One of our greatest joys as archivists is when we are able to open a collection up to researchers which had previously been unavailable or difficult to access. Different collections pose different challenges to access, and collections containing moving image or sounds recordings can be some of the most labor intensive to make available. The issue is further complicated when a collection contains an older or rare recording format, for which the equipment required to play it back may not be readily available. This was the case with the papers of Lorenzo Dow Turner, which were donated to Amistad in 2011. In addition to correspondence, photographs, and other paper materials, the collection also contains a treasure trove of field audio recordings that Turner made, in the form of wire recordings and phonograph records. It is with great excitement that we now make these digitized recordings available to researchers for the very first time.

Lorenzo Dow Turner was a groundbreaking scholar and linguist who lived from 1890 to 1972. He was the very first African American member of the Linguistic Society of America, and one of the first forty African Americans to hold a PhD. As a professor at Fisk University in the 1940s, Turner help to establish the first African American Studies program in the country. However, he is perhaps best remembered as the “Father of Gullah Studies,” for his work with the language spoken by the coastal residents of the Low Country of South Carolina and Georgia. While teaching a summer class at South Carolina State College (now University) in Orangeburg in 1929, Turner overheard some of his students speaking Gullah to each other. At the time, scholars had viewed the language as a substandard form of English. Turner, however, sensed that it may instead have been heavily influenced by the languages of West Africa. He devoted the rest of his career to proving his theory.

The recordings in Amistad’s collection were made between 1932 and 1952, during the time that Turner was teaching at Fisk, and then at Roosevelt College (now University) where he served as chair of the African Studies program. They cover a variety of geographical locations, from Nigeria and Cameroon to Brazil, as well as locations within the United States, where Turner recorded native speakers of Yoruba, Igbo, Portuguese, English, Creole, and Gullah among other languages and various dialects. Turner used these recordings as evidence to trace the linguistic and cultural connections between West Africa and the Americas, and in 1949 he published his seminal work Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect, which laid the groundwork for continued study in the fields of Gullah, Creole, and African American Studies.

Amistad has worked hard over the past year to bring these recordings into the digital realm, and we look forward to the continued scholarship and cultural impact that increased access to Turner’s work may bring. This project was supported by a Recordings at Risk grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). This grant program is made possible by funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and was designed to support exactly this type of project by covering the costs of preservation reformatting for fragile and obsolete formats. For further information about the Lorenzo Dow Turner papers, please contact Amistad’s Research Services.

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Amistad has acquired the records of Atlanta-based Alternate ROOTS, a regional arts service organization of artists who work for social justice.

The acquisition documents 41 of the regional group’s 43 years, 1976 to 2017. Alternate ROOTS was founded in 1976 by a group of Southern-based artists and organizers “working to dismantle all forms of oppression – everywhere.” Its name, “Alternate,” means an alternative. “ROOTS” was originally an acronym for Regional Organization of Theatres South. For decades, Alternate ROOTS has served art organizations beyond theater groups, and its membership of 3,500 now consists of artists outside of the Southern region.

The grassroots focus of Alternate ROOTS, however, remains intact.

“The Alternate ROOTS collection will cover over 40 years of art and activism in the South, documenting the organization and its members’ history, legacy and contributions to community organizing. From the Civil Rights Movement to now, the archives tell the story that is simply not captured anywhere else but in these documents, video footage and other precious artifacts,” Michelle Ramos, executive director of Alternate ROOTS, said.

“We are thrilled they have found a home with Amistad and look forward to sharing them with our community and the world, and hope they will inspire future generations of arts activists, committed to continuing the important work of ROOTS,” Ramos said.

[alt0001.jpg] Amistad’s new collection consists of 111 linear feet of materials. Included is the entire body of Alternate ROOTS organizational records and files pertaining to its membership. Also included is correspondence, executive committee meeting minutes, memos, policy papers, administrative reports, outreach program proceedings, newsletters, bylaws, educational events and regional workshops, research material, notes, contracts, legal and financial records, printed marketing and publicity materials, clippings, photographs, videotapes, electronic media and artifacts created by Alternate ROOTS staff and members.

Many of the resources contained in the new Alternate ROOTS collection can be brought to life and activated to address some of the most pressing social issues of the day. Cultural organizing, creative place-making, regional community theater, the Black Arts Movement, AIDS activism, immigration, environmental justice, oral history in rural communities and more are addressed. Alternate ROOTS’ founders sought to meet the distinct needs of artists who create work by, for, about and within communities of place, tradition, affiliation and spirit.

Among the collection’s 577 audio-visual materials, many are deemed “at risk” due to age or format obsolescence.

New Orleans theater legend John O’Neal, founder of Junebug Productions, was a founding member of Alternate ROOTS. Documentation of Illinois-born O’Neal’s relationship with ROOTS is evident in this archive. O’Neal was also a founding member of Free Southern Theater, which began at Tougaloo College in Mississippi in 1963. Free Southern Theater - and O’Neal - later relocated to New Orleans in 1965. Amistad also holds the records of Free Southern Theater and O’Neal’s personal papers.

Amistad is currently collaborating with ROOTS and the History Department at the University of New Orleans to host a graduate student intern, Ella McIntire, to begin organizing the collection.

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Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Uruguay, Peru, Oman and Jordan are just a few of the countries Belmont F. Haydel has worked in as an economist and diplomat. The retired U.S. Army major says he supports Amistad Research Center because it goes hand in hand with advancing U.S. cultures, as he believes Amistad offers multiple versions of people’s activities.

Determined to follow his interest in Spanish and Latin America, Dr. Haydel attended La Universidad de México in 1948, was graduated from Xavier University Preparatory School in New Orleans, 1949, and earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Loyola University of Chicago. In 1962, he received a master’s degree in Finance and his Ph.D., conducted jointly by North Texas State University (Denton, TX) and New York University, in Organization Theory and International Business Administration (major in economics from NYU). He served two years on active duty in the U.S. Army as an Infantry officer and 18 years in the reserves, retiring as a major.

Dr. Haydel was appointed by Presidents Kennedy in 1963 and Johnson in 1964 as a U.S. Foreign Service Officer (Diplomat) in economics, commerce, and protocol in Brazil and Argentina. Later, he returned home to New Orleans to work as an accountant in the family business, Haydel’s Flower Shoppe. Later, he served as a Peace Corps adviser and economic consultant in Paraguay.

He was awarded two Fulbright Awards in economics at National Universities in Amman, Jordan and in Uruguay, and is fluent in Spanish, Portuguese and his native English, with a familiarity in Arabic, French and Latin.

Dr. Haydel does not remember when he became aware of Amistad Research Center, but he found it is an excellent repository for his literary works, including multiple professional articles he authored ranging from international economics and family Creole ancestral history. His works are also archived in other institutions.

“It is my intention that the Center’s collections benefit students who are interested in African American and Louisiana Creoles,” he says from his suburban home northwest of Philadelphia.

He notes that his cousin, Sybil Haydel Morial, a retired Xavier University dean and educator; her husband, Ernest “Dutch” Morial, New Orleans’ first African American mayor; and their son, Marc Morial, who is now president of the National Urban League, have done “marvelous” things in Louisiana and on the national stage. Now retired Lt. General Russel Honoré, who coordinated relief efforts in New Orleans after the 2005 hurricanes, is another cousin from his paternal grandmother’s Honoré ancestry.

Dr. Haydel retired in 1994, as professor emeritus of business administration at Rider University, New Jersey. He has authored three books: A Rendezvous with My Professional Destiny - Making a Difference (auto-biography); The Victor Haydel Creole Family -- Beginnings and Early Descendants; and Discovering Our Ancestral Roots: Chessé and Honoré Families, co-authored with Gina Greenlee. He is currently preparing another book, tentatively entitled “Passport to Manhood,” which offers guidance and inspiration to men, ranging from ages 21 and older. He has mentored numerous well-known men in Latin America, including Daniel Ortega, president of Nicaragua today. He continues his engagement with men who are developing from his experience and knowledge.

Not only has Dr. Haydel donated his papers to the Amistad Research Center, but he provides financial contributions to help support the Center’s collections and activities. “It may not be as much as I’d like, but whenever I can help, I like to,” he says. Dr. Haydel has been an inspired supporter of Amistad for close to six years, contributing both to the Center’s holdings and to its financial well-being. Moreover, he regularly calls to check in with staff about Amistad’s needs and its future plans. “I always like to hear about what is going on, and hope to visit again in the future,” he says.

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The history of the Original Illinois Club is making its debut at Amistad Research Center.

A ledger book dating from 1930 to 1949 is the oldest account of the social and pleasure club in the new collection, which was coordinated by President Tracey L. Thibodaux. The ledger contains detailed lists of officers, committees, members, and debutantes. Membership dues, a hand-script copy of the club’s charter and articles of incorporation are also included.

Most of the records date from the 1970s and later. They document much of the club’s annual planning and execution for its cotillion and ball. However, the bulk of the collection documents the club’s Executive Committee, Debutante Committee and the Original Illinois Club’s monthly meetings. Included in the files are agendas and minutes; correspondence detailing yearly planning for the balls and debutantes; and annual selections of kings and queens.

“Next year the Original Illinois Club will celebrate its 125th anniversary. In recognition of this, Amistad is honored to begin preserving the club's organizational records. They provide not only a rich view into Mardi Gras history in general, but into the often-overlooked aspect of African American participation in the annual Carnival and debutante balls,” Christopher Harter, Deputy Director of Amistad Research Center, said.

“President Tracey L. Thibodaux, Andrew Harris and Chris Hammond were extremely helpful in assisting the Center in evaluating and selecting records to preserve.”

The club has alternately been known as the Illinois Social and Pleasure Club Inc. and Illinois Club. Its first meeting was called sometime after March 21, 1895 – Mardi Gras - by Wiley Knight, a Tennessee transplant. Knight had briefly worked in Chicago. He founded Knight’s School of Dancing for men and women of color in Uptown New Orleans on Cadiz Street near Camp Street. According to CreoleGen, the genealogy website, Knight wanted to teach dance and pass on traditional social customs. He would eventually be known as the “Father of Negro Society in New Orleans.”

During the early years of the Illinois Club, its balls started at 10 p.m., according to CreoleGen. This late start allowed its membership of butlers and maids time to complete their jobs. It was in the 1920s that Illinois Club became more exclusive, as African-Americans entered the business class and joined the swelling professional ranks. Soon, a splinter emerged. A group of former members organized themselves as Young Men Illinois Club Inc. To distinguish itself, members of the founding group began referring to themselves and their group as the Original Illinois Club.

In this new collection, Ball Committee correspondence and reports detail planning from 1984 to 2005. Records regarding debutantes are extensive in the 1980s and later. Included are applications, biographical sketches, yearly lists, debutante reception programs and invitations, orientation schedules and handbooks.

Photographs primarily depict the myriad balls and royal courts from the 1970s to the 1990s. There are occasional reproductions of early photographs from the 1920s in this collection, including one of Knight. Additionally, there are DVD films, digital photos and scripts for balls dating from 1987 to 2013. Of note are ball souvenir programs from 1967 to 2019 and various news clippings and articles detailing the history of the club.

The collection is currently open for research as the Amistad staff work to further organize the materials.

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Decades before “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” “The ‘L’ Word” or “Pose” hit screens across America, there was “Just for the Record,” a New Orleans public affairs show on Cox Channel 49 with programming and features just for the LGBTQ community.

Behind it all was creator and producer Valda Lewis, a recent transplant to the United States, the daughter of a U.K. public relations professional. Although Lewis had never worked in broadcasting or behind the camera, she helped steer “Just for the Record” to an incredible six-year run, from 1987 to 1993.

“The show was an answer to the Great Plague [the AIDS crisis]. At the time, I was kind of driven. This was what I could do, given the crisis that was around us,” Lewis says from her Cleveland home.

“The show is a document of the time. We did spots on cooking, healthy eating, holistic care and channeling good energy. We were spotlighting long-time survivors, the latest medical breakthroughs and any info that was out there that we could get to keep people informed through the TV. There was no internet.”

Given Lewis’ contributions to chronicling LGBTQ life over the past 32 years, the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana honored her in September at its Fifth Annual Oracle Gala. Amistad Research Center shared in the honors as repository of the “Just for the Record” collection. The event was held at New Orleans Jazz Market on Sept. 14.

“There were a couple of things we took into consideration in deciding to honor Valda this year. The overwhelming thing is the breadth of her collection,” Frank Perez, president of the LGBT+ Archives Project, says. “Her collection is by far the largest video collection we’ve ever facilitated the collection and processing of. It’s not just its breadth, but also its importance and the scope of its rarity.”

Last year, the LGBT+ Archives Project funded a grant that Amistad used to digitize the shows. Researchers can now easily comb through 124 hours of the 30- to 60-minute shows permanently housed at Amistad Research Center. The Center hopes to make the content available online in the future.

Early in-studio segments of “Just for the Record” feature a bare bones set. Host Loretta Mims interviewed activists, business owners, professionals, culture bearers and other newsmakers in the local and national LGBT community. Events like New Orleans Gay Pride Fest and an ACT-UP rally, which first ran on Channel 49, are digitally preserved for posterity.

“For 26 years Amistad has had the honor of being the steward of the video collection “Just for the Record,” a wonderful record of the LGBTQ community and its activism in New Orleans,” Amistad’s Executive Director Dr. Kara Tucina Olidge says. “As a cable access show, it was truly groundbreaking because it aired from 1987 to 1993. As you know, there were few, if any, programs representing the LGBTQ community during this time.”

The show’s subtitle, “A Series for Gay People,” is plucky, upfront and revelatory. One week, “Just for the Record” made the cover of the now-defunct newspaper supplement “TV Focus.”

“I thought they’d been destroyed in Katrina. I’m kind of pleased that they still exist,” Lewis, 63, says. “When I looked, I found I still had the originals and more. I continued to tape. I have 700 hours of footage here. Everything from national conferences to church services. I’d like to see what we could do with the rest. I was the only one out there filming this stuff.”

“It’s hard to be responsible for the physical well-being of this archive,” Lewis says. “I have 30 office-size boxes of tapes. A real value to me is the historical value. This is important stuff.”

Within those well-preserved boxes from Lewis’ basement are tapes from conferences of “Celebration,” the Louisiana LGBT group; the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute; the National Commission on AIDS; several Bourbon Street Awards contests; carnival balls; and more.

“In those days, you could show the backs of heads. But no one wanted to be on that 1995 tape,” Lewis says. These days, she works in desktop publishing, creating websites and promotional videos. Lewis is putting her 32 years of footage to good use in a documentary. She’s been in talks for a couple of years to find financing.

To properly celebrate her honor as someone who has made a substantial contribution to the preservation of local LGBT+ history, the three Lewis sisters flew in from London to attend the Oracle Gala. Lewis produced a video just for the gala crowd. It included a three-minute clip of “The Plague” and music montages from Gay Pride Parade 1989.

“People were just thrilled to see the footage, whether they were old enough to be there [then] or not. We highlighted the presenters. One is now a judge,” Lewis says.

“The tapes are just as good today as when we shot them. It’s been a long time, and this is a good time for the archive people to get involved. Many people in the clips that I shot are gone. AIDS was killing people every day.”

Perez says the Archives Project’s board of directors selects one annual honoree based on the donations it facilitated during the prior year. Lewis’ desire to place her “Just for the Record” collection somewhere in New Orleans made her selection a “no-brainer.”

At 25-years-old-plus, Lewis’ tapes have far surpassed their prescribed 15-year life span. Even as second-hand tapes. This is her hope for the copies of “Just for the Record” awaiting viewing at Amistad Research Center.

“We couldn’t fully understand what was going on at the time [AIDS was ravaging the community.] Our show made a difference,” Lewis says, remembering the certificate former Mayor Sidney Barthelemy presented her. “People said, ‘Thanks so much for doing this.’ This is what I could do.”

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Byron Stewart was an eight-year-old when he saw the building that changed his life.

“We were in Alexandria. It was a very eye-catching building. It wasn’t traditional in design,” Stewart, now 62, remembers. “When I asked my mother about it, she said ‘Architects do that.’ ” Thus, Stewart’s course was inevitably set.

After the family moved to New Orleans from Hammond (He was born in Honolulu, Hawaii.), Stewart attended Cohen High School, where students are “book smart and street smart,” then Southern University. He earned a degree in architecture and was licensed for practice in 1987.

Today he is a successful professional, who designs innovative residential, commercial and institutional sites for his firm Modus Inc. In 2017 Stewart joined Amistad Research Center’s board of directors. He also serves as treasurer to the board.

“This is a great organization to be a part of. I love everything it stands for,” Stewart says.

“It’s a privilege to be on the board, and it’s also an asset for them to have a variety of expertise on the Amistad board. I am excited to learn and support the growth of Amistad’s vision and goals. My goal is to use my expertise to support in bringing [Amistad] to another level,” Stewart says, pausing during a break in his busy schedule.

Modus, the name of his firm, means “the total procedure for design.” It explains Stewart’s thinking about why more architects should be tapped for service on more boards of directors.

“Architects bring to the table their experiences of creating environments. There’s no one like that at the table: capable of creating the total, built environment,” Stewart says. “It’s the difference between building a house and building a community.”

Stewart is a member of the American Institute of Architects. Some of his notable projects include Harrah’s New Orleans Casino; Carter G. Woodson School and Marrero Commons in Orleans Parish, Mooretown Library and Shreveport Convention Center in Shreveport, La. Stewart has worked on a variety of projects not limited to churches, fire stations and residencies.

“Different people teach you different things. Every job I had was to learn. Once I couldn’t do that, I left,” Stewart says. “In order for an African-American architect to be successful in this country, we must work in the public sector. Nationwide, approximately 95% of African-American architects work on public projects. There are also a lot of opportunities in the private sector. My hope is that in the near future we will have larger African-American representation in private projects.”

Stewart believes, “Just because you are non-profit organization doesn’t mean that an organization can’t profit.” Stewart is constantly generating ideas to create ways to profit, that would relieve the stress of fundraising for operational expenses for Amistad. This would provide more time to focus on the organization’s goals and mission statement. In conclusion Stewart states, “ I look forward to contributing to Amistad’s continued growth and I am elated to be a part of archiving our history and sharing it with others.”

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Retired oncologist, former U.S. representative and honorary New Orleanian Parker Griffith wants more people to know about his heroes and sheroes on the walls and in the stacks at Amistad Research Center. So he gives.

“When you go through that archive there, you’re looking at people who were not afraid. And it took tremendous intellectual and physical courage to do what they were doing. They were at risk of losing not only their lives - not only their jobs or their livelihood - but also they physically were courageous. I admire ’em, and I love to read about ’em,” Griffith says from his Huntsville, Ala., office. “It’s a part of America’s history. And, in particular, Southern history. We don’t really get enough of it.”

Griffith,76, knows that of which he speaks. Born in Shreveport and raised in Baton Rouge, he graduated from the LSU School of Medicine downtown. Racism was overt and virulent during the Earl Long era of his youth, prompting Griffith to join the Civil Rights Movement while working as an emergency room doctor at Charity Hospital, from 1968 to 1970.

“The people on the walls at Amistad are heroes. I think that’s lost on people who look like me,” Griffith says. “They don’t understand it because stereotypes are so prevalent in the South that no one gets past the stereotype. It’s unfortunate.”

In the two years since becoming a sustaining donor, the Griffith Family Foundation has helped fund Amistad’s annual operating budget and events like last year’s 52nd anniversary soirée at the Orpheum Theatre, according to Amistad board member Byron Stewart. Stewart introduced Griffith to the board after meeting him at a local hotel. He describes the 2014 Alabama gubernatorial candidate as kind, big-hearted and really wanting to help.

“I think Amistad has a major role to play in featuring the very, very capable and smart and active, involved African-Americans who historically ... have never been not involved. Their families were involved. They handed it down from family to family,” Griffith says.

“New Orleans has always had a - what I consider to be a - very, very intellectual African-American community. Some overtly active; some behind-the-scenes active.” Griffith references meeting former Mayor Ernest “Dutch” Morial at the barber and tellingly refers to Mayor LaToya Cantrell as “our new mayor.”

“I’ve had so many positive experiences in New Orleans. Amistad Research Center definitely deserves a lot of support,” he says. “I know a lot about New Orleans and its history.”

From obvious cases of police brutality in the former St. Thomas housing development to the influx of heroin in its streets; the first African-American mayor to the first female African-American chief executive, Griffith has had a front-row seat.

“The research center needs more exposure. I wish that it had a larger space,” he says. “It’s a diamond. It’s a jewel for us, and there should be some major corporate donors there.”

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A significant American art form, previously shunned to the margins of society, is again captivating the national public’s eyes.

