Tag Archives: PERPETUAL

THE AMERICAN BLACKSTORY 2025

DAY 4 — The Buffalo Soldiers

Courtesy of the Smithsonian.

The Buffalo Soldiers have a deceptive name.

And I’m not talking about the “Buffalo” part.

Yes, reports do vary as to whether that nickname came from the heavy buffalo fur coats these Black regiments wore on the American frontier, or from their hair texture that seemed nearly identical to the buffalo’s.

It’s the “soldier” that reasonably implies that all these men did was fight.

From their establishment in 1866 to the last regiment’s formal service disbanding in 1951, their military contributions are too tremendous to count.

But their peaceful contributions here at home are absolutely stunning.

In fact, if you’ve ever been to ANY major national park west of the Mississippi, chances are you’ve walked directly in their footsteps and don’t even know it.

Yosemite, Yellowstone, Hawai’i Volcanoes, Klondike, and Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks simply would not exist without the Buffalo Soldiers’ relentless work.

Browse National Park Service sites related to the Buffalo Soldiers.

And that’s still just a fraction of the trails they blazed across the United States.

Between 1866 and 1891 alone, the Buffalo Soldiers are documented at 250 sites across twelve different states.

One of the furthest is Hawaii, and its “highly challenging” 36-mile Mauna Loa Trail. 30 of those miles leading to the 13,681-foot summit were painstakingly carved out of solid lava by the Buffalo Soldiers with 12-pound hammers as their only tools.

Mauna Loa Trail in 1931
Buffalo Soldiers assist lava surveys
Historical photos of the Buffalo Soldiers’ work in Hawai’i, courtesy of the National Park Service

Further north in California, Brigadier General Charles Young—who later became the first Black U.S. national park superintendent and the highest ranking Black Army officer until he died in 1922—led his company in clearing a road into Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Park, allowing public citizens access to the giant trees for the first time ever.

When leadership suggested naming a sequoia for then-Colonel Young, he refused, humbly requesting the tree be named for Booker T. Washington instead. If sentiments were the same in 20 years, he said, only then might he accept the honor. Spoiler alert…

But that wasn’t the only big work the Buffalo Soldiers took on in California. If you’ve ever taken the trail up nearby Mt. Whitney, the highest peak in the lower 48, you got it. Buffalo Soldiers.

Lt. James A Moss’s 25th Infantry, U. S. Army Bicycle Corps, atop Minerva Terrace at Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone National Park. [August 1896 per Moss’s diary]

Among the first people to survey and create trails through the land that would become Yellowstone National Park, the nine men of the 25th Infantry bicycled from Missoula, MT to Yellowstone, crossing the Continental Divide twice over a 800-mile round trip. Since Yellowstone was still a largely uncharted place, there were no permanent accommodations. By necessity, these men carried over 100 pounds of gear, munitions and provisions, all on their bikes.

Compared to those assignments, Yosemite’s pristine landscape was a “cavalryman’s paradise” actively sought out by soldiers from all corners of the States. And yet, to this day, Yosemite specifically names the Buffalo Soldiers as the “stars of its story” and “safeguards of its mountain cathedrals.”

Buffalo Soldiers atop Yosemite’s Fallen Monarch in the Mariposa Forest. (NPS)
A Buffalo Soldier’s hat hangs in the Yosemite Office of the Acting Superintendent. A poster in the same office details the Buffalo Soldiers’ contributions to the park. (Click the poster image and open in a new tab to read in full.)

All of these trailblazing acts of service by the Buffalo Soldiers were before the National Park System was created. So more than just pioneers and explorers, the U.S. Army served as the country’s original Park Rangers.

In Yosemite, that service was especially vital as the park was especially vulnerable to all sorts of dangers like poachers, wildfires and overgrazing. The Buffalo Soldiers regularly patrolled against those dangers and were fully prepared to oppose them if necessary. When they weren’t protecting Yosemite’s borders, they built the Wawona Arboretum in 1903, and in the process, launched the U.S. National Parks’ first educational program, a cornerstone of the system today.

The 24th Infantry Buffalo Soldiers patrol Yosemite armed and on horseback in 1899. (NPS)

Now, if you’re paying attention, you might notice a theme. The Buffalo Soldiers were frequently sent to the most remote and rugged parts of the U.S. territories to forge new lands and protect them through military force if necessary. Aside from poachers, fires and livestock, the Army was almost certain to confront Indigenous People.

And Army leadership knew they had a secret advantage in the Buffalo Soldiers, because they’d learned it from some of the first U.S. pioneers, Meriwether Lewis & William Clark.

When native tribes encountered Lewis and Clark, it was frequently their curiosity or admiration of York, the expedition’s enslaved man, that gave those tribes any incentive to speak to white men at all.

It’d be naive to believe this didn’t influence the Buffalo Soldiers’ peacekeeping AND wartime assignments, where they were deployed against native Americans, the Spanish, Filipinos, and Mexicans among many others. Whether it was that they were expendable against other brown people, or that they unknowingly served as a shock tactic against them, the Buffalo Soldiers valiantly fought on behalf of the United States anyway.

The Army enlisted fighters, but look closer and you’ll find the Buffalo Soldiers’ true legacy still growing along the most peaceful streams, under purple mountains, and so many more places that make America beautiful.

KEEP GOING BLACK IN HISTORY:

Watch Yosemite Ranger Shelton Johnson discuss preserving the traditions of the Buffalo Soldiers in National Parks today.

Listen in on Ranger Johnson’s historically based podcast “A Buffalo Soldier Speaks” here.

The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture maintains an extensive Buffalo Soldiers collection here.

Learn more about their historic service at the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum.

Browse the beautifully crafted history of the Buffalo Soldiers maintained by Yosemite.

Explore the National Parks Service archive of the Buffalo Soldiers 85 year long impact on the foundation of the United States.

There’s still more about how and why the Buffalo Soldiers were the first national park rangers at History.com.

THE AMERICAN BLACKSTORY 2025

DAY 2 — Kitty Black Perkins

Before President Barbie could run, a woman named Kitty dreamed big.

Louvenia “Kitty” Black was born in the late 1940s before Barbie existed.

