Afro American Music Site at Carnegie Hall

http://www.carnegiehall.org/honor/history/index.aspx
This site provides excellent organizational resources for the analysis of the development of African American music.  It is authored by Portia K. Maultsby, who has also published a very useful book,  African American Music: An Introduction edited by Mellonee V. Burnim and Portia K. Maultsby and published by Routledge in 2006.

The book is plainly built upon the research of an entire field in these three or four decades since scholars have been systematically attempting to find words to describe the African American oral tradition.  In this case, the focus is on music largely to the exclusion of spoken forms of oral tradition.  But on its own turf, it comes the closest to providing what I, myself, was trying to construct for my own use in the Blues People Curriculum.

Doing this course again at the Ph.D. level or at the graduate level, I would use this book as the starting point for the literature and the images that make up the Blues Tradition.  Also in a more advanced context, I would emphasize music more because music is so dominant and has such great explanatory power  in African American culture.

On both the website and in the book there is a chart which provides a genealogy of African American music composed of three major categories--African American sacred traditions, African American secular traditions and African American Secular Traditions Instrumental.

The book contains chapters on the various relevant fields by the appropriate experts, among them Bernice Johnson Reagon, Dena J. Epstein, David Evans, Thomas I. Riis, Lawrence Levine and Mark Anthony Neal.

African American Literature: 30s through 60s--Jazz Life: A Journey for Jazz Across America in 1960

This photo graced the album Black Brown and Beige: Duke Ellington and his Orchestra Featuring Mahalia Jackson released by Columbia Records in 1958.  These are two of the most elegant and most interesting people that the African American Blues tradition ever produced, two of the most famous and successful and unscathed by the racism and Jim Crow that were the scourge of the nation at the time.  I don't know as much as I would like to know about how they managed it but there's no question that they were birds of a feather (Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox) and they made a fine couple in this picture, which I have no idea who took it except that it was taken at the time they made the album together and there were other photos, which are included in the reissue package designed and compiled by the brilliant Phil Schaap although the print is so small I despair of ever finding the information I am looking for.  


We will be hearing from both of them in the Blues People Curriculum on various occasions.  Both are heard from via the audio recordings including in the Norton Anthology of African American Literature.  I fear not nearly enough but these are more musical questions. 

This is the same Mahalia Jackson we meet on the pages and in the magnificent albeit rarely seen photos of JAZZ LIFE: A JOURNEY ACROSS AMERICA IN 1960 described below, the same America.  People go to her house in Chicago and she cooks for them, probably something she learned to cook growing up in New Orleans.  

I found this photo on line and used it here, wanting the album but feeling as though it was an expense that I could spare myself.  Finally, I broke down and bought it (turned out to be very inexpensive) as much to learn more about the photograph and the historic collaboration as to hear the music.

 I already had had the experience of being disappointed by the fact that the wonderful performance of Mahalia Jackson at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, in which she is accompanied by Duke Ellington, is not really captured in all its musical richness either on the film make by Bert Stern, JAZZ ON A SUMMER'S DAY, or on the Newport Jazz Festival recording released of it.  It seems it was rather common to re-stage performances for the albums that were released as Newport Jazz Festival performances.  Moreover, black artists were so subject to being corrupted.  Their sound, their look, and everything else about them.  You never knew and you still don't know what part is this and what part was something somebody just slapped on them on their way out of the door.

In fact, I am thinking of poor Louis at that very same festival singing his trademark "Sleepytime Down South" with that ragtag gang of All Stars he was hanging out with then. Not that I didn't cherish every bit of it but I could see the strain he was under.  I've gotten so I can feel every bit of the strain he was under because I at a age and at a point where I am feeling that strain myself.

 For all I know, the recordings that were released were actually made at the festivals, although maybe at some other point in performance.  All they had to sell was lps, which had very limited recording space.  Also, I don't know much about what remained on the cutting room floor although this version includes many unreleased cuts so there is a vault of some kind somewhere.  Whats in it I don't know.

Nor would there have been much point in miking every instrument back then since they didn't have the technical capacity to use all the tracks anyway yet.  Perhaps all the sound is kept somewhere for future generations but I don't suppose I will ever find out what it sounded like to hear the Duke Ellington band backing Mahalia Jackson in the open air of Newport, Rhode Island, or even to be at a Newport Jazz Festival.

   In my view, a recording made under studio conditions, even if it was Duke Ellington and his orchestra and Mahalia Jackson, could never touch a live performance.  The best I've ever seen for this period were made abroad.  For instance, Duke Ellington in Amsterdam in 1958 is one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard.  But what makes it so sweet is the way it looks (released as part of the Jazz Icon series on DVD), and my total inability to have imagined at the time (in the 50s or the 60s) that such a thing as such exquisitely beautiful, exquisitely elegant black men could ever exist on film.  I already knew it could never be made in America and lord knows I never had a clue taking classes at NYU in their Ph.D. program that film could ever result in anything so exquisite.

   It's interesting that George Wein didn't allow more film to be made at Newport, although if it had ever gotten out in technicolor the racial experiment that was going on there, it would not have been allowed to continue I should think. In the 50s, sliding right into 1960 with room to spare, the Newport Jazz Festival provided a utopian alternative racial space, one of the few in which blacks and whites of the highest caliber freely intermingled and associated with one another, thanks to the brilliant interventions of George and Joyce Wein, one of our most celebrated interracial couples.  It was still illegal in some states for blacks and whites to marry, and certainly there were still lots of white Americans who thought it should be illegal for whites and blacks to party together like that.  Yet George and Joyce were not only married but making history with some of the most brilliant performers in America in the brilliant summer sunlight.

  Anyhow I gather that somehow Duke Ellington (who was in my estimation one of the greatest purveyors of American folk culture/popular culture ever born) is just for brainy folk so I don't know how many of my acolytes in World Humanities Blues People will be able to catch on.  Words can't say. 

    But the whole point of this was to mention this wonderful supersize, heavily illustrated book of photographs by William Claxton and Interpretative Text by Joachim E. Berendt, which is entitled Jazz Life: A Journey for Jazz Across America in 1960, Taschen 2005.  It is composed of the pictures and information collected by Claxton and Berendt as they travelled across the United States seeking out the rich variety of African American musical culture taking place in the year of 1960.

Initially, the book was only published abroad, not in english, and was not well known but the book I have has German, French and English, and was signed by Claxton and sold to me for $200 by a high-end photography shop that had recently opened near me.  

The young man who waited on me kindly explained how Claxton's distribution worked.  As it turned out the shop was another outlet for the main shop in another location, which also functioned as a photographic gallery.  The book was, in essence, a collection of copyrighted photographs which you might use to make a selection of one or more prints that you might like to buy from Claxton, frame and put on your wall.  There was actually a market for such a thing, people buying individual prints of photographs for thousands of dollars that they could not obtain in any other way directly from the photographer or his representatives.  The runs were limited in number in order to ensure the increasing value of each print, just as would be the case with lithographs or other kinds of artistic prints.  