The comic book – a revolution popularized by such Jewish-American authors and artists as Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Bill Finger and Bob Kane, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby - captivated the minds and shelves of both children and adults in their heyday, but were later delegated to a corner-space of our minds. Much as the pulp fiction and paperback romance fads, the comic book had its time in our culture, but later became a niche interest catering to the demographic most loyal to it. In this case, children and speculative fiction fans. Then came the 1990s, a decade where television programs like “Batman: The Animated Series” and “X-Men” dominated children’s programming. Slowly, comics began to recapture the public’s attention.

The success of the Marvel trilogy, “Blade,” laid the groundwork for later Marvel films which would be produced by Disney under the collective story of a Marvel Cinematic Universe, or MCU. These MCU films would not only routinely beat out box office records and cinematic award expectations, they would also lead to our current state of media: one in which comics and comic-related tropes inspire a continuous stream of superhero television and movies. The golden age of comics may have long passed, but today we are in a new age of comics and comic-inspired media.

What’s most fascinating about American comics are the commentaries they provide as political and cultural mediums. Fans of the X-Men comic and movie franchise would know that the central conflict (the struggle for mutants to gain acceptance in a society determined to see them exterminated) has direct parallels with the Civil Rights and LGBTQ Rights movements, respectively. Titles like Wonder Woman similarly tell stories which reinforce themes of gender equality. Such commentary isn’t always immediately obvious, however, as is the case with one of the most iconic comic book characters, Superman.

Throughout its 81-year history, the franchise has engaged in discourse regarding immigration, nationalism, totalitarianism and other complex political and philosophical debates through chronicling the adventures of a displaced extraterrestrial with demigod-like strength. The social discourse present in comics can take any number of perspectives from across the political spectrum, allowing a free exchange of ideas and (at times) a front-row seat to social debate regarding such ideas. For example, a 1970s magazine published by DC Comics in which the conservative-leaning Green Lantern (Hal Jordan) and liberal-leaning Green Arrow (Oliver Queen) teamed up to fight crime and address the social issues of the day. The diverse perspective of comic artists and fans are often reflected in the characters and stories they craft, creating a medium which provides a look into the diverse ideologies of American citizens with each turn of the page.

Additionally, comics can be used as a tool to study marginalization in our society. Comics have historically featured negative and offensive representations of minorities and women. The adventurous themes of past generations of comics put heroes in foreign environments and in league or battle with people the average reader had little to no contact. Such excursions by comic heroes to the jungles of Africa and Asia often portrayed the native peoples and their beliefs as primitive others to the American standard. As a genre largely marketed toward males, women in comics were frequently represented as love interests and damsels. Few women led their own titles as the active agents in their own stories.

Marvel Comics' Fu Manchu and Man-Ape are notable examples of the industry’s history of racial stereotyping, the former based on 20th century anti-Chinese propaganda and the latter evoking images of anti-black sentiment. While the industry at-large has moved forward from the tired trope of white damsels in distress screaming for rescue from black or Asian ‘savages,’ there are still issues of marginalization in comics and comic-fan spaces. Today, female characters are often designed and positioned in overtly sexual fashions by male artists. DC Comics, specifically, has a tendency toward creating villains who suffer sensationalized mental illnesses. Its most famous are Two-Face and The Joker.

More characters of color exist in the comic industry, yet there are still the occasional vaguely Middle-Eastern terrorists or black and Latino street criminals. In fan spaces (colloquially referred to as ’fandom’), reception of diversity in comics is varied, with some welcoming the diversity while others decry it as forced pandering. Naturally, the pitfalls of comics in navigating a global landscape are not uniquely characteristic to the art form itself. Similar difficulties arise in other arts as well.

There are multiple reasons why Amistad has elected to cultivate a collection of comic and graphic novel materials. The history of comics is relevant to the history of American culture, with comics having influence over said culture for decades. No art form exists in a vacuum, and through reading comics and studying the historical context in which each was published, one can see how comics interact with their environment. The political discourse in comics, as well as their representation of marginalized communities, are relevant to Amistad’s commitment to “collecting, preserving and providing open access to original materials that reference the social and cultural importance of America's ethnic and racial history, the African Diaspora, human relations and civil rights.” The insight that comics can provide in analyzing America’s past and present social climate should not be ignored or underestimated. It is in recognition of the significance of this form of artistic expression that we collect and preserve these materials.

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The Amistad Research Center received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to survey the records of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives-Land Assistance Fund (FSC-LAF), an organization committed to assisting African-American farmers in the southeastern United States through training programs and a network of co-ops.

Through this survey we learned about the many different programs and projects created and administered by FSC from the 1960s to the 1990s. While the majority of FSC-LAF’s work was focused directly on African-American farmers, it was also concerned with the overall development of the rural southeast and the challenges faced by African-Americans. FSC administered several non-agricultural projects and programs focused on business, education, providing legal services and providing healthcare to underserved areas. As a result, there are many points of access in this collection. It is interesting for many reasons beyond agriculture.

It comes as no surprise that FSC was interested in cultural development as well. For this post, I wanted to focus on two creative arts endeavors by FSC. The first is the Rural Arts Program, which I learned about through a proposal by Billie Jean Young. The program operated around Eutaw, Alabama, located in the west central part of the state in what is known as the Black Belt. The Rural Arts Program offered instruction and training in dance, drama, conga rhythms and all aspects of theater to enhance the quality of life for young children. It provided a forum for the development, growth, presentation and display of creative abilities. Students who attended these classes were taught with performance in mind. In addition to its daily classes, Rural Arts Program aspired to feature artists in residencies, according to the proposal. Young directed performances at local high schools as part of the Branch Heights Company and Theater.

The records also include materials from the Mississippi Folk Arts Festival, which was co-sponsored by FSC and Miles College in conjunction with the Minority People’s Council. It was supported by a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts. This festival was a forum to help document and preserve the traditions and cultural heritage of those affected by the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway (TTW). The TTW is a significant public works project which connects the Tombigbee River to the Tennessee River to aid commercial navigation. The Army Corp of Engineers predicted economic, ecological and cultural change in the area. The Mississippi Folk Arts Festival showcased local artists and craftspeople and also served to bring the community together to celebrate their traditions and heritage in the face of change and possible upheaval.

According to a report found within the records, the Mississippi Folk Arts Festival in 1980 provided a stage for local musicians who sang and played the harmonica and the guitar and showed off other skills, such as jug blowing, rubboard beating, beating spoons and knocking the bones (I had to look that one up. ‘Bones’ are a musical instrument consisting of a pair of, well, animal bones). Several gospel choirs large and small performed old hymns. In addition to the music, the Festival had quilts on display, basket weaving, cooking, sculptures and hair braiding. The event was a huge success which drew more than 500 people on the festival’s second day.

Surveying these records provided an interesting window into the different aspects of rural life for African-Americans throughout the southeast, including the formation of cooperatives and the various agricultural, economic and cultural programs created by FSC. My examination of the art programs and initiatives highlights another dimension of the work that the Federation of Southern Cooperatives accomplished.

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This summer, the Amistad Research Center welcomes four interns who will gain hands-on experience and learn more about the archival and library profession. For three years, Amistad has hosted interns from the NOLA Youth Works, and this year we welcome Raven Johnson. The New Orleans City Hall program introduces local high school students to an array of careers while providing a unique experience over summer break. Profiles of our Summer 2019 interns are below.

Khalif Aziz Birden is a native New Orleanian and graduate student of anthropology at Albion College in Albion, Michigan. His research interests are studying the people and cultures of the African continent and Diaspora, with a specific focus on storytelling traditions, spirituality, LGBTQIA+ experiences, black literature and media and pre-colonial African societies.

Khalif is working with the Willie Lee Hart Research Division as a reference desk attendant. The reference desk connects researchers with collections at Amistad and includes a variety of tasks, including handling reference inquiries from researchers at the Center and distance researchers via telephone and email. At the National Insurance Association, an economic organization committed to racial uplift, Khalif assisted with records and also completed personal research in the archival collections.

“What I like most about my job at Amistad is that through working, I’m gaining a better idea of the contents of each material collected in the archives. There’s a wide variety of different materials here, and every so often I find myself re-shelving a book or manuscript box while thinking ‘Oh, I should come back to look at this for myself later.’ I have a very wide general research interest, and I think this type of exploration could help me with any projects I may undertake in the future.” –Khalif Aziz B

Aria Johnson is a junior at Southern University in Baton Rouge. This is the fourth summer that Aria has spent at the Amistad Research Center. She is interning with the Florence Borders Processing Division. This summer, she has assisted in the processing of the papers of Chakula cha Jua, a New Orleans director/artist/teacher/poet/actor, and the papers of poet and writer Sybil Kein. Aria is a considerate and enthusiastic worker and we are over-joyed to have her working with us again this summer.

“I am glad to be back here. I like processing; the ins and outs of archival work. It’s fascinating to discover new things in the archives, read up on new information, and I enjoy working with familiar faces.” –Aria Johnson

Raven Johnson is a senior at St. Thérèse Academy. She is a NOLA Youth Works Traditional Summer Worker and has joined the Florence Borders Processing Division for the summer months. Her work at Amistad has included creating biographical sketches for creators of archival collections, working with Amistad’s ephemera collection and assisting with the processing of author and educator John Hatchett’s papers. Raven is a dedicated worker with an interest in writing and poetry. Working with the Hatchett collection has particularly interested her. She says she is enjoying her time here at Amistad Research Center.

Maiya Bougere is a senior at Nicholls State University, double majoring in Education and History. She is completing her history internship with us before moving on to complete her student teaching requirement. This summer, Maiya has been creating descriptions for videos in the Just For the Record collection, an audiovisual collection documenting New Orleans’ first LGBT television show, which ran from 1987-1993. The videos were recently digitized with a grant provided by the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana.

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The original Henry O. Tanners, Jacob Lawrences, Bruce Nugents, Elizabeth Catletts and other masters housed in Amistad Research Center’s fine arts collection have quadrupled in value, with a new appraisal of $24 million.

The six-month-long appraisal process was the first valuation of the collection in 15 years, according to Executive Director Kara Tucina Olidge, Ph.D. Kohlert Art Appraisal, a local firm specializing in African-American art, assessed 863 art pieces last year. Owner Sherry Kohlert describes Amistad Research Center’s fine arts holdings as an “incredible, outstanding collection.”

“[I would like the general public to know] how good it is. How ... it spans from the 19th century, 20th century, early 21st century. The scope of it is amazing,” Kohlert says passionately. “The artists who they represent are amazing. They’re all the major artists, and they have some incredible artists that their talents are going to be up-and-coming and will see the future.”

Kohlert and Olidge both note that African-American artists and their marketplace are ascendant. Because of this, Kohlert recommends appraising an art collection of this size every five to 10 years.

“What happens next is building more awareness about the wonderful collection that we have,” says Olidge, who was hired four years ago. “We have many of the 20th century masters and many who directly came out of the Harlem Renaissance. What I’d like to do now is create a preservation plan to help raise money to do some conservation on the works.”

A Closer Look

Edward Mitchell Bannister was a boy in Canada when the mutiny aboard the schooner La Amistad occurred on July 1, 1839. Today, 180 years later, Bannister is one of the oldest masters whose work finds refuge inside Amistad Research Center’s fine arts collection.

“The historical collection is really most significant and very significant. You have a collection here that basically spans the early- to mid-19th century going into - with Edward Bannister and Henry Ossawa Tanner, these were two of the greatest and the earliest black American artists. They kind of put things on the map – then we go into the Harlem Renaissance. The holdings from the Harlem Renaissance are really amazing,” Kohlert says.

Aaron Douglas, Hale Woodruff, William H. Johnson, Lois Mailou Jones, Ellis Wilson, Richmond Barthé, Romare Bearden and William Edouard Scott are a few of the artists from that period here. Amistad also owns 13 Malvin Gray Johnson works; only 60 are known to exist, according to Kohlert. Johnson died at the height of the Harlem Renaissance at 38.

Jacob Lawrence is well-represented in the collection. The 41 gouache paintings in his “Toussaint L’Ouverture” series are Amistad’s most valuable holding.

“It’s a very, very rich time there,” Kohlert summates. “Moving along the line, they also have some nice pieces from the era of the Black Power Movement, the late 1960s, early 1970s. I love these works, myself. This is the era that I just really attach myself to.”

Graphics by Louisiana-born Margaret Taylor-Burroughs rest from that time. AfriCOBRA, or the African Commune of Bad Relevant Art, is represented by prominent members Jeff Donaldson and James Phillips.

“From the ’50s and the ’60s, ’70s up, there are abstract works by Sam Middleton and David Driskell. Dr. David Driskell was very instrumental in forming the Amistad Research Center and the Amistad collection,” Kohlert continues. “He was a brilliant poet. I think the Amistad collection might not be the Amistad collection if it weren’t for Dr. David Driskell. He played a really important role.”

Abstracts by Driskell and linocuts and a bronze by Catlett propel the collection’s worth. In addition, a nice collection of local and regional artists help round out the assemblage.

“I don’t want to leave anybody out,” Kohlert says. Nevertheless, Jeffrey Cook, Kimberly Dummons, Ron Bechet, Claude Clark, Claire Foster-Burnett, Jack Jordan, Martin Payton, Steve Prince, John T. Scott and Louise Mouton Johnson are members of the set.

Amistad holds the original Ellis Wilson painting “Funeral Procession,” which was popularized in the 1980s by “The Cosby Show.” It is among the most valuable of Amistad’s holdings.

Future Gaze

Olidge, who previously served as deputy director at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, had an inkling of the collection’s value, so commissioned the appraisal, in part, to get back on track administratively.

“We went literally from $6 million to $24 million. That is an impressive number,” Olidge says. “We want to ensure that we can preserve the artwork, the collection. We want to be a good steward, and we also want to exhibit the works. We want to make sure that people can actually see them. I think much is given for people to experience. So our goal is to do this work so we can do more activities with the work.”

Kohlert praises Olidge as visionary and her “incredible” staff of knowledgeable, hard workers. She points out that while the collection is really well catalogued and in really good shape, she would prefer to see a more sophisticated storage system in place at Amistad Research Center for its art.

“I would hope that as years go by and funding comes in, this collection will be housed in a safer, better storage system than they have right now. It’s such an incredible collection. I would like one day for it to be housed somewhere where people could come and actually be able to see these pieces on the wall with proper lighting,” Kohlert says.

“I really hope one day that Amistad will have a permanent location where people can see these things correctly archived and with correct climate control. A collection like this is deserving and worthy of [that] type of housing, whether in a free-standing building or part of a larger institution. It requires a lot of space,” she continues.

A home equivalent in size to the New Orleans Museum of Art or Ogden Museum of Southern Art is what Amistad’s artwork requires, Kohlert says.

“This collection is incredibly powerful. It’s just a really good collection. That would be my dream for this collection,” Kohlert says.

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Amistad has received a new preservation transfer of the 1972 film “A Place to Start,” thanks to a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation, which will make the film available digitally for the first time.

The film, part of the Community Relations Council of Greater New Orleans Records, documents a 1971 gathering of students from across the New Orleans public high school system, who were brought together by the council to discuss the “social, cultural, racial and administration problems” they faced. Students were divided into small, racially diverse groups to share their ideas, before convening for a conversation with Superintendent of Schools Dr. Gene Geisert.

The students speak candidly within their groups, sharing their differing viewpoints. On certain topics the students find themselves in easy agreement, such as noting poor communication between students and administration and a lack of activities. On other subjects, students ask each other to clarify their stances. In one exchange, a white student asks a black student, “I want to know why you said ‘We have to fight the white establishment.’” The black student responds, explaining what her experience has been by trying to put the white student in her shoes: “Okay, you go to our school and you’re black, and everything is white around you…”

Filmed soon after the height of the Civil Rights Movement and school desegregation in New Orleans, the subject of integration is still very much at the forefront of the conversation in this film. Students express differing viewpoints on the subject and have a nuanced discussion regarding the social difficulties of navigating an integrated school. Many of the students present still attend all-black schools, and they use the opportunity to ask Superintendent Geisert about why that is so - and to question the distribution of resources across schools. Geisert defends the districting of the schools and explains that the city’s majority black population means that the attendance of white students at every school is a difficult prospect in practice.

The African-American students present are straightforward in their discussions about the racism they regularly face at school. One student recounts a story about a friend who was discouraged by a counselor from applying to the predominantly white engineering school she had been planning to attend and was instead pointed toward a local HBCU and asked “Why don’t you be nice little maid?” Other students share similarly frustrating experiences.

Ultimately, the discussions lead students to the conclusion that to enact any change, unity is needed both within cultural groups and across them. “School is a good place to start,” one student notes, because people from all sorts of differing backgrounds find themselves thrust together there and need to find a way to communicate with each other, as difficult as that may be. “It’s not a fight against black and white, really,” another student observes, “It’s a fight against society, broad-minded people against narrow-minded people.”