But even then, she’d sit at home in Spartanburg, SC, coloring paper dolls into her own image.

It’d be 12 more years before Barbie came on the scene in 1959, and 7 more before Francie—Mattel’s first “Black” doll—was released in 1967.

“Black” because Francie was essentially a Barbie in blackface. Skin color aside, Francie was indistinguishable from her white counterpart.

Two years later, Christie was introduced as the Civil Rights Movement swept the nation. Her unique face mold and hair styles finally gave Black women a progressive, fashionable vision of themselves in mainstream toys, but…

The original Black Francie
Talking Christie (Barbiepedia)

Francie, Christie, Curtis, Cara, Brad and all the other Black skinned dolls Mattel introduced weren’t Barbie.

Barbie had shifted from just a doll to a symbol of what was possible for modern women. Even Mattel’s other white dolls were still just sidekicks.

That is, until 1980—four years after Kitty Perkins walked through the door, and two years after Mattel promoted her to Principle Designer.

Kitty didn’t even own a Barbie before before her 1976 interview with Mattel. But she bought one, made six outfits for her—all of which were subsequently put into production—and was hired on the spot.

It was Kitty’s presence at Mattel that made an authentic Black Barbie an actual possibility, and it all boiled down to one simple desire: “I wanted my Black Barbie doll to look more like me.”

“I had a person that was in the hair department, a sculptor, a face painter, and most of their direction would come from me because I was Black,” she recounted to the New York Post.

It was 1980, and for the first time in American history, children of ALL races saw ordinary store shelves consistently stocked with Black dolls that were fashionable, authentic, and most importantly, beautiful.

Dr. Mamie Phipps-Clark‘s “Doll Test” found that among white and Black children, almost all of them associated only the white doll with being “good” and other positive qualities.

Some people probably ignored her, some probably hated her, but for others, especially those who’d lived the Doll Test first-hand, Black Barbies were monumental.

At the same rate, some Black girls didn’t want a Barbie. She’d been a white doll for so long that some people didn’t care that Mattel finally got around to representing them.

In 1991, Shani & Friends, a Mattel subsidiary also led by Kitty, introduced an entirely new line of Afrocentric Black dolls. From their clothes and jewelry featuring African prints and hoops, even down to their names borrowed from Swahili and real-life Black Barbie Nichelle Nichols, everything about Shani & Friends was inspired by the diaspora. The trio even had different body molds. And though they only lasted 3 years as an independent line, Shani, Asha, and Nichelle’s face and body sculpts were reintegrated into the Barbie line to increase their range of representation.

By 1989, nine years after the first Black Barbie found shelves, Mattel sold 22 million Barbies globally that year alone. By 2021, that number was 86 million, or 186 Barbies every MINUTE.

Today, you can buy a Barbie in almost every single physical representation you wish. They come in all colors—including vitiligo, all shapes and sizes, and even have a range of disabilities from prosthetic users to Down’s syndrome.

And though you can find just about any Barbie these days, in 2019, Mattel’s best-seller was Black with an Afro.

Kitty retired from Mattel in 2004 after 30 years leading Barbie’s design, but the company’s commitment to diversity is stronger than ever, and so are their profits.

Barbie isn’t just a doll these days. She’s graced countless cartoons and movies (including 2023’s live action), costumes, self-care products, bags and accessories and so much more. If it exists, Barbie’s probably been there.

And Barbie certainly wouldn’t be the doll she is without the Black woman who made Barbie more like her.

An array of today’s Black Barbies, representing a range of our beauty.

KEEP GOING BLACK IN HISTORY:

Watch “Black Barbie: The Documentary” on Netflix and visit the official website.

Learn more about Kitty’s life and work at ScreenRant.

THE AMERICAN BLACKSTORY 2023

DAY 5 — The Fisk Jubilee Singers

Today’s hot goss is all about Beyoncé’s history-making 32nd GRAMMY win, 88th nomination, and how they still won’t give her Album of the Year.

With only two GRAMMY wins, the Fisk University Jubilee Singers are on the complete opposite end of that spectrum. Still, they can relate.

After all, who cares what the Recording Academy’s awarding when you’ve got over 150 years of musical history as a force against racism, multiple world tours and concerts to monarchs, presidents, and other global leaders, and ALL the credit for bringing slave spirituals to mainstream music?

In 1866, Nashville’s Fisk University became America’s first institution of higher learning “to offer a liberal arts education to ‘young men and women irrespective of color.’”

“Originally known as the Fisk Free Colored School, Fisk University was established in 1866 in Nashville (Tenn.) at the site of former Union Army hospital barracks. The school was named after General Clinton Bowen Fisk who arrived with Union occupying forces in Nashville in 1862. Enrollment topped 900 students in the first year and, in 1867, the school was incorporated as Fisk University.” Courtesy of the Tennessee Virtual Archive.

Five years later, the school was nearly bankrupt.

Brief as it had been, Fisk had a legacy to maintain, and they weren’t letting it die without a fight. One man at Fisk held the title of both treasurer and music professor, and he devised a clever plan. A choral ensemble could hold concerts benefitting the university. Besides, there truly was nothing left to lose.

Nine men and women shaped the unnamed ensemble, who’d begin their tour in the small towns near Nashville. Soon, their director had another clever idea: a national tour along the route of the Underground Railroad. Most of Fisk’s student body was comprised of Black students who’d been recently freed from enslavement with the 1863 signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, so a public tour in the locations their ancestors and even parents had secretly sought freedom was a poignant—and marketable—move.

An original program commemorating the Jubilee Singers, courtesy of the African American Registry.
A minstrel show poster depicts a white man’s transformation into Blackface Minstrel. Courtesy of the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History & Culture.

It was also entirely unheard of. Before this, Black people didn’t perform in public spaces—but white people in minstrel makeup did. Many reviews of the time even noted this phenomenon, with one writing “Those who have only heard the burnt cork caricatures of negro minstrelsy have not the slightest conception of what it really is.” So when the Fisk Singers began touring in earnest in October 1871, many people attended their shows out of the sheer novelty. Nearly all left as fans.

Ella Sheppard, one of the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ original sopranos, went on to form a career of her own in music. Read more at PBS.