The book itself is reissued a number of times in limited printings with each printing going up in price, if demand continues to rise, or down if the demand falls off.  Also, Taschen, which is one of the publishers who participate in these arrangements, would simply stop making more copies at some point in order to facilitate the collectability and value of the original editions.  So the book, itself-- if carefully maintained without damage and so forth--could also end up being worth a fortune in some rare instances.  

Both Claxton and Berendt were white (Claxton recently died) while a considerable number of the photographic subjects of the book are African American.  The photographs are, in many cases, absolutely exquisite and more importantly not the same pictures you see all the time.  Indeed, I bought the book after leafing through it because I knew that it contained a documentation of the year of 1960 in the United States, including the relationship between whites and blacks, such as it would be impossible to find elsewhere.  

Moreover, this is clearly a more racially integrated version of the cultural milieu of 1960 than those of us who teach African American Studies are in the habit of employing.  I am eager to see how his musical inventory would match up with the one I have been able to reconstruct from archival sources.  

But I cannot legally reproduce a single one of these pictures, which is ironic.  I've got some juicy bits of 1960s history in my hot little hands.  I can tote it to class and let my students look at it--although I will certainly have to take a cab and just their breathing on it is likely to diminish its collectability (by which I mean its financial value).

There isn't even an image of a person on the cover, just lettering and the book, itself, is 600 pages.  

Bert Williams, A Natural Born Gambler (1916)

Bert Williams was one of our early Blues People.  Of the highest caliber.  Blackface and all!  In a proper chronology of Blues People, Bert Williams and George Walker, and their musical play In Dahomey, which derived from their experience of the Dahomey Village at the Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, would provide one of the crucial starting points of the Modern African American Century.

I have also included here a running copy of the only surviving film of a Bert William's performance in A Natural Born Gambler (1916), which I picked up from former student Chris's blog.  It works well although many of the other wonderful links have degraded to pictures.  Still wonderful commentary.

The film is from the Biograph Company, apparently produced written and starred in by Bert Williams. A man for the ages.  A black man in blackface par excellence. There is no equal.  I saw many of them as a child at the Apollo Theatre in the 50s and I am still laughing.

August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone

. . . a mythmaker who sees his basically naturalistic panorama plays as stages in an allegorical history of black America, Michael Feingold (1987)

There is a production of August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone on Broadway at the Belasco Theatre, which I just saw tonight.  I sat in the second row right under the stage, soaking up the mystical, allegorical palette of the set design and the way in which the characters are molded from Wilson's rhythmical, repetitive text.  I found it somewhat more comprehensible than I found it the first time I saw it on Broadway twenty or more years ago.  Not sure how well students in the class may be able to read it but it certainly relates very directly to a blues reading of African American history and the migration from the South to the North.

The play is entirely set at a boarding house in Pittsburgh run by a seemingly middle aged couple, both warm and nurturing people.  Part of the household is Bynum, an elderly man who also works roots and exercises at various times a power to move people around that goes beyond the visible and the concrete.  His powers, he says, are specifically to bind people together, to help people to find the one with whom they should be bound and then bind them.  Also in the household is a very young man who plays the guitar, a frisky kind of troublesome fellow just up from the South and given to womanizing.

Two women come to the house and each takes up with the young man in turn.  Meanwhile, Harold Loomis, a mysterious dark stranger arrives at the house with his daughter in tow.  He is looking for his wife whom he hasn't seen in 11 years.  As it turns out, he was kidnapped by Joe Turner and endured the horrors of forced labor and exploitation.  Loomis is presented as a man who wears the scars of his enslavement on his sleeve and who is holding onto the pain but in a manner meant to symbolize, I should think, the incorporation of a slave mentality for some black men in a manner making them particularly subject to violence against others and themselves.  

The coercive nature of his service is clearly meant to serve as a metaphor for the forced enslavement and transportation of the slave trade and of Jim Crow peonage.  In any case, I don't want to say too much more about this for fear of entirely ruining the pleasure of seeing the play for the first time, except to say that Wilson's text has aged well in my opinion.  Also that it continues to fascinate me that black authors regardless of the aesthetic tradition they practice all seem to embrace so much of the same resonant vocabulary having to do with drowning, water, dead rotting or floating bodies, bones, backbreaking physical labor--all of them drenched with the rhythms and preoccupations of the blues and African influenced religious practices.  In particular, watching this play I was struck by how much of it seemed to resonate with some the visual vocabulary of so many African American visual artists generally. 

The music was done by Taj Mahal, somebody who is a vigilant student of the blues and its roots in African music, which comes through the score although very little musical performance is incorporated into the show.  

I have invited those students who might be interested in my World Humanities version of Blues People to go to see the play and write about it as an assignment that could substitute for the mid-term, or provide extra credit.  Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone is set in the early teens, and all his plays are all devoted to portraying the history of the folk.

Also, the entire text of August Wilson's Joe Turner is included in the Norton Anthology.

In addition, Joe Turner is the subject of a number of blues tunes, having much to do with Wilson's choice of him as a subject for his play no doubt.  The ones I have in my musical collection, and which I play all the time they are so beautiful and mysterious are by Big Bill Broonzy, Ed Young and Hobart Smith, and Miles and Bob Pratcher, all of them coming from Alan Lomax's Blues Songbook Collection, a 2-cd set with a medley of classics from Lomax's copious collection of "folk" performance mostly in the rural South from the 20s through the 60s.  

According to these songs, Joe Turner is a mythological figure something like John Henry, except that in Turner's case he comes to your house when you are in need, without work and food, and then he makes sure you get what you need.  How this works in August Wilson's play is somewhat different.  Joe Turner seems to be a figure who occupies the symbolic position of the enslaver, the enforcer, the white kidnapper of black men.  

The play begins with this beautiful and poetic description, as a preamble to the action:

It is August in Pittsburgh, 1911.  The sun falls out of heaven like a stone.  The fires of the steel mill rage with a combined sense of industry and progress.  Barges loaded with coal and iron ore trudge up the river to the mill towns that dot the Monongahela and return with fresh, hard, gleaming steel.  The city flexes its muscles.  Men throw countless bridges across the rivers, lay roads and carve tunnels through the hills sprouting with houses.

From the deep and the near South the sons and daughters of newly freed African slaves wander into the city.  Isolated, cut off from memory, having forgotten the names of the gods and only guessing at their faces, they arrived dazed and stunned, their heart kicking in their chest with a song worth singing.  They arrive carrying Bibles and guitars, their pockets lined with the dust and fresh hope, marked men and women seeking to scrape from the narrow, crooked cobbles and the fiery blasts of the coke furnace a way of bludgeoning and shaping the malleable parts of themselves in a new identity as free men of definite and sincere worth.

Foreigners in a strange land, they carry as part and parcel of their baggage a long line of separation and dispersement which informs their sensibilities and marks their conduct as they search for ways to reconnect, to reassemble, to give clear and illuminous meaning to the song which is both a wail and a whelp of joy. (August Wilson, Joe Turner's Come and Gone)

Treemonisha by Scott Joplin

A wonderful opera, it is rarely performed for reasons that escape me. It is a musical masterpiece of the beginning of the 20th century by the great ragtime musician and composer Scott Joplin.