To view “A Place to Start,” please contact the Amistad Research Center Reference Department.

~~~~~~

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Donor support is essential to Amistad’s mission of telling America’s story. Financial funding is critical to this mission, but so, too, are donations to the archive itself. Last year, Amistad announced that author, poet, playwright, journalist and activist Alexis De Veaux had begun donating her personal papers to Amistad. De Veaux now reflects on the importance of donation.

“I supported Amistad with my literary donation. It’s bigger than any financial contribution I’ve made,” De Veaux says. “The main reason I wanted to donate to Amistad Research Center was because of the center’s mission of looking at not only America - Blacks born in America - but the Black Diaspora. My work has crossed over into those veins.”

After 25 years as a professor and departmental chair in the Department of Women’s Studies, De Veaux retired from the University of Buffalo six years ago. She now lives in New Orleans.

De Veaux’s expertise is in black Diaspora women’s literary production and social histories. Until former student Kara T. Olidge departed the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture four years ago to become the Executive Director at Amistad Research Center, Amistad just wasn’t on native New Yorker De Veaux’s radar.

She gifted Schomburg with half her papers, the ones from the 1970s to 1980, and Amistad with the half dating from the 1990s to 2000.

“This constitutes what I’ve done as writer and teacher,” said the former Essence magazine contributor. De Veaux was the first North American journalist to interview Nelson Mandela after his release from Robben Island. In 1990, she flew to South Africa to meet with the late president. “Amistad now has my teaching notebooks.”

“Writers have to seek out institutions that house our historic realities. For them to do that, we have to give them the tools,” De Veaux says. “We want the generations coming to know not just what we went through, but what they’re going through.”

To the dedicated staff going about the everyday work of helping Olidge “unearth, record, and preserve the histories of the multitudes of Black people who have lived and are documented in the way of an archive,” De Veaux sends particular kudos.

“It’s important not to think of Amistad Research Center as simply a local institution. When we tend to think of it as a New Orleans institution, we render it small in the work we’re all doing every day,” De Veaux says. “Amistad Research Center takes its place among other internationally-recognized Black institutions that forward the mission of Black realities. It’s important to approach the Amistad with the kind of respect that it deserves.”

At the University of Buffalo, De Veaux’s teaching was centered on how Black women have written themselves into the history of a culture when they weren’t allowed to insert themselves into history books. This is why Amistad’s mission resonates so deeply within her.

“Amistad Research Center is centered on the housing and taking care of what our historic reality is. If we don’t do it, no one else is going to,” De Veaux says.

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The gem that is the Amistad Research Center serves a worldwide assemblage of scholars, but also the New Orleans community at-large.

Local playwright and director Tommye Myrick, who was then acting director of the Department of African & African-American Studies at Southern University at New Orleans, was outraged by the omission of African-American soldiers from most every aspect of the new D-Day Museum’s grand opening in 2000. After calling for Blacks to boycott the institution (now renamed the National World War II Museum), she called Amistad for help. “I contacted the Center and asked ‘Can I come in there to see what you have?’ I practically lived in Amistad.”

Because of her research, “we had a seven-day celebration of African-American soldiers of World War II. We produced a pictorial book, called Souls of Valor, in February 2001, and Amistad Research Center started documenting oral histories of World War II veterans like Felix James, Bennie Francis Sr., Calvin Moret, and others,” Myrick says. The result of these interviews is the Double Victory Collection housed at Amistad.

Myrick, now Artistic Director of Voices In The Dark Repertory Theatre Company, says, “Amistad Research Center is guarding, protecting, and harnessing our history. Myrick has used the collection as a resource for her historical drama, Le Code Noir. She credits Amistad for helping her with accuracy of the work and collaborative efforts to document the play’s first performances. Amistad was helpful in connecting Myrick with other community organizations, like the Historic New Orleans Collection. For her most recent production, A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry, Amistad assisted with a symposium about the revolutionary work of Hansberry and her impact on Black female writers.

One way Amistad builds cultural capital in the community is by allowing other arts nonprofits, like Myrick’s, access to its collection for their own exhibition purposes. The New Orleans African American Museum’s current exhibition, curated by Amistad, is a chronology of the Faubourg Tremé neighborhood from 1700 to the 1960s. Photos and other artifacts are culled from Amistad holdings to tell Tremé’s rich story. “It is a tremendous collection of work. It really allows creatives an opportunity to delve into a wide subject matter,” says Gia M. Hamilton, Executive Director and Curator of the museum.

Collaborative programming is another area where Amistad excels. Carolyn Barber-Pierre’s job as Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs in Tulane University’s Office of Multicultural Affairs is to “enhance the educational experience here on campus.” After 35 years on staff, she has utilized Amistad “for years, on a number of things,” including outreach to community contacts, research on segregation at Tulane, to plan Week For Peace activities, and while gleaning information on the Civil Rights Movement.

For the past two or three years, Barber-Pierre’s office has collaborated with Amistad Research Center on the popular “Conversations in Color” speaker series. As partners, the two organizations have brought Pose FX writer and producer and trans activist Janet Mock, Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza; Andrew W. Mellon Foundation President Elizabeth Alexander, New York Times Op-Ed columnist Charles Blow and the Dr. Rev. William J. Barber, II, of the Poor People’s Campaign, to campus. All of these events are available through Amistad’s Vimeo account.

“These are important voices we want to come to campus,” Barber-Pierre says. “These are voices neither of us can do on our own because of the cost.” She calls the research center “real, true partners, particularly under the leadership of Kara Olidge.” Barber-Pierre also notes how “very helpful” Amistad’s staff is.

“Amistad is a constant source of information. In particular, on African Americans and their history,” Barber-Pierre says. “You’d be surprised at how many people utilize the center for research. In a city that is 60 to70 percent black, it’s incredible to have that kind of world-class resource here.”

Amistad Research Center doesn’t just bring world scholars to New Orleans, it offers all takers a true lens to view influential African and African-American movers, shakers and creators. The center recently acquired performance sculptor-installation artist Senga Nengudi’s papers. Nengudi, 76, was named one of the Most Influential Living African-American Artists by online art magazine Artsy, in a February 2019 editorial. The Colorado Springs, Colo.,-based artist’s upcoming exhibition at Lenbachhaus in Munich has afforded Amistad yet another partnership – this one, global in scope.

“This is an exhibition in Germany of a prominent contemporary African-American artist, whose papers are at Amistad. We have been working with Lenbachhaus to digitize portions of the papers for use in the exhibition and its accompanying catalog,” Amistad Deputy Director Christopher Harter says. The eponymous Nengudi exhibition opens Sept. 17 and closes on Jan. 19, 2020.

Clyde Robertson knows the power of the awe-inspiring archive in Tilton Hall. He’s utilized Amistad for decades. As a doctoral student, Robertson relied on Amistad while completing his dissertation on Alexander Pierre Tureaud while a student at Temple University in 1996. Today, Robertson is an associate professor of humanities at Southern University at New Orleans. He is also director of the school’s Center for African and African-American Studies.

While working for New Orleans Public Schools in the 90s, Robertson helped establish Amistad’s Afrocentric Archive. This collection holds works by eminent thinkers Molefi Kete Asante, Jacob Carruthers and the young James Nazier Conyers, a “prolific author,” now working from the University of Houston. These days, Robertson is working with Olidge to do more community engagement. For Black History Month, they worked to bring political analyst and author Donna Brazile back to her hometown to give the Charles Frye Memorial Lecture at Southern University at New Orleans.

“This is the largest independent repository of African and African-American culture and intellectual property in the country. Harboring African-American history is significant to all, regarding its place in American and world history,” Robertson says. “[Amistad] is vital to that mission for securing and perpetuating the history of America’s major population in this country. One that contributed mightily to its progression.”

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Amistad boasts a strong internship and mentoring program that helps local high school and college students meet educational and community service requirements as part of their studies. Grant funding also allows the Center to occasionally hire student assistants to help with high-priority, short-term projects. Such opportunities assist the Center staff in organizing and cataloging its collections, increasing access through digitization, designing exhibitions and other tasks. They also provide valuable experience in archival and library research and methods and the preservation of cultural heritage to students who may be considering a future in the library/archival fields or other career paths.

Amistad is fortunate to once again have hosted a wonderful cohort of students this Spring semester. Profiles of our interns/assistants and the projects they are working on are featured below.

Lerin Williams is a second-year master’s student in Ethnomusicology at Tulane University. Her research interests lie in African Diaspora studies, identity, oral history, tourism, music of the African Diaspora, transnational knowledge production, linguistics and liberation movements. Williams has a background in music education and jazz studies. Her study of music performance and fieldwork has led her to Brazil, as well as the Caribbean.

“As a graduate assistant at the Amistad Research Center, I am creating descriptions of field recordings by Lorenzo Dow Turner. Turner was an African-American linguist and ethnographer, native to North Carolina. He dedicated his life’s scholarship to understanding the interconnectivity between the ethnic groups of West Africa and its diaspora, ranging from the Caribbean and Brazil to the Gullah Geechee communities in the North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia sea islands. Turner was a pioneering linguist whose ethnographic research and system of illuminating commonalities between cultures and languages revolutionized the field in 1949. Turner’s work dispelled myths of Black inferiority and substantiated the irrefutable links between a myriad of African cultures (including Yoruba, Igbo, Wolof, among many others) and their descendants in the Americas.”

Simenesh Semine is a sophomore at Tulane University double majoring in Political Science and African Studies with a minor in Public Health. She is currently completing a fellowship through the university’s Center for Public Service.

“At Amistad, I have been compiling descriptions and information about the New Orleans-based TV show, “Just for the Record.” “Just for the Record” began in 1987 and was the city’s first gay and lesbian advocacy show that interviewed local activists, business owners and members of the LGBT community. Producer and interviewer Loretta Mims also went to businesses in the area that supported LGBT rights and told viewers about ways to support different organizations such as the NO/AIDS Task Force. The show also covered larger events such as New Orleans’ GayFest (later Gay Pride) and The March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation in 1993. This project has been really interesting because I get to learn about what gay advocacy looked like in late-1980s/early-1990s New Orleans, while also learning about the city. I hope that because of Amistad’s work, more people will have access to “Just for the Record” and be able to get a view into the city’s gay culture and pride.”

Three students – Kristen Osborne, Ellen Williams and Noah Weiser – came to us through the service-learning requirement of a Modern African American history course taught by Dr. Rosanne Adderley of Tulane University’s History Department. All three worked to further inventory three important collections at Amistad: The Comics and Graphic Novels Collection, The Zine Collection, and The Janette Faulkner Ethnic Notions Sheet Music Collection. Each reflects on their experiences below.

The Ethnic Notions collection was a sobering look back at American history. The collection focused on racist depictions of African Americans in sheet music, both in the visual components of the artwork on the sheet music and in the content and lyrics of the songs themselves. A majority of these songs were from the minstrel era of music and focused on many of the stereotypes from that time. The sheet music was from the 1890s to around the 1930s, and the majority of it was published in the North or the West.

The second collection I worked on cataloging was the Zines Collection, which includes small-circulation, self-published booklets and magazines. After weeks of looking at racist depictions of African Americans in the Janette Faulkner collection, the chance to see self-published works by marginalized groups about whatever the publishers saw fit to make a zine about was a breath of fresh air. This was certainly my favorite collection of the semester, and I would often get distracted flipping through the zines while I was cataloging. The collection includes everything from small poetry collections [and] art zines with stunning collages to political activism and information relating to the Black Lives Matter movement [but also] a punk zine made specifically for black women punk fans. Overall, getting the chance to look through people’s manifestations of their creativity and activism was incredibly fun, and I think it’s very cool the Amistad Research Center deemed these important enough to be in the collection.

--Kristen Osborne

As a history major, I was excited to be partnered with the Amistad Research Center for my service learning. When I was assigned the comic books and graphic novels at the Amistad Center, I was so excited to begin. I grew up reading comic books with my dad and brothers and could not wait to begin cataloging and learning more about superheroes. What I did not expect to find in these comic books, some of them dating back to the 1940s, is how much of American history is written in the pages of them and how many of them represent the history of people of color in the United States. Whether intentional or not, the comic books are a great lens into America’s past and present.

I think this service learning was a great complement to Modern African American History because in addition to learning about the political history in class, I was given insight into different lenses of cultural and social history and experiences through the comic books. If there were more comic books to be cataloged, I would have stayed on until the end of the semester to finish the inventory because of how much this experience meant to me.

--Noah Weiser

The work I did this semester augmented my academic curriculum immensely. I gained firsthand experience in an archive setting, interacting with types of publications I haven’t seen before and an extremely friendly staff who helped me comprehend the work I was doing. The exposure to sheet music in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, along with small personal zines from the 1990s to the 2010s, showed me new subcultures I didn’t know existed. It [also] widened my view of what constitutes history and what can represent a community in a specific period. I have loved my time interning for the Amistad Research Center, and I know that the experience I gained here will be extremely valuable to my further development.

--Ellen Williams

Amistad’s Archives Division also hosted CeCe Adler, a senior Political Science major at Tulane University. CeCe assisted in processing the personal papers of attorney, activist and Louisiana Supreme Court Justice Revius Ortique Jr. CeCe’s project involved assisting with the initial sorting of the papers, as well as preservation work to help stabilize documents that had been affected by rusting metal fasteners such as staples and paper clips.

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Ora Myles Sheares has come a long way since her insulated origin story in West Monroe, Ouachita Parish, Louisiana.

She and the late Rev. Reuben Sheares, director of the United Church of Christ’s Office for Church Life & Leadership, moved 11 times during their 39-year marriage as he followed the path ordained for him to serve. Still, Sheares, a retired librarian, sticks with the fundamentals: Knowledge is power, and education is the way forward.

“I come from a family that really values education. Education is as much a part of raising children as any of it: You feed, clothe and educate,” Sheares says from her suburban Chicago home. “You produce citizens who are contributing members of society.”

Sheares met “Preacher” on campus at Talladega College in Talladega, Alabama. It was the first time she’d left Louisiana. Like all new arrivals on campus, Sheares took the campus tour to Savery Library to view artist Hale Woodruff’s acclaimed “Mutiny on the Amistad” murals. This 1938 commission tells the story of La Amistad in its three panels: “The Revolt,” “The Court Scene” and “Back To Africa.”

“They took us to the library to explain the story of Amistad. A replica of the ship was painted on the floor. It was sacred. You never walked on it,” Sheares says.

Sheares was always a member of one of the now-defunct local Friends of Amistad groups that supported Amistad Research Center. The Chicago chapter kept her abreast of happenings at the Center. She’s been a donor for nearly 10 years.

Sheares donates annually through her Ora Sheares Charitable Fund. End-of-year distributions are administered from her Individual Retirement Account.

“I give so much every year. It’s simple. It’s money that I give to charity,” Sheares says. “I decide how much I’ll give. I’ve got a certain amount of money.”

A mother of three sons, Sheares delayed graduate school for 12 years while raising her family and traveling with her husband as he completed his doctorate, served several stints as pastor and helped grow the UCC church as a board member. She earned a master’s degree in Library Science from Pratt Institute in New York. For 14 years she worked as school librarian at Vernon L. Davy Jr. High in East Orange, NJ. (The school was later renamed Cicely Tyson School of Performing and Fine Arts.)

“We’ve been especially blessed. We’ve come a long way,” Sheares says, remembering when Rev. Sheares drew $40 per week in pay and they lived in the parsonage. “I had to be able to get a job because we didn’t have any savings.”

Although it’s been a while since Sheares last visited New Orleans, her son visited a few years ago in conjunction with Amistad’s exhibition on African American freemasonry in Louisiana. Sheares’ father, Reuben Myles, was a Mason and her family donated items to Amistad that were used in the exhibition.

Likewise, the Sheares Papers contain the Rev. Sheares’ sermons and ephemera from his work with Community Renewal Society (“Forward. Responsible. Freedom.”) in Chicago from 1968 to 1974; correspondence during his 14-year tenure as director of UCC’s Office for Church Life & Leadership; and a copy of his crowning achievement, the Book of Worship, a collection of prayers and verse for UCC ministers.

‘Do you know what you’re sitting on?,’ Clifton H. Johnson, Amistad Research Center’s founder, asked Sheares after the Rev. Sheares’ untimely death in 1992. ‘You know Reuben wants those papers in here.’ Thus, Sheares gathered and submitted her husband’s papers in 2004. And she’s so glad she did.

“They house the stories of so many people. Some of whom I knew and loved, and others whose stories are just so important to hold on to,” Sheares says about her financial support to Amistad. “The stories that they hold are just so rich. So valuable.”

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John O’Neal, the playwright, actor, director, educator and community/civil rights activist died February 15, 2019, in New Orleans after a lengthy battle with dementia. He was 78.

O’Neal was a founding member of the Free Southern Theater in 1963 at Tougaloo College in Mississippi. It relocated to New Orleans in 1965. The theater’s mission was “to use theater as an instrument to stimulate the development of critical and reflective thought among black people in the South” while supporting the efforts of those involved in the Civil Rights Movement. “Inherit The Wind” and “In White America” are among the productions Free Southern Theater is known for.

In 1980, after Free Southern Theater folded, Junebug Productions assumed its mantle in the post-civil rights era. O’Neal served as its longtime artistic director until retiring in 2011. “Don’t Start Me To Talking or I’ll Tell Everything I Know: Sayings From The Life and Writings of Junebug Jabbo Jones,” “You Can’t Judge A Book by Looking at The Cover: Sayings From The Life And Writings of Junebug Jabbo Jones, Volume II,” “Ain’t No Use in Goin’ Home, Jodie’s Got Your Gal And Gone” and “Trying To Find My Way Back Home” are a few of those plays.

John M. O'Neal Jr. was born Sept. 25, 1940, in Mound City, Illinois. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English and philosophy from Southern Illinois University in 1962, where he also studied playwriting. O’Neal’s involvement with the southern Civil Rights Movement led to him becoming a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Georgia and Mississippi. He also served as the committee chairman and coordinator for the Freedom School Program of the Council of Federated Organizations' Freedom Summer in Mississippi project in 1964.

After extensive contributions to SNCC, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and other civil rights organizations, O’Neal was instrumental both nationally and internationally for using theater as a tool of social justice while also urging artists to become activists.

He is survived by his wife, Bertha O’Neal; three children; two siblings; seven grandchildren; and a great-grandson.

John O’Neal’s life and work are reflected in many collections held at the Amistad Research Center, including O’Neal’s own personal papers, the records of the Free Southern Theater and Junebug Productions, and other collections.

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"Please I beg of you to help me and talk with me. I'm truly afraid to die, and Louisiana Penitentiary is a very dangerous place for a 16-year-old to spend the rest of his life."- Johnny Ross, 1976

Amistad archivists, working with the records of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund found these heart-wrenching words recently. Work on the collection had to pause for a time that day, as Johnny's letter to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) struck horror in the hearts of our archivists. We needed to know more.

Supporting documents within the collection shed some light on this young man's plea and the era in which his case was fought. The 1970s heralded the emergence of the women's movement, the anti-death penalty movement and the ongoing work of the SPLC and other civil rights organizations to address the systemic role of racism and sexism in the criminal justice system.

Johnny's story is one that is repetitive in our American history. At age 16 Johnny Ross, an African American, was charged as an adult, convicted and sentenced to death in 1975 for the rape of a white woman. At the time, he was the youngest inmate to ever be sentenced to death row in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Absurdly enough, Johnny was not old enough to attend his own execution, under state law.

After a police lineup in which Johnny was not initially identified by the victim as her rapist, Johnny, then 15, signed a confession under extreme duress without a parent, guardian or legal counsel present. Though uncorroborated, Johnny maintained that he was beaten severely while in police custody until he signed the confession. Needless to say, his court-appointed attorney did not mount a vigorous, or even adequate, defense on his behalf. Nevertheless, the Southern Poverty Law Center and its president, Julian Bond, believed Johnny.

"Only if I had someone to hold my hand and walk with me I know I will make it."- Johnny M. Ross, 1976.

Johnny's letter within the collection at Amistad was the first letter the Southern Poverty Law Center received from him. Julian Bond sent it, along with a letter of appeal and an image of Johnny in his cell at Angola, to the Federation of Southern Cooperatives (FSC). The FSC advocates for black farmers, low income people and their communities. It is understandable why the SPLC would seek the FSC's support for Johnny's case.

"I am aware that my letter comes at a time when the women's movement is struggling to make our society recognize and deal with the crime of rape. My concern for Johnny Ross is not at odds with this struggle. Rather, it is a dimension of it - because the historical treatment of interracial rape, particularly in the South, has been an expression of both sexism and racism."- Julian Bond, President, Southern Poverty Law Center, 1976

As Bond references in his letter of appeal for Johnny, the 1970s birthed the women's movement and the emergence of the anti-rape movement. It was a time when women of color and white feminists were banding together and seeking legal reforms to protect victims of rape, while spotlighting women's experiences with sexual violence to the broader public.

The SPLC was working in this area as well. In particular, it took a stand against women of color being raped by white men. The 1975 case of Joan Little illustrates this. Bond notes in one letter SPLC's success in defending Little against the capital charge of murder, for using deadly force to defend herself from a sexual assault by a prison guard at Beaufort County Jail in Washington, North Carolina, in 1974. Her case was a landmark case. Little was the first woman in the United States acquitted for killing while defending herself from sexual violence.

