O Say Can You See?

From the low point of American race relations: Dr. Carter Woodson's Negro History Week

When there were no academic journals to counter racist scholarship, Dr. Carter G. Woodson created one. When no professional presses that would accept materials about African Americans, he founded one. Fellow Kimberly D. Brown explores Woodson and the origins of Black History Month.

 

Portrait of Dr. Carter Woodson by the Scurlock Studio in Washington, D.C. Scurlock Studio Records, ca. 1905-1994, Archives Center, National Museum of American History

Eminent scholar and social activist W.E.B. DuBois lauded Negro History Week as the greatest achievement to arise from the Black Renaissance of the 1920s in his 1940 book Dusk of Dawn. Known as Black History Month today, it carries the incandescent legacy of its creator, Dr. Carter G. Woodson.

Dr. Carter Goodwin Woodson legitimized and popularized the history of African American people through his establishment of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH, referred to today as the Association for the Study of African American Life and History) in 1915 and the organization's subsequent launch of Negro History Week in February 1926. When mainstream history either largely ignored or debased the Black presence in the American narrative, Dr. Woodson labored to inject a fair portrayal of African Americans into the national record.

 

9th St. home of the Association for the Study of Negro History in Washington, D.C. Founded by Dr. Woodson. Scurlock Studio Records, ca. 1905-1994, Archives Center, National Museum of American History.

A Harvard graduate, Dr. Woodson produced his dissertation with university professors Edward Channing and Albert Bushnell Hart, as committee member and dissertation advisor respectively. The two plainly expressed their convictions about African Americans as inferior. Hart paternalistically encouraged education as a mechanism for improving what he believed was an innate intellectual inadequacy within African Americans. Channing bluntly argued that the Negro had no history and, according to Woodson, found laughable the idea of Crispus Attucks and his role in the Boston Massacre as an important contribution to the independence of the country. Channing challenged Woodson to undertake research that the Negro had a history.

Woodson, however, had taken up that challenge long before arriving at Harvard and continued to do so for the rest of his life as an educator and prolific scholar. He meticulously researched, wrote, and published innumerable works on almost every aspect of Black life. Despite his earliest efforts taking place during what many scholars refer to as the "nadir," or lowest point, in American race relations, his work sparked a mass movement to recognize and celebrate Black resilience in and contributions to the United States. When there were no academic journals to counter racist scholarship, he created one. When there were no professional presses that would accept materials about African Americans, he created one. The Journal of Negro History, Associated Publishers, and what became known as "Black History Month" are among the crown jewels of his legacy.

 

A 1984 stamp commemorating Dr. Woodson. U.S. Postal Service. All rights reserved.

Still, Woodson viewed a yearly emphasis during one week (or now, during one month) as entirely missing the charge, which was to use the week as an overview of what should have been taught throughout the year, not to compensate for what was not. His mission was, "emphasize not Negro History, but the Negro in history." In other words, one cannot understand the foundation of American government, tax structure, or changing legislative developments without understanding slavery, its economic implications, and heavy influence on political party identity. Civil War figures, such as Stephen A. Douglas and President Abraham Lincoln, go misunderstood without proper evaluation of their relationships with Black people. Science and technology, business and capitalism, Hollywood and popular media, urbanization, and foreign policies will never be fully comprehended without consideration to the Black presence in America.

Now, in 2015, the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History will stand on the foundation of public access to Black history that Dr. Woodson built. May we all be moved to keep building the house of preservation and acknowledgement, even if it's just by just sharing the history of Black History Month.

Kimberly D. Brown is a Ph.D. Candidate at Howard University and museum fellow. Stay tuned for her second blog post on "Miss Negro History Week." Dr. Woodson's home is a National Park Service National Histori Site. 

The true meaning of voice

Editor’s note: Today’s post is written by a student at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC. This spring, Professor Amy Stevens’ civil rights course at Gallaudet attended a performance of Join the Student Sit-Ins in the museum.

Imagine having separate churches, separate deli shops, and even separate bathrooms for two races—whites and blacks—in 2012. It is amazing how historical events are responsible for what we are able to access as a whole community today.

Our civil rights class traveled to the National Museum of American History to get a better understanding of the student sit-in protests that happened in 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina. This matched our course objective: to look at historical events and see how they impact us today.

The event nationally known as the “Greensboro Sit-In” was a time when students knew it was their chance to fight for social change in a non-violent manner. Their intentions were not only to benefit their community, but for the entire nation to gain equal access instead of having “separate but equal” facilities. If these civil rights activists did not take a stand, we would continue having “separate but equal” situations.

The performance of Join the Student Sit-Ins was a phenomenal experience for me as a college student. At the beginning of the demonstration, the actor playing the role of a female student organizer asked the audience for four volunteers to sit in the “sit-in” chairs. She then had the remaining audience (about 50-60 people) approach the four volunteers and stand as close as possible to each of them. This created an uncomfortable environment full of emotions. Imagine that many people breathing down each volunteer’s neck.

