It’s more than fitting that this year’s Black Music Month begins with the release of a tribute anthem honoring the legacy of Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma on the 100th anniversary of its purposeful destruction, which was officially acknowledged by President Joe Biden in a speech yesterday.
“We Will Never Forget” is the featured track from LeBron James’ Springhill Company and CNN Documentary film, Dreamland: The Burning of Black Wall Street, that premiered on CNN on the centennial anniversary of the Black Wall Street Massacre May 31, 2021.
This soul stirring song recorded by Omarion, Lalah Hathaway and Kierra Sheard, written and produced by Greg Curtis and executive produced by Michelle Le Fleur, honors the families and descendants of the 1921 Greenwood District massacre in Tulsa.
Proceeds from the single benefit social change grassroots organization Color of Change to aid the social justice movement to end systemic racism and racially motivated violence.
Color of Change currently has a campaign going to demand the Centennial Commission and City of Tulsa give 80% of the $30 million raised to the survivors and descendants of the Tulsa Race Massacre. Learn more about it here.
Although May 30, 1868 is cited as the first national commemoration of Memorial Day at Arlington National Cemetery, events lead by African Americans in Charleston, SC to decorate the graves of fallen Civil War soldiers occurred on May 1, 1865, less than a month after the Confederacy surrendered.
Reports of this early version of Memorial Day or “Decoration Day” as it was called, were rediscovered in the Harvard University archives in the late 1990s by historian David Blight, author of the 2018 biography Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.
When Charleston fell and Confederate troops evacuated the badly damaged city, those freed from enslavement remained. One of the first things those emancipated men and women did was to give the fallen Union prisoners a proper burial. They exhumed the mass grave and reinterred the bodies in a new cemetery with a tall whitewashed fence inscribed with the words: “Martyrs of the Race Course.”
And then on May 1, 1865, something even more extraordinary happened. According to two reports that Blight found in The New York Tribune and The Charleston Courier, a crowd of 10,000 people, mostly freed slaves with some white missionaries, staged a parade around the race track. Three thousand Black schoolchildren carried bouquets of flowers and sang “John Brown’s Body.” Members of the famed 54th Massachusetts and other Black Union regiments were in attendance and performed double-time marches. Black ministers recited verses from the Bible.
Despite the size of the gathering and newspaper coverage, the memory of this event was “suppressed by white Charlestonians in favor of their own version of the day,” Blight stated in the New York Times in 2011.
On May 31, 2010, near a reflecting pool at Hampton Park, the city of Charleston reclaimed this history by installing a plaque commemorating the site as the place where Blacks held the first Memorial Day on May 1, 1865.
During the dedication of the plaque, the city’s mayor at the time, Joe Riley, was present to celebrate the historic occasion which included a brass band and a reenactment of the Massachusetts 54th Regiment.
In 2017, the City of Charleston erected yet another sign reclaiming the history and commemorating the event:
Many may know Lorraine Hansberry as the award-winning playwright of the now-classic 1959 Broadway play A Raisin in The Sun, adapted into a 1961 movie starring Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee in 1961, and remade for television in 2008 starring Phylicia Rashad, Audra McDonald, Sanaa Lathan and Sean Combs.
Some may know of her family’s fight to end restrictive housing covenants in Chicago that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court (Hansberry v. Lee), or of her civil rights activism and advocacy for universal healthcare, women’s rights, and for the demise of colonialism and imperialism.
A few may even know of her embrace of her queer identity and desire to fight for gay rights at the end of her life.
I know all of these things because my personal connection to Lorraine Hansberry started when she became the first (and only) Black woman writer I got to read as a part of English curriculum in either middle school or high school in the 1980s.
We read Raisin In The Sun as a class in 11th grade AP English. So when my teacher Dr. Victor had his students spend our spring semester studying one author in depth of our own choosing, I chose Lorraine.