Even the singers themselves had to be won over initially. Just because these songs had come from within their culture didn’t mean that every Black person in America knew them. Spirituals were sung in the fields, secretly formed churches, and as code songs, so those who’d been freed from slavery before the Proclamation, or lived in affluent, free-standing communities like Seneca Village had no reason to know them. And when they did, they were reluctant to share them with a racist society.

Ella Sheppard, one of the original members wrote, “Sitting upon the floor (there were but few chairs) [we sang] softly, learning from each other the songs of our fathers. We did not dream of ever using them in public… they were sacred to our parents, who used them in their religious worship and shouted over them… It was only after many months that gradually our hearts were opened… and we began to appreciate the wonderful beauty and power of our songs.”

During one of their first stops, they were forced to use that power against an angry white mob that cornered them at a train station. The Fisk Singers’ worshipful songs, angelic voices, and non-violent response shamed the mob into dispersing. “One by one, the riotous crowd left off their jeering and swearing and slunk back until only the leader stood near Mr. White and finally took off his hat,” Ms. Sheppard wrote. “The leader begged us, with tears falling, to sing the hymn again.”

But those beautiful voices couldn’t save them from racism every time. When they donated the proceeds of one of their first concerts in Cincinnati to victims of the Great Fire of Chicago, they were thanked on their next stop in Columbus with terrible hotel accommodations, name-calling from the newspapers, and all manners of abuse from the locals. It was only their first month on tour, and many of the singers—and their parents who didn’t want to allow their children on the tour for this very reason—were so disheartened, they were ready to throw in the towel.

After a night of prayer, the singers regrouped and to build their spirits, were finally given a name that referenced both their heritage and their musical repertoire: The Jubilee Singers. It’s written in the book of Leviticus that every fifty-first year would be a “year of jubilee” in which all slaves would be set free, and the Fisk singers almost exclusively sang spirituals. It fit, spirits were lifted, and the show went on.

18 months later, the Jubilee Singers sent $40,000 back to Fisk, more than they could ever have earned through organized fundraising efforts alone.

Their fame had also grown too big to turn back. By 1872, invitations to the Fisk Jubilee Singers were pouring in. The World’s Peace Jubilee and International Musical Festival in Boston, President Ulysses S. Grant’s White House, and Steinway Hall in Manhattan were among a few of the venues they performed.

One of many posters preserved from the Jubilee Singers’ early shows, courtesy of the Tennessee State Museum.

But in 1873 came their crown jewel: a surprise performance and audience with Queen Victoria of England. The Queen requested a handful of songs by name: “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Did the Lord Deliver Daniel,” and “Go Down Moses.” She made her share of unsavory requests too. “Tell the dark-skinned one to step forward,” Ella Sheppard wrote in her diary, quoting the Queen’s request to have a better look at Jennie Jackson, another of the singers. Still, their appearance, performance and the combination of both left such an impression on the Queen that she commissioned a portrait of the Jubilee Singers that still hangs today in the university’s Jubilee Hall, built with $150,000 the singers earned from their European tour.

The Jubilee Singers’ portrait by the official painter of the Court of St. James after a performance for Queen Victoria in 1873. Ella Sheppard is depicted seated at the piano with Jennie Jackson to the right.

Their reception in Europe mirrored the attitudes in the States. Some places were progressive enough to recognize the Jubilee Singers’ humanity, others were brutally racist.

These conflicts and controversy around them left their toll on the singers. But they also began reshaping attitudes around racism and segregation. George Pullman personally integrated his entire fleet of trains after learning the Jubilee Singers had been automatically denied accommodations because of their race. When Jersey City voted to integrate schools after the Jubilee Singers had been turned away from a local hotel, the New Jersey Journal wrote, “By their sweet songs and simple ways, the Jubilee Singers are moulding and manufacturing public sentiment.”

Those sweet songs also molded American music as we know it today. “If they had not begun to sing the songs of their ancestors in concert halls, this oral tradition, which existed only in the memories of former slaves, would most likely have been lost to history forever.” The New York Times writes. “And if it had disappeared, it would have taken with it the DNA of much of the American music that followed: blues, gospel, jazz, country, rock, and more.”

And not just American music. Before the Jubilee Singers toured Europe again in 2015, Richard Hawley, a Head of Artistic Programming in Birmingham, England said, “They are without doubt responsible for introducing the Black Oral Tradition to the U.K., and are therefore responsible, certainly in part, for the enormous diversity of music we now have in this country.”

Though they briefly disbanded for a year, the Fisk Jubilee Singers still exist and you can witness an enduring American legacy, live and in person. Until then, stream their catalog—past and present—on Spotify or Apple Music, and listen to how through song and struggle, they saved their school, transformed attitudes across two continents, and left a lasting mark on music as the Gospel Group of the Ages.

Listen to the historic sounds of the Fisk Jubilee Singers on Spotify or Apple Music.

KEEP GOING BLACK IN HISTORY:

Visit the digital home of today’s Jubilee Singers for more on their past, present and future.

Learn more about The Fisk Jubilee Singers and some of its original members at the Smithsonian Archives Blog.

Discover the depths of the Jubilee Singers’ “Sacrifice and Glory” at PBS.

“In Walk Together Children: The 150th Anniversary of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Dr. Paul T. Kwami and the current singers explore the stories of the world-renowned ensemble’s original nine members and reflect on their roles as students and preservers of the group’s legacy.”

Watch the trailer & full-length special now on PBS.

There’s even more about how the Fisk Jubilee Singers changed American music at the New York Times.

“Jubilee: An Inspirational A Capella Tribute” ran in 2019. Revisit scenes from the show & reenactments from Ella Sheppard’s diary here.

THE AMERICAN BLACKSTORY 2022

DAY 24 — Charmay & Black American Sign Language

Social media personality Nakia Smith coined a saying: “My hands are loud enough.”

So instead of me, a hearing person, introducing you to Black American Sign Language, here’s Nakia speaking for herself.

On her social channels, she goes by Charmay, but as a woman who’s Black, deaf, and Black and deaf, she’s used to having multiple identities, each with its own unique set of circumstances and challenges to navigate.