Both cases were death penalty cases. As Bond notes in his letter, 455 men were executed for rape during the period dating from 1930 and the majority, 405, were black men. By the 1970s, only the Southern states of Georgia, North Carolina and Louisiana maintained the death penalty for sentencing rapists.

The grossly disproportionate number of black men sentenced to death for rape is obvious. Johnny remained on death row until Louisiana's mandatory death sentence for rape was struck down by the United States Supreme Court in 1977. Bond's reference to the women's movement and the crime of rape highlights the long history of ongoing sexual violence against women in general. In particular, it reminds us of the terror campaign against black women by white men and the reality that a black woman faced death for defending herself against a white man.

The threat of lynching for black men and rape for black women, from slavery onward in American history, demonstrate how systemic terrorism was used to maintain white political, social and racial control over black lives and black communities.

Johnny Ross' case is an example of the miscarriage of justice and the presumption of guilt when a black man was accused of raping a white woman. We see this multiple times throughout U.S. history, one of the more well-known cases being that of the Scottsboro Boys in 1931 Alabama. Joan Little's case is an example of the triumph of the women's movement in demanding justice for women who have experienced sexual violence at the hands of men.

The SPLC in early 1980 sought to move Johnny's case to the federal court system. But when new forensic details emerged, all charges were dropped in 1981.

Johnny Ross was exonerated and released after more than six years in Angola. He was 22.

More information about Johnny Ross' case can be found in the National Registry of Exonerations.

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The alien and the foreign born often labor under a heavy handicap. Never more so than in times of unemployment and economic depression. As the programs outlined below indicate, many groups are demanding a stricter rather than a more flexible immigration policy. Church people need to scrutinize these policies, to follow legislation as it is proposed in the coming session of Congress, and to seek justice for every resident, citizen or not.

From the December 1930 issue of Church and Society, published by The Department of Social Relations of the Congregational Education Society.

They crowd against the high iron fence which…separates them from the Promised Land. Hundreds of them in a week, thousands in a month – refugees, D.P.’s, detainees. They have come so far, from such hunger and misery! They have hoped for so long!...Outraged, frightened, ashamed, one says to himself, ‘I am decent and law abiding and America is no police state. Why am I locked up?’

From “Strangers No Longer,” published by the Missions Council of the Congregational Christian Churches, April 1951.

Without their identified sources, the statements above could very easily be mistaken as being part of the current debate on immigration in the United States. Discussions of stricter immigration policy, detainees and fences have filled national news coverage, political discourse in the U.S. and our private conversations over the past two years. Last year, as images of children detained in metal cages at an immigration processing center in McAllen, Texas, began to circulate, I recalled a series of photographs housed at the Amistad Research Center showing immigrant children on Ellis Island in the 1920s. While the reality of the upheaval faced by individuals and families while passing through Ellis Island, either as immigrants or deportees should not be overlooked, the photographs of children being taught and playing outside in the photographs stood in stark contrast to those reflecting the current immigration policy that I saw in newspapers and online.

From 1892 to 1954, more than 12 million immigrants entered the United States through Ellis Island in New York Harbor. One of the missionary societies present on Ellis Island was the Congregational Home Missionary Society (CHMS), which began assisting new arrivals on Ellis Island in 1894. Found within the CHMS records housed at Amistad, are a set of files for the General Committee of Missionary and Immigrant Aid Work at Ellis Island. The committee included representatives from Protestant, Catholic and Jewish missionary societies and provided funding and representatives to work with immigrants on the island. It also worked with government officials to appeal on behalf of the immigrants in regard to living conditions, medical care and distribution of relief. Additionally, committee workers helped newly arrived people connect with their relatives, find housing and provided advice on traveling, particularly for young women who were traveling alone. An important figure among these files is Jennie F. Pratt, a social worker from New Jersey who spent more than 30 years assisting immigrants and deportees on the island.

In 1921, the U.S. Immigration Service asked the Board of Home Missions of the Congregational Christian Churches to organize a school and playground on Ellis Island. In April of that year, Henry M. Bowen, Director of Foreign Speaking Work of the CHMS, wrote to Mrs. Pratt: “At the suggestion of Colonel Helen R. Bastedo [of the Salvation Army], I am writing you asking if you would care to consider a proposition relating to some work which we hope to undertake at Ellis Island.” Pratt accepted the invitation and began her work in June 1921.

The Ellis Island files contain a large number of letters and reports from Mrs. Pratt to various missionary and government officials detailing her work and others’. On September 14, 1921, she wrote in a lengthy report:

While I have been at the school we had about one hundred and sixty children a day. We give in the school about forty pieces of clothing a day. We give about 30 pieces of clothing a day in the detention rooms. We have a school at Ellis Island, but that is only one part of our work as we help in the Detention Rooms. We give our time to them in writing [letters], sending telegrams, trying to get the welfare societies to push their case thru so they will not remain on the Island long. We try to cheer the mothers and children as they are frightened and do not know what is going to happen to them.

Mrs. Pratt’s report, one of many, continues for twelve handwritten pages, noting that more than 900 pieces of clothing had been given out since she started her position. With such a workload, it is not surprising that she wrote earlier in September, “Dear Rev. Bowden: Could I have a vacation as I feel I need one badly? My classes at Ellis Island have been large. A little rest would help me for my fall work.”

Included within many of Pratt’s reports and letters are personal accounts of individual children and adults under her charge, stories of their backgrounds and families and their current circumstances on Ellis Island. She relates the stories of children from Central America, Asia and from throughout Europe. During World War II, her reports include accounts of those deemed “enemy aliens” – Japanese, Germans and Italians from the East Coast – who were interned at Ellis Island. Through her descriptions, Mrs. Pratt humanizes the throngs of individuals and families who passed through the island.

Also found within the CHMS records are numerous articles written by and about Mrs. Pratt, which provide glimpses into her background and work. Included is a reprint of an article published in the April 1953 issue of Coronet that dubbed her “Mrs. Liberty of Ellis Island” and relates her father’s own immigrant experience as the reason for her dedication to her work with the children and families on Ellis Island.

When Ellis Island closed in 1954, immigration and naturalization services were transferred to a Federal Building in New York City and Mrs. Pratt continued her work there. The last letter from her in the records at Amistad is dated around 1963. In it, she writes of the many people she has seen over the past year: “Some are students, visitors, folks paroled into the country, seamen here illegally, and some have fallen in distress before the five year period in the country. Some have used fraudulent documents or committed crimes or are persons needing to adjust to their status in the country…We must remember no matter what the problem is, they are all human beings.”

Through her years of work on Ellis Island, Jennie F. Pratt seems to have taken the idea of seeking “justice for every resident, citizen or not” to heart – a notion for us all to consider in today’s world.

More information on the records related to Ellis Island in the Congregational Home Missionary Society Records can be found here. The images from Ellis Island are held in the American Missionary Photograph Collection and are viewable through Amistad’s digital collections here.

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A 1973 “Black Politics Series” in the New Orleans States-Item included journalist and public relations guru Bill Rouselle alongside the city’s leading attorneys, activists and politicians.

Rouselle has worked in City Hall and throughout the community. He’s served as director of the city’s Human Relations Committee, moderated “Nation Time,” a public affairs show on WYES-TV and was an advisor to The Plain Truth, an African American newspaper focused on civil rights.

A survey of Amistad’s myriad archival collections, pertaining to New Orleans politics and the arts, reveals Rouselle’s name throughout these collections. Now, the journalist who was mentored in civil rights by activist Oretha Castle Haley has started assembling his own collection. His desire to add to the Amistad Research Center’s collection of personal papers stems from his own knowledge of the importance of institutions like Amistad.

“By necessity we had to go research to make sure we got accurate information from the source. We wanted to read what a person had to say and not rely on what someone else wrote about them,” Rouselle remembers about utilizing ARC when it was housed at Dillard University. “It was always a good resource, and I have always been supportive of the institution.”

Through the years, Rouselle’s work on his “Liberty Network” cable access show in the ’90s; his service as deputy director of the city’s Human Relations Committee in 1968; and certainly his tenure at WDSU-TV, as the station’s first black reporter, has been greatly enhanced by Amistad’s holdings.

“I didn’t choose a career where I made lots of money. I make these contributions from the heart. It’s about what I believe in,” Rouselle says of his work helping to both identify papers and help acquire materials Amistad might want to collect.

These days, Rouselle’s clients include New Orleans East Hospital, Liberty Bank and companies seeking business with the city. Now 72, Rouselle is actively involved in outreach to rebuild the local public school system. So far, Bright Moments has orchestrated community buy-in to help the state and Orleans Parish School Board rebuild or renovate 50 schools.

On Feb. 22, he’ll debut a documentary he’s produced about Haley, who “was like a big sister” to him, for the upcoming New Orleans Jazz Orchestra Celebrates Black History Month program at the New Orleans Jazz Market. And when he’s finished with all of that, Rouselle sits in on talks about Amistad’s new auxiliary space at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, “to raise the profile of a cultural gem.”

“They say when you get old, you’re supposed to fade off into the sunset. I tell them ‘I’m not old; I’m chronologically gifted.’”

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Danielle Metz revels in her ability to drive around town and sleep on a brand-new, pillow top mattress each night.

Metz, 51, is one of the 1,715 inmates President Barack Obama granted clemency before leaving the White House in 2017. On that particular day, a Tuesday in August, Obama commuted the sentences of a then-record 111 inmates. The early releases were the former president’s attempt to clap back at drug laws he deemed unusually harsh to nonviolent offenders like Metz.

In 1994, this wife and mother of two was sentenced to three life sentences - plus 20 years - on four counts of drug dealing and conspiracy. Category 3 federal sentencing guidelines demanded the stiff punishment, although Metz had never been in trouble with the law before. Her husband, the alleged ringleader, is still in prison. They rarely talk.

“I was kind of ashamed to tell anybody I had life. At that time, I was 26 years old. I couldn’t even digest it. Every time I [got] ready to say it, it made me sick to the stomach. I can’t believe this happened to me,” Metz said. “Don’t get me wrong: I did some things, but nothing merit[ed] the kind of sentence that I got.

“When the judge sentenced me, he told me I had forfeited my right to live in a humane society again.”

A life sentence means the length of one’s natural lifespan. There is no abbreviated sentencing or parole for good behavior.

So, for 23 years and eight months, Metz filled her days in a box, torn away from her children, earning 29 cents an hour at the Dublin Federal Correctional Institution in California. She made a triumphant return home to New Orleans in September 2016.

Since then, her days are busy with work, college, speaking engagements, youth mentoring and getting reacquainted with her family. A memoir, “Victory,” is expected in mid-March.

“This is answered prayer, what we’re going through. This is prayer without cease; without giving up until you get to where you need to get to,” Metz said recently from her childhood home. “This [ordeal] has changed my life in many ways.”

Primarily, Metz is committed to bettering herself and the world. The psychology-substance abuse student works in a local community health clinic, helping the formerly incarcerated make a healthy transition back into society. She’s also on-call as a Violence Interrupter, providing counsel to gunshot victims, 16 to 28 years old, fresh from a violent incident, while still in the hospital.

On weekends, Metz mentors girls through a nonprofit organization, sometimes accompanying them to court. Then, there’s her Pep Rallies to Prison motivational speaking business, of which she is chief executive officer.

“President Obama wrote to me that I must lead by example. That I had demonstrated the potential to do great things. Only a fraction of [the country’s prisoners] are chosen [for clemency], and I was one of ’em,” Metz said. “So I don’t take that for granted.”

Instead, Metz keeps productive. Clemency means that although she was released from the 973-bed women’s prison, this is supervised release for five years. At some point, her supervisor may recommend getting her record expunged.

What happened?

“I’m playing catch on, not catch up, with my friends. Life has passed me by,” Metz admits, though philosophically upbeat. “They did it the right way. They went about it the right way.”

Metz, born Danielle Bernard, is the youngest of nine children. Her parents were hard-working individuals who provided a loving and stable household for their brood. Dad worked days and mom worked nights. She was under the protective gaze of six older brothers. They owned their shotgun double. Yet, Metz describes herself then as materialistic and full of fantasy. She wanted to live the glamorous life.

At 17 she was pregnant and too ashamed to go back and finish high school. Two weeks after her son was born, she met her husband, a man 12 years her senior. She describes him as “a nice guy, laid back.” Her girlfriend was dating his brother.

“I was looking for love. I wanted someone to treat me like dad [did,]” Metz says. “When he asked me ‘Where you been at all my life?’, I said ‘Inside.’ I [didn’t] even know what to say. I was young. Immature.”

The two married and had a daughter three years later. When Metz asked ‘Is there anything I can do to assist you?’ her 33-year-old husband had her transport his product.

“I was in denial. I did what I did. I didn’t have to see [the cocaine]. It was just me bringing a car and picking up a car,” Metz says matter-of-factly. Unwittingly, she moved Schedule II narcotics across state lines three times.

“It happened, and I allowed it to happen. Now, I’m much more responsible,” Metz says. “The federal system wants you to take accountability. This is about my healing. I’m here to get a healing for Danielle because [the easy route] cost me too much. All I really wanted to do in that situation was to provide for my kids.”

Old enough to know better

Writing “Victory” is an achievement for Metz because she says her education suffered in federal prison. She put off completing a GED certificate for some time because “I was the girl who was never going to leave.” Nevertheless, two years after her sentence began, Metz earned her diploma on Dec. 1, 1996.

Over the course of 23 years, Metz would also become Department of Labor-certified in bakery training, an Occupational Safety & Health Administration-certified powered industrial truck operator and also complete courses in “Surviving Life,” “Domestic Violence Education” and Ace Legal Research, among others.

“I’m not too much worried about hurrying up and earning a degree to help somebody, but to help me. I want to be able to see what went wrong in my life,” Metz stresses. “I want to help Danielle. Unless you know a person’s background and what they’ve been through, you can never know why they behave the way they do. I’m still trying to figure it out.”

To make it easier for young women and girls to navigate the city’s mean streets, Metz has sprung into action. Not only does she warn girls about “holding” packages for a love interest or friend, she also warns teen girls and boys about signing legal documents while in custody without a parent or guardian present.

“Kids don’t know. I didn’t know you can get this kind of time. But if somebody come and tell them that, then they can’t say they didn’t know,” Metz says.

“I knew nothing about the law. Nothing about a habeas corpus. Those Latin words that they tell us. And that’s what happens to those young kids today,” Metz says. “They go to court, they don’t have anybody present. They don’t have nobody interpreting the law. They sign things that they don’t know.”

And, quite clearly, she makes girls aware of predator older men.

“We’re looking for love, but a lot of times we’ll do almost anything to get validated by a man. That’s our desire. Every young girl desires a man. We just don’t know the right one for us.”

Doing Our Best, Better

Metz is on a roll. And her mind is clearly centered on the prize.

In her first job out of Dublin at Catholic Charities, she earned the Joseph Massenburg Memorial Award for Excellence in National Service. The 2017 award’s $2,200 prize money allowed Metz to enroll in a local university. Last summer, she sat on an Essence Festival Empowerment Seminar panel with Mayor LaToya Cantrell. A couple of months earlier, she’d traveled to the Stockton Country Club in California to address 400 women on Mother’s Day.

“She’s a very dynamic speaker. She spoke directly to the graduates and really drove home the point that even someone with a life sentence can get out of prison. And how she worked at it every day,” Philip Stelly, public information officer for the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office, said.

At a White House Council on Women and Girls convention a couple of years ago, Metz met Piper Kerman, author of the book “Orange Is The New Black,” in a writing class.

This year, Metz has already addressed the First Amendment Lawyers Association and the 31st graduating class of the New Orleans Day Reporting Center. In between, she takes public speaking courses to sharpen and further develop her skills.

“My dream is to become a renowned author...and just tell people...give them a voice. Like Michelle Obama says, ‘Everybody has a story.’ I’m becoming Danielle Metz,” Metz says.

“Victory,” her book, is a way to connect with President Obama. And to thank him.

“I always tell myself, ‘I wanna be better than I did the prior year.’ That is the goal,” Metz says.

Carl Bernard, her son, says having his mother home again is like winning the lottery. But better. “We talk almost every day. More days than not. She loves to text message and send pictures,” Bernard says.

“I never thought in my wildest dreams that – I thought some days I would go home. Some days I thought, ‘I never will.’ And for him to give me the opportunity – sometimes I get discouraged,” Metz admits. “I’m trying to do too much. I’ll go back to that letter, and I’ll say ‘This man believed in me.’

“If it can happen for me, it can happen for anyone. It makes me feel like everything I went through was worth it. Now, God is showing me that,” Metz says, contentedly.

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Lewis Tappan is remembered as a strong-minded individual in the pursuit of abolitionism, but the early records of the Mercantile Agency of New York present a businessman who may have been just as self-righteous as he was righteous. Nonetheless, his ambition created the first systematic scheme for credit reporting.

Lewis Tappan was born in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1788, one of five brothers. Following in the commercial footsteps of his father, Tappan amassed a small fortune selling dry goods only to lose it in the 1820s through poor investments. He was saved by his brother, Arthur Tappan, who had amassed a small fortune in the silk wholesale business. Arthur assumed Lewis’ debts and offered his brother a position in his company in Lower Manhattan. The Tappan brothers were known for their ardent views on abolitionism, perhaps to the point of being notorious among the business community of New York.

The Panic of 1837, one of the worst economic recessions to hit the young American nation, sunk Arthur Tappan & Company into debt. The silk concern was able to keep its doors open, but it was evident to Lewis to find a more lucrative line of work. If there is one thing that economic depression will teach a businessperson about extending credit, it is the multitude of ways in which a debtor can escape repayment. In the 1830s, it would not be difficult to assume a false identity under which to obtain a loan of money or goods. Likewise, the burgeoning American frontier offered a safe haven to anyone who found themselves with limited prospects in the Eastern states.

Opening its doors in 1841, Tappan’s Mercantile Agency sought to rectify the issues with credit, making it more reliable. His plan was to find correspondents – attorneys, ministers, and fellow abolitionists – who would twice annually submit reports to his office in New York. The reports would track businessmen, their firms, and answer certain questions like:

“Is he a man of fair character and good business habits?”

“Was he educated to merchandise?”

“What is he worth, and has he able friends?”

“Is he engaged in any other business, and if so, what?”

“Is he a man of family, and has he ever failed in business?”

With subscription to the Mercantile Agency, firms could request information on prospective customers as to their honesty and reliability. Tappan was able to find willing correspondents in the Northern states and territories, but his known abhorrence to the institution of slavery made him much less popular with potential correspondents in the South. As such, subscribers could only inquire about firms and proprietors in the Free States.

When Lewis Tappan set out to sign up subscribers for his credit reporting agency, fellow members of the New York business community quite often met him with hesitation and sometimes outright rejection. Not only did his abolitionist reputation precede him, but the entire scheme seemed devious to some, akin to a confidential network of espions selling personal information to those willing to pay. Though in time, subscriptions increased and the Agency was successful enough to open branches in other major Northern cities.

Like any good business idea, it was quick to attract imitators. After a few years of growing success, subscribers began opting for rival, less pious firms that had access to Southern markets. Tappan’s management of the company, too, was becoming a secondary priority to abolitionist duties. As early as 1833, he helped found the American Antislavery Society. When the ship La Amistad was intercepted off the coast of Long Island in 1839, Tappan helped to form the Amistad Committee, and by 1846, he was helping to establish the American Missionary Association. By the end of the decade, Tappan left the Agency to fully devote his time to the Association.

The Mercantile Agency continued under the management of Benjamin Douglass, the chief clerk. Douglass later turned the company over to his brother-in-law, Robert Graham Dun, who changed the name from the Mercantile Agency to R.G. Dun & Company. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, almost 100 years after the Panic of 1837 inspired the establishment of the credit reporting agency, R.G. Dun merged with the Bradstreet Companies, a competitor, to form Dun & Bradstreet.

The early records of the Mercantile Agency came with the donation of the American Missionary Association Archives to the Amistad Research Center. The records consist of correspondence, printed circulars concerning the founding and operation of the Mercantile Agency, and a record book containing business transactions, news clippings, announcements related to the Agency, and some biographical information on agents who worked for the business.

Much of the background information on the Mercantile Agency comes from R.G. Dun & Co. 1841-1900: The Development of Credit-Reporting in the Nineteenth Century by James D. Norris (1978), God and Dun & Bradstreet, 1841-1851 by Bertram Wyatt-Brown (1966), and the Mercantile Agency records.

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Note: Brendon’s work on the “Just for the Record” Collection is part of a larger project to process and digitize our video collection. This work has been generously funded by a grant from the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana. ARC is working with the New Orleans Video Access Center to digitize “Just for the Record,” which ran on New Orleans cable access from 1987 to 1993 and was New Orleans’ first LGBTQ+ television program. The show covered local and national topics of interest to the gay and lesbian community. We are hopeful that the full collection will be processed and available to researchers by the end of 2019.

Over the last semester, I had the opportunity to do my service learning at the Amistad Research Center. At Tulane University, all undergraduate students are required to complete two tiers of service learning, each one at 20 hours. All of the service learning opportunities are in conjunction with a class and a community partner related to the class subject matter. For me, this class was “Sexuality in U.S. History,” taught by Dr. Red Tremmel. The Amistad Research Center was my community partner.

On my first day, I walked in excited, but mostly just there to complete my service learning hours. However, as soon as I was given a tour of the archive’s library, its climate-controlled back room and the upstairs museum, I was truly excited to have the opportunity to work with the materials. At the end of my service learning, I realize that I have discovered a passion for archival research.