Interestingly, Scott Joplin finished Treemonisha in 1910 and it was first published in 1911. It was never produced during his lifetime. The sole performance was a concert read-through with piano in 1915 at the Lincoln Theatre in Harlem, funded by Joplin himself.

Later, Katherine Dunham directed its world premiere in 1970 in Atlanta. From time to time it has been produced since then in small productions around the country. The interesting thing about the date of 1911 is that Joe Turner's Come and Gone is also set in 1911.

Synopsis: "The opera is concerned with the plight of the newly-freed slaves who, because they lack education, fall easy prey to conjurers and superstition. The story takes place after the American Civil War, on a plantation in the South. Treemonisha -- found under a sacred tree as an orphan -- is a young girl who is the only educated person in her black community. She refuses to accept the superstitions of her people. Angry with her denouncements, the conjurers-men who make their living by preying on the superstitions of others-kidnap her. As they are about to thrust her into a wasp's nest, her boyfriend Remus rescues her. She then returns to her people, and they ask her to be their leader. At the end of the opera, she prepares to embark on an educational campaign. The liberation of a people through education and the concept of women's liberation are the crux of Joplin's message. Joplin focuses on the need for education to eradicate prejudice, superstition, and ignorance."

This performance which is available on videotape, is an excellent job from the Houston Grand Opera on PBS Great Performances in 1986. Citation is available on IMDB at http://akas.imdb.com/title/tt0459664/

The cast includes Obba Babatunde as Zodzetrick, Delores Ivory as Monisha and Carmen Balthrop as Treemonisha.

A little bit more on this on the Blues People-The Music blog at:

http://blackandbluesmusic.blogspot.com/2009/04/treemonisha-by-scott-joplin.html

This is a pretty good link who anybody who needs to know something about Joplin fairly quickly.  There's a lot to know. 

100 Years of the Maple Leaf Rag by Rex Levang

http://music.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/9905_ragtime/index.shtml#timeline

African Americans and WWI

World War I is an important topic in understanding the nexus of blues people aesthetics and the history of African Americans in the 20th Century.  I knew this but couldn't explain how I knew it until I begun to really dig for some way to clearly represent this to an audience of students.

I started with a series of unconnected pieces, clues really: the fact that my great Uncle Cardoza had been a soldier in WWI and been stationed in France, that I had two photographs of him in uniform at the beginning and at the close of the war, as well as many pictures of friends in his regiment.  I also knew that James Reese Europe had led the Regimental Orchestra along with Noble Sissle, and that both of them were highly productive and well documented innovators in jazz and ragtime.  When I say documented, I mean not only written documents but also photographs.  I knew that WEB Du Bois had recommended to African Americans that they fight in WWI, Close Ranks with other Americans despite the unwelcome environment of racism and Jim Crow at home, in the hopes that things would get better after the war.  

But at the same time, I came to the realization that a great deal of negativity continues to radiate around African American participation in WWI, the notion that their contribution was less than dignified, that few of them fought, that others were employed in segregated units doing labor that failed to contribute to any advancement of the race.  

I had bought second hand a series of books by Kelly Miller containing many photographs of black troops from the U.S. and from other places throughout the Diaspora, which I haven't yet  had the time to read.  Then I found Walter Dean Myers lovely little volume written with Bill Miles, the documentarian of the 369th Regiment: The Harlem Hellfighters: When Pride Met Courage.  Although it is a text intended perhaps for a high school or junior high school audience, like much that Myers does, himself a collector of black photographs, it is beautifully done.  I had not even realized that I had never known what a regiment or a platoon was and how important it was to gather these rudiments of military vocabulary to comprehend what had happened to the black soldiers in my great Uncle's unit. 

Via Walter Dean Myers' book, I discovered other references, including The Unknown Soldiers: African-American Troops in World War I by Arthur E. Barbeau and Florette Henri and Harlem's Hell Fighters: The African-American 369th Infantry in World War I by Stephen L. Harris. And so now the thing to do is to put it altogether.  

But I do think the undervaluation of African American cultural contributions in the 20th century begins with the profoundly damaging misreading of how wars have and continue to eviscerate men's bodies and souls. 

World's Fairs

There were several significant intersections of world's fairs and issues of race around the turn of the century.

At the Columbian Exposition in 1893, African American composer Scott Joplin introduced ragtime. His most popular piece, Maple Leaf Rag, is included on the cd of music which comes with the Second Edition of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature. There are two versions of the Maple Leaf Rag on the cd, including a version played by Jelly Roll Morton, with a variation that helps to explain the musical connection between ragtime to jazz.

At the Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago there was a Pavillion devoted to the Republic of Haiti. Frederick Douglass, who was then ambassador to Haiti from the United States, maintained his headquarters there with Paul Lawrence Dunbar, the young poet, acting as his assistant. Douglass was by then an enormous celebrity, highly regarded and respected universally in Chicago despite the spread of Jim Crow practices throughout the country.

Also featured at this fair was an exhibition of Aunt Jemima (played by Nancy Green) and her pancakes, as well as something called the Dahomey Village featuring a collection of people from Nigeria living in a rustic setting and presumably engaged in their normal village life. The Dahomey Village was just one of many exhibits demonstrating various primitive cultures from around the world, some of them directly resulting from the imperial exploits of the United States, others vestiges of imperial exploits of other countries. These exhibits however were confined to the Midway Plaisance where the more entertaining exhibits were made available to the public. Often these exhibits were more popular with fairgoers than the great so-called white cities composed of majestic architectural structures that were supposed to be the main events of the fair.

African Americans were given a special day at the fair, as a consequence of the protest of the lack of an African American presence at the Fair. Unfortunately Puck Magazine used this occasion as an opportunity to circulate one of the most famous of images associated with the black presence at the fair with black people gathering the free watermelons that were supposedly distributed.

Also, although Douglass visited the Dahomey Village and was well treated by the occupants, he did make statements in the press saying that their exhibit was designed to humiliate African Americans, primarily because of the relative nudity of the Africans.

There is also a story that Bert Williams and David Walker and other African American entertainers stood in for African performers until they could arrive. Once they arrived, African American performers were fascinated by the music and dance of the Africans. The result was a Broadway musical called In Dahomey written by Williams and Walker, which was a major success in 1901.

My main source for materials on African Americans and the Columbian Exposition has been "All the World is Here! The Black Presence at the White Cityby Christopher Robert Reed, Indiana University Press 2000.

Ida B. Wells, together with her husband and Frederick Douglass, wrote and circulated a pamphlet on racism, including lynchings, in the United States.*
Wells, Ida B. "The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition: The Afro-American's Contribution to Columbian Literature." Originally published 1893. Reprint ed., edited by Robert W. Rydell. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999. ISBN 0-252-06784-3.More later.

