by Cieslafdn | Aug 15, 2014 | Rosenwald Grant Recipients
We wrote about Gordon Parks’ “Segregation Series” last June, following the surprising rediscovery of the complete series, which Parks produced for LIFE magazine in the 1950s and which was thought to be lost.
Starting November 15th, according to The New York Times, the High Museum in Atlanta is mounting an exhibition of this series that they’re calling “Gordon Parks: Segregation Story.” The exhibit will be open until June 7, 2015.
Many of the powerful photographs in this collection have never before been seen in a gallery. Out of the more than 40 color prints depicting segregation, a select few were published in a 1956 LIFE Magazine article. From the examples we’ve seen in the media, these photographs, by the first recipient of a Rosenwald grant for photography, offer a truly unique illustration of the segregated institutions of the Jim Crow South.
Read more at The New York Times.
by Cieslafdn | Aug 13, 2014 | Rosenwald Grant Recipients
According to a review in The New York Times, the debut novel of author Jess Row, Your Face or Mine, (to be released this week) uses the science fiction concept of “racial reassignment surgery” as a jumping off point to a rumination on race and identity in the modern world. “Passing” as a member of another race is a familiar literary theme, mainly found in African American literature of the 20th century, like the works of Rosenwald fellows James Baldwin and James Weldon Johnson. Writing for the the Times, Felicia R. Lee explains:
A fan of James Baldwin’s work, Mr. Row said he set out to have “Your Face in Mine” explore the ways people try to escape their racial identities, as well as investigate their desire for racial reconciliation and deeply unconscious fears and discomforts around race.
“Passing” has been a major theme in African-American literature for over a century, and has usually meant blacks living as whites to escape bias. “Your Face in Mine” owes something to classic stories of passing like “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,” by James Weldon Johnson (published anonymously in 1912 and under his name in 1927), and the 1931 satire “Black No More,” by George S. Schuyler, in which blacks rush to embrace a new scientific process to become white.
Read more about the new novel at The New York Times.
by Cieslafdn | Jul 31, 2014 | Rosenwald Grant Recipients
Adrian Higgins writes for The Washington Post about the historic home of African American poet Anne Spencer. Spencer lived most of her life in segregated Lynchburg, Virginia, and her Victorian home became a salon of sorts for Harlem Renaissance figures. Her social circle contained many past Rosenwald fellows as well, like Marian Anderson, James Weldon Johnson, W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes. In Lynchburg, Spencer formed a local chapter of the NAACP and spoke out against segregation on public transportation. Spencer’s home and garden has been restored by the combined efforts of her descendants and a Lynchburg garden club, and both can be visited today.
Read more at The Washington Post.
by Cieslafdn | Jul 21, 2014 | Rosenwald Grant Recipients
Were he still alive, James Baldwin would have been 90 years old this year. His thoughts, words and the way he used them to analyze the racial climate of the time touched readers and fellow authors alike.
After winning a Rosenwald grant in 1948, Baldwin could start work on his first novel: Go Tell It On The Mountain. In this novel, he explored religion and its effect on the nature of relationships and interactions within a community. For African Americans specifically, Baldwin’s Go Tell It On The Mountain looks at the repressions, moral hypocrisy and inspiration that comes from being entrenched in the church community.
Portrait of James Baldwin, 1955
Photo Credit: Library of Congress, Carl Van Vechten Collection
The experiences of racial tension in Harlem, life in France with the expatriates, and travels around the country during the Civil Rights era shape the the enduring image and legacy of Baldwin. In the 1940s he fled the abuse, frustration and despair that came with being a young black man in America.
For him, “It wasn’t so much a matter of choosing France—it was a matter of getting out of America. I didn’t know what was going to happen to me in France but I knew what was going to happen to me in New York. If I had stayed there, I would have gone under, like my friend on the George Washington Bridge,” he told the Paris Review.
The characters in Baldwin’s work, reflect this feeling. They’re as frustrated and downtrodden as Baldwin, hiding their fear and clutching on to their anger. But he reaches beyond this to the everyday interactions, manifestations of love and compassion that humanized the characters. Black youth for generations to come have identified with his stories, such as “Sonny’s Blues”.
Walter Dean Myers, who made a career writing children’s stories, was one of the many inspired by Baldwin to write stories where, as Myers explained, “black children [are] going to get a sense of who they are and what they can be.”
Myers died earlier this month, but much like his mentor Baldwin, his work remains an integral part of the African American literary canon.
A friend of Myers is quoted in his New York Times obituary saying that Myers “wrote about disenfranchised black kids, particularly boys, and he wrote about them with extraordinary honesty and also with compassion.” Undoubtedly some of this honesty and compassion was passed down from Baldwin, who also created a literary space where young black males could find themselves and their sense of belonging.
By Anakwa Dwamena
by Cieslafdn | Jul 16, 2014 | Rosenwald Grant Recipients
The HistoryMakers, a huge archive of interviews with African Americans (both famous and not) who accomplished great things, will be added to the collection of the Library of Congress soon, according to The New York Times.
The archive, which contains over 9,000 hours of video interviews with 2,600 interview subjects, is an important historical endeavor and captures the stories of many amazing individuals, including some who have since passed away, such as Maya Angelou and Ruby Dee. Clips of the HistoryMakers interviews with Angelou and Dee can be viewed in the New York Times article linked above.
Adding these materials to the Library of Congress should ensure their preservation and open them up to easier access by viewers from the public as well as researchers and documentary filmmakers. Before he passed away in 2006, photographer and filmmaker Gordon Parks sat for a HistoryMakers interview. In the interview, he discusses his fellowship from the Rosenwald Fund that helped his photography career early on. We hope to use this footage in our upcoming documentary, The Rosenwald Schools.
The founder of The HistoryMakers, Julieanna Richardson, should be commended on her vision and the years of work it took to realize it. Read more about this new stage of the HistoryMakers at The New York Times.
by Cieslafdn | Jul 15, 2014 | Rosenwald Grant Recipients
A few weeks ago, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C. announced a new partnership with the National Gallery of Art and George Washington University that will radically change the makeup of the historic museum. As the Corcoran prepares to enter into a new phase of its existence, The Washington Post asked chief curator Philip Brookman to talk about some of the works of art that have made the gallery what it is today.
One of the works Brookman, who we interviewed last year about Rosenwald fellow Gordon Parks, mentioned was by another Rosenwald fellow, Aaron Douglas. In 1996, Brookman remembers, the Corcoran Gallery acquired “Into Bondage”, a panel from a mural by Douglas that depicts slaves being led to ships in chains. According to Brookman, this was “a moment of important collecting,” for the Gallery, which has an outstanding collection of African American art.
You can see and read about the rest of the works of art named by Philip Brookman and Corcoran’s manager of curatorial affairs Lisa Strong here.
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