy’ in ‘Gone With the Wind.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>One of the first fictional mammies appears in the novel <em>Uncle Tom’s Cabin</em> (1852) as the character Aunt Chloe. Mammy lives on through the advertising trademark <a href="https://www.utpjournals.press/doi/abs/10.3138/jcs.49.1.205">Aunt Jemima</a>, which
has graced store shelves since her debut in 1893. <a href="https://digitalcommons.conncoll.edu/sheetmusic/886/">U.S. songs like “Mammy’s Little Coal Black Rose”</a> (1916) were <a href="http://spacing.ca/toronto/2018/10/29/the-complicated-history-of-canadian-blackface/">played in local communities across North America</a>, and served as a reminder that the dominant culture considered Black women to be their caregivers. When <a href="https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/04/05/hattie-mcdaniel-oscars/">Hattie McDaniel won an Oscar for her role as Mammy in <em>Gone With the Wind</em> (1939)</a>, it also naturalized the role of the mammy in Hollywood. </p>
<p>Mammy was so enduring that in 1923, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) almost succeeded in their campaign to get <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/05/the-mammy-washington-almost-had/276431/">the U.S. government to approve a monument “in memory of the faithful slave mammies of the South.”</a></p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/259334/original/file-20190215-56220-18ymxd6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=6%2C7%2C1014%2C536&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/259334/original/file-20190215-56220-18ymxd6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=324&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259334/original/file-20190215-56220-18ymxd6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=324&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259334/original/file-20190215-56220-18ymxd6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=324&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259334/original/file-20190215-56220-18ymxd6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259334/original/file-20190215-56220-18ymxd6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259334/original/file-20190215-56220-18ymxd6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A scene from the movie, ‘The Help,’ with Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Disney Pictures</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Many have written about <a href="https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/appview/news/toronto/hadiya-roderique-black-on-bay-street/article36823806/">institutional racism</a>, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-hadiyas-black-bay-street-story-have-us-saying-me-too-percil/">racial microaggressions</a> and <a href="https://www.ubcpress.ca/the-equity-myth">the lack of equity/diversity, especially at Canadian universities</a>, and therefore, many may understand that these depictions of the mammy are racist. </p>
<p>However, in the 21st century, <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/between-the-lines/201204/studies-unconscious-bias-racism-not-always-racists">racism is not necessarily so overt. It is often perpetrated by people who feel threatened by Black people who are self-assured</a>. </p>
<p>When a Black woman resists playing a subordinate role, some white people in institutional settings find issue with it.</p>
<h2>How to end this centuries-long racial dynamic</h2>
<p>I believe <a href="https://au.reachout.com/articles/how-to-become-self-aware">self-awareness</a> is the starting point of any transformation. Unless we take active steps to do something about it, we can remain in the dark about <a href="https://www.devex.com/news/opinion-here-s-how-to-combat-unconscious-racial-bias-at-work-92099">unconscious racial bias</a>. Once we become self-aware, we might become one step closer to laying the mammy to rest once and for all. </p>
<p>Ryerson University Prof. Beverly-Jean Daniel argues that <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13613324.2018.1468745">many white women in the Canadian academy lack awareness of their role in reproducing racial dynamics</a>. Daniel explains that many white women have the power to reproduce patriarchy, marginalize and exclude Black women, but they are seldom called out as racist because, as a gender minority, they fit into marginalized categories created under multiculturalism and inclusion policies. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DlrqeWrczs">In a speech at the Stanford Graduate School of Business years ago</a>, Oprah Winfrey said that all relationships are rooted in three questions: Did you hear me? Did you see me? And did what I say mean anything to you? Instead of putting on a veil of niceness, creating genuine connections by asking questions such as the ones Oprah Winfrey suggests would improve white-Black woman racial dynamics.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/111028/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Cheryl Thompson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Stereotypes of Black women continue to impact how they are treated in institutions.
Cheryl Thompson, Assistant Professor, Toronto Metropolitan University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/110762
2019-02-14T22:37:42Z
2019-02-14T22:37:42Z
NAACP’s first meeting was held in Canada but there were no Canadians there
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/257834/original/file-20190207-174857-1rhnyap.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Niagara Movement meeting in Fort Erie Canada, near Niagara Falls in 1905 had no Canadians present. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ppmsca.37818/">Library of Congress</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The first meeting of what would later become the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) took place in 1905 in Fort Erie near Niagara Falls, Canada. Legendary thinkers such as W.E.B. Du Bois attended.</p>
<p>Although the social justice movement for the advancement of Black Americans was initially named <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/niagara-movement">the Niagara Movement</a>, based on that first meeting in Canada, there was no mention of Black Canadians at this historic meeting. </p>
<p>The story of this meeting helps to demonstrate the ongoing invisibility of Black Canadians both within Canada, across North America and internationally. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/259129/original/file-20190214-1730-10t1tm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/259129/original/file-20190214-1730-10t1tm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=454&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259129/original/file-20190214-1730-10t1tm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=454&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259129/original/file-20190214-1730-10t1tm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=454&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259129/original/file-20190214-1730-10t1tm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=571&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259129/original/file-20190214-1730-10t1tm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=571&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259129/original/file-20190214-1730-10t1tm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=571&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">American women at the 2nd Niagara Movement Conference which took place in the U.S. at Harpers Ferry: Mrs. Gertrude Wright Morgan (seated) and (left to right) Mrs. O.M. Waller, Mrs. H.F.M. Murray, Mrs. Mollie Lewis Kelan, Mrs. Ida D. Bailey, Miss Sadie Shorter, and Mrs. Charlotte Hershaw.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Given the strong geographical connection between Canada and the U.S., it is reasonable to question why Black Canadians are missing from the Niagara Movement’s historical narrative. </p>