During my time at Amistad, I had the opportunity to work with two different collections. The first of these was the “Just for the Record” Collection. “Just for the Record” was an LGBT cable access television show from the late 1980s and early 1990s. This collection is comprised of a video archive of old episodes and stacks of its monthly newsletter. The videos are on U-Matic videocassettes, a format no longer in use and not widely accessible. However, two of the episodes had been digitized and were viewable. One of the episodes was filmed at New Orleans Gay Fest 1989 and the other was filmed at a drag show, “Ladies of the Eighties: Live at Paw Paws.” I not only had the opportunity to watch these episodes, which alone would be an incredible opportunity, but to also work with them.

For each episode I wrote a summary of what happened, compiled a list of search terms using language from the Library of Congress website, then created a list of who’s featured in each show. In addition, I went through all of the monthly newsletters, alphabetized and scanned them. I found this project to particularly interesting because it provided a glimpse into queer culture in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The footage of Gay Fest shows how far LGBT movements today have come, and it was very interesting to see drag back then.

The other project I worked on was the Impact collection. This is a set from an LGBT newspaper called Impact. I went through two boxes that were filled with a somewhat random assortment of materials ranging from newsletters to flyers and maps, with pamphlets and photographs, too. Initially I went through the boxes to figure out what was there, then I made a list of the types of materials enclosed. Next, we discussed the best way to organize the materials. It was eventually decided that each specific organization should have that honor. So my next task was sorting each box and cataloging all materials into folders based on which organization they originated from. This was interesting because the groups covered a wide berth. Log Cabin Republicans, The New Orleans Lesbian Avengers, the Gay & Lesbian Association Against Censorship, The Human Rights Campaign, The Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, NO/AIDS and many others are represented.

After I had sorted most of the larger organizations, I organized the materials by date. Then, I alphabetized and labeled them for archival. This was very exciting because it allowed me to see what was actually going on during the gay liberation movement. I also learned, up close and personally, how to put together a collection. It is one thing to read about a movement, but quite another to actually spread the physical remnants of a movement in front of you.

Through my service learning I learned all about what goes on behind the scenes in archives. I have always had a fascination with old things and history, but I had only seen collections after they were neatly assembled. Looking through the unpacked materials, I was thrilled to see it all and so glad we were organizing this bounty to share with others.

Being on the inside and seeing how collections come together, how they are organized and all the work necessary is very interesting. This experience helped me realize how easily things can be forgotten and even erased from history. My service learning afforded me the chance to protect and preserve the history of gay people, which is truly invaluable. I didn’t really know what archival research consists of before entering the Amistad Research Center, but now I cannot wait to work in an archive again.

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Nearly six decades after Larry Bagneris began his activist career, the now-retired local and regional LGBTQ pioneer is busy learning meditation.

“I never knew how much this could help!” Bagneris, 72, proclaimed recently from his French Quarter home. “I need it to deal with Trump.”

Bagneris spent 30 years working for the City of New Orleans. First, as a commissioner on the 18-member Human Relations Commission’s advisory committee for 12 years. Then, as its executive director for 18 years. Bagneris retired in May 2018.

“I worked for Marc [Morial], Ray [Nagin] and Mitch [Landrieu]. I realized with all these young kids coming through here I need to start thinking about what I want for me.”

What Bagneris has always wanted is the freedom and respect granted from equal treatment under the law. For all of us. Growing up in his close-knit family at St. Ann and Galvez streets, Bagneris knew early on that he was different.

“I knew I was gay when I was 4. When the priest hit me with the holy water at confirmation, I prayed that I would get rid of all that gay stuff,” Bagneris remembers.

Nevertheless, it was simply not to be. Neither the $238 psychiatrist’s bill did it nor did the idea of suggested shock therapy treatments. Instead, Bagneris began channeling his energies more constructively.

In 1962, at 16, he began picketing on Canal Street for civil rights, initially stepping in when a restroom-ready protester agreed to let him help. Bagneris later studied and worked with the women’s movement, too. After earning a bachelor’s degree in political science and history from Xavier University and moving to Houston for work, Bagneris found his calling as an organizing advocate for gay rights.

Something to talk about

Ever the New Orleanian, the Houston Gay Pride Parade thanks Bagneris for dreaming it up 40 years ago, in 1978. As chair of Gay Pride, Bagneris is responsible for the beads, marching bands and whimsical throws associated with this now-massive event, which snakes through downtown Houston each June. Attendance in 2015, days after the Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage, is estimated at a record 700,000. That’s a far cry from those first parades along Westheimer Boulevard in Montrose with two police car escorts.

“The first year, just a handful of people came out,” Bagneris remembers. “The next year 10,000 people showed up. We used the parade as a vehicle of something the community could become. We wanted to present this as something a community could be proud of.

“In recent years, I’m just blown away by the number of people who come out. When we started out, my whole idea of it was ‘if the bars made money, that’s a successful Pride Festival.’”

But Bagneris soon realized the error in his thinking. Eventually, he was planning and organizing a $100,000 venture. In 1986, Tina Turner performed at Houston Pride, the dayslong event leading up to the Saturday parade.

Bagneris’ recall of names is good. He handily spouts off full names of acquaintances, associates and friends from his adventurous past. His handle on acronymic organizations is also whip-sharp.

“What struck me about Larry is that he was always really good at listening to people. Vincenzo Pasquantonio, executive director of the City of New Orleans Human Relations Commission, says. “His method is to gather facts and listen to folks.” Pasquantonio noted that at the start of any interaction, Bagneris always seeks to make it a win-win shot for both parties.

Since 2011, details of this trailblazing bon vivant’s life have been housed in the Larry Bagneris Papers at Amistad Research Center.

“Years ago I became aware of Amistad, and I was familiar with what [it was] doing at Tulane. Later, when I was looking for a place to store my papers, I dropped by. I had a lot of stuff I didn’t want to throw out. When I saw how comfortable the place is and how so effectively it makes information accessible, I knew this was where I wanted to house my papers,” Bagneris says. Initially, it had been a toss-up between Amistad and New Orleans Public Library.

“I loved the concentration on civil rights and inclusiveness and knowing that there are students all around who can access these items,” he continued. “I just want them to know that whatever they’ve envisioned for themselves, they would be able to accomplish it by hopefully learning something from my life, in the fight for justice.”

Working it

Bagneris worked in corporate America for 20 years as an agent, assistant manager and trainer with Washington National Insurance Co. This tenure with the “very generous” company allowed him lots of vacations as well as national exposure to rights wins and trends. Pioneer San Francisco City Supervisor Harvey Milk picked Bagneris out of a Gay Political Caucus banquet crowd when Milk noticed him weeping during Milk’s keynote.

“We hit if off real well. I spent one week with him after [he finally won] election,” Bagneris says. “I spent the week in his office. I met the guy who shot him.

“I learned so much from Harvey about staging things; about making proclamations. I took [his murder] very personally. [Milk] really was a great human being.”

The following year, Bagneris attended the first March on Washington for Gay Rights as a member of the national planning committee. The march was Oct. 14, 1979. Ephemera in his papers document his attendance at the Democratic National Conference in Memphis in December 1978 as “Guest,” as part of the “Presidential Convention Staff” at the Texas Democratic Party and as “Delegate” to the 1980 Democratic National Committee in Madison Square Garden over three days in August.

He was the first openly gay person elected to a Texas delegation of the DNC. In 1983 he was honored with the Harvey Milk Award.

When his company was acquired in a buy-out, Bagneris packed his bags for home. He needed to channel grief from his companion Jimmy’s terminal diagnosis, so made a run in 1990 for the District C city council seat. After making the runoff, he lost with a respectable 40 percent of the vote. He’d later work as a lobbyist for the N.O. AIDS Task Force in Baton Rouge, where legislators killed no less than 186 HIV/AIDS-related bills. Bagneris stitched several names onto the AIDS Memorial Quilt.

In New Orleans, he committed 10 years to the N.O. AIDS Task Force. Bagneris was unsuccessful in his candidacy for House District 93, against the Rev. Avery Alexander, a mentor, in the fall elections of 1999. But the following year, Mayor Marc Morial tapped Bagneris to head the city’s Human Relations Commission. The Commission was created by Mayor Sidney Barthelemy to receive and mediate complaints of discrimination in housing, public accommodations and employment for the City of New Orleans. In 2004, Mayor Nagin appointed him liaison to the New Orleans City Council.

So, what drove and sustained Bagneris during his active activist years?

“Deep inside of my soul is the same thing that drove me to watch the ignorance and the homophobia and the misogyny with a sense of incredulousness and sadness. Inequality to anybody means inequality for everybody,” Bagneris says. “Women and a laundry list of other people are under attack. This job is never done. These bigots are always one step ahead of you.”

While heading the HRC, Bagneris says his greatest achievements were saving Southern Decadence, the city’s $150 million late-summer shot in the arm, and recouping and distributing $2 million over the last 12 years in wrongfully-withheld pay to Spanish-speaking laborers. Thanks to Bagneris, there are now also Civil District Court sessions in Spanish.

“My job has been to get people to look beyond the stupidity of homophobia. It’s been largely about educating the police departments and exposing both communities to each other,” Bagneris says. “I just found this to be challenging work that gave you even more back.”

New Orleans Police Department Captain Louis Dabdoub wrote Nagin in September 2003 “to commend [Bagneris’] efforts...hard work, dedication and now-proven abilities in tough situations. We are lucky to have him on our team,” the longtime 8th District commander gushed.

Flying his flag

Although he left the Commission, Bagneris says he remains committed. These days, when he’s not meditating away presidential pain or traveling the world, you can still find him organizing the local LGBTQ community. One very visible reminder of his enduring legacy are all those fabulous rainbow flags flying above North Rampart Street, the west border entrance to the French Quarter.

“I had fun with other people’s money,” Bagneris deadpans again. “Twenty bars are paying $500 each for those flags” along eight city blocks.

He recently began gathering his thoughts for a book documenting his experiences: his “magical upbringing,” his ever-supportive family and Houston as the place where he “couldn’t have found a better place” to have been.

“From my papers, people can see what I’ve done and see that New Orleans is 10 to 15 years behind. My mission has been making justice for every group in the city,” Bagneris says. “You can’t beat that. I’ve been through the hard days; now you enjoy it.”

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Farming is not for the faint of heart. Thank goodness the Federation of Southern Cooperatives Land Assistance Fund is still here, bringing bounty and blessings to those who work the land.

It’s been 52 years since The Federation started helping small and minority farmers through advocacy, the development of farm cooperatives and land retention. According to Wendell Paris, the group’s first director of training, the FSC is first and foremost about the value of strength in numbers.

“You’re not just out there fighting by yourself, but you have some people that’s got a bulldog’s grip. They’re not going to give up on folks if there’s some way we can give them some help.”

The Federation’s work stretches from Virginia to Florida and on to Texas. Land Assistance Fund offices are located in Marksville, La.; Jackson, Mississippi; Epes, Alabama; Albany, Georgia; and South Carolina. An upgrade to the Louisiana office is currently under way: A commercial office will soon replace the home-based one in Avoyelles Parish.

Bruce Harrell, an agriculture specialist, heads the Louisiana office and the Louisiana Asset Building Project. He is a fifth-generation farmer who’s worked with the Federation for 12 years.

Harrell estimates that he works with 50 to100 farmers annually in the state, traveling to wherever a need arises. He helps growers resolve growing issues and complete applications and claims of loss. Other services include workshops on heir-and-succession property issues, in-school programming on healthy living with fruits and vegetables and some OpenAg workshops on urban farming that haven’t quite taken off yet in New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

“We were there letting the residents know about urban agriculture, how to start and let them know they can apply to get a loan to farm” with a high tunnel. (A high tunnel is a lightweight and mobile greenhouse where farming is executed in the soil, not just in pots on tables. The beauty of the high tunnel is that it extends the growing season, Harrell says.) These structures have revolutionized farming over the last 20 years, fueling the popularity of farm-to-table dining internationally.

“The USDA helps farmers pay for high tunnels. You just need to show [you] have had the land for at least five years,” Harrell continues. If you can, an applicant is put on the agency’s list and eligibility is determined. The length of the process depends on one’s parish of residency. Harrell has been waiting two years for funding.

In keeping with its 1967 mission, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives Land Assistance Fund works with all minorities, Harrell says. It exists to organize and empower poor people, providing them the power to control their lives and resources, according to Paris, a founding member.

“Black farmers are losing their land. Ownership has declined tremendously over the last century,” Harrell says. “You have a younger generation that is not aware of what’s going on with their family’s property because their forefathers didn’t talk their business. The ancestor might have left a small debt, that goes into foreclosure, and the land is lost for a very little bit of money.”

To counteract this tragedy, FSC encourages its members to draw up a will or a trust so their land stays in their families’ possession.

Harrell farms grains: wheat, corn and soybeans. But he recently diversified his crop with several vegetables after a historically wet summer.

“It’s expensive to farm. There’s the cost of the materials and the implements,” he says. However, “there’s always a need for vegetables.”

Farming is a full-time job, so the fact that Avoyelles Parish growers have watched the price their soybeans fetch drop $2 per bushel over the last year is more than a little disconcerting. Harrell wishes President Donald Trump would lay off the tough talk about the Chinese trade imbalance. He figures the Chinese have now found a new partner in Brazil.

“Farmers need all the help they can get. People think farmers are making a bunch of money,” he says.

In reality, the average family farmer works a plot of land 50 acres or less – and usually just 10 to 15 acres- compared to the 10,000-plus an agribusiness has at its disposal, Harrell noted. Oftentimes, two or three households are reliant on any income generated from these yields, he added. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, a small farm in 2013 stretched 231 acres and a very large one 2,086 acres.

“We need the support,” he admitted of government subsidies in general and the recent rebates due to the fall in prices, more specifically. “We need to start working with China and stop this trade battle.”

When the weather is adequate, Harrell says a farmer is going to work 10 to 12 hours each day, literally sun up to sun down, in the field and into the wee hours with record keeping and yield planning. Record keeping is especially crucial, he says, when a commercial grower is applying chemicals – or raising and selling vegetables.

In his 2009 keynote address on the history of the FSC, Paris remembered how important it was at the beginning for the Federation to not just help its members cultivate and profit from their land, but to also cultivate its membership. For farmers, a direct result of this emphasis was overall increased savvy and the abolition of records on loose leaf paper in notebooks.

In October 2018, the Louisiana state office of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives began administering the Louisiana Mediation Program, once run by Southern University. This procedure offers farmer-borrowers a mediation hearing when any adverse decision is rendered against them by the government. Southern has partnered with the Federation to train program mediators.

The Amistad Research Center is the repository for the records of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives and is currently inventorying those records with grant support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Completion of this project will allow greater access to the records for scholars and researchers.

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Marian Wright, then the young director of the NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund in Jackson, Miss., made a suggestion to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. regarding a drive for jobs and justice. Later, during a staff retreat of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in November 1967, King announced the Poor People’s Campaign as “middle ground between riots on the one hand and timid supplications for justice on the other,” according to documents in The Martin Luther King Jr. Research & Education Institute at Stanford University.

Having largely won the war for black America’s civil rights, King looked to advancing economic equality as his next, logical challenge. Plans were well under way for the Poor People’s March on Washington by spring. King had reportedly wept at the sight of barefoot children when he visited Marks, Miss., in March 1968. This small, rural community had the dubious distinction of being America’s poorest town, in the poorest county (Quitman) of the poorest state in America.

“King wanted the Poor People’s Campaign to begin at the end of the world, in Marks, Miss. So, it did,” writes Hilliard Lawrence Lackey in his 2014 book, “Marks, Martin and the Mule Train.” Lackey is a history professor at Jackson State University.

But first King and his SCLC had to sell this movement to the masses. The public simply wasn’t in the market for an examination of poverty, despite a reported 35 million Americans (17.6 percent of the nation) living in families with total incomes less than $4,000 annually. A look at historical data shows the Dow Jones Industrial Average was at a record high of 7,795.30 in January 1966. But by October 1967, it had fallen more than 1,200 points to 6,579.58, where it would languish for much of the next year.

The campaign’s tenets were simple:

Feed the hungryHire the joblessCare for the sickEnd slumsProtect welfare rightsEducate childrenRespect poor people

“We can now see ourselves as the powerless poor trapped within an economically-oriented power structure,” reads SCLC prose from its April 4, 1969, Soul Force newspaper. “We are those men and women with certain inalienable rights, but without the means to express them.” The Southern Christian Leadership Conference noted it stands with “the nation’s poor and disinherited.”

Original SCLC planning materials in the Amistad Research Center archives illustrate the depth of planning and organizing it took to undertake – and pull off - such an endeavor.

“The SCLC ideal is of moving the entire town of Marks, Miss., to Washington. The justification of this move would be to dramatize the conditions of the town,” reads a March 27, 1968, letter from Miss Tut Tate, acting secretary of the Grenada, Miss., SCLC chapter. The letter is housed in Amistad’s Fannie Lou Hamer Papers. “There should be some interpretation of the march for black Mississippians.”

SCLC planning began after King’s announcement at the November retreat. By December 1967, SCLC staff was organizing, recruiting and contacting various support groups. This coalition of the poor included blacks, poor whites, Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans and American Indians. However, all people with a yen for justice were invited to participate. In preparation for the inevitable confrontations that would occur in public spaces, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference conducted workshops on the philosophy and practice of nonviolent action. The City of Hope shanty town was planned as a place for poor people to sleep, eat and receive education and cultural programming.

The scheduled May 30, 1968, March on Washington sought “massive student participation” in “the real work of nonviolent revolution.

“We need tens of thousands of people to pledge to remain in Washington until Congress meets our demands,” reads one missive from SCLC’s campaign timetable in the Hamer Papers.

When the unthinkable happened on April 4, 1968, SCLC forged ahead heartbroken, yet resolute in the mission. The Rev. Ralph Abernathy, King’s best friend and co-founder, took the reigns. According to SCLC staff-only preparation documents, the campaign would begin on April 29 in Memphis, at the spot where the Rev. King had been assassinated just three and a half weeks earlier. The massive March on Washington from all points of the nation was set for May 30.

According to the James Hargett Papers, initial overwhelming rejection of the march turned to receptivity only after King was assassinated. King had been supporting a sanitation workers strike in Memphis while finalizing preparations for Poor People’s Campaign. Americans were, undoubtedly, finally ready to look at “the reality of poverty in our midst,” the Rev. Hargett, a community activist and civil rights advocate, wrote.

“Poor people have been denied power, and that is why they are poor,” SCLC staff-only pre-march preparation document.

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference was founded in 1957 after the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56. That boycott was led by Martin Luther King, president, and Abernathy, its vice president and treasurer. The Atlanta-based group was known for its aggressive nonviolent action.

“Part of the routine of America is oppression of poor people. When people understand this, they will also understand why we are going to Washington to demand the basic right to a decent life,” reads an SCLC march preparation document marked “Staff Only.”

“Our society should stop cheating and insulting people who are forced to live on small welfare checks. We are against a capitalistic system where poor people – especially Black people and other minority groups – do not have money for capital and are prevented from getting it... It does not allow poor people to control their own lives.”

A fact sheet titled “The Poor People’s Campaign & You” used sobering statistics to illustrate the poverty problem: 3 million unemployed and nearly 6 million Americans forced to live in substandard homes in the wealthiest nation on earth; the poorest Americans are the 35 million who do not have enough money for a decent life; yet, America spends ten times as much on military power as it does on welfare, earmarking $30 billion a year on the Vietnam War and billions on nuclear research and putting a man on the moon.

The tired, the poor and the dispossessed traveled from all points to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. One report in the archives details the nearly-three-week odyssey of one church group because its bus had broken down so many times. From Marks, Miss., the 1,000-mile journey took one month for a caravan of 28 wagons, pulled by 56 mules, according to Lackey, the Jackson State historian. The Marks Mule Train was a centerpiece of the Poor People’s Campaign, especially when it arrived on Juneteenth 1968, parading down Pennsylvania Avenue.

“Which is better? Send man to moon or feed him on Earth?”, “Stop the war and feed the poor” and “I have a dream!” read some of the signage affixed to the Mule Train’s wagons.

“In A Land of Plenty, Why Are We Poor?” read one protestor’s sign

The game plan was to make the invisible visible, and at the seat of power in Washington, D.C., “where America had to look at the shame of poverty,” Abernathy later said. With an estimated 10 million Americans starving or malnourished, the PPC’s 51st State of Hunger delegation made the rounds on Capitol Hill and to both major national party conventions.

On Mother’s Day, May 12, 1968, Coretta Scott King kicked off the march by leading thousands of women in the first wave of demonstrators. The next day Resurrection City, a temporary settlement of tents and shacks, was built by participants who would live there during the action. Midway through the campaign, however, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-NY) was assassinated in Los Angeles while campaigning for his party’s presidential nomination. Ethel Kennedy, his wife, had attended the Mother’s Day opening of Resurrection City. Out of respect for the Poor People’s Campaign, Kennedy’s funeral procession passed through the encampment.