When the audience returned to their seats, the student organizer asked the audience how it felt. One person responded that it felt very powerful to have a large group of people unified with one belief against the small group (the four volunteers). The student organizer asked the four volunteers how it felt to have the whole audience getting up close in their personal space. The volunteers admitted it was very emotional and terrifying because the whole audience was united against the four volunteers who were peacefully sitting in their chairs.

Amy Stevens’ Gallaudet University class with actor Lauren Davis. The author is second from the left in the front row.

In the performance, “voice” is obviously emphasized as an important tool. As Gallaudet students looking back at our own deaf history, the deaf community has fought for its own voice throughout history. For example, in 1988 students at Gallaudet united to fight for “Deaf President Now.” We wanted an ASLpresident to lead the university. Through student-led protests, Gallaudet appointed its first deaf president in the university’s 124-year history.

In retrospect, I personally cannot forget when the actor told us, “You can actually die just by peacefully protesting.” Your life is at risk, just for standing up for the community. Join the Student Sit-Ins exceeded my expectations and the performance was more memorable than a regular walk through the museum.

Thanks to Professor Stevens, who encouraged us to witness the performance. Also thanks to the actor who did such an amazing job helping us find our own connections to the history of the sit-in protests.

Tiasha Bera is a student at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC.

 

Inspiration from the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides

One of the things I love most about being a public historian at the nation’s history museum is how the past comes to life every day. As the director of the museum’s Program in African American Culture, I have had the privilege of meeting people who made history and changed the destiny of this nation. For more than 30 years, the Program has documented and shared the story of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s through living testimony from folks who were there. The countless stories and courageous decisions we have presented show this movement was about so much more than the few remarkable people whose names we all know.

As we have marked the passing of fifty years since this staggering uprising of ordinary Americans, I have talked with dozens of people whose courage and commitment forced our nation to come closer to living up to its ideals. I’ve met people like the Greensboro Four and Rev. James Lawson, whose bravery and resolve seemed breathtaking and otherworldly to me in high school when I saw their grainy images on news footage in documentaries like Eyes on the Prize. I’ve met people, like Mabel Williams, whose militancy seemed frightening and off-putting when I read about them in college. And I’ve met people like Rosa Parks and Congressman John Lewis, whose intelligence, determination, and selfless passion for justice would make anyone think “I could never be like that.”

Today is a good day to remember that we all have the capacity to take our citizenship and ideals to heart and have the power to make a tangible difference in the course of history. Fifty years ago today, two ordinary buses left Washington headed south. In addition to the regular passengers who rode on them were a group of activists known as the Freedom Riders. Riding together in interracial groups on buses and trains, they put their bodies and freedom on the line by challenging Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation in interstate travel.

During the spring and summer of 1961, more than 400 Americans became Freedom Riders. Young and old, male and female, black, white, and Asian, religious and secular, Southern and non-Southern – the Riders represented a cross section of America. Criticized by some for disrupting the social order and engaging in civil disobedience, the Riders were actually doing exactly what the United States Supreme Court said they had a right to do. While Southern officials chose to ignore two Supreme Court rulings that struck down racial segregation on interstate buses and trains, and in the terminal waiting rooms, restaurants, and restrooms that served interstate travelers, the Freedom Riders were determined to exercise their constitutional right to sit and eat where they pleased. They did so knowing full well that the simple act of violating long-held traditions of racial segregation and white supremacy would almost certainly lead to arrest and imprisonment, and might even cost them their lives. Propelled by faith in nonviolence and the hope that the country could be awakened to the promise of democratic renewal and social justice, the Riders endured beatings, bombings, harassment, and imprisonment. In the process, they drew the Kennedy administration into the gathering movement for civil rights and, even more importantly, demonstrated the power of ordinary people to effect great social change.

Congressman John Lewis, filmmaker Stanley Nelson, Diane Nash, Revered James Lawson, Jim Zwerg, and historian Ray Arsenault take the stage at the 2011 National Youth Summit.

In February the Smithsonian hosted a National Youth Summit, in collaboration with the National Endowment for the Humanities and WGBH/American Experience, which brought together middle and high school students here, online, and at the Japanese American National Museum, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, the Senator John Heinz History Center, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, and the Arab American National Museum to meet Freedom Riders and discuss the role of young people in shaping history. I entered the planning for this event with one real hero among the Riders: Diane Nash. As a teenager, the image of the young Nash persuading the mayor of Nashville to admit the injustice of segregation in front of news cameras in 1960 captivated me. Who was this Fisk University student with grace and strength enough to bend her oppressors toward justice? After meeting her, she’s even more of a hero to me and I wish for every young person the opportunity to be inspired by her story. I came out of the last year working on the Freedom Rides, however, with scores of new heroes. Riders still represent America—veterans of the Rides live in communities all across the nation and they still have much to teach us. What is most inspiring about the Riders is how the ordinary can be extraordinary. These heroes are not marble models, but everyday people who lived for a history not yet written.