<p>Their absence in this history highlights the erasure of the contributions of Indigenous, Black people and other racialized peoples in Canada. This Canadian historical narrative, as Canadian sociologist Rinaldo Walcott suggests, has effectively “invisibilized” the Black presence in Canada. </p>
<p>In his book, <em><a href="https://49thshelf.com/Books/B/Black-Like-Who3">Black Like Who?</a></em>, Walcott speculates that the NAACP disallowed Black Canadians from attending this first meeting, despite their attempts to engage in dialogue with the organizers. Walcott writes that there were Black people in Canada who had both heard of and wanted to participate in the movement. However, he believes they were not welcomed. </p>
<p>Many know that Black Americans faced racist laws meant to segregate and oppress their existence, but many do not realize that Black Canadians also faced the hardship of anti-Black racism or the extent to which they suffered. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/259130/original/file-20190214-1721-2apkp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/259130/original/file-20190214-1721-2apkp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259130/original/file-20190214-1721-2apkp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259130/original/file-20190214-1721-2apkp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259130/original/file-20190214-1721-2apkp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259130/original/file-20190214-1721-2apkp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259130/original/file-20190214-1721-2apkp6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The untold story of Canadian slavery and the burning of Old Montréal.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">HarperCollins</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Historian Afua Cooper’s portrayal of enslaved woman Marie Joseph Angelique, accused of <a href="https://greyroots.com/sites/default/files/naomi_norquay_book_review_the_hanging_of_angelique_2009.pdf">“allegedly setting fire to Montréal in 1734”</a> in <a href="https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/the-hanging-of-angelique-book-review"><em>The Hanging of Angelique</em></a>, helps to illuminate anti-Black racism and the enslavement of Black people in Canada in the 1700s. Although there was no direct evidence to prove Angelique caused the blaze, <a href="https://greyroots.com/sites/default/files/naomi_norquay_book_review_the_hanging_of_angelique_2009.pdf">“she was convicted on circumstantial evidence in a justice system that declared defendants guilty unless proven innocent, by a court whose members had all suffered losses in the fire and by 24 vengeful witnesses, including a 5 year old girl.”</a> </p>
<p>Cooper’s example helps to demonstrate the Canadian settler social conditions where Black people are assumed to be guilty.</p>
<h2>The urgent need for a social justice movement</h2>
<p>Black people in both Canada and the United States have encountered, and continue to face, a white settler terrain that loathes Blackness. After the Civil War, the United States Congress passed laws to support newly freed African-Americans but in the decades that followed, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a series of decisions that set back those efforts. </p>
<p>During that time, Black Americans encountered “anti-Negro” <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/springfield-race-riot-1908/">race riots</a>. Historian <a href="https://academic.oup.com/jah/article-abstract/54/3/696/744430">Charles Kellogg</a> recounts stories from African-Americans in places like Springfield, Illinois, where they encountered <a href="https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.2307/2716769?journalCode=jnh">white mobs that burned down Black homes, lynched Black bodies and murdered Black people</a>.</p>
<p>By 1905, the need for a social movement for African-Americans was urgent. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/257827/original/file-20190207-174894-ld8xlz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/257827/original/file-20190207-174894-ld8xlz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=455&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/257827/original/file-20190207-174894-ld8xlz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=455&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/257827/original/file-20190207-174894-ld8xlz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=455&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/257827/original/file-20190207-174894-ld8xlz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=571&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/257827/original/file-20190207-174894-ld8xlz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=571&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/257827/original/file-20190207-174894-ld8xlz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=571&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A closer look at the studio photo taken at the Niagara Movement meeting in Fort Erie Canada, 1905. Top row (left to right): H. A. Thompson, Alonzo F. Herndon, John Hope, James R. L. Diggs (?). Second row (left to right): Frederick McGhee, Norris B. Herndon (boy), J. Max Barber, W. E. B. Du Bois, Robert Bonner. Bottom row (left to right): Henry L. Bailey, Clement G. Morgan, W. H. H. Hart, B. S. Smith.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Library of Congress</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The NAACP would become the vehicle to increase the social citizenship of Black people in America, especially during the early 1900s, when the race divide cut deep and afflicted the social, political and economic conditions of Black folk. </p>
<p>U.S. segregation laws in the 1900s made holding meetings in hotels impossible. Efforts to hold the original meeting in Buffalo, New York were thwarted by a social climate that was simmering with racial hostility toward Black Americans. In historical notes, Buffalo’s NAACP chapter president, Rev. Mark Blue, mentioned that Black American thinkers were accepted by the management of the <a href="https://www.wgrz.com/article/news/niagara-movement-paved-the-way-for-the-naacp/71-588302597">Erie Hotel</a>, near Niagara Falls, Ont. </p>
<p>Why were Black Americans but not Black Canadians allowed at this historic meeting? Who disallowed them to enter? Was it the hotel managers? Was it the organizers? Were they there but perhaps not mentioned?</p>
<h2>Invisible in Canada</h2>
<p>Canada often characterizes itself as a haven for Black slaves of the American South, but it does so without acknowledging its own participation in the Black slave industry.</p>
<p>A seldom mentioned historical fact is that <a href="https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/black-enslavement">Canada has its own Black slave history</a>. Prior to abolition, Black enslavement existed in Canada until it was abolished throughout British North America. </p>
<p>Before the Niagara Movement, the Canadian region was the site of safer passage of Blacks fleeing slavery in the United States. Heroic figures like <a href="https://search.proquest.com/openview/dc40217905404be7424014b40b6ba0fd/1?casa_token=v-V4tPkuYPkAAAAA:k4hQUofCUVTgFEDg86h6OA_kRohjSniPD1ZoqWG_7MQLdhv1s3xideVBtUzViBG9twOIpAXM6gIB&cbl=37747&pq-origsite=gscholar">Harriet Tubman</a> travelled through Niagara, Canada to bring slaves to a better life in northern North America. Yet, as Walcott points out, <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674076068">there is little or no reference to these facts</a> in the historical commentaries on the Niagara Movement. </p>