Over six weeks an estimated 2,500 mostly-poor and underserved men, women and children lived on 16 acres of flood-prone land, which was frequently ankle-deep in mud, in barracks-style quarters near the Lincoln Memorial. Essentially, camping out in D.C.’s steamy late-spring temperatures. Hosea Williams, who was in charge of the campaign’s direct action program, reportedly drew loud applause when he said “everybody is running around worried about Resurrection City when many of the people here are living better than they ever lived in their lives,” according to New York Times reporter Earl Caldwell on June 3, 1968.

During the day, Abernathy and other SCLC leaders took Resurrection City residents to visit congressional and other federal government offices to advocate for “at least jobs or income for all.”

“The poor man is the one-dimensional man, the man who cannot choose the work most suited to his character and ability, the man who cannot feel the pleasure of supporting his family,” wrote the SCLC in the campaign’s Statement of Purpose in 1968.

By the time Resurrection City was shut down, on June 24, 1968, the Poor People’s Campaign had succeeded in mostly trivial ways, due to congressional inaction on the campaign’s demands. According to the King Research & Education Institute, 200 counties were qualified for free surplus food distribution and several federal agencies promised to hire the poor to help run aid programs. Abernathy felt these concessions were insufficient.

The campaign’s unmet demands included a massive job and job-training program; a guaranteed income for those unable to work; national welfare rights and standards; enforcement of civil rights laws; bargaining rights for farm workers; Indian rights on and off of reservations; land reform; expansion of the poverty program and return of its control to poor people; greater housing expenditures for the poor; special education programs; decent health care for all; free food stamps (people with no money can’t buy the stamps); and an end to racism in farm programs.

The Department of the Interior forced closure of Resurrection City after the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s park permit had expired. Questions also arose about whether the $5,000 bond the group had earlier posted to use the park would be adequate for the expense of the massive project.

Still, the encampment was cleared of all occupants in less than 90 minutes, according to a New York Times article the next day. Shortly before that, however, Abernathy and 223 marchers from Resurrection City were arrested during a “mild-mannered act of civil disobedience” at the foot of Capitol Hill. The front-page report noted that 119 others were arrested at Resurrection City when the campsite closed at 10:40 a.m. The charge: “Camping without a permit.”

That night, Mayor Walter Washington declared a State of Emergency and issued a 9 p.m. to 5:30 a.m. curfew, due to disturbances in the city. Nevertheless, “a feeling of good riddance was shared by leaders of the campaign and the police,” Joseph Loftus reported in a second Times article on June 25, 1968.

“Resurrection City achieved symbolic status but had become unmanageable as a practical venture,” Loftus wrote. It is unclear if a move to preserve the huts and ship them to 40 large cities to stand as symbols of the ’68 campaign ever came to fruition.

“We came as builders...To demonstrate that we, too, could dream,” one unidentified young man said in “This Was Resurrection City,” a post-march commemorative booklet.

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Our performing arts blog series comes to an end as we look into the life of Roger Dickerson, a Pulitzer nominated composer and educator who realized early on that his heart was in New Orleans.

Roger Dickerson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana to an auto mechanic father and a mother who was a homemaker. Dickerson was no stranger to music; there were many musicians in his family who played for their own enjoyment even though they were not formally trained. Dickerson began taking piano lessons with Mrs. Miriam Panelle when he was eight years old while he attended Gilbert Academy—a school for black boys that has since closed. He also attended McDonogh 35 High School. He received his Bachelor of Arts in music education from Dillard University, and his Masters in music composition from Indiana University. He continued his education as a Fulbright Fellow at the Akadamie für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Vienna, Austria. He also continued taking private music lessons in Germany. Dickerson played a variety of instruments. In addition to the piano, he learned to play the French horn, trombone, tuba, timpani, contrabass, bass, and the saxophone.

Like many young artists, Dickerson at first dreamed of going to New York City to make his fortune. However after listening to New Orleans music—the music from his own heritage—with his trained ear, he realized his hometown provided everything he needed to become the composer he wanted to become. He also had strong feelings for the city’s culture. Thus, he decided to remain in New Orleans; as a composer, he was considered a rarity for his decision.

Some of his works include the “New Orleans Concerto” which was composed for the United States Bicentennial, “Orpheus an’ His Slide Trombone,” the Louis Armstrong requiem, “A Musical Service for Louis,” “Psalm Forty Nine,” and “Concert Overture for Orchestra.” In addition to composing, Dickerson also taught music theory, composition, orchestra, and piano at Xavier University, Southern University of New Orleans, and Dillard University. He also continued to give private music lessons and mentor other musicians. Even when displaced by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, he continued educate others and share his passion for jazz music. When Dickerson was evacuated to Roswell, New Mexico, he helped found the Roswell Jazz Festival. It has grown to an annual event that is its thirteenth year.

Dickerson won many awards over the course of his long career including the ASCAP and the Marcus Christian Award. In 2014, he received the Best of the Beat Lifetime Achievement in Music Education Award when he was eighty years old. Though retired from his teaching posts, Dickerson continues to mentor others and find new ways to learn.

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Legendary sax man Donald Harrison, Sr. and trumpeter Christian Scott are the award winning and Grammy nominated son and grandson of Big Chief Donald Harrison, Sr. and member of New Orleans first family of art and culture. Both born in New Orleans, they are high caliber musicians known for their innovations in the genre of Jazz.

Donald Harrison, Jr. (1960- ), composer and saxophonist created the “Nouveau Swing”, a style of jazz that merges the genres of R&B, Hip-Hop, Soul, and Rock. Harrison, heavily influenced by Afro-New Orleans traditional music, his critically acclaimed albums, Indian Blues (1991) and Spirits of Congo Square (2000) combine his historic cultural music form with jazz. Harrison performs and produces in this genre with his group, The New Sounds of Mardi Gras, which was established in 2001. His group, The Donald Harrison Electric Band has recorded a number of radio hits that have been in the top ten of Billboard magazine’s music charts. Harrison has performed and recorded with a number of key figures in Jazz, R & B, Funk, Classical and other music genres: Art Blakey, Roy Haynes, The Cookers, McCoy Tyner, Miles Davis, Lena Horne, Ron Carter, Billy Cobham, Eddie Palmieri, Jennifer Holiday, Dr. John, Guru’s Jazzmatazz, McCoy Tyner, and Dr. L.

A survivor of Hurricane Katrina, Harrison was featured in acclaimed Director, Spike Lee’s HBO documentary, When the Levees Broke and was a character consultant an appeared as himself on HBO’s series, Treme. As a composer, Harrison co-wrote the soundtrack for the feature film, Rachel Getting Married, directed by Academy Award winning Director, Jonathan Demme. In 2015, Harrison started his exploration in classical orchestral composition in his work, Congo Square Part I, which was performed by The Moscow Symphony Orchestra in 2016.

A long-term music educator, Harrison co-founded and was Artistic Director of the Tipitina’s Intern Program. He also founded The New Jazz School educating students ages thirteen to eighteen in the genres of jazz, soul, funk, as well as scholarship in the areas of history, music theory, harmony, and composition. He has nurtured numerous young musicians over the years, including his nephew, trumpeter Christian Scott.

Christian Scott (1983- ), also known as Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, is a two-time Edison Award winning and Grammy Award nominated trumpeter, composer, and producer. His musical education began under the direction of his uncle, Donald Harrison, Jr. when he was thirteen years old. He graduated from the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA) in 2001 and received a scholarship to attend his uncle’s alma mater the Berklee College of Music in Boston.

As a jazz innovator, Scott developed the harmonic convention “forecasting cell” and the un-voiced tone of playing, the “whisper technique.” Additionally, Scott is the originator of the genre blind musical form, “Stretch Music” that allows jazz to encompass many other musical forms, languages, and cultural influences. He created interactive music player, The Stretch Music App and won the Jazz FM Innovator of the Year award in 2016.

Since graduating from NOCCA in 2001, Scot has released eleven critically acclaimed studio recordings and two live albums. He launched the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the first known jazz recording in 1917 with a trilogy of studio albums titled, The Centennial Trilogy. Like his uncle, Scott composes scores for films, including award nominated and winning films, Samaria and The Roe Effect, created and directed by his twin brother, Kiel Adrian Scott.

More information on New Orleans first family of art and culture can be found in the papers of Harrison Family.

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Tucked away in the Amistad Research Center’s offsite storage facility is a collection you might not know about. The temperature and humidity controlled environment is home to ARC’s audiovisual collections. Among the reels of film and audio tapes, you’ll find shelf after shelf filled with a series of white boxes. If you were to pull one of these boxes down and open it, you would find a treasure trove of jazz and classical music records.

This is the record collection of Harold Battiste.

Harold R. Battiste, Jr. was a central figure among the small group of jazz musicians and educators who shaped the second fifty years of New Orleans jazz music. He is perhaps best remembered as the founder of All For One (AFO) Records and At Last Publishing Co., the first African American musician-owned recording and publishing companies. He worked closely with many New Orleans musicians, from Ellis Marsalis to Lee Dorsey to Mac Rebbenack (better known to the world as Dr. John, with Battiste’s help), but his influence reached far beyond the city of his birth.

Born in New Orleans in 1931, Battiste was a graduate of Booker T. Washington High School and Dillard University. “Those of you that know my past are familiar with AFO and At Last Publishing etc., and all the serious fumblin’ and foolin’ around I did back in the ‘50s & 60s tryin’ to play like a ‘business’ man,” he wrote in a letter to Amistad circa 2007. “I was serious ! However, I just didn’t know how dumb I was about the reality of handling business.” However he viewed it, his business took off. In 1963 Battiste, already a sought-after producer and arranger, took the AFO collective to Los Angeles. He stayed for thirty years, during which time he served as a producer and arranger for studio, film, stage, and television, and worked with artists such as Sam Cooke and Sonny and Cher. When he returned to New Orleans in 1989, he became part of the Jazz Studies faculty at the University of New Orleans, where he continued to impact the next generation of New Orleans musicians. He remained an active member of the community and worked closely with a number of local cultural organizations until his death in 2015.

The Harold Battiste Papers at Amistad document his career as an influential composer, producer, educator, and promoter of modern jazz music. But in addition to documents related to these topics, Mr. Battiste also deposited something more personal: his own collection of musical scores, 45s, LPs, and CDs. Many of these were produced by AFO Records, with Battiste serving as arranger and producer. They serve as an overview of both his career and his musical passions. For a full inventory of the collection, contact Amistad’s Reference Department.

Images from the Harold Battiste Papers at the Amistad Research Center. Images from Amistad’s website, newsletters, and blogs cannot be reproduced without permission.

The Dashiki Project Theatre was founded in 1968 and was initially funded by a grant from the Office of Economic Opportunity. The primary goal of the theatre was to present “an accurate portrayal of the black experience for the black community.” The Artistic director for the company was Dr. Ted Gilliam, who is also the Director of the Drama department at Dillard University. The majority of the Actors and Actresses came from Dillard University’s Players’ Guild. The group’s First production was “Moon on a Rainbow Shawl” in 1968 and its debut was at St. Francis de Sales gymnasium. The group’s second production was “A hand on the Gate” and it was performed at the Young Adult Coffee House as part of their Black Heritage Festival. The Theatre’s third production was a controversial play titled “The Blacks” and it performed at the St. Francis de Sales auditorium in 1969. The opening weekend of the performance was well received, as the Louisiana Weekly noted “the theater found enthusiastic and generous response in attendance and donations from the community.”

In 1972 the Dashiki Project Theatre hit its stride with a production of Derek Walcott’s “Dream on Monkey Mountain.” The play tells the tale of a coal salesman named Makak and the dreams of grandeur he has while locked in jail for drunk and disorderly conduct. The Times Picayune said the theatre group had produced its “most complex, polished, and rewarding production to date.” A local reviewer raved “the combination of an interesting and important play, impressive performances from a large cast, and creative and exciting staging make Dream on Monkey Mountain a stunning event.”

That stride continued on into the 1980s with the group’s ambitious production of a Broadway play titled “Home.” Home follows the story of Cephus Miles and his journey from adolescence to adulthood. Along the way, Miles ends up in prison for draft evasion, and upon release he moves to a big city in the North before realizing he belongs at his home in the South. A Reviewer commented that “Home” was a “rarely acted play with superior direction by Gilliam and an impressive set by Warren Kenner. Do see it.”

The Dashiki Project Theatre also hosted an annual fashion show at Dillard University to help raise funds for their theatrical productions. The fashion shows were African inspired and the clothes were designed and sewn by members of the theatre.

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New Orleans traditionally slows down during the summer months, but Amistad Research Center is busier than ever, with work underway on several grant-funded projects this year. This year is a landmark year for the city, and the Keller Family Foundation has kindly provided the support for ARC’s 2018 New Orleans Tricentennial celebration. As part of that, an exhibition entitled “‘A Peculiarly Segregated City...’: The Civil Rights Movement in New Orleans” will launch in October and will focus on the individuals and organizations that raised awareness of the social, educational, and political inequalities in New Orleans, and fought for their elimination through political and civic activism and engagement. Support from the Keller Family Foundation is assisting with the organization of thirteen archival collections documenting civil rights efforts in New Orleans and the mounting of the Fall 2018 exhibition. The full list of Keller grant recipients can be found here.

ARC’s entire Processing Department is pitching in to organize one of our larger collections, the records of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives and the Emergency Land Fund, supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The FSC was founded in 1967, and was designed to provide technical assistance, information, training, and research to low-income cooperatives and credit unions throughout the South. ELF was founded in 1972 by economist Robert S. Browne to promote the retention and acquisition of land by African Americans, teach rural Blacks about property and mineral rights, and to support landowners in soliciting development money and exposing land fraud. The FSC and ELF merged in 1985 to form the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund. The materials being organized document the important work done by these organizations from the 1960s through the 1990s, and this project will be a big step toward making these materials more easily accessible to our researchers. Read the announcement here.

Finally, ARC is excited to announce the award of a preservation grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation to preserve the 1972 film A Place to Start, produced by the Community Relations Council of Greater New Orleans. The Council was established in 1962 by a group of progressive minded citizens to promote community relations among all members of the New Orleans community regardless of race, color, ethnicity, or religion. In 1971, the Council asked students from the New Orleans Public Schools to form diverse committees to discuss desegregation, community relations, inclusion, and other topics. Students from different schools were brought together and the idea exchange was filmed, forming the basis of A Place to Start. The film documents candid conversations between small groups of students on what they see as the primary social, cultural, and administrative problems within their schools and in society. It provides a view of the New Orleans school system, and of education as a whole, through the eyes of students – an important snapshot of the time just following the Civil Rights Movement, on the heels of school desegregation in America. We are eager to receive a new 16mm preservation master for the film, and to finally be able to make a digital viewing copy available to our researchers.

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From 1991-1992, national attention was focused on the U.S. Senate race in Louisiana. It had essentially come down to two candidates: Edwin Edwards, a Democrat, and David Duke a Republican who espoused controversial ideas that the public did not believe would ever become mainstream. One group, however, foresaw the appeal of David Duke and took action.

The Amistad Research Center would like to announce that the organizational records of the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism are open and available to researchers.

Initially formed in 1989, the Louisiana Coalition Against Nazism and Racism (LCARN) was a bipartisan political action committee in opposition to David Duke’s political ascendance in Louisiana, by Dr. Lance Hill who served as the organization’s executive director. Other prominent members include Rev. James Stovall, Lawrence Powell, and Beth Rickey. It was incorporated on March 5th, 1990. The organization sought to popularize and expose David Duke’s affiliations with hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and Duke’s history of racist and anti-Semitic statements and inclinations to the public through avenues such as brochures, pamphlets, and television and newspaper spots. During Duke’s 1990 senate campaign, LCARN raised nearly $500,000 to achieve this goal.

The organizational records in this collection reflect the work done by members of LCARN—particularly from 1990-1991. They include correspondence (including the hate mail they received), campaign and fundraising strategies, Anti-David Duke advertisements, mailers, and brochures created by LCARN, and collected materials from other anti-racism and white supremacist organizations. LCARN also collected materials generated by David Duke’s various campaigns such as mailers and a David Duke for Senate hat. The records also includes newspaper clippings, which LCARN used for research for their campaigns; these clippings now provide a broader context for their activities as well. The group remained active until 1992, but it was reorganized in 2016 with the same goals when David Duke ran in the United States senatorial election again.

Overall, the records give a deep insight into a particularly controversial and volatile period in Louisiana’s political history.

The finding aid with a detailed description of the materials in LCARN’s records can be found here.

Images are from the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism Records. Images from Amistad’s website, newsletters, and blogs cannot be reproduced without permission.

Every year Amistad hosts summer interns to delve into exciting archival projects at the Center. Our internships are one of the ways in which Amistad gives back to the local community and introduces students to the field of libraries and archives. For summer 2018, we have interns who are newcomers and veterans. Profiles of each and the projects they are working on are featured below.

Sarah E. Jones is a junior at Tulane University majoring in Political Economy and Africana Studies. She is Amistad’s Digital Projects intern this summer. She highlights her first summer at Amistad.

“As a Digital Projects intern, I am tasked with the responsibility of creating and managing content for Amistad’s social media platforms. Every week, I research interesting articles, videos, and stories to share on Facebook and Twitter. Although I search through items related to African American history across the diaspora, I try to keep a keen eye on the silenced stories of Black women, New Orleans greats, and the activism and history of Black individuals on college campuses. In addition to this, I also explore Amistad’s digital collections and exhibitions to find images, oral histories, and documents that I can share with their social media audience. I want people to view the types of hidden treasures that are located in the archives at Amistad.

My other responsibilities as a Digital Projects intern includes scanning physical items from Amistad’s past exhibitions to be placed on their website, and creating a Black History social media calendar for Amistad, which has been my favorite endeavor thus far. Through this project, I have had the chance to read about monumental people and organizations like the Dent family, the MOVE organization, and the Free Southern Theater.

I was nervous stepping into this position without having previous archival experience. But thanks to the guidance of my supervisor and Amistad’s Reference Archivist, Chianta Dorsey, and the rest of the Amistad team, I have had a pleasant transition into the position. My nervousness was also aided by the awareness of knowing such a large audience views the content that I post. To my surprise, a tweet I posted in honor of Black Music Month was retweeted by the National Museum of African American History and Culture. I look forward to seeing my social media skills develop and the growth in my knowledge of African American history.”

Aria Johnson is a sophomore at Southern University in Baton Rouge and is a nursing major. She discusses her fourth year as an intern at Amistad.

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Jenidza Rivera is a second year graduate student at the University of New Orleans seeking her Master’s degree in Public History. She highlights her first summer at Amistad.

“For my internship at the Amistad Research Center, I am cataloging and writing descriptions for the Arnold R. Hirsch collection. Arnold R. Hirsch was born and raised in Chicago and later served as a professor at the University of New Orleans between 1979 and 2010. He is best known for his book, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago 1940-1960, where he discusses the housing segregation and racial struggles in Chicago following World War II.

The Arnold R. Hirsch collection is made up of interviews that Hirsch conducted between 1987 and 1994. In these interviews, Hirsch and his interviewees discuss the political climate of New Orleans as well as their own individual works in the city during and following the Civil Rights movement. The interviews were used as oral histories on New Orleans’ racial politics from the 1950s to the 1980s for his essay that was included in Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization (1992). Those interviewed included former mayors of New Orleans Moon Landrieu (1970-1978) and Ernest “Dutch” Morial (1979-1986), the first African-American mayor of New Orleans. Hirsch also interviewed Sybil Morial, the former First Lady of New Orleans and civil rights activist who helped to found the Louisiana League of Good Government (LLOGG) in 1962, and Dr. Raphael Cassimere Jr., the first black instructor to be hired at the University of New Orleans.”

Quincy Landry is a sophomore at Xavier University majoring in History. He is a Reference and Cataloging intern and talks about his first summer at the Center.

“I started at the Amistad Research Center in early June. When I first began, I started typing out labels so folders and articles in the ACOA library could be identified. I’ve also de-spined a huge bound “book” full of newspaper articles from the Reconstruction era. One of the most interesting things I’ve done at the Center was getting an opportunity to go through Malcom X’s FBI surveillance files.

Aside from the array of things I’ve been doing, my main focus has been on authoring a blog post for the Center’s blog. The topic of the post will be about Black Catholics in the city of New Orleans. For research about the topic, I have read books and viewed documents from the Center’s collections. My internship has been a really informative experience, and I know I will continue to learn!”

Amber Kinui is working at the Amistad Research Center to aid in her DLS project for her English Masters at Tulane. She is exploring racial passing as a theme, specifically by analyzing actress Fredi Washington’s role in the film Imitation of Life. She has been reading on this topic with the help of her advisor, Joel Dinerstein, along with her intern supervisor Christopher Harter. She is also helping with Amistad’s newest digital mapping project, which will feature black businesses in New Orleans during the early 20th century.

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As the city of New Orleans celebrates its 300th anniversary, the Amistad Research Center is assisting efforts to ensure that the city’s African American history and heritage are recognized. The Center has contributed to a multi-organizational effort to create a series of citywide exhibitions and programming events throughout the community.

Amistad’s current onsite exhibition, entitled “The Things We Do For Ourselves: African American Civic Leadership in the Crescent City,” runs from through September 28, 2018. This exhibition is detailed in a recent blog post by Reference Archivist Chianta Dorsey. In Fall 2018, the Center will host an exhibition open house and lecture related to the topic. Amistad will round out the tricentennial year with the exhibition “‘A Peculiarly Segregated City...’: The Civil Rights Movement in New Orleans,” which will run from October 8, 2018 to February 22, 2019.

