by Cieslafdn | Nov 26, 2014 | Social Justice Work
According to The New York Times‘ ArtBeat column, a new Center for the Study of Women’s History is planned by the New-York Historical Society, slated to open in late 2016. Among the new building’s features is a large-scale multimedia video that highlights significant female leaders from the past, including Zora Neale Hurston, who received a Rosenwald grant in 1935 to study anthropology.
You can read more about the project at ArtBeat. The editor of The Rosenwald Schools, Marian Sears Hunter, also worked on a great documentary about Zora called Jump at the Sun.
by Cieslafdn | Nov 26, 2014 | Social Justice Work
On September 10, 2014, until September 12, 2015, the Library of Congress exhibition “The Civil Rights Act of 1964: A Long Struggle For Freedom”, will be on display. The exhibition commemorates the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Civil Rights Act. Interviewees from “The Rosenwald Schools” are part of the images in the exhibition, including Julian Bond and his colleague Rep. John Lewis, who is shown in a photograph on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at the March on Washington. Julian Bond provides narration for an introductory film for the exhibit on the Civil Rights Act and John Lewis appears in a second introductory film on the impact of the legislation. As a child, John Lewis attended a Rosenwald School in Alabama.
More details regarding the exhibition here.
President Lyndon B. Johnson signing The Civil Rights Act of 1964:
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.
by Cieslafdn | Nov 14, 2014 | Social Justice Work
The black and white footage of the statuesque Justice Department attorney John Doar, escorting James Meredith to attempt to register at the University of Mississippi, are unforgettable in U.S. Civil Rights history. Doar died November 11 at age 92 in New York. Of Doar’s distinguished legal career, Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), an interviewee in The Rosenwald Schools, stated, “Every major step in the South in those days- he was there.” In his seven years as the second highest ranking Civil Rights attorney at the DOJ, in addition to to successfully prosecuting the killers of Civil Rights volunteers James Chaney. Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner, Doar won a conviction of the gunman who killed Selma voting rights volunteer and Detroit mother Viola Luozzo.
There were Rosenwald Schools in every Southern U.S. state, as well as Maryland and Texas. Doar tried Civil Rights cases in nearly all those states, sometimes appearing in courtrooms in three states on the same day.
The pioneering attorney who died this Veterans Day, served in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War Two. He graduated Princeton University, where the 6’4″ Doar played on the basketball team in the mid-1940’s. His first years at Justice were under President Eisenhower. After the Civil Rights Movement, Doar served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, where he led an impeachment inquiry against President Nixon in 1973. One of the young attorneys on his staff was Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Historians have said the Civil Rights Movement was fought on three fronts, equality of education, public demonstration. and legal battles, Julius Rosenwald’s support of Black schools exemplifies the former, and the work of John Doar, the latter.
John Doar, far left, w/ Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, and then-Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall:
by Cieslafdn | Sep 28, 2014 | Social Justice Work
Lawrence Downes, a writer for The New York Times, recently took a trip to locations around the city where Woody Guthrie spent half his life: New York. Downes was guided by two grandchildren of the great folk singer, Anna Canoni and her brother Cole Rotante, and wrote an entertaining article about the experience.
On a related note, “My Name is New York” is the name of a recently published guide book (in paperback and audio format) to the city written by Guthrie’s daughter, Nora Guthrie. The book follows the traces of Guthrie’s movements and residences around the city – click here to get your copy today.
Guthrie was living in a community of like-minded artists and musicians in New York around 1943 when he first applied to the Rosenwald Fund for assistance writing a book. During his Rosenwald grant period, Guthrie worked on several projects, the most prominent of which, entitled House of Earth, was finally published last year.
You can read more about Guthrie landmarks in the Big Apple in the online version of the New York Times article, which also includes a video of Canoni and Rotante exploring some of the locations in New York inhabited by their famous grandfather.
by Cieslafdn | Sep 4, 2014 | Social Justice Work
An excellent, but under-seen film made in 1984 by Bill Duke called The Killing Floor will screen at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York on September 26th.