<p>Black Canadian historical moments, such as the destruction of <a href="https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/4w5q9n/africville-canadas-secret-racist-history">Africville</a> in 1967, live “only in the memories of its former inhabitants and their descendants.” Few know that <a href="https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/africville">“Halifax was founded in 1749, when African people held as slaves dug out roads and built much of the city.”</a></p>
<p>The lack of information about these histories is another form of anti-Black racism that exists in Canada. Canada has adopted a policy of erasure when it comes to acknowledging the history and contributions of its Indigenous and Black peoples. </p>
<p>Many scholars have asserted the importance of continued Black Canadian cultural studies. The power politics of whose work gets published, and where, and the absence of Black, Indigenous and racialized histories have reinforced Black invisibility. </p>
<p>It is necessary to critically engage on historical notions of Blackness and the “<a href="https://49thshelf.com/Books/B/Black-Like-Who3">cross border political identification</a>” of Black Canadians and Americans. By recognizing that both Black Canadian and American historical episodes of anti-Black racism are similar, we question how the white settler terrain has convinced mainstream society to believe one is worse than the other. </p>
<p><em>This is an updated version of a story originally published on Feb. 14, 2019. It clarifies the location of the Niagara Movement’s first meeting.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/110762/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The first NAACP meeting was held in Canada but there is no mention of Black Canadians in the books. This historical absence is a symbol of the invisibility of anti-Black racism in Canada.
Warren Clarke, Ph.D., Carleton University
Nadine Powell, PhD Student Department of Sociology; RA - Migration and Diaspora Studies, Carleton University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/110013
2019-02-01T11:40:29Z
2019-02-01T11:40:29Z
3 ways to improve education about slavery in the US
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/256702/original/file-20190131-124043-7q7ksb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Textbooks often do a poor job when it comes to teaching students about slavery in the U.S.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/years-slave-657173227?src=3agCZltIQa_nIG3hMFF_-g-1-6">Dusan Pavlic from www.shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>When it comes to teaching students about slavery in the United States, teachers often stumble through the topic. In the worst cases, they use poorly conceived lessons that end up inflaming students, parents and communities about a subject that is already difficult to deal with because of the inhumanity involved.</p>
<p>For instance, in 2018 a Bronx middle school teacher “<a href="https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/bronx-teacher-sparks-outrage-cruel-slavery-lesson-article-1.3793930">shocked and traumatized</a>” her social studies class when she had black students lie on the floor, then “<a href="https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/bronx-teacher-sparks-outrage-cruel-slavery-lesson-article-1.3793930">stepped on their backs to show them what slavery felt like</a>.” </p>
<p>In 2012 in Georgia, a third-grade teacher resigned after an investigation found the teacher and three others had <a href="http://www.gpb.org/news/2012/01/19/teacher-quits-over-slavery-math-lesson">assigned math homework with word problems about slavery</a>, such as, “If Frederick got two beatings each day, how many beatings did he get in one week?”</p>
<p>As a former social studies teacher and now as an assistant professor who <a href="https://cehs.wvu.edu/news/enews-archive/0818/2018/10/17/faculty-spotlight-tiffany-mitchell-patterson">helps prepare educators</a> to teach social studies, I have no shortage of ideas on how educators – or parents or anyone who is interested in learning more about slavery in the United States – can do a better job of understanding the subject and presenting it to others. Here are three of those ideas:</p>
<h2>1. Identify the slaveholding presidents</h2>
<p>Every American should know that several U.S. presidents – including some of the Founding Fathers – were slaveholders. <a href="https://www.history.com/news/how-many-u-s-presidents-owned-slaves">Twelve U.S. presidents</a> held anywhere from one to hundreds of people as slaves. The nation’s first president, George Washington, <a href="https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/slavery/ten-facts-about-washington-slavery/">enslaved over 300 people</a> and held slaves for 56 years. Thomas Jefferson, the nation’s third president, held <a href="https://www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery/property">600 persons as slaves</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/256700/original/file-20190131-42594-1xxcwj3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/256700/original/file-20190131-42594-1xxcwj3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/256700/original/file-20190131-42594-1xxcwj3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=486&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256700/original/file-20190131-42594-1xxcwj3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=486&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256700/original/file-20190131-42594-1xxcwj3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=486&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256700/original/file-20190131-42594-1xxcwj3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=611&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256700/original/file-20190131-42594-1xxcwj3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=611&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256700/original/file-20190131-42594-1xxcwj3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=611&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">George Washington standing among slaves harvesting grain at Mt. Vernon.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/george-washington-plantation-owner-standing-among-245963809?src=3agCZltIQa_nIG3hMFF_-g-2-2">Everett Historical from www.shutterstock.com</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This often comes as a surprise to students. In my experience, many students have also been taught that the presidents were nice and humane to their slaves. I would emphasize to students that treating a person as property is neither nice nor humane.</p>
<p>About three years ago, critics prompted Scholastic to <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/18/463488364/amid-controversy-scholastic-pulls-picture-book-about-washingtons-slave">stop distribution</a> of a book, <a href="https://www.cbcbooks.org/cbc_book/a-birthday-cake-for-george-washington/">“A Birthday Cake for George Washington,”</a> that depicted <a href="https://www.teachingforchange.org/gw-birthday-cake-not-recommended">“happy”</a> slaves and which Scholastic itself admits may have given a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/18/business/media/scholastic-halts-distribution-of-a-birthday-cake-for-george-washington.html">“false impression of the reality of the lives of slaves.”</a></p>
<p>Slavery should be taught from the perspectives of those who were enslaved. For example, the young reader’s edition of <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Never-Caught-the-Story-of-Ona-Judge/Erica-Armstrong-Dunbar/9781534416178">“Never Caught, The Story of Ona Judge: George and Martha Washington’s Courageous Slave Who Dared to Run Away</a>,” sheds light on an aspect of George Washington’s life as a slaveholder that is not widely told to children.</p>