WORLD'S FAIRS

The Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 1893

Approaching the turn-of-the-century, there were many world's fairs taking place throughout Europe and the United States.  There were also fairs in the Pacific, Asia and even Africa.  Worlds fairs or expositions were a major form of popular culture dominated by the interests of the wealthy and the bourgeosie, and conceived as family entertainment.  

Much of these fairs were officially devoted to exhibitions of architecture, art, film and photography, as well as industrial and technological advances.  They included sometimes massive displays of commodities and/or raw materials gathered from successful often imperialist or colonialist military campaigns leading to the opening of new markets combined with various technological breakthroughs.  What makes these events difficult to imagine or recollect today is because we really don't have anything like them.  Probably the most similar would be the formation of a successful mall on the weekend or a car or technology fair.  

The issue of the fairs for our study relates to photography and visual art in which people of color often appeared.  Artists and photographers made images of peoples of color that was sometimes included in the exhibitions.  Frances Benjamin Johnston took pictures of black students and faculty at Hampton Institute, Tuskegee and public schools in Washington D.C. some of which were included in Du Bois's Negro Exhibit featured at the Paris Exposition.  Some of the photographers Du Bois included were black.  There was at least one black photo historian and photographer Deborah Willis has been able to identify in her book on the subject and in her remarks concerning the collection of the exhibited photographs and documents deposited at the Library of Congress.  

The fairs continue in interest throughout the turn-of-the-century beginning with the Columbian Exposition in 1893 where Frederick Douglass, who was then ambassador to Haiti was permanently stationed in the Haitian Pavillion.  Paul Lawrence Dunbar served as his young assistant.  George Walker and Bert Williams were among the American performers who substituted for the Africans who had not yet arrived to populate the Dahomey Village.  Once the members of this incorporated village had arrived, Walker and Williams stayed around to observe the music and the dance, prompting them to construct the highly successful show In Dahomey, which toured Europe and had a successful run on Broadway. 

Human exhibitions were also a major part of what took place at these fairs.  These were exhibitions in which people were presented engaged in typical activities usually from someplace recently the object of military conquest. For instance there were displays of Native American villages, Asian cities and a "Dahomey Village."  In St. Louis there was a display of a group of Pygmies.  Sometimes these displays were incorporated as regular traveling units and they would go from fair to fair for hire.  

Two years after the Columbian Exposition in 1895 at the much more racially segregated Atlanta Cotton Exposition, a "Negro Department" with its own building was featured. Booker T. Washington made his famous Address compromising the political and intellectual aspirations of African Americans at this very same fair. 

Du Bois's Negro Exhibition--1900 Paris Exposition

This link will take you to a selection of photographs from the Negro Exhibition as composed by W.E.B. Du Bois (the author of Souls of Black Folk) and installed at the Exposition Universelle in Paris of 1900. The entire collection of photographs are publicly available online at the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

These photographs are composed of a variety of image types. They include portraits of graduating classes at black colleges, individual three-quarter portraits, images of run-down black communities, successful black businesses, buildings of black colleges, black businesses and black churches. Not much is known about most of the photographers who took the pictures or the people in the photographs but Deborah Willis has related that which is known at the website at the Library of Congress. And I am sure there will be more information forthcoming as people learn of these images from 1900.  For instance, there is one photograph of the offices of Pauline Hopkin's The Colored American.

These photographs were composed and exhibited just three years before DuBois published Souls of Black Folk.  Part of the response of some of the leading citizens of the black community to Jim Crow segregation and genocide was to build a separate set of resources and communities in which every effort was made to provide equal facilities especially for the young people of these communities, particularly given the obvious implications of the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court Decisions, known to many as "the separate but equal" decision. 

The photographs gathered by Du Bois and exhibited in Paris document that effort.   Nonetheless, the tragedy of this period is that the "separate but equal" approach only resulted in more inequality at every conceivable level.  Du Bois suggests in The Souls of Black Folk, citizens protect their rights through the use of the ballot. Without the ballot any minority population is defenseless and will incur outright hostility rather than support.  Or at least this seems to be the way it went. 

Another aspect of interest from a racial standpoint were the many entertainment features of the fairs, often located in their own section called the Midway at the Columbian Exposition and the Pike at the St. Louis Fair of 1904.  Also, President McKinley was murdered at the 1901 Buffalo Fair.

1904 St. Louis World's Fair.  Photographs by Frances Benjamin Johnston.  The Midway was called the Pike in St. Louis.

Native American Rider at Pan-American Exhibition, Buffalo 1901.  

The Crowd at the St. Louis Fair.  Photographs by Frances Benjamin Johnston.

Negro Exhibition at the Paris Exposition 1900

Photograph taken by Frances Benjamin Johnston of a class in telephone electronics at Hampton Institute, including in the Negro Exhibition in Paris.

The Print & Photo Online Catalogue--African American Photos for Paris Exposition 1900

The Negro Exhibition Complied by WEB Du Bois

Negro Exhibition Diagram, 1900 Library of Congress, Washington D.C.

Souls of Black Folk is now available in so many different editions that it is impossible to keep track of them all plus their various additions to the text but The Illustrated Souls of Black Folk edited and annotated by Eugene F. Provenzo Jr. is a particular favorite of mine because of its use of photographs and other materials stemming from The Negro Exhibition, which Du Bois compiled for the Paris Exposition of 1900.

Du Bois's purpose was to document for the world the economic and educational advances African Americans had made since their Emancipation from slavery in the United States of America. That Du Bois used photography the way he did at the turn-of-the century had much to do with recent advances in the technology of photography and its popularization via the blossoming popular culture of world's fairs and the related media of the illustrated press, journalism, postcards and film.

Cameras and the film needed to produce photographs were becoming increasingly accessible in middle class and working class communities. Providing the services of a photographic studio where one could purchase a portrait of oneself or of one's family was becoming a popular business in urban black communities as well as in cities all over the world of every description.

These photographs Du Bois commissioned and compiled of black businesses, black churches, black schools, and their occupants were the beginning of a trend in African American popular culture that would continue from the turn-of-the-century through the 1960s. As other media would increase in popularity in mainstream American culture, photography would not be displaced in black communities until much later because blacks had significantly less access to the mainstream of popular culture as represented by the corporatization of film, television, publishing and the mainstream press.

Only since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s have blacks had even hypothetical access to "mainstream" media. What they had instead was a separate press, separate towns, schools, and a largely separate (but not equal) popular culture, albeit in all aspects of performance, particularly musical performance. Ironically, with the success of the Civil Rights Movement came the collapse of much of this separate culture. As is common with popular culture generally, a lot of it has been lost without documentation partly because little value had been placed on it before.

With the rise of a computer technology and the internet, the possibility of making available to researchers generally the record that does survive has intersected with the rise of an audience which values these materials.

