This week, a Bachelor of Arts diploma that belonged to Richard T. Greener, the first African-American to graduate from Harvard, will hit the auction block in Chicago, when it’s sold by Leslie Hindman Auctioneers to the tune of $15,000.
“Greener was a pioneer of social and racial equality in the racially divided South. His Harvard diploma, a document of incalculable historical significance, has never before been offered at public auction,” according to representatives from Leslie Hindman Auctioneers, who will put the diploma out to bid on Wednesday.
The document, dated July 1870, along with piles of other personal papers and artwork that belonged to Greener, were previously thought to have been lost during a San Francisco earthquake in 1906. In 2009, however, Rufus McDonald, a 52-year-old contractor, stumbled upon a treasure trove of Greener’s belongings while cleaning out an old house in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood.
After he found what Harvard University officials have called priceless artifacts, McDonald started selling his discovery to those who he thought could benefit from having them as part of their own collections.
McDonald sold some of the documents for around $52,000 to the University of South Carolina, where Greener taught. “It was like the Holy Grail. It’s such an important symbol of that time period,” Elizabeth West, university archivist at USC, told Boston last year.
When he approached Harvard with a collection that included the diploma, McDonald said he was offered a lowball amount based on appraisals he had done, and instead threatened to torch the document if the school didn’t meet his demands.
“I’ll roast and burn them,” he said in October of last year, when trying to negotiate with the Cambridge university. “It might sound crazy, but people who know me know I’d really do it—I’m sick and tired of Harvard’s BS.”
While the actual amount that Harvard offered McDonald was never revealed, Henry Gates, Jr., who leads Harvard’s W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African-American Research, told Boston that he wanted the documents to end up back at the school.
“I very much hope that Harvard acquires these documents at a fairly appraised value. Mr. McDonald’s discovery was extraordinary,” he said at the time McDonald threatened to burn them.
The price tag set on the diploma alone—valued between $10,000 and $15,000— is lower than McDonald’s original demands from the school for a pile of items owned by Greener. In October of 2013, McDonald was calling on the school to fork over around $65,000 for the Harvard degree and several other documents, after he had them appraised.
Because it’s being sold through an auction house, McDonald doesn’t stand to pocket the full amount of the sale, either. According to a spokesperson from Leslie Hindman Auctioneers, the company will take a cut of the profit once the sale is complete. “If it sells, [Mr. McDonald] gets a portion of that sale. If it doesn’t sell, he can take the document back with him,” the spokesperson said over the phone on Tuesday.
article by Steve Annear via bostonmagazine.com
Posts tagged as “Henry Louis Gates Jr.”
The rapper Nas made his first appearance at Harvard University on Thursday, not to perform but to give his blessing to a new fellowship in his name – formally, the Nasir Jones Hip-Hop Fellowship. The fellowship will be awarded to two scholars or artists annually, chosen by a Harvard faculty committee. It is primarily a research fellowship, although Marcyliena Morgan, a professor of African and African American Studies and the founder and director of the Hip-Hop Archive and Research Institute, which will administer the fellowship, said on Friday that fellows could teach courses as well. The application process, she said, has just started.
“The main purpose of the fellowship,” Ms. Morgan said, “is to support people doing work that has to do with the ways hip-hop itself reaches out to youth through the world, and particularly how it brings together issues of social justice, art and politics. That relationship – and how difficult it can be – is an important aspect of what we’re looking at. Hip-hop has been a way of getting the word out in very difficult situations.”
It always seemed pretty straightforward. And horrifying. Early African-American history was the story of thousands of Africans who were captured, shipped like cargo to the New World and sold into slavery, mostly to work and die on Southern plantations. But Henry Louis Gates Jr. and PBS show us that history’s complexity in a beautifully done six-part, six-hour documentary, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, which began on Tuesday night and continues weekly through Nov. 26.
Mr. Gates — the Harvard professor, author and critic — is highly visible, interviewing historians, talking to older black Africans who acknowledge that their ancestors became wealthy through the slave trade, chatting with contemporary black Americans over Hoppin’ John and iced tea, standing at seemingly innocuous city intersections where shameful history unfolded.