<p>Similarly, students should contemplate the life of <a href="https://www.monticello.org/sallyhemings/">Sally Hemings</a>, an enslaved house servant with whom Thomas Jefferson – <a href="http://www.americaslibrary.gov/aa/jefferson/aa_jefferson_declar_1.html">author</a> of the <a href="https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript">Declaration of Independence</a> – fathered six children, <a href="https://www.monticello.org/sallyhemings/">beginning when she was 16</a>. Jefferson <a href="https://www.americanheritage.com/content/thomas-jefferson%E2%80%99s-unknown-grandchildren">never publicly acknowledged</a> his children with Hemings.</p>
<h2>2. Move beyond textbooks</h2>
<p>When it comes to dealing with slavery, textbooks often use inadequate or inaccurate descriptions. For instance, in 2015, a high school freshman noticed that his geography textbook referred to Africans brought to plantations in the United States between the 1500s and 1800s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/06/us/publisher-promises-revisions-after-textbook-refers-to-african-slaves-as-workers.html">as “workers” instead of as slaves</a>. This <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/10/23/450826208/why-calling-slaves-workers-is-more-than-an-editing-error">sparked widespread outrage</a> as McGraw-Hill is a <a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/78030-global-publishing-leaders-2018-mcgraw-hill-education.html">major textbook publishing company</a>. McGraw-Hill <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2015/10/05/slave-workers-mcgraw-hill-textbook/73404632/">apologized</a> and agreed to revise the textbooks.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/256693/original/file-20190131-127151-1ntst0s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/256693/original/file-20190131-127151-1ntst0s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/256693/original/file-20190131-127151-1ntst0s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256693/original/file-20190131-127151-1ntst0s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256693/original/file-20190131-127151-1ntst0s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256693/original/file-20190131-127151-1ntst0s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256693/original/file-20190131-127151-1ntst0s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256693/original/file-20190131-127151-1ntst0s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A page from a McGraw-Hill textbook that referred to enslaved Africans transported to plantations in the United States as</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/10/23/450826208/why-calling-slaves-workers-is-more-than-an-editing-error">NPR</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The McGraw-Hill textbook controversy was hardly an isolated issue. In 2018, <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/teaching-hard-history-american-slavery">the Southern Poverty Law Center found</a> that when it comes to teaching students about American slavery, “textbooks do not have enough material about it.” Even the best textbook examined in the center’s analysis scored just 70 percent on a rubric designed to assess how good the textbooks were teaching various aspects of U.S. slavery, such as how the nation’s founding documents – the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution – <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/how-the-constitution-was-indeed-pro-slavery/406288/">contain protections for slavery</a>, or how <a href="https://www.history.com/news/slavery-profitable-southern-economy">slave labor was critical to the nation’s economy</a>. The average book scored 46 percent.</p>
<p>Parents and educators would be wise to encourage the use of primary sources to fill in what the textbooks are missing. Primary sources include records and firsthand accounts.</p>
<p>Since slavery in the U.S. was not <a href="https://www.archives.gov/historical-docs/13th-amendment">formally abolished</a> until the 13th Amendment was <a href="https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/13th-amendment-ratified">ratified in 1865</a>, today’s student might think there’s no way they could actually hear the voices of former slaves. But as demonstrated by <a href="https://www.loc.gov/collections/voices-remembering-slavery/about-this-collection">Voices from the Days of Slavery: Former Slaves tell their Stories</a> – a collection on file at the Library of Congress and available online – a person can actually hear firsthand accounts of life during slavery.</p>
<p>Hearing the voices of those who were enslaved is more powerful than what could ever be captured in a textbook.</p>
<p>Similar primary sources can be found in in the <a href="https://www.tolerance.org/frameworks/teaching-hard-history/american-slavery">Framework for Teaching Hard History of American Slavery</a>. Picture books and novels, such as those on a list titled “<a href="https://socialjusticebooks.org/booklists/slavery/">Slavery, Resistance and Reparations</a>,” are also a great way to engage children of all ages.</p>
<h2>3. Get out of the classroom</h2>
<p>Another way to learn about slavery is to visit museums and historic sites. Smaller state and local museums with exhibits, plantations, cemeteries, auction blocks and historical markers might be located in your state or local community. A librarian or archivist at a local library might be able to share unique local histories of slavery.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/256698/original/file-20190131-109820-np652w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/256698/original/file-20190131-109820-np652w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/256698/original/file-20190131-109820-np652w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256698/original/file-20190131-109820-np652w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256698/original/file-20190131-109820-np652w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256698/original/file-20190131-109820-np652w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256698/original/file-20190131-109820-np652w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256698/original/file-20190131-109820-np652w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A 2001 photo at the New York State Museum in Albany, New York, shows a depiction from the exhibit of ‘A Slave Ship Speaks: The Wreck of the Henrietta Maria.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Associated-Press-Domestic-News-New-York-United-/fc992c6c52e1da11af9f0014c2589dfb/109/0">Jim McKnight/AP</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Plan family trips or field trips to larger national museums that highlight the histories of slavery. In Washington, D.C., the <a href="https://nmaahc.si.edu/">Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture</a> has a <a href="https://nmaahc.si.edu/slavery-and-freedom">“Slavery and Freedom” exhibition</a>. There is also the <a href="https://www.nps.gov/frdo/index.htm">Frederick Douglass National Historic Site</a>.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.freedomcenter.org/">National Underground Railroad Freedom Center</a> in Cincinnati, Ohio, <a href="http://lwfsm.com/">Lest We Forget Black Holocaust Museum of Slavery</a> in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the <a href="https://museumandmemorial.eji.org/museum">Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration</a> in Montgomery, Alabama, all provide a more comprehensive lens on the systemic oppression of slavery.</p>
<p><em>This article was updated on September 27, 2023 to correct how the name of Southern Poverty Law Center was written.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/110013/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tiffany Mitchell Patterson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
A former social studies teacher lists three ways educators and others can better understand the difficult subject of slavery in the US, including a way to hear directly from freed slaves themselves.