Among the textual materials supplementing Souls in Provenzo's version are:

1) "The Emancipation Proclamation"

2) "An Act to Establish a Bureau for the Relief of Freedmen and Refugees"

3) Booker T. Washington's "Atlanta Exposition Speech" (a portion of which is included on the spoken word cd)

4) Du Bois's essay "The Talented Tenth"

5) Booker T Washington's "Nineteenth Annual Report of the Principal of Tuskeegee Normal and Industrial Institute"

6) Ida B. Wells' "Tortured and Burned Alive"; "

7) Du Bois's Atlanta University Report on "The Negro in the Black Belt"

8) Du Bois Crisis editorial "Colored Men Lynched Without Trial"

9) Selections from Du Bois' The Philadelphia Negro10) Thomas Wentworth Higginson's "Negro Spirituals"

The quality of illustration is very poor but the choices are interesting and instructive at least to me, never having had minimal access to any of this material prior to the rise of the internet and the two years I spent at Cornell University as a Visiting Professor, which gave me my first real access as an insider to a world class research library since the time I briefly spent in the early 80s at Yale University.

 Provenzo reproduces via photocopy some of the actual pages of Du Bois's exhibition, some actual images and photographs taken from the pages of The Crisis, the journal Du Bois created under the auspices of the NAACP founded in 1906. Provenzo also includes sheet music covers, political cartoons and illustrations, and 19th century photographs taken from publications dealing with topics discussed in The Souls of Black Folk.

Professor Eugene Provenzo is also the author of a particularly useful reconstruction of the Negro Exhibition online at http://www.education.miami.edu/ep/Paris/home.htm.  As he notes although much of the material contained in the Exhibition are available in the photo archives of the Library of Congress there are some missing pieces.

Wiliam Edgar Burghhardt Du Bois, "The American Negro at Paris."  The American Monthly Review of Reviews, Vol. XXII, New York, November 1900, #5, pp. 575-577.

Jim Crow Cartoon

Don't know anything yet about the origin of this cartoon but I got it from The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow site produced by PBS for a documentary and book of the same name. This illustration appears in the book as well but in black and white. In the documentary, it is in full color but it goes by in a flash, owing probably to its provocative nature. When such an image is exhibited today, no one wishes to take responsibility for the thought it seems to express.
In any case, it isn't entirely clear what the illustrator is getting at. The point of view is conflicted it seems as reflected by the stereotypical way in which the woman who is speaking by virtue of her language in dialect and the portrayal of her features. On the other hand, freedom is the subject of the cartoon with clear illustrations that all the benefits of society are closed to her by the practice of segregation in the South, and that the creator of the cartoon disapproves of such restrictions on the former slave's freedom.
It is often assumed that the stereotypical portrayal of blacks or the portrayal of blacks by whites in black face equals hatred for blacks and the belief that they are intellectually and socially inferior but what is considered superior in a woman at this time: she's dainty, frail, helpless and useless, to be placed on a pedestal. She has no vote and for the most part she is restricted from working. Her freedom is her husband's to give and take. Whereas this particular black woman is a large, strong, independent figure. Mentally she is easily baffled but physically she is obviously well endowed. So therein lies the conundrum of racism. What does the racist want? We're never quite sure.
I would date the cartoon at some point after Reconstruction heading toward the turn-of-the-century or immediately after.

Negro Exhibit at the Paris Exposition

This link will take you to a selection of photographs from the Negro Exhibition as composed by W.E.B. Du Bois (the author of our first book--Souls of Black Folk) and installed at the Exposition Universelle in Paris of 1900. The entire collection of photographs are publicly available online at the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

These several hundred photographs are composed of a variety of image types. They include 1) portraits of graduating classes at black colleges, individual three-quarter portraits, images of run-down black communities, successful black businesses, buildings of black colleges, black businesses and black churches. Not much is known about most of the photographers who took the pictures or the people in the photographs but Deborah Willis has related that which is known at the website at the Library of Congress. And I am sure there will be more information forthcoming as people learn of these images from 1900.

These photographs were composed and exhibited just three years before DuBois published Souls of Black Folk, and no doubt his perspective had not significantly changed in that length of time. The response of most of the leading citizens of the black community to Jim Crow segregation and genocide was to build a separate set of resources and communities in which every effort was to provide equal facilities especially for the young people of these communities. These photographs document that effort. Nonetheless, the tragedy of this period is that the "separate but equal" approach only resulted in more inequality at every conceivable level. Citizens protect their rights through the use of the ballot. Without the ballot any minority population is defenseless and will incur outright hostility rather than support.

The Sorrow Songs in Souls of Black Folk

Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God himself stamped on her bosom; the human spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty. And so by fateful chance the Negro folk-song—the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas. It has been neglected, it has been, and is, half despised, and above all it has been persistently mistaken and misunderstood; but notwithstanding, it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people.

W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903
These words are taken from the final essay in Souls on the Sorrow Songs, or the Slave Spirituals. He regards the spirit of African American culture as most epitomized by these anonymous songs composed improvisationally by the slaves, themselves, as they became Christians in a New World of deprivation and torment. While he isn't yet ready to include all of African American music and culture in his highest claims for the "Sorrow Songs," nonetheless he poses the question and the problem of racial differences one last time in this essay.

The silently growing assumption of this age is that the probation of races is past, and that the backward races of to-day are of proven inefficiency and not worth the saving. Such an assumption is the arrogance of peoples irreverent toward Time and ignorant of the deeds of men. A thousand years ago such an assumption, easily possible, would have made it difficult for the Teuton to prove his right to life. Two thousand years ago such dogmatism, readily welcome, would have scouted the idea of blond races ever leading civilization. So wofully unorganized is sociological knowledge that the meaning of progress, the meaning of "swift" and "slow" in human doing, and the limits of human perfectability, are veiled, unanswered sphinxes on the shores of science. Why should AEschylus have sung two thousand years before Shakespeare was born? Why has civilization flourished in Europe, and flickered, flamed, and died in Africa? So long as the world stands meekly dumb before such questions, shall this nation proclaim its ignorance and unhallowed prejudices by denying freedom of opportunity to those who brought the Sorrow Songs to the Seats of the Mighty?

Passage also taken from "Of the Sorrow Songs" in Souls of Black Folk.

     African American music has a tendency toward spiritual inflection and in such cases listening is like being in a time machine. In some cases it seems almost as though the chords or the tone transports the listener back into the history, in particular of slavery and Jim Crow persecution.  This seems to me the case regardless the rendition of presentation--whether it is gospel, primitive ring shout or operatic (as it was with the original Jubilee singers and subsequent performance groups).  "Authentic" American music and folk culture is made up of a mysterious amalgam of black and white, sacred and profane, formal and vernacular.  Du Bois' elitism in this regard signals the always present anxieties of the determination in African American pronouncements on the topic.

Chronology: 1861-1909

1861--Southern States form Confederacy in response to election of Abraham Lincoln as President. Civil War begins.
**Confederate States/Territories:Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, California, Louisiana, Indian (later Oklahoma) and New Mexico Territories--a total of 14
**Union States/Territories:New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Delaware, Connecticut, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Iowa, Kansas, Oregon, West Virginia, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Rhode Island, Maryland, District of Columbia, Washington, Utah, Nebraska and Colorado Territories--a total of 28

1863--Lincoln issues Emancipation Proclamation, declaring slaves in Confederate "rebellious" states "forever free." 186,000 African Americans enlist during the final two years of the Civil War.