But why does “Black and deaf” fall into a separate category?

Because Jim Crow didn’t give passes for disabilities.

Accommodations for deaf people have always been drastically behind those for the hearing, and it wasn’t even until 1817 that the first school for deaf children—the first in the entire Western Hemisphere, actually—was opened. Because that same school wouldn’t accommodate African-American students until 135 years later in 1952, racism essentially stripped Black deaf people of any community at all. In some southern states like Louisiana, deaf schools weren’t desegregated until 1978. Physically unable to communicate with people who looked like them, and legally unable to learn with people who communicated like them left Black deaf people in a very small circle. Within it, they built a community, schools, and a rich language of their own.

Austin’s Blind, Deaf & Orphan School is one example of the segregated learning facilities for Black deaf students, and the same institution that Charmay’s grandfather Jake attended.

Americans typically think of the “Black version” of things as lesser, and English is no exception (see: the wholesale invalidation of Ebonics and African-American Vernacular English [AAVE]). Linguist John McWhorter explains, “The educated white person has often internalized a sense that it’s wrong to associate black people and ‘bad grammar’ at all. There’s a dissonance that person permits, which is to read southern white speech depicted in all of its glory and accept that as ‘the way they talk,’ but to bristle at Black people depicted speaking the same way. Human minds tolerate a lot of dissonance of that kind!”

Those concepts translate over to sign language quite fluidly because BASL uses different signs than ASL, but it’s visually different in practice as well. Where ASL largely uses one hand for signs and communicates around the shoulders and midsection, BASL uses two hands to sign in the face and forehead region more frequently. BASL users also employ a lot more of their personal space for communicating than ASL users do, with signs that use big motions around the body. In other words, as our friend Charmay says, “The biggest difference between BASL and ASL is that BASL got seasoning.” Teraca Florence, a former president of the Black Deaf Student Union at Gallaudet University, says “Our signing is louder, more expressive. It’s almost poetic.”

@itscharmay

Cool right? 😎 very old fashioned signs from 1887! My grandfather & his friends, who he went to school with, still use those signs!

♬ original sound – @itscharmay

Charmay’s social channels are filled with videos documenting the history and celebrating users of BASL because she realized that many people in deaf and hearing communities didn’t even know Black American Sign Language existed. Because this is the Internet, for every bit of praise, Charmay received even more criticism. Even white deaf people weren’t fully in support, asking questions like “Why further divide the deaf community?” But questions like that were just more proof that her voice absolutely needed to be heard, because they were evidence of history repeating itself over a lack of shared experience. Felecia Redd, a Black deaf interpreter says, “I’m always told by deaf African Americans, ‘I am Black first; then I’m deaf.’ White deaf people are deaf first and then white.”

BASL didn’t develop out of Black people’s need for specialized communication. It developed out of their need to communicate AT ALL. It’s not a variant of ASL, “Black ASL could be considered the purer of the two forms,” says Ceil Davis of Gallaudet University. Because African-Americans weren’t allowed access to any advancements in hearing technology, they could only refer to the original curriculum used by Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet when he opened the first school for the deaf. From that curriculum, Black ASL developed nuance, syntax, slang, idioms and other language fundamentals that simply don’t exist or function differently in ASL, giving the Black deaf community something truly unique. That is, until schools integrated, and Black deaf students had no choice but to conform to ASL. Instead of being welcomed into the broader community, Black deaf students were only further marginalized, mocked and teased for having developed a separate language due to the racism forced upon them.

@coda_plug

My Deaf Dad going to a Deaf/Blind school and his experience with desegregation. #deafawareness #asl #deafculture #codaplug #blackasl

♬ original sound – Coda Plug
@coda_plug

The treasure my parents didn’t know they have. My g-parents didn’t let them know to value your language. Representation Matters! #asl #deafculture

♬ original sound – Coda Plug
Dr. Carolyn McCaskill of Gallaudet University was a Black deaf student who integrated into all-white schools. She discusses her experiences code-switching as a Black deaf person, and shows you what that looks like too.

Even though Black deaf people are now “integrated” in the broader deaf community, many of the challenges they faced are unchanged. “In the United States, less Black people from the age of 25-64 are deaf—a rate of 1.8%, compared to the overall population at 2.3%,” according to the National Deaf Center. Of course, that means fewer translators in comparison as well. So when Black deaf people have to navigate places that already demonstrate unconscious bias against them, like say, doctor’s offices, they also find themselves facing a double language barrier as well. LeeAnne Valentine complained of constant abdominal pain to her hearing white doctor via white interpreter, but was routinely dismissed. When she visited the same doctor with a Black interpreter, her experience was night and day.

“She actually interpreted what I said, with the intent and the tone, plus my emotions,” LeeAnne said. “And she conveyed that to the doctor… and he finally took some action.” As a result, LeeAnne was rushed for emergency gallbladder surgery. Health services employees routinely report BASL users misunderstanding information about COVID and vaccines, if they receive it at all, because televised broadcasts rely on mostly white interpreters as though ASL is the only way for deaf Americans to communicate. Inherently tense social interactions like encounters with the police take on a whole new layer of complexity for Black deaf people. “Black Lives Matter” is even signed differently in BASL than ASL because Black people have an entirely different relationship to the movement than white people do. Even today with more accommodation than ever, the same physical and social barriers exist for Black deaf people, just in more modern spaces.

Dozens of Black deaf people ask the question “Am I Next?” in this short PSA.

That’s where Charmay comes in. There’s no more modern space than TikTok. And with 402K followers, she’s speaking truth to power to an audience bigger than her ancestors could have even imagined. She’s the 5th generation of BASL users in her family, and like so many things precious to the Black diaspora, her language has only been handed down by oral tradition. Without Charmay and other visible BASL users on social media, university collections, and privately funded documentaries, the world might not know BASL existed at all. “Historically, so much has been taken away from us, and we’re finally feeling that ‘this is ours,’” she said. “‘This is mine. I own something.’” And she’s one of many claiming every bit of her history and guaranteeing its future with the power of her two Black hands.