Tiffany Mitchell Patterson, Assistant Professor of Secondary Social Studies, West Virginia University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/110148
2019-01-31T11:42:15Z
2019-01-31T11:42:15Z
How Howard Thurman met Gandhi and brought nonviolence to the civil rights movement
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/256435/original/file-20190130-103164-pswg2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Howard Thurman's image on Howard University chapel's stained glass window.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Howard_University_-_Andrew_Rankin_Memorial_Chapel_-_stained_glass_window_with_three_deans_including_Howard_Thurman.JPG">Fourandsixty from Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Director Martin Doblmeier’s 2019 documentary, <a href="https://www.tpt.org/backs-against-the-wall-the-howard-thurman-story/">“Backs Against the Wall: The Howard Thurman Story,”</a> highlighted Thurman’s important role in the civil rights struggle as a key mentor to <a href="https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/vernon-e-jordan-jr">many</a> <a href="https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/marian-wright-edelman-40">leaders</a> <a href="https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/reverend-jesse-l-jackson">of the movement</a>, including <a href="https://theconversation.com/meet-the-theologian-who-helped-mlk-see-the-value-of-nonviolence-89938">Martin Luther King Jr.</a>, <a href="https://www.biography.com/people/james-farmer-21349629">among</a> <a href="https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/reverend-dr-otis-moss-jr">others</a>.</p>
<p>I have been a <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/They_Looked_for_a_City.html?id=_hhtQgAACAAJ">scholar of Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King Jr.</a> for over 30 years and I serve as the editor of Thurman’s papers. Thurman’s influence on King Jr. was critical in shaping the civil rights struggle as a nonviolent movement. Thurman was deeply influenced by how Gandhi used nonviolence in India’s struggle for independence from British rule. </p>
<h2>Visit to India</h2>
<p>Born in 1899, <a href="http://www.bu.edu/htpp/the-papers/">Howard Washington Thurman</a> was raised by his formerly enslaved grandmother. He grew up to be an ordained Baptist minister and a leading religious figure of 20th-century America.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/256190/original/file-20190129-39344-1ap5kng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/256190/original/file-20190129-39344-1ap5kng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=776&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256190/original/file-20190129-39344-1ap5kng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=776&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256190/original/file-20190129-39344-1ap5kng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=776&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256190/original/file-20190129-39344-1ap5kng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=976&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256190/original/file-20190129-39344-1ap5kng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=976&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256190/original/file-20190129-39344-1ap5kng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=976&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Journey of the delegation in South Asia.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Marc Korpus</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In 1936 Thurman led a <a href="https://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2014/10/when-howard-thurman-met-mahatma-gandhi-nonviolence-and-the-civil-rights-movement.html">four-member delegation</a> to India, Burma (Myanmar), and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), known as the “pilgrimage of friendship.” It was during this visit that he would meet Mahatma Gandhi, who at the time was leading a nonviolent struggle of independence from British rule.</p>
<p>The delegation had been sponsored by the Student Christian Movement in India who wanted to explore the political connections between the oppression of blacks in the United States and the freedom struggles of the people of India. </p>
<p>The general secretary of the Indian Student Christian Movement, <a href="https://library.columbia.edu/content/dam/libraryweb/locations/burke/fa/mrl/ldpd_4492546.pdf">A. Ralla Ram</a>, had argued for inviting a “Negro” delegation. <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Papers_of_Howard_Washington_Thurman.html?id=rc6VZwEACAAJ">He said</a> that “since Christianity in India is the ‘oppressor’s’ religion, there would be a unique value in having representatives of another oppressed group speak on the validity and contribution of Christianity.”</p>
<p>Between October 1935 to April 1936, Thurman gave at least 135 lectures in over 50 cities, to a variety of audiences and important Indian leaders, including the Bengali poet and Nobel laureate, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Rabindranath-Tagore-Uma-Das-Gupta/dp/0195669800/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1548792576&sr=8-6&keywords=tagore+biography">Rabindranath Tagore</a>, who also played a key role in India’s independence movement.</p>
<p>Throughout the journey, the issue of segregation within the Christian church and its inability to address <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/titles/5906.html">color consciousness</a>, a social and political system based upon discrimination against blacks and other nonwhite people, was raised by many of the people he met. </p>
<h2>Thurman and Gandhi</h2>
<p>The delegation met with Gandhi towards the end of their tour in <a href="http://gandhiseries.blogspot.com/2011/10/gandhi-bardoli-protest-and-satyagraha.html">Bardoli, a small town in India’s western state of Gujarat</a>. </p>
<p>Gandhi, an admirer of <a href="https://blackpast.org/aah/washington-booker-t-1856-1915">Booker T. Washington</a>, the prominent African-American educator, was no stranger to the struggles of African-Americans. He had been in <a href="https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/98/2/570/133494?redirectedFrom=fulltext">correspondence with prominent black leaders</a> before the meeting with the delegation.</p>
<p>As early as May 1, 1929, Gandhi had written <a href="https://minervasperch.wordpress.com/2018/12/15/mahatma-gandhi-message-to-the-american-negro-1929/">a “Message to the American Negro”</a> addressed to W.E.B. DuBois to be published in <a href="https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=crisisnaacp">“The Crisis</a>.” Founded in 1910 by DuBois, “The Crisis” was the official publication of <a href="https://www.naacp.org/">the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People</a>.</p>