Both exhibitions are being held in conjunction with Amistad’s role in the New Orleans Arts & Culture Coalition (NOAAC). NOAAC is a coalition of community organizations that has sought to ensure that New Orleans’ African American experience is represented in the city’s tricentennial celebrations. The coalition has produced citywide exhibitions and programming on this topic, with the main exhibition, entitled “African Heritage of New Orleans: 300 Years in the Making,” opening at the Historic New Orleans Collection in the French Quarter on June 1, 2018.

The exhibition features artwork, historical documents, and artifacts collected in three galleries to tell the story of the colonial and enslavement period, Reconstruction Era, and the Civil Rights Movement in New Orleans. Contributing to the exhibition are: The Amistad Research Center, Southern University at New Orleans’ Center for African American Studies, The Dillard University Ray Charles Program in African American Material Culture, The Historic New Orleans Collection, LaBelle Gallerie, Louisiana Civil Rights Museum, The Louisiana Creole Research Association, Louisiana Museum of African American History, Louisiana Research Collection at Tulane University, The McKenna Museums, New Orleans African American Museum, New Orleans Jazz Museum, New Orleans Public Library, OperaCréole, The Plessy and Ferguson Foundation, Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans, and Xavier University of Louisiana.

The opening reception at the Historic New Orleans Collection boasted close to 200 people and th

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William Christopher Handy, more commonly known by his initials, earned worldwide recognition as one of the earliest musicians to write and publish blues music. During his life, Handy was called the “Father of the Blues” as a nod to the pioneering role he took in making the folksy blues of the American South accessible to a larger audience. The Amistad Research Center has two small collections of letters and sheet music produced by Handy later in his life.

W.C. Handy was born in Reconstruction-era Alabama. As the son of a church minister, he was introduced to hymns and church music from an early age. Although his parents denounced musicianship as a career, they supported his musical training while encouraging him to attend college and become a schoolteacher. Handy attended Teacher’s Agriculture & Mechanic College in Huntsville, AL (now Alabama A&M in Normal, AL). He did not make it far as a teacher; after taking a teaching exam in Birmingham and learning how little it paid, he instead found work in a factory. He had also made a name for himself as an outstanding cornetist and found the musical life appealing. He joined a traveling band, appearing with Mahara’s Minstrels in the 1890s. In 1900, he was recruited by his alma mater to teach music at the college, but he only taught for two years as he felt he would be better paid as a bandleader. His interest, too, had always been in the American style of music, which at the time was considered inferior to classical European music taught in most schools.

W.C. Handy was already a locally-known cornetist and bandleader when he started to turn his focus to songwriting. One of his earliest songs to be published, “Memphis Blues,” was released in 1912 by music publisher Theron Bennett. The new sound, which was originally advertised as “southern rag,” was not originally a commercial success, and Bennett eventually went out of business. Not long after, Handy and another musician-friend, Henry Pace, founded their own music publishing company in Memphis, TN. With the publication of the song “St. Louis Blues,” Handy found an audience that was interested in this unique style of music he called the “Blues.” The popularity of “St. Louis Blues” gave Handy the opportunity to publish more songs and introduce the music of African American songwriters to the general public. Several of his employees, like Fletcher Henderson and William Grant Still, later went on to achieve their own fame as composers and bandleaders.

After five years on Beale Street in Memphis, Handy moved his music publishing company to the Gaiety Theater Building in New York City. In a letter from 1949, he claims that the move made the Handy Brothers Music Company the first Black-owned business on Broadway. He remained in New York for the remainder of his life, but he remained in personal contact with friends and early supporters. Of the W.C. Handy correspondence held at the Amistad Research Center, the largest collection is letters written to his longtime friend Walter C. Reinhardt, who was also a music publisher in Memphis. In several letters written from one W.C. wrote to the other, he recounts how Reinhardt had showed early support before Handy gained nationwide fame.

Despite an accident in 1943 that left Handy blind and partial paralysis as he grew older, he continued promoting African American music until his death in 1958. According to one article on his funeral, more than 25,000 mourners filled Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church and the surrounding streets to honor him.

Images from the W.C. Handy collection and the Walter C. Reinhardt collection. Images from Amistad’s website, newsletters, and blogs cannot be reproduced without permission.

Masani Alexis De Veaux (1948- ) is an American writer and illustrator, and former chair of the Department of Women’s Studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Born on September 24, 1948, in Harlem, De Veaux received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the State University of New York Empire State College. She continued her education in creative writing at the University of Buffalo, where she attained a Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees. A voice for black feminism and LGBTQ equality, Dr. De Veaux’s writings often reflect the racial and sexual experiences of black female characters. Her work encompasses a range of social articles, poetry, fiction, and memoir.

Throughout her career, she has been part of the black feminist movement and the Third World Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement. Her work has been heavily influenced by these movements. Early in the 1970s, De Veaux become a member of the writer’s workshop of the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center in Harlem. Under the guidance of the workshop’s leader, the late writer Fred Hudson, De Veaux won first place in a national black fiction writer's contest (1972). Working in multiple genres, De Veaux has been the recipient of a number of literary awards including the Gustavus Meyers Outstanding Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award for Biography, and the Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award, Nonfiction.

De Veaux has traveled extensively for her work as an artist and lecturer. She was a freelance writer and contributing editor for Essence magazine (1979-1991) and traveled throughout Africa for the magazine. Essence chose her to travel to South Africa in 1990 to interview Nelson Mandela after his release from prison and was the first North American to interview him.

De Veaux’s published works include books (Na-Ni, 1973; Spirits in the Street, 1973; Don’t Explain: A Song of Billie Holiday, 1980; Blue Heat: Poems and Drawings, 1985; An Enchanted Hair Tale, 1987; The Woolu Hat, 1995); Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde (2004); Yabo (2014); and five short stories (“Remember Him A Outlaw,” 1972; “The Riddles of Egypt Brown-stone,” 1980, rpt. 1990; “All Shut Eyes Ain’t Closed, All Goodbyes Ain’t Gone,” 1983; “Adventures of the Dread Sisters,” 1991; and “The Ethical Vegetarian,” 1995). In addition, De Veaux has published dozens of articles and essays on various subjects, including “Jayne Cortez, Revolutionary Mouth on Paper” (Essence, 1978) and “SisterLove” (Afrekete: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Writing, 1995). One of her plays, “The Tapestry” (1986), is included in the anthology Nine Plays by Black Women Playwrights. Others have been produced Off-Broadway and in regional theaters across the country, and one play, “Circles” (1972), was produced at KCET-TV, California (1976).

Alexis De Veaux’s papers mainly consist of correspondence, drafts of original manuscripts, photographs, and ephemera documenting her professional life and work. Correspondence within the collection is professional in nature covering De Veaux’s many speaking and lecturing engagements, publishing, her work as the chair of the Women’s Department at the University of Buffalo, and her work as a graduate student in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The papers are rich in original drafts and notebooks of De Veaux poetry, novels, and biographies including Yabo, The Unbreakable Threat, and Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde. Additionally, her published work, Blue Heat: A Portfolio of Poems and Drawings (1985) is available.

Of note are photographs taken in South Africa during the celebration of Nelson Mandela's historical release from prison in 1990.

Images from the Alexis De Veaux Papers. Images from Amistad’s website, newsletters, and blogs cannot be reproduced without permission.

Senga Nengudi (1943 -) is an African American visual artist known for her abstract sculptures that combine found objects with choreographed performance.

Born as Sue Irons in Chicago, Nengudi grew up in California. She studied art and dance at California State University in Los Angeles, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1967. She studied for a year afterward in Tokyo, Japan at Waseda University and returned to California State University for graduate study receiving her Master of Arts in 1971.

Nengudi was part of a group of radical, avant-garde black artists working in New York City and Los Angeles during the 1960s and 1970s. She was a member of the Studio Z Collective, also known as LA Rebellion and collaborated frequently with the collective’s artists David Hammons and Maren Hassinger. She also worked in the Los Angeles and New York galleries, Pearl C. Woods and Just Above Midtown.

Themes found throughout her work highlight issues around gender, race, culture, and ethnicity. Nengudi is best known for her R.S.V.P. “responsez sïlvous plait” series created in 1975 after the birth of her first child. Having an interest in movement and sculpture, her work reflects this focus through the use of found objects and choreographed live or filmed performances. She is also a painter and photographer, as well as a poet writing under the pseudonyms Harriet Chin, Propecia Lee, and Lily B. Moor.

Nengudi’s work can be found in many museum collections including, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, California), the Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), and the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Brooklyn Museum (New York).

The papers of Senga Nengudi mainly document her artistic career as a sculptor and performance artist encompassing correspondence, ephemera, and photographs. Images and documentation for Nengudi’s exhibitions and performances dominate the collection. There is extensive documentation for Nengudi’s most known work, the R.S.V.P “répondez s'il vous plait” series, created in 1975. Additionally, contracts and agreements, as well as exhibition catalogs, books, and publications highlighting her work are extensive. Correspondence is found throughout the papers and is professional in nature; however, there is a collection of personal letters, many of them from artist Cheryl Banks, with whom Nengudi collaborated. Of note within the collection is Nengudi’s travel diary and concept diary (1994). Nengudi’s papers contain an extensive collection of photographs, negatives, and slides of her artwork, performances, as well as individual and group collaborators. Individuals found within the photographs include Nengudi's artist contemporaries Maren Hassinger, Franklin Parker, Ulysses Jenkins, Greg Pitts, and Barbara McCullough. Moving image and sound recordings of Nengudi's performances are in the formats of VHS tape, audiocassettes, DVD, and CD-ROM. Of note is a video recording of the performance, Dance Card (1980) and The Treader (2007).

Performances and exhibitions documented throughout the collection include, The Concept as Art (1977); Studio Z: Individual Collective (1977); Afro-American Abstraction (1980); Air Propo (1981) a group performance with Cheryl Banks and Butch Morris; Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970 (1998); and Senga Nengudi: Warp Trance (2007).

Images from the Senga Nengudi Papers. Images from Amistad’s website, newsletters, and blogs cannot be reproduced without permission.

The Thomas-Jones Family Papers document four successive generations of an African-American family with ties to New Orleans, North Carolina, and New York City. The collection is comprised of correspondence; legal records, such as marriage, death, and birth records; real estate records; membership certificates; insurance and funeral records; school records; photographs; news clippings; collected ephemera; and art work.

The earliest family members documented are William W. and Elizabeth (nee Johnson) Coleman of Louisiana, who were married in 1880. Elizabeth owned property in Plaquemine Parish and Orleans Parish as early as 1912 and 1921, respectively. Their daughter, Emma C. Coleman, married Rev. Fletcher W. Thomas in 1903 and lived in New Orleans. Their son, Fletcher W. Jr. left New Orleans for New York City where he worked as a clerk in an antiques firm and married Ethel Jones, whose family came from North Carolina. Children of Fletcher W. Jr. and Ethel Thomas are documented in the collection, most notably Fletcher A. (Sonny) Thomas and Caroline M.

Items of note within the collection include love letters written by Fletcher W. Thomas Jr. to Ethel Thomas during the 1920s; materials related to African American-owned funeral homes (Marion A. Daniels & Sons in New York City and Gertrude Geddes Willis Funeral Home in New Orleans); a 1921 photograph of an 8th grade class at McDonogh No. 35 High School in New Orleans; photographs from the 1944 N.Y. Daily Mirror Youth Forum; ephemera from the Pinochle 12 Social Club in New York City; and news clippings related to family member and soprano Clamma Dale.

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The Fredi Washington papers at the Amistad Research Center highlights the life of the African American actress, dancer, and activist known for her stage and screen rolls from the 1920-1940s. She was born Fredericka Carolyn Washington in Savannah, Georgia on December 23, 1903, and was one of nine children of Robert T. and Harriet Walker Ward Washington. Fredi's mother died when she was young, and she attended St. Elizabeth's Convent in Cornwell Heights, Pennsylvania with her sister Isabel. Fredi moved to Harlem in 1919 to live with her grandmother. She left school and soon entered show business. She began her career in the early 1920s as a chorus dancer in Nobble Sissle and Eubie Blake's Shuffle Along. She adopted the stage name Edith Warren in 1926 when she acted in the lead role opposite Paul Robeson in Black Boy.

Washington's stage career was interrupted when she became half of the dance team Fredi and Moiret, along with Al Moiret, and toured throughout Europe. Upon returning to the United States in 1928, her musical stage career continued with roles in Sweet Chariot (1930), Singin' the Blues (1931), and Run, Little Chillun (1933). Washington's film career began in 1929 with an appearance in Duke Ellington's short sound feature, Black and Tan Fantasy. Her best known role was that of Peola Johnson in Imitation of Life (1934). Washington's racially ambiguous look mirrored that of Peola’s, leading some to speculate that Washington, like her character in the film, passed for white during her life. A 1935 letter written to Fredi by a fan named James Samson echoes this sentiment. Samson wrote:

“I saw your picture of Imitation of Life and [I] enjoyed it very much and I want to let you know just how well every part was played….I like the part you played because I am colored and I think every person look as much like white as you did, I think that they should pass for white not because I believe that they are better than colored people but I believe your chances are better if you could pass for white.”

Washington’s role in Imitation of Life elicited strong reactions from fans, many who saw the movie multiple times according to their declarations in her fan mail. The correspondence to Fredi regarding her racial background and Peola’s character are quite interesting to read. In one letter, she was asked a barrage of intrusive questions regarding her racial/ethnic makeup by a fan named Mary Flecknoe who wrote:

“It is quite evident that your white blood is in the ascendancy over your colored blood, because you looked rather like a slightly dusky foreigner; say a Spanish girl. I wonder just how much white or dark blood you have. I should say you are a quadroon, or perhaps an octoroon. Would you mind telling me? Please don’t think me impertinent, but I truly am interested in this problem of people of mixed blood.”

Fredi was certainly not interested in passing for white. Throughout her career, she was active in efforts to end discrimination in the film and theater industries. Her political activism began in the 1930s, when she participated in boycotts and demonstrations organized by her brother-in-law, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who had married her sister Isabel. She cofounded the Negro Actors Guild and was active in the Joint Actors Equity-Theater League Committee. Washington contributed a weekly column devoted to theater news in Powell's newspaper, The People's Voice. In a February 1944 column, Washington clearly displayed her advocacy for African American civil rights not only inside the entertainment industry but outside of it as well. When MGM was slated to do a film on the controversial book Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Washington was skeptical about whether the studio could address and portray slavery with the seriousness and sensitivity that it deserved. She stated:

“

Washington retired from her acting career following her marriage to Lawrence Brown, a trombonist in Ellington's orchestra, in July 1933. However, her retirement lasted less than a year when she appeared with Paul Robeson in Emperor Jones later that year. Washington divorced Brown in 1948 and married Hugh Anthony Bell, a Connecticut dentist, in 1952. After her marriage to Bell, she retired permanently from show business. She died of pneumonia following a stroke in Stamford, Connecticut on June 28, 1994. The finding aid for the Fredi Washington papers can be found here.

Images from the Fredi Washington papers. Images from Amistad’s website, newsletters, and blogs cannot be reproduced without permission.

As New Orleans celebrates its tricentennial in 2018, its residents will have much time to reflect upon the historical timeline of one of the most culturally diverse cities in America. African Americans have existed in and contributed to the city since its earliest days.

The struggle for freedom and civil rights is a narrative that constantly appears when discussing the existence of African Americans in New Orleans. The history surrounding how African Americans were able to develop and thrive within a segregated society where Jim Crow laws excluded them from predominately white institutions is one of strength, courage, and endurance. While accessibility to resources such as schools, hospitals, and businesses were limited due to racism and discrimination, a crop of leaders emerged to address the needs of Black New Orleanians.

From benevolent associations and funeral homes to insurance companies and restaurants, Black entrepreneurship flourished to serve communities during an era plagued by segregation. The Woods Directory, published from 1912 to 1914, displayed just how enterprising African Americans were at the dawn of the 20th century. Its pages are littered with advertisements of business owners promoting their products and services. Many of the city’s business leaders were also civically engaged in their local communities.

Being proactive in improving educational opportunities was one of the many ways in which Black civic leaders worked to increase the quality of life for African Americans within New Orleans. Organizations such as the Colored Educational Alliance and the Federation of Civic Leagues advocated strongly to increase educational access for students in public schools.

This exhibition draws upon the rich library and manuscript collections at the Amistad Research Center to highlight African American leaders in the areas of business, education, philanthropy, medicine, and civic engagement from the mid-19th through the mid-20th century.

Image from the Dunn-Landry Family papers. Images from Amistad’s website, newsletters, and blogs cannot be reproduced without permission.

As part of our blog series spotlighting African-American performers, I will be looking at the life of Carol Brice—a singer, recording artist, and professor who received many accolades for her beautiful contralto voice as well as her instruction. Much of the correspondence in her personal papers contained praise from a variety of different people from students to her peers. Ms. Brice was born January 16, 1918 in Indianapolis, Indiana to Reverend Dr. John Brice and Ella Hawkins Brice; she was the youngest of four children.

Her vocal talent was already evident when she was only three years old. At age thirteen, she won an award for best contralto at a music festival in North Carolina where she now lived with her cousin Dr. Charlotte Hawkins Brown. Dr. Brown was the founder and president of Palmer Memorial Institute, one of the only finishing schools for African Americans. Carol Brice was an early student at the institute and her musical talent was nurtured. Her education there opened up other educational and musical opportunities for her; she grew in musical stature through excellent performances at concerts and other venues. In the summer of 1939, Brice performed with Bill "Bojangles" Robinson in the musical The Hot Mikado at the New York World's Fair for which she received excellent reviews. Here, she would find love as well; she met her husband Cornelius Wiley "Neil" Scott, a baritone in the chorus. They had two children and remained married until his death in 1967.

She graduated from Talladega College with a bachelor of music degree and then received a fellowship to study at the Julliard Graduate School in New York. Her voice teacher at Talladega, Frank G. Harrison, sent his congratulations along with a newspaper article about her achievement, which stated, “While competing with students from white and Negro colleges, Miss Brice gave an excellent performance to win the approval of the committee on awards.” She continually supplemented her considerable talent with hard work and sought out other opportunities to develop and improve her vocal prowess, which is shown in a piece of correspondence from her time at Julliard.

Her musical career bloomed and matured throughout the following decades. In 1941, she was asked to perform at the third inauguration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt—one of the first African Americans to receive such an opportunity. Ms. Brice received many invitations to perform including from Howard University. She sang with the Yale Glee Club, the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She also performed abroad. At this point, many people compared her to Marian Anderson. In the late 1950s through the 1960s, she performed in Broadway performances.

Ms. Brice became a professor in 1973 with the University of Oklahoma appointed her Associate Professor of Music in the College of Fine Arts. She and her second husband Thomas Carey founded the Cimarron Circuit Opera Company. The couple performed together, which included Mozart’s Magic Flute. In 1981, she received the Governor’s Arts Award for her contributions to the cultural development of Oklahoma. She continued her working as a recording artist as well; in 1978, she won a Grammy for her solo work in Porgy and Bess. In 1985, Ms. Brice died of cancer after a long, successful career and her recordings continue to captivate those who hear them.

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Annabelle Bernard (1935-2005) was an internationally renowned opera star.

Born in New Orleans, Bernard began singing publicly at a young age in her school, Fisk Elementary and church, the Fourth Baptist Church. As a student at McDonogh #35 in New Orleans, she received her first formal voice training at an opera workshop under the direction of her music teacher, Edwin Hogan. Professor Hogan obtained an audition for her with Sister Elise, the director of Xavier University’s music department. Bernard won a scholarship to attend Xavier and during her time there (1952-1956) sang in various operas and concerts on campus. While at Xavier, she was mentored by art patron, Mrs. Edith Stern, who assisted her in further study at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. After earning both a Master of Arts degree and an artists’ degree in 1958, she won the prestigious Eleanor Stebert Award and the Fran Huntington BeeBee Scholarship to continue her studies in Europe. She went to the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria and studied at the Stuttgart Conservatory of Music under Professor Hermann Reutter.

Bernard gained international notice in 1960 after winning the top prize in the International Radio Competition in Munich, Germany. In 1961, she made her debut under Maestro Karl Bohm in the role of Verdi’s Aida at the Deutsche Oper Berlin – the Berlin Opera. Bernard was highlighted in the February 1, 1962 issue of Jet magazine as the "Newest Negro Opera Star" for the critical acclaim she received from her debut. At the Berlin Opera, she became a permanent member and leading soprano for forty years, and sang the title parts for many operas, including “Madame Butterfly”, “II Trovador,” Mozart’s “Coris Van Tutte,” and Tchaikovsky’s, “Eugene Onegin.” In 1970, Bernard received the West German honorific of the title, Kammersänerin (chamber singer).

Even though Bernard sang internationally including a performance at the Vatican for Pope Paul VI, she didn’t perform often in the United States and had no plans to leave Berlin, admitting to a Stars and Stripes reporter, "I would eventually like to return to the States but there's so little opportunity there if you want to sing opera. And if it means staying in Europe to sing – I stay."

The color barrier at the Metropolitan Opera in New York was not broken until 1955 when the great Marian Anderson sang in Un Ballo in Maschera there. By the mid-1960s in New Orleans, Bernard's hometown, black singers were beginning to be part of the chorus and were singing a few supporting roles. However, no black vocalist would sing a major role at the New Orleans Opera until 1976 when Bernard starred in a local production of Giordano's Andrea Chenier in November of that year. After her appearance in New Orleans, Bernard performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. and Carnegie Hall in New York. The New York Post wrote, “Bernard has a creamy beautiful voice, easily produced and like an angel’s… why has she not sung here before is mind-boggling.”