KEEP GOING BLACK IN HISTORY:

Spend 30 minutes getting to know the intricacies of being a Black person signing in America, and if you like that, watch the rest of the series for more legacies of African-American language at Talking Black in America. If you’re hooked, continue down that rabbit hole with “What Counts as Standard? On Black English and Black American Sign Language,” a compelling conversation between a linguist and a writer.
Gallaudet University has a complete series on Black ASL, and this video links to the full playlist. Fair warning, it’s totally 90s style production, but there’s SO much insight from Black ASL users and so much story to see here.
Good Morning America presented an extensive overview of BASL, its history and how its users are preserving their language today.

Follow Nakia Smith (aka Charmay) on TikTok for more videos on Black American Sign Language and cameos from her family members!

If Instagram is more your speed, follow her here.

“I have to make sure my hands are not ashy before I sign.” Get even more insight on the life & times of Charmay & more Black ASL users past & present at the New York Times.

There’s an incredible repository of creative and accessible content “Celebrating Representation, Identity and Diversity of Black Deaf Families” here.

Find another amazing collection of resources examining “Black Deaf Culture Through the Lens of History” here.

THE AMERICAN BLACKSTORY 2022

DAY 20 — Vanilla Powell Beane

Only a handful of places immediately come to mind as somewhere a hat can transcend accessory to become ceremony.

Royal weddings and the Kentucky Derby have their own hat stories, but they’ve got nothing on the history and tradition a hat carries atop an African-American woman’s head.

Flash back to the Middle Passage, 1518.

Before Africans were transported on ships to the British Empire, the Americas, and all over the colonized world, they were shaved bald. Officially, shorn heads prevented lice and the sanitation issues bound to arise when people are chained in excrement.

“The American Slave,” an illustration in a 1900 issue of Pearson’s Magazine depicts an enslaved man being restrained for examination, shaving, some other nefarious purpose, or all of the above. Read more about violations of bodily autonomy regularly practiced during the Transatlantic Slave Trade at the African-American Intellectual History Society.

But there’s more to the story. Shaving a person’s head is the easiest way to dehumanize them. Throughout the centuries, it’s been used as a tool of war, degradation, and shame. The mighty Sampson lost his identity when his hair was shorn.  Even Nazis knew to shave and commodify their captives. And American slavers did the same, profiting from the hair, teeth, and even living bodies of the enslaved. 

@karahbura

#blackhistory #slavery #jimcrow #history #capitalism #blm

♬ original sound – karahbura nebjari

But on glorious Sundays, away from the strict eye of their captors, the enslaved could adorn their shaved heads in any way they pleased. The hair once decorated with beads, shells, feathers and dyes in Africa, was replaced with elaborately tied wraps, some of which used techniques that had been carried across the Atlantic. Community and individuality were both reclaimed, all in a single piece of fabric.

Flash forward to the French colonies, 1685.

The French held a great deal of land in what’s now North America, and enacted the Code Noir enforcing specific (and outrageous) rules on the conduct of Black people throughout their colonies. In 1786 Louisiana, Code Noir was made even more outrageously specific when the governor, lobbied by his white female constituents, ordered that all women of color, free or enslaved, must cover their hair with a scarf or handkerchief called a tignon, devoid of any added embellishments like feathers or jewels. You see, white enslavers had so abused Black women that it had gotten hard to tell who was who anymore. A fair-skinned, well-dressed woman could be an upstanding white woman, a free Black woman, or the slave girl of a wealthy French family, and of course, treating them all the same would be disgraceful. Forcing only enslaved women to cover their hair would create visible classes among Black women, and that wouldn’t do either because the whole point of Tignon Law was to prevent Black women from thinking too highly of themselves and presenting themselves accordingly. Actually, the governor’s exact words were “too much luxury in their bearing.”

How tignons were MEANT to appear is seen in the painting of Dominican women, Free Women of Color with their Children and Servants, by Agostino Brunias, c. 1764–1796.
How tignons turned out. An unknown Creole woman painted by François Fleischbein in 1837.

Those actions backfired in the biggest way when tignons caught the eye of one Empress Josephine Bonaparte who began wearing her own as a fashion accessory. The tignon turned into a trend, and the racist society snobs of Louisiana were right back to square one.

Flash forward to modern day Civil Rights, and today’s story.

Members of the National Association of Fashion and Accessory Designers, an organization created by Mary McLeod Bethune (front center) and others to battle mainstream, white gatekeeping throughout the fashion industry . In 1975, Mrs. Vanilla Beane was inducted into the NAFAD Hall of Fame. Also, the hats, OK?!

African-American churches were the lifeblood of the movement. There, boycotts were organized, flyers were printed, and the people were fed, physically and spiritually, throughout their tireless fight. Those churches were also the only place African-Americans could truly serve as leaders in a culture where work, school, and leisure were segregated. African-American women in particular acted as pioneers and again, head coverings played their part. Women in leadership roles or married to leaders needed to be identifiable among crowds of their congregations and onlookers. A beautiful hat is also a symbol of dignity, status, and taste. Women who marched in the Montgomery Bus Boycotts came dressed not in their typical domestic uniforms, but in their Sunday best, knowing the optics of both their personal presentation, and of violence against a church-going woman. Nothing speaks to religious piety, humility and grace like a woman with her head covered. And when you couldn’t change your skin color, the one thing you could change was your clothes.

Dr. Dorothy Height, immortalized on a US postage stamp, wearing one of Mrs. Vanilla Beane’s hats.

Civil rights pioneer Dorothy Height knew all of this, and there was only one lady she trusted to capture all of that history for her: Vanilla Powell Beane.

If you’ve ever seen a photograph of Dorothy, you’ve almost certainly seen Mrs. Vanilla’s handiwork. 

In 1950s Washington D.C., Mrs. Vanilla was barely out of her 20s, just a working woman with no grand designs towards civil rights, history, or fashion. She didn’t even have hat-making experience. “I [worked] in a building where they sold hat materials, so I bought some and decided to see if I could do it.”

Today, she’s the 102 year old proprietor of Bené Millinery & Bridal Supplies, having built a reputation as hat maker to not only Dorothy Height, but other past and present African American women in power like D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and poet laureate Maya Angelou.

Vanilla Powell Beane, then and now.