<p>Gandhi’s message stated,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Let not the 12 million Negroes be ashamed of the fact that they are the grandchildren of slaves. There is no dishonour in being slaves. There is dishonour in being slave-owners. But let us not think of honour or dishonour in connection with the past. Let us realise that the future is with those who would be truthful, pure and loving.”</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Understanding the idea of nonviolence</h2>
<p>In a <a href="https://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2014/10/when-howard-thurman-met-mahatma-gandhi-nonviolence-and-the-civil-rights-movement.html">conversation lasting about three hours</a>, published in <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Papers_of_Howard_Washington_Thurman.html?id=rc6VZwEACAAJ">The Papers of Howard Washington Thurman</a>, Gandhi engaged his guests with questions about racial segregation, lynching, African-American history, and religion. Gandhi was puzzled as to why African-Americans adopted the <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Slave_Religion.html?id=G3CkQgAACAAJ">religion of their masters, Christianity</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/256459/original/file-20190130-108338-18lwz7m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/256459/original/file-20190130-108338-18lwz7m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256459/original/file-20190130-108338-18lwz7m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256459/original/file-20190130-108338-18lwz7m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256459/original/file-20190130-108338-18lwz7m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256459/original/file-20190130-108338-18lwz7m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256459/original/file-20190130-108338-18lwz7m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Gandhi, spinning cotton, in a photo from 1931.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Associated-Press-International-News-India-INDIA-/7ff0a6c899e5da11af9f0014c2589dfb/40/0">AP Photo</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>He reasoned that at least in religions like Islam, all were considered equal. Gandhi declared, “For the moment a slave accepts Islam he obtains equality with his master, and there are several instances of this in history.” <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/44209369?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">But he did not think that was true for Christianity</a>. Thurman asked what was the greatest obstacle to Christianity in India. Gandhi replied that Christianity as practiced and identified with Western culture and colonialism was the greatest enemy to Jesus Christ in India. </p>
<p>The delegation used the limited time that was left to interrogate Gandhi on matters of <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0392192116666470">“ahimsa,”</a> or nonviolence, and his perspective on the struggle of African-Americans in the United States. </p>
<p>According to <a href="https://www.hindustantimes.com/columns/gandhi-made-india-mahadev-desai-made-gandhi/story-pzU3tEGwLPjKtCwmPFcNjK.html">Mahadev Desai</a>, Gandhi’s personal secretary, Thurman was fascinated with the discussion on the redemptive power of ahimsa in a life committed to the practice of nonviolent resistance. </p>
<p>Gandhi explained that though ahimsa is technically defined as “non-injury” or “nonviolence,” it is not a negative force, rather it is a force “more positive than electricity and more powerful than even ether.”</p>
<p>In its most practical terms, it is love that is “self-acting,” but even more – and when embodied by a single individual, it bears a force more powerful than hate and violence and can transform the world. </p>
<p>Towards the end of the meeting, Gandhi proclaimed, “It may be through the Negroes that the unadulterated message of nonviolence will be delivered to the world.”</p>
<h2>Search for an American Gandhi</h2>
<p>Indeed, Gandhi’s views would leave a deep impression on Thurman’s own interpretation of nonviolence. They would later be influential in developing Martin Luther King Jr.’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance. It would go on to shape the thinking of a generation of civil rights activists.</p>
<p>In his book, <a href="https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.260684/2015.260684.Jesus-And_djvu.txt">“Jesus and the Disinherited,”</a> Thurman addresses the negative forces of fear, deception and hatred as forms of violence that ensnare and entrap the oppressed. But he also counsels that through love and the willingness to nonviolently engage the adversary, the committed individual creates the possibility of community. </p>
<p>As he explains, the act of love as redemptive suffering is not contingent on the other’s response. Love, rather, is unsolicited and self-giving. It transcends merit and demerit. It simply loves. </p>
<p>A growing number of African-American leaders closely followed Gandhi’s campaigns of “<a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/satyagraha-philosophy">satyagraha</a>,” or what he termed as nonresistance to evil against British colonialism. Black newspapers and magazines announced the need for <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300205619/breaking-white-supremacy">an “American Gandhi.”</a></p>
<p>Upon his return, some African-American leaders thought that Howard Thurman would fulfill that role. In 1942, for example, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0807000469">Peter Dana of the Pittsburgh Courier, wrote</a> that Thurman “was one of the few black men in the country around whom a great, conscious movement of Negroes could be built, not unlike the great Indian independence movement.”</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/lLPp0KWmYMo?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<h2>King, love and nonviolence</h2>
<p>Thurman, however, chose a less direct path as an interpreter of nonviolence and a resource for activists who were on the front lines of the struggle. <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/With_Head_and_Heart.html?id=Z5_07RsCWWsC">As he wrote</a>,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“It was my conviction and determination that the church would be a resource for activists – a mission fundamentally perceived. To me it was important that the individual who was in the thick of the struggle for social change would be able to find renewal and fresh courage in the spiritual resources of the church. There must be provided a place, a moment, when a person could declare, I choose.”</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/256192/original/file-20190129-108367-12svphf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/256192/original/file-20190129-108367-12svphf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256192/original/file-20190129-108367-12svphf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256192/original/file-20190129-108367-12svphf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256192/original/file-20190129-108367-12svphf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=562&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256192/original/file-20190129-108367-12svphf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=562&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/256192/original/file-20190129-108367-12svphf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=562&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., speaking at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Watchf-Associated-Press-Domestic-News-Georgia-U-/db147adc924c43559a8e188a82e2ddff/4/0">AP Photo</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Indeed, leaders like Martin Luther King did choose to live out the gospel of peace, justice and love that Thurman so eloquently proclaimed in writing and the spoken word, even though it came with an exacting price. </p>