Everyone (you hope) knows that slavery existed at least as long ago as Ancient Egypt. Many are also aware that black Africans helped the white slave traders who arrived on their shores. But Episode 1 (“The Black Atlantic: 1500-1800”) delves deeper — in Sierra Leone, the Temne people would sell the Loko people, so they didn’t see it as turning against their own — and points out that Europeans invented the idea that skin color determined who was and was not enslavable. As Mr. Gates observes, “the dehumanization of an entire race” takes a while.
Just over 10 years ago, the private equity mogul Glenn Hutchins was on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard. With his 25th Harvard College reunion near, he was thinking about how to put some of his wealth to good use. One afternoon, clad in a T-shirt and board shorts, he stopped at an old whaling chapel, where Henry Louis Gates Jr., the prominent professor of African and African-American studies at Harvard, was leading a symposium. That encounter gave Mr. Hutchins his cause.
Since then, Mr. Hutchins has strengthened his connection to Mr. Gates and the Harvard program. Their bond will become stronger on Wednesday, when Mr. Hutchins is expected to announce a gift of more than $15 million to create the Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research, solidifying Harvard’s program as one of the top in its field. “It creates an infrastructure for the department and a solid foundation on which they can thrive,” Mr. Hutchins said in an interview this month.
The gift — part of a previously announced $30 million donation to the university whose uses had not all been specified — also bespeaks a friendship between two men unlike each other in many respects. One is a wealthy white financier whose firm, Silver Lake, is on the verge of taking over the computer maker Dell with its founder, Michael S. Dell; the other is a celebrated black professor who helped popularize African-American studies as an academic field and social phenomenon.
In 2002, a novel thought to be the first written by an African-American woman became a best seller, praised for its dramatic depiction of Southern life in the mid-1850s through the observant eyes of a refined and literate house servant. But one part of the story remained a tantalizing secret: the author’s identity.
That literary mystery may have been solved by a professor of English in South Carolina, who said this week that after years of research, he has discovered the novelist’s name: Hannah Bond, a slave on a North Carolina plantation owned by John Hill Wheeler, is the actual writer of “The Bondwoman’s Narrative,” the book signed by Hannah Crafts.
Beyond simply identifying the author, the professor’s research offers insight into one of the central mysteries of the novel, believed to be semi-autobiographical: how a house slave with limited access to education and books was heavily influenced by the great literature of her time, like “Bleak House” and “Jane Eyre,” and how she managed to pull off a daring escape from servitude, disguised as a man.
The professor, Gregg Hecimovich, the chairman of the English department at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C., has uncovered previously unknown details about Bond’s life that have shed light on how the novel was possibly written. The heavy influences of Dickens, for instance, particularly from “Bleak House,” can be explained by Bond’s onetime servitude on a plantation that routinely kept boarders from a nearby girls’ school; the curriculum there required the girls to recite passages of “Bleak House” from memory. Bond, secretly forming her own novel, could have listened while they studied, or spirited away a copy to read.
The research also shows that Bond may have been given a man’s suit by a member of the Wheeler family who was sympathetic to her desire to flee.
Professor Hecimovich, 44, said that he has verified the writer’s identity through wills, diaries, handwritten almanacs and public records. He intends to publish his full findings in a book, tentatively titled “The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts.”
His work has been reviewed by several scholars who vouch for its authenticity, including Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the nation’s pre-eminent scholars of African-American history. Professor Gates bought the obscure manuscript at auction in 2001.
Nas has found a new home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard University’s W.E.B Du Bois Institute and Hip-Hop Archive announced the creation of the Nasir Jones Fellowship. The fellowship named after the rapper who is known for his philosophical bars, will allow scholars and artists to use their education through a creative outlet. The Nasir Jones Fellowship key purpose is based on the motto: Education is real power.
The Hip-Hop Archive press release states the mission:
“To seek projects from scholars and artists that build on the rich and complex hip-hop tradition; to respect that tradition through historically grounded and contextualized critical insights; and most importantly, to represent one’s creative and/or intellectually rigorous contribution to hip-hop and the discourse through personal and academic projects.”
The fellowship will cover the works of Nas and other prolific hip-hop artists who contributed monumental work to the genre. Recipients of The Nasir Jones Fellowship will be selected by Harvard faculty.