Her shop opened in 1979 and prior to COVID shutdowns, Mrs. Vanilla still worked 40+ hours per week, crafting hats and styling customers. When she started making hats, segregation and Jim Crow was still very real. But today, her diverse range of hatwear sits atop a diverse range of heads, and she’s glad to teach any woman her “rules”: “Don’t match the hat to the outfit. Just buy a hat you like and the outfit will come. Never wear your hat more than one inch above your eyebrows. Slant it to look more interesting and possibly even risque.”

A VERY small selection of some of Mrs. Vanilla’s favorite hats.

“She’s at the shop six days a week, and whenever we celebrate her birthday, she typically wants to stay open so people can stop by and get a hat to wear to the party,” Mrs. Vanilla’s granddaughter Jeni Hansen said. Mrs. Vanilla wholeheartedly agrees that it’s the shop and customers that have kept her going. At her age, she’s seen, experienced and overcome so much, including the deaths of her husband and son along the way, and of course most recently, a global pandemic affecting small businesses like never before. But Dr. Dorothy Height’s mother Fannie once said, “No matter what happens, you have to hold yourself together.”

Through Bené Millinery and her extraordinary work in a slowly dying art, Mrs. Vanilla has held herself—and the D.C. African-American culture together through hats, and thankfully, shows no signs of hanging up her own.

Mrs. Vanilla poses in front of creations in her shop, in a photo taken when she was a mere 90 years old.

KEEP GOING BLACK IN HISTORY:

Early last year, Mrs. Vanilla gifted Rep. Cori Bush a hat in recognition of Bush’s work on Capitol Hill. The two ladies shared a chat and showed us a bit of Mrs. Vanilla’s past and process here.
See more of Mrs. Vanilla’s work, her shop and her legacy here.

Inspect one of Mrs. Vanilla’s favorite hats in interactive 3D at the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History & Culture.

Artist Ben Ferry was so delighted to meet Mrs. Vanilla in her shop that he created a whole art collection featuring the lady herself, her work, and her shop. The cover image for this post shows Mrs. Vanilla posing next to Ben’s work. See the collection here, and read the story of how these two opposite creatives attracted here.

September 19 was designated “Vanilla Beane Day” in the District of Columbia. Read the full proclamation, issued on Mrs. Vanilla’s 100th birthday, here.

Bené Millinery is still working to get online, but in the meantime, browse around and plan an in-person visit by appointment on their website.

Learn more about the history of Black hair, its care and its coverings around the globe and throughout the diaspora at BET.

It’s still not illegal to discriminate against a Black woman’s natural hair in the United States. Find out more about the steps being taken to pass The CROWN Act nationwide.

THE AMERICAN BLACKSTORY 2022

DAY 17 — Oscarville & Lake Lanier

Death looms so large over Georgia’s Lake Lanier that people say it’s haunted.

Since it was filled in 1956, it’s estimated that nearly 700 people have lost their lives in its waters or at its banks in boating accidents, drownings, and unexplained events. Official reports list at least 24 people as “missing” there because what lies below the lake’s surface makes searching it nearly impossible.

Beneath those unrecovered souls, wrecked boats, discarded nets, and silty waters lie the charred remains of the Africa-American community of Oscarville, GA.

Before 1912, Oscarville’s people thrived as farmers, teachers, ministers and tradespeople of all sorts.

Harrison, Rosalee, Bertie, Fred, Naomi, and Minor Brown were among the thriving residents of Oscarville, in a photo taken in 1896.

Their world started to unravel on September 5th of that year, when a white woman accused a Black man of entering her bedroom and attempting rape. When a local preacher mentioned that perhaps the woman had not been entirely forthcoming in her account, suggesting the encounter may have been consensual, he was nearly beaten to death right in front of the Oscarville courthouse.

Tensions between the segregated populations of Forsyth County were so high that the Governor of Georgia activated the National Guard to stand patrol and keep the peace.

Just 4 days later, that fragile peace was shattered when another white woman was found dying in the local woods, an apparent victim of yet another sexual assault. 

The only evidence police turned up was a pocket mirror claimed to be property of a 16-year-old boy named Ernest Knox. Hardly a smoking gun, but enough to satisfy the white folks of Oscarville, especially when Ernest confessed to the crime and gave up the people who were going to help him dispose of the body. Suppose it didn’t matter much that Ernest made that confession from the bottom of a well just before he was nearly drowned in it.

Ernest and 3 supposed co-conspirators—Oscar Daniel, Oscar’s 22-year old sister Trussie, her boyfriend Big Rob—plus an alleged witness, were all transported to the county jail in Cumming, GA. But there was no point. A mob estimated in the thousands stormed the jail, killed Big Rob, and dragged his body into the street. He was hung from a light post and used as target practice while the others inside could only listen to their potential fate.

A newspaper photo depicts all of the suspects for the rapes of two white women were still alive in their custody.
Left to Right: Trussie Daniel, Oscar Daniel, Tony Howell (defendant in the first case), Ed Collins (witness), Isaiah Pirkle (witness for Howell), and Ernest Knox.

Trussie accepted a plea bargain in exchange for testifying against her brother Oscar and was forced to be his executioner (see the sub-headline in the article above). Charges were dropped against the witness. But Big Rob was already dead, and Ernest and Oscar were doomed to the same fate.

On October 25, 1912, Oscar Daniel and Ernest Knox were publicly lynched before a crowd estimated at as many as 8,000 spectators. People gathered around the gallows for picnics, and PBS reports that one of the boys was so small a special noose was created to ensure the momentum wouldn’t decapitate him and splash anyone’s Sunday dress with blood.

You don’t even have to imagine the scene. You’ve probably seen the images of vast crowds gathering under the feet of a Black man. Though these images are rarities now, in 1908, they were so frequently mailed, the U.S. Postmaster was forced to ban them. “Even the Nazis did not stoop to selling souvenirs of Auschwitz,” TIME Magazine’s Richard Lacayo writes. 

A postcard shows the sprawling crowd gathered for the 1893 lynching of Henry Smith in Paris, TX.

But the terror didn’t end with two lynchings. Over the next few months, each sunset brought nightmares to Oscarville. 