<p>In his last letter to Martin Luther King, dated May 13, 1966, Thurman expressed his regret for the time that had elapsed since he and King last spoke. He ended the short note with a rather <a href="http://findingaids.auctr.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/172824">foreboding quote</a> from the American naturalist and essayist <a href="http://www.eiseley.org/">Loren Eiseley</a>, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Those as hunts treasure must go alone, at night, and when they find it they have to leave a little of their blood behind them.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>King, like Gandhi, fell to an assassin’s bullet.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/110148/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Walter E. Fluker consulted with Journey Films in the production of the film documentary, "Backs Against the Wall: The Howard Thurman Story". </span></em></p>
Howard Thurman, a mentor to MLK, first met Gandhi during a visit to India in 1936. He came to understand nonviolence as a force more powerful than hate that had the power to transform the world.
Walter E. Fluker, Professor of Ethical Leadership, Boston University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/109560
2019-01-17T22:24:40Z
2019-01-17T22:24:40Z
Black Canadian women artists detangle the roots of Black beauty
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/254017/original/file-20190116-152968-1y7zphw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C32%2C1198%2C768&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Detail from Mickalene Thomas's 'Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe: Les trois femmes noires' which is part of a show called 'Femmes Noires' currently at the Art Gallery of Ontario.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">The Rachel and Jean-Pierre Lehmann Collection © Mickalene Thomas</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Renowned visual artist Mickalene Thomas has taken over the fifth-floor gallery space of the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) with her show “<a href="https://ago.ca/exhibitions/mickalene-thomas-femmes-noires">Femmes Noires</a>.” Working with curator Julie Crooks, it is the first time the Brooklyn-based artist has staged an exhibition in Canada — and it is only the second time the AGO has exhibited the work of a Black woman artist.</p>
<p>Thomas’s exhibit is a powerful and extraordinary contemplation on the intersections of being both Black and a woman. Thomas takes inspiration from multiple art forms, movements and histories, like Impressionism, and focuses on issues such as race, representation, sexuality and Black celebrity culture. </p>
<p>As a Black woman, it is the first time I have ever walked the floors of the AGO and have seen myself reflected back at me. However, something for Canadians like myself to note is that Thomas’s visioning of Black womanhood is from an American point of view. </p>
<p>(The last solo exhibition by a Black woman at the AGO took place in 2010 — “<a href="https://ago.ca/exhibitions/wangechi-mutu">This You Call Civilization?”</a> featuring the work of Kenyan-born, New York-based Wangechi Mutu.)</p>
<p>Blackness in Canada has often been framed through an African-American lens. This representation (or lack of) is an issue I fully explore in my book, <a href="https://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/Books/B/Beauty-in-a-Box"><em>Beauty in a Box: Detangling the Roots of Canada’s Black Beauty Culture</em></a>.</p>
<p>For example, one of the reasons why Black beauty culture has not received much attention in Canada until now is because the task of locating Black voices in the Canadian historical record has been and remains a difficult challenge. Across the border, there are archival collections dedicated to African Americans, such as the <a href="https://www.nypl.org/about/locations/schomburg">Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture</a> in New York City, but we don’t have anything like this in Canada.</p>
<h2>Media circulates African American experiences</h2>
<p>When I started researching Black beauty in Canada, most people were shocked there was enough material for me to write about in a book. The assumption was that the topic would have to focus squarely on African-American women. </p>
<p>For decades, Canadian cultural institutions have consumed African-American desires and fantasies as stand-ins for Black Canada. As a result, Black Canadian representations in popular culture have been rendered invisible. </p>
<p>Throughout the 20th century, cultural and economic practices were co-produced through the circulation of “African-Americanness” through media. From African-American TV shows in the 1970s, films in the 1980s and beyond, Canadians probably know more about the African-American experience than they do about Black Canadians because of media culture. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/q53Mft1U3ro?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">A staging of, ‘da Kink in my Hair’ at Theatre Calgary and National Arts Centre. The play would later grow into Canada’s first TV show created by and starring Black women.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Canada’s media culture has participated in the creation of identities that privileged African-American images, products and ideologies. These identities originally crossed the U.S./Canada border as desires and fantasies represented in advertising and, later, television and film, and today, art.</p>
<h2>Black Canadian women are here</h2>
<p>When Trey Anthony’s <a href="https://youtu.be/RCk0xOR4V7E"><em>’da Kink in My Hair</em></a> TV series appeared from 2007-09 (based on the play of the same name), it was the first comedy series created by and starring Black women on Canadian national television. The broadcast of <em>’da Kink in My Hair</em> happened nearly 40 years after <em>Julia</em> (1968–71) in which Diahann Carroll became the first African American woman to star on a U.S. sitcom in a non-stereotypical role. The representation gap between African American women and Black women in Canada spans decades. </p>