[Photos: Jay Z / Tina Turner via wikipedia.commons.org]
Among the six inductees who’ll be formally inducted as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame class of are rock and R&B legend Tina Turner, and hip hop artist and impresario Jay Z. This will be Turner’s second induction — she was voted in in 1991 as part of the Ike & Tina Turner duo.
Additionally, LL Cool J, who has been nominated six times since 2010, is being honored with a “Musical Excellence Award.”
Joining LL Cool J in getting that Musical Excellence honor is solo star and “fifth Beatle” Billy Preston, and jazz/soul visionary Gil Scott-Heron is being recognized with an Early Influence Award along with early 20th century blues musician Charley Patton.
Finally, the Ahmet Ertegun Award, usually given to record industry executives or other non-performing figures, goes to Clarence Avant this year, the trailblazer who was subject of the 2019 Netflix documentary The Black Godfather.
The four other main inductees this year are the Go-Go’s, Todd Rundgren, Carole King and Foo Fighters.
The 36th annual ceremony is set for October 30 at Cleveland’s Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse, a return to a live event with performances. Due to the pandemic, last year’s class was inducted virtually in pre-recorded segments that aired on HBO.
SiriusXM subscribers will be able to hear a live simulcast with edited version to be aired later on HBO and HBO Max.
Practically all Americans celebrate or at the very least know about the national Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. But how many know it came to pass because of the activism and efforts of his widow, Coretta Scott King?
Today, on what would have been Coretta Scott King’s 94th birthday, we honor and celebrate her.
Coretta Scott King worked alongside MLK Jr. throughout the civil rights movement, and continued social justice work for decades after his assassination in 1968 until her own passing in 2006.
In 1983 she finally succeeded when President Ronald Reagan signed a bill into law declaring MLK Day starting on January 20, 1986. Coretta Scott King honored the occasion in Atlanta, Georgia, placing a wreath on King’s tomb and holding a ceremony at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Dr. King had served as co-pastor for eight years before his death.
Coretta Scott King also spoke up for women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, against the Vietnam War, against apartheid in South Africa and called out the FBI for its extensive surveillance of both her and MLK. King wrote about her life and work in the book My Life With Martin Luther King, Jr., first published in 1969.
In 2005, King allowed her alma mater, Antioch College, to create the Coretta Scott King Center as a learning resource to address issues of race, class, gender, diversity, and social justice for the campus and the surrounding community. The Center opened in 2007.
To learn more about her life and legacy, watch the video above, or check out the books My Life, My Love, My Legacyand Coretta Scott by Ntozake Shange and Kadir Nelson.
According to the Washington Post, state and federal officials announced that archaeologist Julie Schablitsky and her team believe they have found the site where Harriet Tubman lived with her parents and siblings in the early 1800s in Dorchester County, Maryland before she escaped enslavement and became a conductor for the Underground Railroad.
The structure, of unknown form, was owned by [Tubman’s] father. A timber foreman and lumberjack who had been enslaved, he had been given his freedom, the house where he lived and a piece of land near the Blackwater River by his enslaver.
Officials said bricks, datable pieces of 19th-century pottery, a button, a drawer pull, a pipe stem, old records and the location all pointed to the spot being the likely site of the Ben Ross cabin.
The find is a crucial piece of Tubman’s story, experts said. And it illuminates the role that her father, and her family, played in her development into the fearless Underground Railroad conductor that she became.
The Underground Railroad was the clandestine network of guides, like Tubman, and safe houses mostly across the eastern United States that rescued thousands of enslaved people from bondage in the South in the years before the Civil War.
Between about 1850 and 1860, using stealth and disguise, Tubman made 13 trips home, spiriting 70 people out of enslavement, historians believe. Among those she saved were several brothers and her parents, who, while no longer enslaved, were still in danger in Maryland.
Her father was a devout patriarch who taught Tubman the ways of the marshy woodlands where they lived and struggled to keep his family together within the machinery of slavery, experts said.