Bernard retired from the Berlin Opera in 2000 and returned to New Orleans and she received the 2002 “Lift Every Voice” Legacy Award from the National Opera Association. Annabelle Bernard died in 2005 and was interred at St. Louis Cemetery No. 3 in New Orleans.

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On September 30, 1935, soprano Anne Wiggins Brown stepped onto the stage at the Colonial Theatre in Boston. It was the much anticipated world premiere of George Gershwin’s new “folk opera,” and a big moment for the young vocalist. Far from just a lucky break, this was a major opportunity that Brown had carved out for herself, the culmination of years of work. For the past two years, she had spent many long days completing her classes as a graduate student at the Juilliard School (she had been the first African American student admitted there after auditioning at age 15), and then traveling down to meet with Gershwin and work on new material for his show. In a bold moment, the twenty-one year old had written the composer a letter after reading news of his new project. Once he heard her sing, Gershwin not only included her in his production, but in his writing process, eventually developing her character into a co-lead and a career-defining role for Brown. And thus the story of DuBose Heyward’s Porgy became known to the world as Porgy and Bess.

Anne Wiggins Brown was born in Baltimore, Maryland on August 9, 1912. Her musical career spanned five decades, during which time she toured extensively throughout the United States and Europe. In addition to her Broadway career, Brown was an accomplished radio and concert singer. Following what she called her “Gershwin period,” she studied for several years with German soprano Lotte Lehmann, who at that time was living in Santa Barbara, California. Brown toured the world as a concert singer and recitalist, performing in Paris, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Milan, Lisbon, and Oslo on her first European tour. The European press and audiences welcomed her with open arms, praising her “unfailing and sure musical instinct” and “impressive voice.” As opportunities for her continued to expand globally, however, Brown could not help but feel her limitations at home. In 1948, weary of dealing with the racial prejudices in the United State, Brown moved to Oslo, where she attained Norwegian citizenship.

Brown flourished in Europe, though she did note, “there is no place on earth without prejudice.” With Europe as her base of operations, however, she was able to study with musical masters in Paris, Italy, and London. “Perhaps I missed a lot by being away from my native home, but I gained so much living in Europe,” she would say later in her life. For more than twenty-five years, she continued to tour internationally, singing concerts and performing in operas. This changed in 1955, when her asthma worsened to the point that she was no longer able to perform, cutting her performance career short. “One certainly can’t sing if one cannot breathe,” she explained.

Ms. Brown donated her papers to the Amistad Research Center in 1991, after years of friendly correspondence with Amistad’s founding director Clifton Johnson. By that point, she had already embarked upon a successful second career as a vocal teacher in Oslo (Brown trained operatic soprano Elizabeth Norberg-Schulz and Bergman muse Liv Ullmann, among others). In a 1990 letter to Dr. Johnson, Brown discussed an upcoming move, saying that she had “very definite ideas about where and how I want to live for the remaining years of my life, (an apartment which esthetically [sic] pleases me and where the neighbours will not object to hearing the voices of my vocal students).” She retained a great deal of affection for her home country, and continued to visit when she could. In a 1991 visit to New Orleans to deposit her papers with the Center, Brown was honored with a key to the city.

The honors continued, and in 1998, the Peabody Conservatory, which had denied Brown admission seventy years earlier, awarded her the George Peabody Medal for Outstanding Contributions to Music in America at the age of 85. In her acceptance speech (which can be found in her papers, complete with handwritten edits), Brown reflected on her life and career. “It has been said that when one is old – very old, that is – one remembers best the events which occurred when one was 5 years old, or 6 – in their youth, and NOT that which took place last week or even yesterday,” she told the audience. “I can assure you that the saying is true. The memories of my childhood dreams are very vivid. Among them or perhaps foremost was the dream to become an ‘actor,’ because for me, to sing was to act with the voice. And I still believe that.”

Brown passed away in 2009. After a lifetime of important work both on stage and nurturing new talent, Porgy and Bess endures as Brown’s most memorable role. She performed the part roughly five hundred times over the years, first in the original run, and then again in the 1942 Broadway revival. Though George Gershwin did not live to see this revival – sadly, he passed away from a brain tumor at age 38 – his brother, lyricist Ira Gershwin, was sure to let the singer know how much she was appreciated for her work in the creation of the role. In a telegram from Brown’s papers dated March 9, 1942, Gershwin writes, “I regret not being able to attend the dinner in honor of you Anne [Brown] but here are my warmest greetings to a great and splendid artist and artist my brother was proud to have sing his music. And I feel that way about the words, too.”

For more on the Anne Wiggins Brown Papers at Amistad, read here.

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The B-Sharp Music Club was established in 1917 by Camille Nickerson, a musician, composer, and music teacher for the Nickerson music school. According to Ellen C. Thornton, author of "Highlights of 35 years' service by B Sharp Music Club", the original purpose of the club was Camille Nickerson’s desire to “lead her pupils into the wider field of musical thought and to cultivate a finer artistic taste.” In the early stages of the group’s existence, only students of Nickerson’s music school were allowed to join, but membership was soon extended to a broader scope of musicians and artists.

Once they had officially organized, the group came up with a list of three goals: “1. To inspire its members, through well-planned monthly-meeting programs, to a greater love and appreciation for music. 2. To foster in the community, through the monthly 'Pleasant Hour' programs, a love of good music generally, and of Negro Music in particular. 3. To promote affairs of art featuring local and visiting artists; and, incidentally, to benefit artists, Club, and community.” The free to the public “Pleasant Hour” programs began in 1922 and they featured “musical numbers, community singing, readings and short talks.” The Christmas, Carnival, and Mother’s day “Pleasant Hour” programs were the most popular. In the same year, the Junior B-Sharp Music Club was founded for young musicians to become involved. In the early 1950s, the club began sponsoring an annual scholarship contest for music students.

The club would remain active and relevant well into the 20th century. The importance and impact the club had on New Orleans is explained by Dillard’s dean of music, Dr. Frederick D. Hall, in a speech given in 1957 at a banquet honoring the B Sharps. Dr. Hall commended the club for all of their fine work and noted that the group must “continue as a vital contributor to the cultural life of New Orleans, and to instill in the lives of all people that only the best will suffice.”

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Thomas Carey was an American operatic baritone singer and music professor. Born in Bennettsville, South Carolina, his voice carried him around the world from his time in the U.S. military where he enjoyed singing for his fellow soldiers, to his studies in New York City and Europe, to his time spent at the University of Oklahoma as one of the school’s first Black faculty members. His papers, held at the Amistad Research Center, include correspondence, news clippings, photographs, and other materials relating to his professional career and that of his wife, Carol Brice. Much of the collection pertains to the Cimarron Circuit Opera Company, an opera company founded by Carey and Brice in 1975. There is also a collection of personal letters from Carey’s time studying and performing in Europe that he wrote to his close friends, Wilfrid Pelletier and his wife.

As a young man, Carey served in the U.S. military during the Korean conflict. Afterwards, he moved to New York to study at City College of New York and the Henry Street Music School in Brooklyn. Upon graduating, he receives a grant from the William Matheus Sullivan Foundation to study opera in Europe. The earliest correspondence in the collection is from 1959-1963, written while Carey was in Germany. Almost all of these letters are addressed to “Maestro & Madame” – Wilfrid Pelletier and his wife. Wilfrid (or Wilfred) Pelletier was a well-known Canadian-American conductor, at the time living in New York. It is likely that Carey was a former student of Pelletier before moving to Germany. Carey wrote to them at least monthly, sometimes weekly, keeping them updated on his instructors, his studies, and his performances. There are approximately 100 letters from this period and they illustrate Carey’s transformation from a young student overcoming the culture shock of a new country to an established and recognized performer among his peers.

The move to Germany was initially to Stuttgart to study under Prof. Giesen, but he found Munich and the tutelage of Prof. Grundlach to be more appealing. Many of his letters in early 1960 are focused on convincing the Pelletier’s that he would rather live in Munich and commute to Stuttgart, even going as far as creating a weekly work plan should he live in Munich.

In other letters from around the same time, Carey shares that is working on the musical Show Boat in addition to learning the Verdi’s Rigoletto opera. Although “Maestro” Pelletier does not like the idea of Carey splitting his focus between the two and suggests that he focus on opera, Carey writes in response that he is “very lucky to be in Show Boat, because we are bringing good American music to people who need it very badly." In a few letters written around March 1960, Carey writes about his reaction to hearing the news of Leonard Warren’s untimely death. Warren, a baritone singer like Thomas Carey, died onstage while performing at the Met Opera in New York.

After spending much of the 1960s traveling and performing concerts around Europe, Thomas Carey joined the faculty of the University of Oklahoma as an artist-in-residence. His last letter to the Pelletier’s is from March 27, 1969, where he writes from the Waldorf Hotel in London about his most recent concert – “I do believe that my concert on the 25th was my best yet. I think this and so do many of my friends.”

While Carey moved to Norman, Oklahoma to teach at the university, his wife Carol Brice, who he met while in Vienna, Austria, moved to New York to perform on Broadway. Brice eventually moved to Norman and officially joined the University of Oklahoma faculty in 1974 teaching music. A year later, they founded the Church Circuit Opera Company, which was later renamed the Cimarron Circuit Opera Company. Various news clippings from their time in Oklahoma show how valued they were to the Norman community. He was named Oklahoma Man of the Year in 1976, and a 1987 article from the Oklahoma Gazette calls Carey a state treasure.

The Amistad Research Center is proud and honored to hold the papers of Thomas Carey as well as the papers of Carol Brice.

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African-American musicians, singers, and actors have contributed enormously to America’s history. The remarkable achievements of African Americans in the arena of performing arts have strongly shaped the culture of American music, film, and theater. African Americans have used music, film, and theater to showcase their artistic talents, convey their lived experiences, and create a distinct Black aesthetic. One of Amistad’s primary collecting areas has always been the papers of performing artists. Many of the artists represented in Amistad’s collections are diverse and include operatic singers, jazz musicians, film actors and actresses, and theater troupes. Amistad expanded its collecting focuses on performing arts and added the genre of hip-hop and Bounce music when it acquired the Where They At collection in 2013 and launched the NOLA Hip-Hop and Bounce Archive in 2014.

Our final blog series of the year will feature Amistad’s collections that highlight the histories of Black performing artists. Many of these individuals achieved national and international acclaim and some were stars in the local New Orleans community. The series will run from May 7, 2018 until August 27, 2018.

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Amistad’s blog series featuring the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) found in the Center’s School Newspaper Collection concludes this week with a look at Spelman College.

As someone who was born and raised in Georgia, I’d often heard about Spelman College growing up. It is also the alma mater of our current executive director, Dr. Kara Olidge. And so my journey through the newspapers of HBCUs continues with The Campus Mirror, a publication from Spelman. The newspaper began in 1924; Amistad has 9 issues with the earliest one from 1927.

It is from that March 1927 issue that I found the first thing that caught my eye. Two articles from the front were devoted to chronicling events from Negro History Week, the precursor to Black History Month. It was started by Carter G. Woodson and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1926. Mr. Benjamin J. Davis spoke to the student body at Spelman about how Negro youth should be taught about politics so as to not be ignorant of political duties. Curiously, he also stated that “our immediate foreparents had more to do with governmental affairs and politics than we who are educated.” I’ve definitely heard that sentiment before. What’s old is new again, indeed. Spelman closed out the week with a program filled with music and reading a from Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “The Death Song.”

Like other campus newspapers, The Campus Mirror also contained articles highlighting the faculty, students, and alumni of Spelman College. The November 1929 issue contained an article and profile of Miss Clara Howard, a popular educator and missionary who showed a passion for learning at an early age. Her father, a skilled carriage maker, bought his freedom and then learned to read and write—skills he passed to his daughter before she’d entered school. Miss Howard was from the first Spelman High School graduating class and would later found the National Alumnae Association of Spelman College. Today there is a dorm on Spelman’s campus that is named after her (she is the Howard in Howard-Harreld Hall).

Of course, campus culture was also a big subject of the newspaper. From musical performances to campus organizations to the events of Freshman Week, The Campus Mirror chronicled a lot. One of my favorite articles found in Volume 20, Number 1 was titled “An Introduction to the Male Shortage or Freshman Week at Spelman College.” Its author, Myrene Gray, class of 1947 chronicled her first week at Spelman as she became acclimated to college life. This issue also contained an article about the close and friendly relationship between Spelman and Morehouse College, its brother institution.

The Campus Mirror also contained advertisements from businesses from nearby neighborhoods such as West End, Sweet Auburn, and the Old Fourth Ward—the center of the black middle class in Atlanta. This was a time before Interstate 20 and the Downtown Connector split neighborhoods apart. I quickly fell down a rabbit hole of mapping these businesses on Google Maps. Many of the street names have since been changed to commemorate civil rights leaders. It was easy to imagine students from Spelman and the rest of the Atlanta University Center (AUC) patronizing these businesses and being a part of the larger community.

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This week in our series on Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), we examine the history of Bluefield State College in Bluefield, West Virginia. Bluefield State College was established in 1895 by the West Virginia state legislature as a high school for students of Black coal miners. The school was also referred to as Bluefield Colored Institute and by the 1920’s, its football team was a powerhouse among black colleges. Bluefield served as a source of higher education for much of the region's black middle class.

However, by the mid-20th century, larger social transformations began that turned the demographics of Bluefield State College from a school with a majority Black student base to one with a majority white student body. After the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawed school segregation across the nation, the combination of high educational quality and low tuition costs at Bluefield is what began to attract white students. During the same juncture, Brown v. Board of Education also allowed African American students to exercise their educational options beyond traditionally black colleges like Bluefield. Today, Bluefield State College is 82 percent white, but the school continues to receive the federal funding that comes with its designation as a historically black institution.

The student paper of Bluefield State College is The Bluefieldian and it was published by the Press Club of the Teachers College at Bluefield. Its motto was “A Paper with a Purpose.” Amistad has six issues of The Bluefieldian in our School Newspaper Collection. The issues are all from the 1930s and detail the school’s early history before its demographic change. The paper largely covered school events and stories about faculty and students. This does not mean that local and national issues were ignored. In a February 1932 issue of The Bluefieldian, a glimpse was given into the development of Negro History Week, or what would eventually become Black History Month in the United States. The column, written six years after Carter G. Woodson founded the annual observance, focused on the importance of celebrating the historical contributions of African Americans. The author, doubting if Negro History Week would continue, ended the article with a brief sentence of hope that it would endure stating, “Through the years, may it live: through its life may it produce and to its produce, may men give ear...”

Bluefield had a very robust culture of Greek sororities and fraternities on its campus. The first fraternity to be established on the campus of Bluefield State College was the Beta Theta chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha in March of 1932. By 1938, the fraternities of Kappa Alpha Psi and Omega Psi Phi were added to the list of Greek organizations on campus. New members of the organizations, as well as Greek events, were regularly covered in the newspaper.

One activity on campus that was probably not as popular as Bluefield’s Greek life was its chapel programs. “Chapel,” as it was called, either did not have a high student attendance or was not as high as Bluefield’s administration would have liked. In the November 1933 issue of The Bluefieldian, three separate articles addressed the lack of student participation in chapel. In one article students were threatened to visit chapel “…voluntarily rather than forcibly,” lest they “feel the strong hand of administrative authority.” Some students were interviewed regarding the lack of participation and many said that the boring speakers were to blame for the absence of student zeal towards the activity. A year later in the November 1934 issue, the chapel editor of The Bluefieldian, Wyche Capel, was still imploring students to attend chapel.

The Kampus Komment portion of the paper revealed a more gossipy side of the university. It was a column that included witty and snarky rumors about student relationships on campus. The columnist, whose pseudonym was I. C. Allovit (a name constructed from the term “I see all of it”), made no effort to hide the identities of the individuals he/she was referring to, and in today’s terms their shenanigans would probably be described as “being messy.” Some of the sayings written by I. C. Allovit were:

"M. Watkins, why are you so interested in W. Capel?

Carmichael, how do you get so many dinner engagements?

Ike W., did you take the picture from Mable to give it to Alice R.?

C. Thompson, has J. Holt taken B. Ray’s place?

G. Cozart has quit a man for a boy. Calloway, Little Boy, what now?”

Some of the other university periodicals in the School Newspaper Collection included a similar section, and this kind of column reveals the types of information that can be gleaned about a university’s student culture from its newspapers. A complete list of schools from Amistad’s School Newspaper Collection can be found here.

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Among scholars of the Harlem Renaissance, Melvin B. Tolson is an early and important, yet often overlooked, figure. Tolson was a poet, educator, and columnist who was recalled in the 2007 biopic The Great Debaters as the coach of the Wiley College Forensic Society, which came to prominence as a leader in, and winner of, interracial college debates in the 1930s. Born in Kansas and educated at Fisk University and Lincoln University, Tolson joined the faculty of Wiley College, a small historically Black college in Marshall, Texas, in 1924 as an instructor of English and Speech.

In 1930, Tolson took a leave of absence of absence from Wiley to pursue his master’s degree at Columbia University in New York City. Tolson’s thesis, entitled “The Harlem Group of Negro Writers,” was one of the earliest studies of the Harlem Renaissance. His time in Harlem also coincided with Tolson’s own turn at writing poetry, which resulted in the collections Harlem Gallery: Book I, The Curator (1965) and the posthumous collection A Gallery of Harlem Portraits (written in 1932, but not published until 1979) among others. Yet, examination of two issues of The Wiley Reporter from 1932, held at the Amistad Research Center, illustrate that Tolson also recorded his impressions of Harlem through prose sketches he sent back to Wiley College during his time in New York.

The extent of Tolson’s sketches in The Wiley Reporter is difficult to determine as few libraries report holding issues of the publication and a survey of the scholarship on Tolson’s life and work fail to find any mention of the Wiley Reporter sketches. Works by Joy Flasch and biographer Robert M. Farnsworth lack reference to these writings, while the 1999 edition of Tolson’s poetry edited by Raymond Nelson also excludes these sketches from its bibliography of Tolson’s published works. Were the sketches in the two issues at Amistad, Tolson’s only such works? Further research will have to provide answers, but in the meantime, we report on the Lone Wolf and Countess of Harlem in Tolson’s own words.

The Winter Quarter 1932 of The Wiley Reporter may be the launching point of Tolson’s reporting on Harlem. That issue includes an article attributed to Tolson entitled “The Lone Wolf of Harlem,” which focused on the young novelist Harry F. Liscomb, whose novel The Prince of Washington Square had been published in 1925. Tolson described Liscomb as “a real Harlemite; and, with the possible exception of Countee Cullen, the only Negro novelist who was born and reared in the black metropolis.” [Although Cullen claimed New York City as his birthplace, scholars now cite Louisville, Kentucky, as his likely origin]. Tolson related his initial meeting with Liscomb, their discussions over meals, reviews of Liscomb’s book, and their last meeting prior to Tolson departing New York City:

When I saw him before I left the city, he shook my hand and said, looking across the humming thoroughfare: “Good-bye Tollie. We had a great year together I hate like ---- to see you go.” Hands thrust deeply into his pockets, his hat sitting at a rakish angle, the youthful novelist vanished into the sea of people that flowed along Seventh Avenue.

The lead into Tolson’s contribution to the December 1932 issue states, “In this thrilling article Professor Tolson continues his adventures among the interesting folk who make up the musical, artistic, and literary circles of Harlem” and describes the milieu of Greenwich Village and “The Studio of Countess Felicia.” Tolson recounted his introduction through his friend, Brandt, to the studio of a Russian dancer who was a “convert” to Communism and “had many Negro friends.” Tolson reported that:

I left her studio that night, with an invitation to return. She and Brandt took me with them to strange places. I owe them many evenings of unsurpassed cultural entertainment. I was in their box at the Star Casino when ten thousand radicals denounced the court action in the famous Scottsboro case.

Amistad’s holding of The Wiley Reporter also include the January 1942 issue, which contains a report of a dinner held in honor of Melvin B. Tolson, but the earlier 1932 issues are the only two in the Center’s holdings that include his Harlem sketches. Did Tolson send additional sketches for the students and faculty at Wiley College to read? Are there more out there in other issues of the publication? If so, let us know as we would love to add them to our collections!

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The publication wasThe magazine also provided an arena for poetry, fiction and opinion. American poet and writer Tom Dent was a contributor while he attended from 1948-1952, as was fellow alumni Martin Luther King, Jr.

Morehouse College is a private, all-male, liberal arts, historically African American college located in Atlanta, Georgia. The college is one of the few remaining traditional men's liberal arts colleges in the United States and is the largest men's college in the United States, with an enrollment over 2,000 students.

became prominent centers of student radical activity in the 1930s, with their main focus on foreign policy. Communist Party members and sympathizers played an important role. For the most part, the 1930s student movement focused on off-campus issues, with the exception of threats to campus freedom of expression.

“I consider all these movements very important. The variety of views will help us to see the situation at various angles and, by careful comparison, to determine the best course to follow. I hope that more Negro students will join in these efforts. In the NSL Convention and in the conference on the students in politics I saw very few Negroes, and only two Negro colleges are members of the NSFA despite the fact that all of the organizations welcome Negroes without any discrimination.”

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