<p>To make up for some of this historical invisibility, this month and throughout the winter, the AGO’s “<a href="https://ago.ca/events/living-room-dis/appearing-black-body">In the Living Room</a>” series will feature Black Canadian women engaging with Thomas’s art and discussing their experiences. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/254381/original/file-20190117-32819-t78kbb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/254381/original/file-20190117-32819-t78kbb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/254381/original/file-20190117-32819-t78kbb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/254381/original/file-20190117-32819-t78kbb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/254381/original/file-20190117-32819-t78kbb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/254381/original/file-20190117-32819-t78kbb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/254381/original/file-20190117-32819-t78kbb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Untitled’ from the series ‘Twice on Sundays’ by Canadian artist and portrait photographer, Jorian Charlton who will be speaking at the AGO on Jan.19th.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.joriancharlton.com/">Jorian Charlton</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Each talk will be set in the Femme Noires’ living room space, which is modelled after Thomas’s childhood home growing up in New Jersey. The patchwork chairs and books from African-American women authors become the art installation. Visitors are called to engage intimately with the paintings, installations and videos on the walls but also the productive space, the living room, that birthed Thomas’s art in the first place. </p>
<p>The first discussion in the series, “The Dis/Appearing Black Body,” will feature portrait photographer <a href="https://www.joriancharlton.com/">Jorian Charlton</a> and <a href="https://shantel-miller.format.com/about">Shantel Miller</a>, an artist-in-resident at <a href="https://www.niacentre.org/">Nia Centre for the Arts in Toronto</a>, to discuss Black bodies, power and the gaze. </p>
<h2>Black beauty is always political</h2>
<p>While I can say much about the differences between Black Canadian experiences and African-American ones, there are universal Black beauty experiences that unite all women of African descent. For example, one of these experiences is the caring for and discussions around Black hair. Some of these public conversations are hurtful to many Black women.</p>
<p>The New York-based online platform, <em>Hello Beautiful</em>, which targets their articles toward Black women, recently asked <a href="https://hellobeautiful.com/playlist/meek-mill-protests-wigs/">why Black women should have to defend wigs and weaves more than other women</a>. The article explores why Black women are constantly asked to defend being women and all the things we do, like our hair, to feel beautiful.</p>
<p>On the one hand, our hair is connected to many painful childhood memories of being teased by other children (and sometimes adults) about our various braided hairstyles. On the other hand, natural hairstyles like Afros, dreadlocks or cornrows (tightly braided rows of hair) might denote a Black woman’s politics, but they can also be just a hairstyle or her preference, with no political meaning whatsoever. </p>
<p>Black women who wear hair weaves or wigs can also be the subject of ridicule. In 2017, former <em>Fox News</em> host <a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/tv/ct-bill-oreilly-mazine-waters-hair-20170328-story.html">Bill O’Reilly was forced to apologize to California Congresswoman Maxine Waters</a>, who is African American, when he made disparaging comments about her hair on the cable news program, <em>Fox and Friends</em>. He described her straightened hair as a “James Brown wig.”</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/254295/original/file-20190117-32807-xr3bvz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/254295/original/file-20190117-32807-xr3bvz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/254295/original/file-20190117-32807-xr3bvz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/254295/original/file-20190117-32807-xr3bvz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/254295/original/file-20190117-32807-xr3bvz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/254295/original/file-20190117-32807-xr3bvz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/254295/original/file-20190117-32807-xr3bvz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Mickalene Thomas, Los Angelitos Negros, 2016. Four HD video monitors: four two-channel HD videos, sound. 121.9 x 137.2 cm, 23 minutes, 18 seconds. 121.9 x 137.2 cm.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy of the artist. © Mickalene Thomas / SOCAN (2018)</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Black hair is constantly debated, politicized and misrepresented in media, art and popular culture. A simple decision about wearing it natural or straightened could result in <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/jack-astors-hair-1.3484037">punitive action — not in America, but right here in Canada</a>. This was the case for a waitress-in-training who lost her job at Jack Astor’s because she wore her hair in a bun, and not “down” as required by female wait staff while working at the restaurant. </p>
<p>Black hair stories resonate with Black Canadian women, too. But resonance is not the same as representation. </p>
<p>Why have Black Canadian women artists not been given the same opportunity to exhibit their work as solo artists in Canada? This question about Black Canadian artists and how Black art has been represented and circulated has become prominent in Canadian media lately.</p>
<p>In an article for <em>Canadian Art</em>, Connor Garel <a href="https://canadianart.ca/essays/why-have-there-been-no-great-black-canadian-women-artists/">wondered why no Black Canadian woman has ever had a major solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO)</a>. </p>
<p>Curator Ashley McKenzie-Barnes wrote <a href="https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2019/01/08/time-to-shine-the-spotlight-on-contemporary-black-canadian-art.html">an article for the <em>Toronto Star</em></a>, and argued that Canadian art fairs, public art installations, festivals, major institutions and galleries need to make space for Black Canadian artists. She is right. We’re doing the work — now we need the space to get recognized for it.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/109560/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dr. Cheryl Thompson previously received funding from CIHR Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2016-2018.</span></em></p>
A recent and powerful exhibit by New York artist Mickalene Thomas at the Art Gallery of Ontario has opened the door for some deep discussions about Black Canadian women and visual representation.
Cheryl Thompson, Assistant Professor, Toronto Metropolitan University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.