“The Student Leader”: a short film about Diane Nash from the movie Freedom Riders. Watch the full episode or see more American Experience.

Fifty years ago today a Greyhound bus and a Trailways bus pulled onto the highway toward New Orleans, but destined for firebombs and riots in Alabama. Their legacy lies not in the violence that stopped those two buses, but in the freedom that rose from the flames and blows. As Langston Hughes wrote, “No bomb can kill the dreams I hold, for freedom never dies.”

You can learn more about the Freedom Rides when the American Experience documentary Freedom Riders debuts on your local PBS station on May 16th. You can also watch a full archived webcast of our National Youth Summit on the Freedom Rides.

Christopher Wilson is the Director of the Program in African American Culture at the National Museum of American History.

Mary Lou Williams: Musical and social change agent

Portrait of Mary Lou Williams, CBS studio, New York, N.Y., ca. April 1947. Courtesy of William P. Gottlieb/Ira and Leonore S. Gershwin Fund Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress

Mary Lou Williams was a jazz artist who articulated the history, culture, and heritage of a people and a nation through the music she composed and performed. An All About Jazz article by writer Teri Harllee highlights Ms. Williams as the only major jazz artist whose career spanned every musical era in jazz history. As shown by our collections, we have examples of her boogie woogie music as well as later compositions that were arranged for big bands, including “Scorpio,” which she arranged for the Duke Ellington Orchestra in 1946.

Listen to the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra perform this piece on Public Radio International’s “Jazz Smithsonian” program, which originally aired on May 23, 2000.

 

PLAY: Scorpio

Her vision and jazz experience is succinctly captured in the Jazz Tree that Ms. Williams created with artist David Stone Martin in 1977. At the root of the tree is “Suffering” born of the slave trade and resulting legacies of slavery. The Blues frames the outer trunk. Spirituals, Ragtime, Kansas City Swing and Bop rise inside the tree trunk, and jazz luminaries sprout from the leaves like a bushy afro. The tree creates a jazz timeline that illuminates a musical genealogy of the African American experience in America.

This experience is also reflected in The Kinsey Collection, on view at the museum through May 1, and the slave shackles from the popular culture film Roots. Sheet music, contemporary to Ms. William’s early career, contained examples of stereotypical views of African Americans in popular culture, sometimes degraded by themselves: “Mammie’s Pickaninny Boy” and “All Coons Look a Alike to Me”.

Fr. Peter O’Brien, Society of Jesus, was Ms. Williams’ last business manager and continues to direct the Mary Lou Williams Foundation, where her musical and cultural legacy is extended through education programs. Recently Fr. O’Brien’s reflections on Mary Lou Williams appeared in a Smithsonian Folkways article, and in 1994, he participated in the Smithsonian’s Jazz Oral History Program where he discussed Ms. Williams and her impact on his life.

A catalyst for cultural understanding and transformation

According to Dr. Billy Taylor, the late jazz educator, composer, and musician, Mary Lou Williams remarked that “If we are to make progress in modern music, we must be willing and able to open our minds to new ideas and developments." In 1996, Dr. Taylor presented a bold, new idea to the Kennedy Center: let’s launch a Women in Jazz festival honoring Mary Lou Williams. The response was, “Will there be enough women to perform at the event?” No problem, Dr. Taylor assured skeptics.

Held every May at the Kennedy Center, the Mary Lou Williams Jazz Festival is an annual, seminal event presenting workshops and performances by veteran and emerging jazz women. These vocalists and instrumentalists pay tribute to an artist that most believe to be the greatest jazz woman who ever lived, and many, past and present, view her gender as irrelevant to her accomplishments. In the Joan Burke documentary on Mary Lou Williams, saxophonist Buddy Tate noted: “She was outplaying all those men. She didn’t think so but they thought so.”

In Ms. Williams’ later years, she became a teacher at Duke University, which also saw her legacy and creativity as emblematic of its social and educational changes. On March 8, 1961, Duke’s board of trustees announced that students would be admitted to its graduate and professional schools without regard to race, creed or national origin. Three African American students enrolled that September in the law and divinity schools.

The policy was extended to the undergraduate school about a year later and in September of 1963 the first black undergraduates were admitted. Civil rights advocacy lead to admission changes but Mary Lou Williams and jazz were selected to brand Duke’s new center for black history and intercultural engagement that emerged later.

The Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture was established in 1983, six years after Ms. Williams became the university’s first-ever “artist-in residence,” a position she held until her death in 1981. The Center promotes racial understanding, community building, and appreciation of the black experience in America by increasing and presenting knowledge about African American people, history, culture, and contributions of the African diaspora. Programs developed by the Center include regular jazz performances featuring local and guest jazz artists and students from the Duke University Jazz Studies Program; exhibitions such as “Women of the Blues”; and recognition of black achievement such as contemporary black inventors.

Through the Center, jazz and Mary Lou Williams are instruments of domestic cultural diplomacy and inclusion.

Have a listen

Check out a a podcast and teacher guide from the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra’s Executive Producer, Ken Kimery.

Mary Lou Williams recorded extensively for Folkways Records, and Smithsonian Folkways re-issued many of those recordings in recent years. In addition, a rare big-band rendition of “Virgo” from her “Zodiac Suite” is one of several Williams contributions included on Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology. Hear a rehearsal of “Little Joe” by Mary Lou Williams and the Chosen Five, from the 1950 Folkways album Footnotes to Jazz, Vol. 3, Rehearsal, I.

Listen Here to "Little Joe"

Joann Stevens is Program Director for Jazz Appreciation Month at the National Museum of American History.

Editor's Note: This year's Jazz Appreciation Month poster features Mary Lou Williams. The graceful portrait of Ms. Williams was developed for JAM by Keith Henry Brown, a young African American artist with a passion for jazz and a legacy as the former Creative Art Director for Jazz at Lincoln Center. To request a copy of the poster, write jazz@si.edu. Or, you can download it here it in PDF format.

Bringing heroes to the classroom

Recently in the online community run by our partner, Verizon Thinkfinity, an educator asked how members of our history teachers group “connect the classroom with the outside world.” An avid Skyper, this teacher often finds opportunities to bring experts to his students via the Web. One way that the museum has tried to make the outstanding programming and experts here more accessible to a wider school audience is through live and archived webcasts, including the upcoming National Youth Summit on the Freedom Rides.

On February 9 at noon EST, the Museum—in partnership with the National Endowment for the Humanities, Smithsonian Affiliations, and American Experience/WGBH—will bring together secondary students and Freedom Rides veterans Congressman John Lewis (D-GA), Diane Nash, Jim Zwerg, and Rev. James Lawson for a discussion on the history and legacy of the Freedom Rides. The program will be webcast live; teachers may register at http://smithsonianconference.org/freedomrides and submit questions for possible inclusion in the program. Be sure to visit the Freedom Rides page on the museum’s website to find more information and a teachers guide with suggested activities for before and after the webcast.

The museum piloted this model last year with a Youth Town Hall on the Greensboro sit-ins. The archived webcast from last year’s program is available on our website. You can read what students said about it in the blog post, “Powerful Lessons from the Greensboro Four”. Or, hear how teacher Amy Trenkle prepared and discussed the program with her students in “A Teacher’s Perspective on the Greensboro Sit-in Youth Town Hall.”

As Amy noted:

“These…experiences open gateways for students and encourage them not to be passive readers of history but to be engaged in the world around them. It also encourages them to think about the impact that not only one person can make, but what a difference they can make in their own community and for larger movements.”

In an effort to emphasize that larger lesson, we are inviting classes who participate in the program via the webcast to create a short video response to the program. Teachers may upload these videos to YouTube and email the link to the museum before April 30. Selected videos will be featured in our newsletter, on our Facebook page, on our Twitter feed, and on this blog, too! Topics are included below and details are available in the program’s teacher guide.

Video Topics: 

Option 1: Reflection
Create a video montage of students reflecting on any of the questions below, based on their participation in the National Youth Summit program and webcast. The video should include at least one student, and can include as many as is appropriate for your class or school. 
• What was the most important lesson you took from the panel discussion? 
• What did the Freedom Rides accomplish, broadly speaking? 
• What issue today matters to you? What would you do to address it? 
• What is the importance of civic engagement? How do you participate in public life?

Option 2: Local History
Create a video interview with people in your community who were alive during the civil rights movement or who were active in it. Topics to discuss could include their thoughts on the time period and their activism, including reasons they became involved or not, and their thoughts about the movement’s influence on their life choices afterward. Be sure to ask them to reflect on the methods used by the Freedom Riders. Or, examine a civil rights protest or related event in your area that occurred around 1961, and consider the following:
• The practice of active, nonviolent civic engagement during the event.
• The degree of local sympathy, civil unrest, or apathy, if any, associated with it.
• Any changes that occurred immediately or soon after the event.

We hope you will join us for the webcast on February 9 and we look forward to your videos! You can also find more resources for connecting the outside world to your classroom, including a variety of scholarly lectures and panel discussions, through Smithsonian’s History Explorer.

Naomi Coquillon is an education specialist at the National Museum of American History.