by Cieslafdn | Aug 4, 2014 | Social Justice Work
The Northwest Current reported last month that plans to create a memorial to Carter G. Woodson in the District of Columbia are moving forward. The city council is reviewing plans that were recently approved by the National Capital Planning Commission.
Why Woodson? Woodson was a prominent African American educator, writer and historian who is perhaps best known today for promoting the first Negro History Week in the mid-1920s, a celebration of African American history that lives on today in Black History Month. Woodson lived for many years in Washington D.C. and his historic home, which is owned by the National Park Service, is only a few steps from the proposed memorial site at Q and 9th Streets, NW.
In 1927, around the same time he founded Negro History Week, Woodson completed the first history of the Rosenwald Fund’s school-building program (which was winding down and would end in 1932). The Rosenwald Fund opened its archives (which present a rich demographic picture of rural African American communities in the early 20th century) and provided funding to Woodson to complete this important historical work. Woodson’s work was never published, but the manuscript is stored with the Rosenwald Fund Papers at Fisk University in Nashville.
At this same point in his life, while living in Washington in the mid-1920s, Woodson also crossed paths with a young Langston Hughes. Through a friend of his mother’s, Hughes got a job as Woodson’s personal assistant and began doing clerical work in Woodson’s office. Hughes writes in his autobiography that despite realizing the importance of Woodson’s research, he disliked the position so much that he soon quit and began work at the Wardman Park Hotel. Woodson was a good literary connection for Hughes, but the job at the Wardman Park Hotel gave him the opportunity to become the famous “busboy poet,” when he slipped three of his poems to a critic named Vachel Lindsay who was dining at the hotel. Lindsay introduced Hughes to publishers who would later print some of his most famous works.
Woodson was a great historian and a great Washingtonian. Kudos to the city for recognizing him with a new statue and memorial park.
by Cieslafdn | Jul 30, 2014 | Social Justice Work
Douglas Brinkley, who (with Johnny Depp) co-edited and wrote the introduction for the 2013 posthumous release of Woody Guthrie’s lost novel, House of Earth, will discuss his new book (co-written with Luke Nichter) The Nixon Tapes: 1971-1972 at two locations in the District of Columbia next week. House of Earth was a powerful novel written by Guthrie under his Rosenwald fellowship in the early 1940s.
First on August 6th at 7PM, Brinkley and Nichter will be at Politics and Prose, a bookstore in Northwest Washington. Then, on August 8th at noon, the two will appear at the William G. McGowan Theater at the National Archives.
Douglas Brinkley in 2007
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons
by Cieslafdn | Jul 18, 2014 | Social Justice Work
Teaching for Change Bookstore at Busboys and Poets welcomes…
Matt Herron, Dorie Ladner, and a panel moderated by Askia Muhammad to discuss the book, This Light of our Ours: Activist Photographers of the Civil Rights Movement.
Thursday, July 24, 2014
6:30 to 8:30 PM
Busboys and Poets – 14th & V
Langston Room
For more information, go to Busboys and Poets’ website.
Sponsors:
Julian Bond
Aviva Kempner
Institute for Policy Studies
Lessons of the 60’s Project
NAACP – Washington D.C. Branch
SNCC Legacy Project
WPFW
Teaching for Change
Busboys and Poets
by Cieslafdn | May 28, 2014 | Social Justice Work
In a much-discussed new article in The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates makes a compelling case for reparations. The whole article is worth reading, but we took note of a specific passage about one Coates characters, Clyde Ross. Ross, who later became a housing activist in Chicago, was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi and yearned to attend his local Rosenwald School as a child:
Clyde Ross was a smart child. His teacher thought he should attend a more challenging school. There was very little support for educating black people in Mississippi. But Julius Rosenwald, a part owner of Sears, Roebuck, had begun an ambitious effort to build schools for black children throughout the South. Ross’s teacher believed he should attend the local Rosenwald school. It was too far for Ross to walk and get back in time to work in the fields. Local white children had a school bus. Clyde Ross did not, and thus lost the chance to better his education.
You can read more at The Atlantic. Coates will appear at sixth&i in Washington D.C. on June 12, 2014.
by Cieslafdn | Apr 21, 2014 | Film Production, Social Justice Work
Jeff Labrecque interviews World War Z author Max Brooks in Entertainment Weekly about his new graphic novel, The Harlem Hellfighters. The new book, about a black infantry unit during World War I, looks great. One moment in the interview caught our eye, in connection to some research we’ve done for The Rosenwald Schools.
You use pop culture from the period as crucial plot elements, including D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, a blatantly racist film that reflected attitudes of the time — so much so that Woodrow Wilson screened it at the White House.
I had seen Birth of a Nation in college, and it just blew me away. The movie itself didn’t blow me away; it was the reaction to it. Like you said about Wilson, people loved that movie — white people. That was the Star Wars of its day.
Despite its overtly racist themes and imagery, the release of Birth of a Nation (arguably the first significant feature-length film) was indeed a major event. We learned, however, that in addition to playing to some white viewers’ racism (and even inciting racial violence in some cases), the film also galvanized the nascent NAACP. The film provided them with a nationwide target to organize against and boycott, which helped new organization find its footing and become one of the major advocacy groups for minority rights in American history. We interviewed historian David Levering Lewis about the White House screening of Birth of a Nation and its effect on the NAACP.
You can read the complete interview at Entertainment Weekly.
by Cieslafdn | Apr 21, 2014 | Social Justice Work
I read in The New York Times about the recent renovation of the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. The museum, which is at the site of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination, commemorates the long pathway to Civil Rights for African Americans.
Among its many exhibits is one on Charles Hamilton Houston, a Civil Rights lawyer who we’ve written about on this blog. In order to mount his argument that separate education facilities were not equal in the Jim Crow South, Houston shot a good deal of 16mm footage of the conditions in the South during the 1930s, which is today stored in the National Archives in the Harmon Foundation Collection. Since Houston filmed several of the Rosenwald Schools, we plan to use some of this footage in our upcoming documentary on Julius Rosenwald’s life.
You can read more on the museum’s website. Prominently displayed there is a powerful quote by Houston:
“Maybe the next generation will be able to take time out to rest, but we have too far to go and too much work to do.”
Charles Hamilton Houston with Mary McLeod Bethune, from the outtakes of A Study in Educational Inequalities in South Carolina
Film still credit: National Archives, College Park, Harmon Foundation Collection, 200 HF 265×3
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