1865--Unions wins the Civil War. Lincoln assassinated. Southern states enact "Black Codes." Congress passes 13th Amendment outlawing slavery.

1866--Congress passes 14th Amendment granting citizenship to African Americans. Reconstruction begins. Ku Klux Klan formed in Tennessee. Congress authorizes four black units to fight Indians in the West. Dubbed "Buffalo Soldiers" by Native Americans.

1868--W.E.B. Du Bois born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts only child of Alfred Du Bois and Mary Silvina Burghardt.

1869--Congress passes 15th Amendment giving black men the vote.

1870-1871 Congress passes Federal Ku Klux Klan Acts to protect black voters.

1875--The State of Tennessee is the first to institute Jim Crow (segregation) Law.

1877--Federal Troops withdraw from the South; Reconstruction ends.

1880--60,000 "exodusters" leave Nashville for Kansas to escape Jim Crow.

1880--Slavery abolished in Cuba.

1884--European nations convene in Berlin and divide the continent of Africa into colonies.

1884--Du Bois graduates from high school, the only black student in a class of 13.

1888--Slavery abolished in Brazil.

1890--Du Bois awarded B.A. cum laude in philosophy at Harvard. Begins graduate school at Harvard in political science. Frances Harper publishes her novel IOLA LEROY.

1890-- (Jim Crow Law) Segregation is made law in the state of Mississippi. Begins to use literacy tests to disenfranchise black voters.

1892--Du Bois visits 12 year old Helen Keller (blind and deaf child) at her school in Boston with the philosopher and Harvard Professor William James (brother of Henry James).

1892--Ida B. Wells begins her anti-lynching campaign in response to the lynching of three of her friends in Memphis, Tennessee.

1893--Colombian Exposition in Chicago: Frederick Douglass headquarters at Haitian Pavilion with Paul Lawrence Dunbar as his assistant; Dahomey Village inspired IN DAHOMEY, a Broadway show by Bert Williams and George Walker; the debut of Nancy Green as Aunt Jemima, the pancake queen. Henry O. Tanner's "The Banjo Lesson" is included in the American art exhibition.

1895--Atlanta Compromise speech by Booker T. Washington at the Cotton Exposition, describing racial segregation as an opportunity and black suffrage as not yet necessary. Du Bois who is the first black man to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard in this same year, writes Washington a note: "Let me heartily congratulate you upon your phenomenal success at Atlanta--it was a word fitly spoken."

1896--(Jim Crow) Segregation made law in the state of Louisiana. Plessy v. Ferguson, U.S. Supreme Court upholds Jim Crow Law as constitutional.
The decision stated, "The object of the 14th Amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the war, but in the nature of things it could not have intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either."

1897--Du Bois helps to found the American Negro Academy. Delivers address, "The Conservation of Races," calling on American blacks to serve as the "advance guard" of black racial development globally "and to maintain a separate identity within American society." Becomes professor of economics and history at Atlanta University.

1898--Spanish American War. Black soldiers played a major role in the winning of the Battle at San Juan Hill, which ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris. The U.S. victory against the Spanish led to the American possession of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines and the Caroline islands, in one of the most poorly understood episodes in U.S. history.
Link: http://www.spanamwar.com/AfrcanAmericans.html

1898--Wilmington Massacre, in which Dixie Democrats violently remove Republicans from office and prevent blacks from voting.

1899--Charles Chesnutt's THE MARROW OF TRADITION published. Portrays in a novel the Wilmington Massacre.

1899--Sam Hose accused of murder and lynched in Atlanta. Du Bois recognizes that activism is unavoidable.

1900--Segregation (Jim Crow Law) begins in Texas, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia.

1900--WEB Du Bois travels by steerage to the Universelle Exposition in Paris to install the Exhibition on the Progress of African Americans. Receives gold medal. Attends first Pan-African Conference in London, and delivers speech in which he first says, "the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line."

1900--Pauline Hopkins writes and edits THE COLORED AMERICAN, an illustrated African American journal, in Boston. She also publishes her novel CONTENDING FORCES.

1901--Article defending the Freedmen's Bureau, which will later become a chapter in SOULS is published in the Atlantic Monthly in March.*

1903--WEB Du Bois publishes THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK, which brings him to national prominence and makes public his opposition to Washington's views.

1906--In homage to John Brown, the Niagara Movement first meets at Storer College in Harper's Ferry, West Virginia.

Detail from racist postcard from Rare Books, Manuscripts and Special Collections Library, Duke University, p. xii in THE RISE AND FALL OF JIM CROW by Richard Wormser, Companion Volume to PBS Series, St. Martins Press 2003.

1903-1909--Jim Crow practices (segregation) spread from Kansas to Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois and New Jersey.

1898-1909--Major race riots in Atlanta, Georgia; Wilmington, NC; Ft. Riley, Kansas, New Orleans, Louisiana; Ft Riley, Illinois, Greensburg, Indiana, Springfield, Ohio; New York, NY.

Course Readings--Section I

Basic Readings taken from---(REQUIRED TEXT)

THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE, SECOND EDITION with two audio cds of folk culture.
http://books.wwnorton.com/books/detail-contents.aspx?ID=10626

I. WEB Du Bois, SOULS OF BLACK FOLK (1903)
  Chapters I, III, IV, V, VI, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, and The After-Thought

VISUALS:

Negro Exhibit at the Paris Exposition (1900):
Archival reconstruction by Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr., School of Education, University of Miami

http://www.education.miami.edu/ep/Paris/home.htm  

African American Photographs Assembled for the Paris Exposition of 1900:
Photographs Online Catalog, Library of Congress
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/anedub/

SUPPLEMENTARY READINGS:

Thomas Jefferson, DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE (1776);

Frederick Douglass, NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS (1836)

 LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS (Excerpts) (c1890)

Harriet Jacobs, INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL (1851):

Preface, Chapters I, II, V, X, XIV, XVII, XXI, XXIX, XXXIX, XL, XLI

Harriet Wilson, OUR NIG; OR SKETCHES FROM THE LIFE OF A FREE BLACK IN A TWO STORY WHITE HOUSE, NORTH (c. 1951):

Preface, Chapters I, II, II, VIII, X and XII

Booker T. Washington, UP FROM SLAVERY (1893); Chapters I, II, III, XIV

AUDIO FILES:

Spirituals--
Ezekiel Saw De Wheel, Go Down, Mose, Been in the Storm So Long, Steal Away to Jesus, Soon I Will Be Done

Gospels--This Little Light of Mine, Take My Hand, Precious Lord

Picturing US History: Online Teaching Resource

An interactive resource for teaching history with visual evidence, http://www.picturinghistory.gc.cuny.edu includes a wonderfully lengthy list of links to American visual and cultural history online. The riches that are available here are constantly expanding. Most major universities now have such a portal gathering together and constantly adding the growing list of visual culture resources. This is our very own home grown CUNY resource at the Graduate Center. I strongly suggest drawing upon its riches as often as possible.