“Night riders” went door-to-door demanding that Black people vacate the town. When some people didn’t comply, the threat escalated. Their homes were shot into, animals killed, crops destroyed. Anyone who remained after that fled their property in the middle of the night as it went up in flames. Nearly 1,100 African-Americans—around 98% of Forsyth County’s Black population—were forced out of Oscarville, some still paying on property they’d abandoned until it was foreclosed.

Of course, all of that land was immediately seized by you-know-who.

And nearly just as quickly, things started going wrong.

In 1915, a boll weevil infestation killed crops on Oscarville’s land that was illicitly seized by white farmers and banks. Though they ultimately survived the weevils, being one of the few regions in the state to escape total decimation made them eager to share their methods. (It was chicken poop. They got a bunch of chickens to poop in the soil.) Perhaps too eager. They gained the attention of the mayor of Atlanta, who was developing a dam to ensure the city’s water supply, hydroelectric needs, and flood control. He spent 2 years working with the Army Corps of Engineers to seize nearly all of that recovered farmland. What little was actually purchased was far undervalued, and left the handful of African-Americans left who owned their land through generations with nearly nothing.

When the dam was complete, the waters completely submerged charred buildings, cemeteries, bridges, and any trace left of those who lived and died in Oscarville. Then they named those waters after a Confederate soldier. Though Oscarville is the only Black community under Lake Lanier, it wasn’t the only one Black people were run out of. Towns, Union, Fannin, Gilmer and Dawson Counties all have a history of violently exiling its Black residents. Even today, only 4% of Forsyth County’s almost 250,000 residents are Black.

So is Lake Lanier haunted? No one can truly answer that question.

But is it filled with ghosts? Absolutely.

@indeskribeabull

Top 3 places NOT to visit in GA #fyp #lakelanier #folklore #hauntedlakes #tourguides #stayhome

♬ Lake Lanier – Jerrilyn Lake
Even Tiktok knows you don’t go on Lake Lanier.

KEEP GOING BLACK IN HISTORY:

A diver captures footage of some of the structures lost under Lake Lanier, both visually and on sonar.
Local news coverage shows the efforts to keep African-Americans and their civil rights out of Forsyth County still alive and well in 1987.

Learn more about the tragic history of Forsyth County, GA in Patrick Phillips’ book, Blood at the Root, then pick up a copy from our friends at Marcus Books.

Get more local articles and historic sources from a story originally published by the Forsyth County News.

The terror in Oscarville and ongoing racial terrorism documented in Forsyth County and throughout the South is detailed at History.com

Read more about the taking of Oscarville and the forming of Lake Lanier at CNN.

Forsyth County church leaders took it upon themselves to create the Forsyth County Descendants Scholarship, “simply an act of love that will be helpful to some descendants whose families have suffered. Is it enough? Of course not. But it is a step.” Learn more & donate here.

Explore an interactive map and see the stories of documented racial terror lynchings throughout the States created by the Equal Justice Initiative.

THE AMERICAN BLACKSTORY 2022

DAY 16 — Marcus Books

Writers, photographers, dancers, artists, musicians and so many others Black creatives are represented here at The American Blackstory.

Today, we recognize the keepers of all that Black magic.

Marcus Books is the nation’s oldest Black-owned bookstore, serving San Francisco, Oakland, and now, the world, for over 60 years.

For any small business to survive for that length of time is extraordinary.

For a humble bookstore to do so amidst government suppression, a number of foreign wars, several waves of American social sea change, San Francisco gentrification, technological advances, and many economic recessions is almost unbelievable.

And it all started by accident.

Julian and Raye Richardson met each other at Tuskegee University back in the 30s where Black creativity was thriving around them. Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver were among the university’s professors at the time, and Julian attended classes with Ralph Ellison. When the couple moved to San Francisco, Julian opened a print shop while Raye earned her doctorate in literature at UC Berkeley. Raye’s love for books spilled onto the Richardsons’ friends and neighbors, and soon they found themselves loaning her collection out from the back room of Julian’s print shop. The operation grew until Marcus Books, named for Marcus Garvey, was born.

“My dad in his print shop would want to share books with his friends and never got his books back so he said, ‘Let’s start selling books,’” the Richardsons’ daughter Karen Johnson said. “I asked him, ‘Will white people let you sell Black books?’ He said, ‘It’s not about them. This is what we need.’”

Blanche, another of the Richardsons’ daughters, explains the urgency behind that need. “They shared a love of reading Black books and found them difficult to find and purchase. They realized that for a Black community to be progressive, it must have its own bookstore as a source of information about itself.”

Blanche Richardson, daughter of Julian & Raye, manages the Marcus Books in Oakland.

A simple, admirable, and aspirational goal, no doubt, but some didn’t see it that way.

Hoover’s memo on “black extremist bookstores”

In October 1968, J. Edgar Hoover issued a COINTELPRO memo warning against “increase in the establishment of black extremist bookstores which represent propaganda outlets for revolutionary and hate publications and culture centers for extremism.” In response to the perceived threat, Hoover ordered every FBI office nationwide to “locate and identify black extremist and/or African-type bookstores,… determine the identities of the owners; whether it is a front for any group or foreign interest; whether individuals affiliated with the store engage in extremist activities; the number, type, and source of books and material on sale; the store’s financial condition; its clientele; and whether it is used as a headquarters or meeting place.” Marcus Books was absolutely one of those places, as within its walls organizations like the Black Firefighters Association, the Association of Black Policeman, the Black Nurses Association, and many more were formed to support the Black working class.

Proudly proclaiming that their “very existence was born out of an awareness of anti-Blackness plus a sense of duty to provide a space where we are not simply respected but affirmed” has always put Marcus Books squarely in the sights of American white supremacists. Marcus Books is a family-owned and operated business, and even the Richardsons’ granddaughter Jasmine Johnson says that the bookstore’s entire staff has been met with “white-only-water-fountain-level racism” often. When Marcus Books was supported in 2020 through a GoFundMe after they couldn’t raise the several million dollars to purchase the Fillmore Street location that housed their first official storefront, they were met with racial aggressions, including but not limited to people hiding behind Twitter profiles trolling and undermining their posts with comments like “Why can’t a Black owned bookstore save themselves?”