Produced for American Playhouse and a prize-winner at the 1985 Sundance Film Festival, this well-researched film finds drama in the Great Migration of African Americans to the industrial north. Weaving together a dramatic narrative with both real and fabricated newsreel footage, Duke’s film manages to be engaging while sticking close to the historical details of a complicated and tense part of American history. The scenes depicting the Chicago Race Riots are particularly affecting.
The Killing Floor touches on many of the same topics and events as our upcoming documentary film, The Rosenwald Schools. Part of the film takes place in the historic Wabash Avenue YMCA, an important community center for new African American arrivals in Chicago that was funded by Julius Rosenwald. Rosenwald also helped address overcrowding in the wake of rapid population growth in the city’s “Black Belt” following the Great Migration. Segregation limited African American’s housing choices to this section of the city, but Rosenwald’s Michigan Boulevard Garden Apartments provided hundreds of modern and well-equipped apartments. We hope to use some of the footage from Duke’s film in The Rosenwald Schools as an illustration of the milieu.
The film screens as part of The Rochester Labor Film Series. Visit the Dryden Theatre’s website for more information.
by Cieslafdn | Aug 12, 2014 | Social Justice Work
Much like the Rosenwald Apartments on Chicago’s South Side, construction on the famous Merchandise Mart was begun just before the Stock Market Crash of 1929. In the early years of the Great Depression, both buildings struggled to make a profit. However, in 1945, Joseph P. Kennedy (father of JFK) purchased the building from the Marshall Field Company and successfully renovated and reinvented the iconic building. Once the largest commercial building in the world by floorspace, it is an Art Deco masterpiece of massive proportions that has housed commercial showrooms and offices for most of a century. It’s located at a picturesque point at a bend in the Chicago River where the first trading post and small businesses were founded in the early days of the city.
The Chicago Loop – the Merchandise Mart can be seen in the lower left
Photo credit: Historic American Buildings Survey via Library of Congress
Part of Kennedy’s reinvigoration of the building was introducing a “Merchandise Mart Hall of Fame,” a series of eight busts of famous merchants from around the country that face the Mart. The first seven men were elected by ballot by members of the national business community and their busts were commissioned at three annual ceremonies in 1953, 1954 and 1955. As one of the great retail magnates of Chicago history, Sears president Julius Rosenwald was part of this initial group, inducted in 1954.
Julius Rosenwald’s bust
Photo credit: Zol87 (flickr)
Today, as some commercial showrooms move out, the Merchandise Mart is being reinvented once again as a center for tech start-ups in River North, a neighborhood near Chicago’s Loop that is home to Google and Groupon. The New York Times reports that floorspace in the Mart that had formerly been used for furniture and design showrooms has gradually been given over to tech businesses by Vornado Realty Group, the owner of the Mart since 1998. Especially interesting is 1871, a non-profit organization that rents a large portion of one of the Mart’s 200,000 square foot floors, and acts as an incubator for small tech start-ups, providing networking, affordable space and even investors. The name 1871 recalls the rebuilding of Chicago after the great fire, and symbolizes the rebirth of River North and the Merchandise Mart as a hub for digital technology.
The Merchandise Mart
Photo credit: Mike Desisto (flickr)
After the initial seven busts of the Merchandise Mart Hall of Fame in the early 1950s, the series was revived once more in 1972, to include the famous retailer Montgomery Ward. Today, as the Mart is changing its image again, it may be an opportune time to make a new addition to the Hall of Fame. Montgomery Ward’s induction to the Hall of Fame was not done in the previous manner of advisory committee and national ballot – instead, according to Timothy Garvey (who wrote an article about the Hall of Fame in the Illinois Historical Journal in 1995) it was a more Chicago-centric celebration of a local luminary. Who should be added this time? Should it be Oprah Winfrey, who built her show and media empire in Chicago?
Bust of Marshall Field next to photo of Oprah Winfrey
Photo credits: Damon Taylor (flickr) and Alan Light (flickr)
Recent Comments