Once free, Ben purchased his enslaved wife, Rit, and for a time sheltered Tubman and several of her siblings, all still enslaved, in his cabin in what is now the federal Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, south of Cambridge, Md.
Kate Clifford Larson, author of the Harriet Tubman biography Bound For The Promised Land, is quoted as saying: “That landscape became her classroom. Those years she lived with her father were absolutely crucial to the development of Harriet Tubman.”
The project began last year when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service bought for $6 million a 2,600-acre tract adjacent to Blackwater and refuge manager Marcia Pradines heard the Ben Ross cabin might have existed in the tract. She contacted Maryland experts to see if an archaeologist wanted to investigate.
Schablitsky and her team went have been working in the area since last fall and dug over 1,000 test pits. Only recently, after scouring the area with a metal detector, did something finally turn up — a coin from 1808 — that finally lead them on the right path to the right place.
Archaeology consultants Brandon Ellis and Aaron Levinthal discuss the Ross site April 2. Harriet Tubman is believed to have lived at the site with her family in her late teens and early 20s. (Julie Schablitsky)
The coin was found about a quarter-mile from where the cabin would eventually be located, and last month as the team dug further, more artifacts were uncovered from the 1820s-1840s time period.
The combination of records, location and artifacts finally added up, Schablitsky said. “It’s not just one artifact that tells us we have something. It’s the assemblage. It’s the multiple pieces.”
[Betye Saar: Taking Care of Business, airing as part of AfroPoP:The Ultimate Cultural Exchange (image courtesy of LACMA)]
Exploring modern art, human rights and politics, the AfroPoP shorts program premieres on Monday, April 26 at 8 p.m. ET on WORLD Channel and worldchannel.org with films from Christine Turner, Michèle Stephenson and Amir George.
See the teaser for the Shorts Program below:
The episode opens with Turner’s Betye Saar: Taking Care of Business, a look at the trailblazing Los Angeles-based Black visual artist.
In her 90s and still actively creating art, through interviews with Saar and archival footage, the documentary explores her acclaimed method of using collage, assemblage and more to make pieces — including her famous “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima” work — addressing Black culture, racism, feminism, empowerment and more since the 1960s.
[The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 1972. Wood, cotton, plastic, metal, mixed media. UC Berkeley. de Young]
Later in the episode, AfroPoP examines racism and xenophobia in the Dominican Republic with Elena from filmmaker Michèle Stephenson.
An intimate look at Elena Lorac, a young woman of Haitian descent raised in the Dominican Republic working tirelessly to combat anti-Haitian laws in the island nation. As her parents, who have worked the sugarcane plantations on the island their entire lives, and other Haitians face possible deportation as a result of new government policy, Elena struggles to obtain her own identification papers and also works with social justice groups to increase voting access and legal rights for Dominicans of Haitian descent, efforts made harder by the government at every turn.
The evening closes with Man of the People from director Amir George. Through a mix of sound and archival footage, Man ofthe People relates the story of political leader Harold Washington, his path to victory to become the first Black mayor of Chicago, and his mysterious death.
Presented by Black Public Media and WORLD Channel, new episodes of AfroPoP: TheUltimateCulturalExchange premiere each Monday through May 3. All episodes will be available for streaming at worldchannel.org and on the PBS app starting at the time of their TV premiere.
On Friday, State Senator Steven Bradford (D-CA, Gardena) reintroduced a bill to the California State Legislature that would pave the way for the City of Manhattan Beach to return ownership of coveted oceanside property to the descendants of its former owners, Willa and Charles Bruce.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the Bruces originally purchased the land in 1912 and ran a cafe, dance hall and lodge on the oceanfront lots to provide resort space and activities to African Americans, and the area started being called “Bruce’s Beach.”
But white neighbors resented the resort’s popularity. Tires were slashed. The Ku Klux Klan purportedly set fire to a mattress under the main deck and torched a Black-owned home nearby.