The latest edition is a website of the work of the important American artist Winslow Homer. There has been increasing interest in Winslow Homer, not only for his wonderful work portraying important episodes in American history, such as the Civil War and its aftermath, but also because he did such extraordinary paintings of African American and Afro-Caribbean subjects.

Frances Benjamin Johnston--Sheridan's Ride

Frances Benjamin Johnston, Children in Kernstown. 1900, Library of Congress.

comparison w/James Bland, Carry Me Back to Old Virginny--Sheet Music Cover 1906.

A few years back at the annual meeting of the College Art Association at the Hilton Hotel in New York City, I came across a little lady whom as I recall was distributing from a table a set of illustrations related to the photography of Frances Benjamin Johnston.  As it turned out this was Geraldine Wojno Kiefer, Ph.D., and Assistant Professor of Art History and Art at Shenandoah University.  Perhaps the year was 2004.  I had just moved back to the New York area, was just beginning to probe the mysteries of the powerpoint application.  I was in the process of teaching then my Talking in Pictures course looking at the intersections of race, gender and American photography.  It was already clear that Johnston was a major figure in that world for a number of reasons.  First because of her historical pictures of students and faculty at historically black colleges, including Tuskegee and Hampton, as well as her major input as a woman photographer at the turn-of-the-century and her participation in photography exhibits at various world's fairs.

I have been browsing the PowerPoint's she gave me that day on and off since then, and picked them up again as the Hampton Album came up in its rightful place alongside Du Bois's Negro Exhibition at the Paris Exposition of 1900.  Using Johnston's work has been difficult for me for the simple reason that she was white, and African American photography is by definition something that only an African American can do.  Yet here was Johnston right in the middle of photography of historical black schools at the turn-of-the-century.  Obviously she was a racial voice (or as some prefer to say for some reason, "racialized"), but was she perhaps on the wrong side of things?  Most scholars I have read have concluded as much but I still am not sure whether the subjectivity of the photographer is among the most important things we can say about a photograph.  A photograph can be a work of original art but it isn't necessarily.  Even if and when it is a work of art, it is also a technological intervention.  And, significantly, it is a form of evidence.  

Especially Johnston's photographs were decidedly evidential in their conception and execution.  In order words, they were deliberately designed to function as evidence.  Helping to convince me of this is the study of Kiefer's PowerPoint presentations on Johnston's contribution to a photo-essay called "The Country of Sheridan's Ride" published in The Ladies Home Journal

It is composed of a centerfold layout of a series of pictures houses and landscapes along the route of General Philip Sheridan's 1864 ride to Winchester, along the Valley Turnpike between Winchester and Middletown in Virginia as part of a successful Union campaign in the Civil War.  

Johnston's photographs of the roads, lakes, toll bridges, landscapes, houses and children (many of them black) as they were in 1901, participating in a national campaign of memorializing the landscape of the Civil War, honoring the history and commodifying its recovery.  Kiefer worries that Johnston was helping to further mystify the racial significance of the Civil War in favor of a racist romanticism emphasizing the healing of relations between white Northerners and Southerners.  But the thing I notice about it, as well as much of the celebration of the conclusion of the war prior to 1910, was the focus was on Union victories and a Northern interpretation of events.  It seems to me that the David Blight reading of the cult of the Lost Cause is actually something that emerges as a distinct problem subsequent to the successes of Thomas Dixon's plays "The Leopard's Spots" and "The Klansman," and it really explodes with the hit of D.W. Griffith's collaboration with Dixon on The Birth of a Nation.

Left: Log House in Giles County, Photographs, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, Va.

Right: Frances Benjamin Johnston, Photographs.  In The Ladies Home Journal, Vol. 18, No. 8 (July 1901), 17.

Left: Henry Fenn, Richmond. Wood Engraving.  Picturesque America in The Land We Live In, ed. William Cullen Bryant, Vol. I, New York: D. Appleton Company, 1872, 80.

Center: Harry Fenn, A Glimpse of Charlestown and Boy from the Town of St. Michael's Church. Wood engraving. Picturesque America. Vol I., 201.

Right: Frances Benjamin Johnston, The Children 1901.

Frances Benjamin Johnston Photos of Children, 1900.  Library of Congress.

Left: Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1st Toll Gate out of Winchester.

Center: Frances Benjamin Johnston, Snicker's Gap, Tollgate.  Along the Road.  At Stop at a Tollgate. Right: Town, Now Steven's City.  Tollgate Road. 1900.

Double Spread Layout in Ladies Home Journal, 1901.  Nostalgia for Sheridan's Ride in the Civil War, romanticizing the victory of the Union over the Confederacy in the Old South.  

The Hampton Album

I would like to dedicate this post to former student and colleague Stacy Williams who first introduced me to the Hampton Album and Frances Benjamin Johnston's photographs.  Also, I would like to thank student Fabienne Snowden for drawing my attention to articles on Hampton photographs by Jeannene M. Przyblyski and Ramona Austin.

When I first saw these and other pictures of blacks and Native Americans sharing classrooms at Hampton Institute at the turn of the 20th century, I knew nothing whatsoever about the photographer or where or how they were taken. Nonetheless I was immediately struck by the realization as a cultural historian that the presence of photographs as a form of historical evidence completely changed one's perspective on both literature and events.

This particular set of photographs was first widely seen as a result of an exhibition curated by John Szarkowski, Curatorial Director of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1966.  The source of the 60 or so featured photographs was a much larger scrapbook of 150 photographs purchased by Lincoln Kirsten in a secondhand bookstore in Washington, D.C. some time before.  It seemed very much as though the scrapbook, one of the three which were known to still exist--the other two at the Library of Congress in the Frances Benjamin Johnston Collection of Photographs and as part of the photographic collection of Hampton University--had come into being as a form of illustrating to perspective sponsors the range of programs at the institution.  Johnston charged $1000 for the services of herself and her assistant, who was apparently her mother.  She spent the month of December 1899 as well as some of January carefully executing the job, during which she extensively photographed both African American and Native American students and white instructors at Hampton.

In one photograph, which helps to give you a true sense of the scope of the project, Johnston photographs the entire student body and faculty assembled in a major hall at Hampton.  All the photographs were no doubt taken with available light and with long exposures which would have required that subjects maintain their pose for a period of time, thus accounting for the precise almost clinical angularity of many of the images.  The people in the pictures figure little as emotional individuals (causing some to read the photographs only in terms of the racism of the conditions that produced them).  Yet the youthful vigor, beauty and intelligence of the people in the pictures is superbly illustrated.  The human face and body is, itself, a form of expression virtually impossible to suppress or denature.

The exhibition catalogue was named The Hampton Album, now out-of-print but widely available in the second-hand book market online (http://www.abe.com).  These photographs we learned were taken by Frances Benjamin Johnston, a white female photographer who took many pictures of Native American and African American institutions of learning around the turn-of-the-century, as well as photographs of the Washington elite including the family of then president Theodore Roosevelt.  Later she would become better known as a photographer of architecture but around the turn of the century, her photography frequently implies particular associations with the racial politics of the period, as one can gather from the writings of a range cultural history scholars about her.