The MC who received the privilege of his own fellowship at the Ivy League states:
“In my roller coaster of a life I’ve endured good and bad for sure, and I’ve truly been blessed to have achieved so much through art in my short life thus far. But I am immensely over-the-top excited about the Nasir Jones Hip-Hop Fellowship at Harvard. From Queens, NY to true cultural academia. My hopes are that greed for knowledge, art, self-determination and expression go a long way. It is a true honor to have my name attached to so much hard work, alongside great names like Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and W.E.B. Du Bois and to such a prestigious and historical institution, and all in the name of the music I grew to be a part of.”
Before forming his own fellowship, Nas has helped Grammy-award winning music producer 9th Wonder with his own academic research project called These Are The Breaks. The research was based on compiling original samples from hip-hop albums that were permanently archived in the Harvard Library; Nas’s Illimatic was a part of the research. 9th Wonder’s research project and journey to Harvard has become a documentary called, The Harvard Fellow.
article by Lauren R.D. Fox via madamenoire.com
A portrait of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. by artists Yuki Wang. (Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery)
What does Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. have in common with explorer Amerigo Vespucci, poet Allen Ginsberg , and actress Mary Pickford? They’re all new on the wall at the National Portrait Gallery in D.C. In an e-mail to friends and supporters, Gates called the unveiling of his portrait “one of the most exciting moments of my life.” The oil painting, done by artist Yuqi Wang, shows Gates standing beside a table with an African sculpture and books by W. E. B. Du Bois, Wole Soyinka, and Kwame Anthony Appiah on it. “The perfect portrait for the National Portrait Gallery is one that combines a nationally significant subject and the work of an exceptional artist,” Brandon Fortune, the Portrait Gallery’s chief curator, told us Monday. She said the painting was commissioned by Harvard and then offered to the Portrait Gallery. “It’s a long, drawn out process when we consider a portrait of someone who has not previously been in our collection,” Fortune said.
Philanthropists Joanna and Daniel Rose have donated funds to Yale University to create the Henry Louis Gates Jr. Lectures. Professor Gates is a 1973 alumnus of Yale and currently serves as Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and is director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University.
The first Henry Louis Gates Jr. Lecture was delivered by Kwame Anthony Appiah, the Laurence S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, and a close friend of professor Gates. Speaking at the inaugural event, Dr. Gates stated, “It is difficult for me to think of a greater honor in the life of a Yale alumnus than to have one’s alma mater create a lecture in one’s name.”
article via jbhe.com
Hear The Root’s editor-in-chief, Henry Louis Gates Jr., chat with the Django Unchained director about the n-word and a possible sequel.
A Django Unchained and Inglourious Basterds trilogy? The historical accuracy of the n-word in
Django? The unlikely connection between the slavery-themed film and The Birth of a Nation? How Django fits into Hollywood’s overplayed, often offensive white-savior stereotype? You name it, and The Root‘s editor-in-chief, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Quentin Tarantino — whose latest film, Django Unchained, a “postmodern slave-narrative Western,” as Gates describes it, opened on Christmas Day — likely covered it in this exhaustive interview.
When asked why he wanted to combine a slave narrative with a Western, Tarantino said this:
It’s two separate stories I’ve always wanted to tell. One, I’ve always wanted to tell a Western story. Two, I’ve always wanted to re-create cinematically that world of the antebellum South, of America under slavery, and just what a different place it was — an unfathomable place. To create an environment and again, not just have a historical story play out — they did this and they did that, and they did this and they did that — but actually make it a genre story. Make it an exciting adventure.
Listen to the whole interview by clicking here.
Also, read it in three parts:
Tarantino Unchained Part 1: Django Trilogy?
Tarantino Unchained Part 2: On the N-Word.
Tarantino Unchained Part 3: White Saviors.
Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid “The Three Mulattoes of Esmereldas” (1599) is one of the works in “Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe,” at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.
BALTIMORE — In a fall art season distinguished, so far, largely by a bland, no-brainer diet served up by Manhattan’s major museums, you have to hit the road for grittier fare. And the Walters Art Museum here is not too far to go to find it in a high-fiber, convention-rattling show with the unglamorous title of “Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe.”
Visually the exhibition is a gift, with marvelous things by artists familiar and revered — Dürer, Rubens, Veronese — along with images most of us never knew existed. Together they map a history of art, politics and race that scholars have begun to pay attention to — notably through “The Image of the Black in Western Art,” a multi-volume book project edited by David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates Jr. — but that few museums have addressed in full-dress style.