When harassment failed to drive the Bruce’s Beach community out of town, city officials in 1924 condemned the neighborhood and seized more than two dozen properties through eminent domain. The reason, they said, was an urgent need for a public park.
The Bruces sought $70,000 for their two beachfront properties and $50,000 in damages. They received $14,500.
For decades, the properties sat empty. The Bruce parcels were transferred to the state in 1948, then to the county in 1995. A county lifeguard center occupies the land today. As for the remaining lots, city officials eventually turned them into a park, worried that family members might sue to regain their land unless it was used for the purpose for which it had been originally taken.
Though a plaque designating the and renaming the park area as “Bruce’s Beach” was erected in 2007, this symbolic acknowledgment ]did not address the underlying issues of injustice and racism at the core of why “eminent domain” was invoked by the local government to strip the Bruce’s of their property.
In recent years there has been a grassroots effort to bring the full history of Bruce’s Beach to light as well as a push towards reparations for the Bruce family.
Despite comprehensive efforts over the years to record Los Angeles’ historic places, the city’s historic designation programs, by their own estimation, do not yet reflect the depth and breadth of African American history. Just over three percent of the city’s 1,200 designated local landmarks are linked to African American heritage.
Over the next three years, the project will work with local communities and cultural institutions to more fully recognize and understand African American experiences in Los Angeles. The work aims to identify and help preserve the places that best represent these stories and work with communities to develop creative approaches that meet their own aims for placemaking, identity, and empowerment.
As the African American population of such areas as West Adams and Jefferson Park began growing in the 1940s, new Black churches were founded. One of the most influential was Holman United Methodist, which commissioned architect Kenneth Nels Lind to design this sanctuary in 1958.
The project is led by the Getty Conservation Institute and the Office of Historic Resources (OHR) within Los Angeles’ Department of City Planning, which is responsible for the management of historic resources within the city. A community engagement program will create a space for meaningful input and local partnerships, drawing upon community-based knowledge of lesser-known histories.
“Historic preservation is about the acknowledgment and elevation of places and stories. The point of this work is to make sure that the stories and places of African Americans in Los Angeles are more present and complete than previously,” says Tim Whalen, John E. and Louise Bryson Director at the Getty Conservation Institute. “The work is also about making sure that preservation methods are examined for systemic bias. It’s ultimately about equity.”
Before embarking on this project, Getty and the city convened a virtual roundtable composed of a group of national and local thought leaders with experience in urban planning, historic preservation, African American history, and/or grassroots and community organizing.
Their discussions of diversity and inclusion in preservation policy helped shape the initiative and its goals. In particular, their input shed light on existing processes and practices that perpetuate biases in how places are recognized and protected, and helped expose current preservation policies that prevent the conservation of places of importance to Black communities.
“This project will illuminate overlooked narratives and historic places important to Los Angeles and our nation that deserve protection and recognition,” says Brent Leggs, executive director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund at the National Trust for Historic Preservation and a member of the project’s initial thought leader round table meeting.
“Through public and private partnership, the Getty and City of Los Angeles can model broader reform in the U.S. preservation field and can work proactively at the local government and city levels to grow pathways for equitable interpretation and community-driven preservation.”
This project will include research to rethink and potentially expand the heritage preservation toolkit. This involves examining how current historic preservation and planning processes and policies may be reinforcing systemic racism. It will also work to bring new and improved processes that address injustices and bring greater inclusion and diversity to historic preservation practices.
Barber shops, such as Magnificent Brothers—in operation in the Crenshaw district since 1970— could be found eligible for listing based on their social significance to the community.
The initial phase of this project will also provide a framework for identifying and evaluating properties relating to African American history in Los Angeles. In 2018 OHR completed a framework for identifying African American heritage in the city, drawing upon nine themes that included civil rights, deed restriction and segregation, religion and spirituality, social clubs and organizations, and visual arts. The project will include deeper citywide community engagement around this framework and allow for the report’s potential expansion.