But my immediate interest is in her photographs of educational practices at the turn-of-the-century, and in particular her photographs of the Hampton Institute (the school that Booker T. Washington attended), Tuskegee (the school Washington created), and the Carlisle Indian School.  To see these photographs, to observe their quiet beauty and discipline is to partake something of the difficulties encountered by attempts to educated the children of the  former slaves.  Not only did Johnston document the programs of these institutions for all time but further, apparently her work as a photographer inspired programs in photography at both Hampton and Tuskegee.  At Hampton Johnston's presence coincided with the early activity of a group of faculty who called themselves the Hampton Camera Club, and who subsequently illustrated many issues of The Southern Workman (the house publication of Hampton) as well as several books by Paul Lawrence Dunbar, a famous African American poet at the turn-of-the-century.  At Tuskegee, Johnston no doubt helped to inspire the founding of a photography program at Tuskegee.  Washington seems to have been acutely aware of the potential educational and propaganda value of photography and of black photographers.  

When we turn to the pivotal figure of WEB Du Bois, we find someone who organized a major exhibition of photography known as the "Negro Exhibition" to represent the advances and conditions of African Americans at the Paris Exposition in 1900.  He would also use photography extensively in his campaign for the dignity of African Americans as editor of The Crisis, the publication of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People).

"About 400 Students in Memorial Chapel" in 1900.



"John Wizi, Sioux. Son of Chief Wizi of Crow Creek, S.D." as cited in The Hampton Album.

Young Native American student (in traditional dress in other photograph) with conventional haircut and dress at Hampton 1900, Library of Congress.  

See source at: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3b41032.

"Geography. Studying the Seasons." Hampton 1900.

REFERENCES:

Bettina Berch, The Woman behind the Lens: The Life and Work of Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1864-1952. Charlottesville and London: The University Press of Virginia, 2000.

Max Bennett Thrasher, Tuskegee: Its Story and Its Work (1900), North Stratford, NH: Ayer Company Publishers, Inc. Reprint Edition 2000.

James Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

The Hampton Album, 44 Photographs by Frances B. Johnston from an album of Hampton Institute with an introduction and a note on the photographer by Lincoln Kirstein, The Museum of Modern Art, New York 1966.

Jeannene M. Przyblyski, "American Visions at the Paris Exposition, 1900: Another Look at Frances Benjamin Johnston's Hampton Photographs," Art Journal, Vol. 57, No. 3 (Autumn 1998), pp. 61-68. College Art Association.  http://www.jstor.org/stable/777972

Ramona Austin, "An Extraordinary Generation; The Legacy of William Henry Sheppard, The 'Black Livingstone' of Africa," Afrique & Histoire 2000 no. 4, 74-101.

CHRONOLOGY CONTINUED

This photograph by Frances Benjamin Johnston taken in 1899 of a class of African American and Native American students at Hampton Institute engaged in the study of the traditional costume of a fellow classmate I have chosen to spearhead the Blues People Curriculum for this semester. It was this very photograph, which has been widely reproduced and misinterpreted by American Studies scholars, that has played a key role in the formation of my current conception of the role played by historically Black Colleges, the Blues, and the lives of such extraordinary figures as WEB Du Bois, Booker T. Washington and Ida B. Wells in creating the cultural signature of a people who had once been slaves, whose image was once reviled, but whose legacy has inspired struggles for freedom and democracy all over the world. 

Just by way of explanation of what is going on in this picture.  Hampton University had a Museum, to which were donated artifacts of African and Native American tribes, often as gifts from the students or their parents.  

In this picture I would propose that the young man in Native American costume is actually John Wizi, son of Chief Wizi of Cross Creek, South Dakota.  His presentation in the album elsewhere in Western dress and haircut suggests perhaps that he was an influential person among the students.  As is often the case, the commentary included with the pictures is unreliable and impressionistic.  In another photograph of Native American students, of which there were a great many in the original scrapbook but very few of which were used in the Album, there is a shot of the "Indian Orchestra," one of whom might also be John Wizi, in the center in the back on a large drum. 

Also, Hampton held pageants in which the native dress of Africans and Native Americans were a key aspect of the program, as described in the chapter on the Hampton Museum in ART/Artifact: African Art in Anthropology Collections, The Center for African Art & Prestel Verlag, 1989.  William Sheppard, a Hampton graduate visited the "Belgian" Congo as a missionary and ultimately devoted his important collection of Kuba art to the Hampton Museum, as well as also becoming one of the leading voices condemning King Leopold's persecution of the people of the Congo.  This is just part of the story of the connection between historically black colleges and the Congo as described by Professor Ira Dworkin in his dissertation in the English Ph.D. Program at the CUNY Graduate Center, 1999.  

1909--NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ) is founded in order to attack segregation, lynching and race riots.  Du Bois hired as Director of publications and research.  Moves to New York to found, edit and write The Crisis, the monthly magazine of the NAACP.

1910--National Urban League founded to direct migrants from the South to jobs, housing and education.

1912--Jelly Roll Morton publishes his first song, "The Jelly Roll Blues."

1913--Du Bois writes and stages The Star of Ethiopia, a pageant celebrating black history to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the emanicipation.
[Photo]

1914--Du Bois supports women's suffrage in CRISIS editorial.

1915--NAACP Campaigns actively against the public exhibition of THE BIRTH OF A NATION

1917--Marcus Garvey founded the UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association)

1918--Du Bois writes "Close Ranks" editorial in THE CRISIS urging black men to enlist to fight in WWI in exchange for their liberty at home.

"Let Us while this war last, forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our whhite fellow citizens and the alllied nations that are fighting for democracy."

WEB Du Bois, 1917

COURSE READINGS--SECTION II

II. Jean Toomer, Cane (1923)
The Jean Toomer Pages, University of Buffalo 1996

Visuals: James VanDerZee, Aaron Douglas, Aspects of Negro Life (1934)
Music:St. Louis Blues, dir. Dudley Murphy with Bessie Smith (1929)Louis Armstrong Collection: Dinah, On the Waterfront, Black and Blues, A Sleepy Time Down South III.

III. Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues (1926)

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poetsg_l/hughes/weary.htm

SUPPLEMENTARY READING:"

Yale University Beinecke Library: "Langston Hughes at 100 http:/highway49.library.yale.edu/langstonhughes/web.html

IV. Vernacular Culture Section--African American Literature/Norton Anthology, 2nd Edition

Mahalia Jackson, "Soon I Will Be Gone," on The Norton Anthology Audiotape

VI. Richard Wright, "The Man Who Lived Underground" (1941) in Eight Men

Zora Neale Hurston's Florida

In color photographs taken by Marion Wolcott and publically available at the Library of Congress, one gets to see something of how people lived in Florida in the period of her writings in Mules and Men and Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Not that people didn't have the good times she talked about.  Just that you need to imagine this setting as you are imagining her world.  This is Belle Glade, Florida in 1944.

See also my Talking in Pictures post on Zora Neale Hurston and Marion Wolcott.