“As the largest planning department in the United States, City Planning is uniquely positioned to chart a course for a more fair, equitable, and just Los Angeles for future generations, in part, through cultural heritage and education,” says Vince Bertoni, director of planning for the City of Los Angeles. “We are excited to highlight this broader range of values and history that better represents our diverse city.”
In addition to rethinking the preservation toolkit, the project will include official historic designation of a number of African American historic places by the city. The work of the project will also extend beyond traditional preservation tools to address the development of broader cultural preservation strategies with selected historically Black communities.
The project will also provide opportunities for emerging history, preservation and planning professionals through dedicated paid internships. Additionally, Getty and OHR will soon launch a search for a consultant project leader to further develop, manage, and implement the work of this project, under the guidance of a soon-to-be-established local advisory committee representing key stakeholders in the city’s African American communities.
“The history of Los Angeles is incomplete without recognition of the African American individuals and institutions that shaped the economic, cultural and civic narrative of the region,” says Susan D. Anderson, history curator and program manager at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles and a member of the project’s initial thought leader round table meeting. “This important project will expand how heritage is defined and will provide an opportunity to work with local communities and residents to unearth stories that are vital to our understanding of the place we call home.”
The City of Los Angeles and the Getty Conservation Institute have worked together for nearly two decades on local heritage projects. Their joint efforts include SurveyLA, a citywide survey of historic places that was conducted from 2010 through 2017. SurveyLA covered the entire City of Los Angeles—over 880,000 legal parcels in an area of almost 500 square miles—and identified resources dating from approximately 1865 to 1980. The data from SurveyLA was used to create HistoricPlacesLA, a website launched in 2015 that allows the public to explore these places.
Golden State Mutual Life Insurance building designed by Paul Williams
The announcement follows the Getty Research Institute and the USC School of Architecture’s recent joint acquisition of the archives of Paul R. Williams, one of the most significant African American architects of the 20th century. Several Williams buildings are already designated historic landmarks in Los Angeles, including the 28th Street YMCA and Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company.
The new initiative also builds upon the work of City Planning, in establishing the Office of Racial Justice, Equity, and Transformative Planning in 2020 in response to Mayor Eric Garcetti’s Executive Order No. 27 on Racial Equity in City Government. Through the office, City Planning is comprehensively confronting how land use policies and zoning practices have reinforced racial segregation, environmental injustice, and poor health outcomes.
According to Variety.com, a collaboration between Lionsgate Television, The New York Times, and Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Films will create a docuseries for streaming platform Hulu based on The 1619 Project from New York Times Magazine’s and Nikole Hannah-Jones‘ journalistic examination of slavery and racism in the U.S. from 1619 to current times.
Emmy-nominated and Peabody Award-winner Shoshana Guy will serve as showrunner and executive producer. Kathleen Lingo, editorial director for film and TV at The New York Times, will also executive produce along with Caitlin Roper, The Times’ executive producer for scripted film and TV.
Academy Award-winning director Roger Ross Williams will produce and oversee the series with producing partner and co-executive producer Geoff Martz and also direct the first episode.
The series falls under a distribution agreement between Lionsgate and Disney General Entertainment Content’s BIPOC Creator Initiative led by Tara Duncan.
The 1619 Project connected the centrality of slavery in U.S. history with an account of the racism that endures in so many aspects of American life today. It was launched in August 2019 on the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the English colonies that would become the United States. It examines the legacy of slavery in America and how it shaped nearly all aspects of society, from music and law to education and the arts, and including the principles of our democracy itself.
“The 1619 Project is an essential reframing of American history,” Williams said. “Our most cherished ideals and achievements cannot be understood without acknowledging both systemic racism and the contributions of Black Americans. And this isn’t just about the past—Black people are still fighting against both the legacy of this racism and its current incarnation. I am thrilled and grateful for the opportunity to work with The New York Times, Lionsgate Television, Harpo Films and Hulu to translate the incredibly important The 1619 Project into a documentary series.”