Kids from an Oakland school hold their selections donated by Marcus Books, in front of a mural on the shops building depicting Malcolm X armed next to a shelf of Black literature. It alludes to his quote: “Armed with the knowledge of our past, we can with confidence charter a course for our future. Culture is an indispensable weapon in the freedom struggle. We must take hold of it and forge the future with the past.”

The folks at Marcus Books have an answer to both the question and the racism they face. ““It’s pretty deeply connected to what happens when you qualify anything as Black. You’re met with suspicion or dismissal. The publishing industry has had a history of framing us as a ‘diversity section,’” Jasmine explains. The African-American Literature Book Club listed over 200 Black-owned bookstores in the 90s. Today, that number is only 118. And Marcus Books’ experience in San Francisco is only further proof that America doesn’t truly value literary diversity. Though many other San Francisco bookstores have been listed as historical landmarks, despite all of the history and culture built there, Marcus Books has never been awarded that designation. 

But with authors like Malcolm X, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Terry McMillan, Walter Mosley, Muhammad Ali, Ishmael Reed, Michael Eric Dyson, Tannarive Due, Randall Robinson, Nikki Giovanni, E. Lynn Harris, and so many more who’ve passed through their doors and graced their shelves, Marcus Books isn’t just a Black bookstore; it’s an American treasure that celebrates Blackness, in a culture that’s actively censoring that celebration in literary spaces elsewhere. In times like these and many other tumultuous eras, Marcus Books endures, inspires, and encourages us to do the same, reminding us that the “call to write our own story, now more than ever, continues.”

KEEP GOING BLACK IN HISTORY:

A PBS short documents Marcus Books through a tour of the store, interview with the owner, and bits of the business’s history.

Support Marcus Books by shopping their website or their storefront on Bookshop.

Cozy up to all the latest releases, cultural literature and happenings at Marcus Books on Instagram.

The Marcus Books GoFundMe is still open if you’d like to contribute to keeping them alive for future generations.

Learn more about the Richardson family and their storefront’s legacy in a 2010 SFGate article celebrating the Marcus Books 50th anniversary here.

Learn more about “The FBI’s War on Black Bookstores” at The Atlantic.

The New York Times compiles some great infographics and more stats on the lack of diversity in the publishing industry here.

THE AMERICAN BLACKSTORY 2020

DAY 25 — Black Masking Indians

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The endless mazes of cypress and tupelo trees, cold-blooded predators lurking, and flesh-eating insects guarding the dark, murky Louisiana swamps were all a better fate than the chains waiting for the newly enslaved.

In fleeing their French captors, some survived the swamp’s perils, creating independent, hidden communities called “maroon camps.” (The inhabitants themselves were the “maroons.”) Others perished in the marshlands, but did so as free people, fighting to live.

Many who survived didn’t do it without an unexpected assist from the fiercely independent indigenous peoples of the Choctaw, Blackfoot, Seminole and other local tribes. When the French established the great city of New Orleans in the early 1700s, they did so on already occupied land. The Natives who weren’t scattered by the decimation of their tribes and sacred land were enslaved to build the future Crescent City. Unfortunately for the French, these peoples’ languages and customs, intimate relationship with the terrain, and strategic prowess made their frequent escape a constant liability.

The French didn’t have to wait long for replacement labor, though. In 1719, ships of enslaved people arrived from Africa, Haiti and the West Indies. Without the home advantages native people capitalized on, and terrified of a new, unfamiliar place where humans, plants and animals all held danger, the newly enslaved were much more vulnerable. Rather than live under a slavemaster’s whip, many fled into the nearby swamps, where natives who came upon them fed, clothed, guided them to safety, and sometimes welcomed the newly freed into their own tribal communities. The black and native people even established their own “Swampland Railroad” to liberate those who couldn’t escape to maroon camps on their own.

The deep alliance and mutual cultural respect black and indigenous people shared culminated into the French’s worst fear in the Natchez Revolt of 1729 when 280 slaves and 176 natives joined forces to destroy the tobacco farms further impinging on native lands and enslaving more black people. Their uprising was unsuccessful, but the relationship had been solidified. Though the French repeatedly implemented an assortment of laws and regulations – such as the “Code Noir” that regulated basic behavior like when, where, and if people of color were allowed to gather, leading to the establishment of New Orleans’ historic Congo Square – the two marginalized groups cultivated a friendship that only grew deeper with French suppression.

Having gained so much from the indigenous Americans, by 1746, the free black communities chose to honor and appreciate the tribes in the best way they knew how – by incorporating hallmarks of tribal culture, mythology and textile making into their own creations for the biggest celebration of the year, Mardi Gras. Black people were only allowed to attend the city festivities as servants, and once again couldn’t gather together under French law, but when police were occupied with peacekeeping among the major white-only parties, in black communities, vivid feathers, beaded story scenes, and tribal traditions learned from local natives became the fancy dress of choice. The bravest of black revelers would even craft masks to go with their elaborate suits, and sneak into the society events undetected. Masks were soon outlawed as well, but a centuries-long tradition was born.

Today, the Mardi Gras Indians – or Black Masking Indians as some prefer to be called, since people of color were historically segregated from the festival – preserve the tradition of their African and indigenous forefathers. During Mardi Gras, St. Joseph’s Day, and “Super Sunday” – in recognition of the only day of the week that black free and enslaved people were allowed to congregate, trade and socialize together in Congo Square – dozens of “tribes” of Black Masking Indians parade the streets of New Orleans, hoping they’ll be recognized by the crowds as the prettiest of them all.

“Beads and feathers have always been worn by indigenous people — you can’t hide among a people unless you resemble them,” explains Big Chief Shaka Zulu of the Golden Feather Hunters. “Masking” is the term used to describe dressing in your hand-crafted suit, likely derived from the tendency to subvert segregated Mardi Gras parties by donning a mask. In each tribe’s suit, elements of indigenous, African, and Afro-Caribbean influence all intermingle to create a distinctly southern African-American tradition.

“It is a tradition of resistance. It is an homage to the mutual struggles of both African Americans and indigenous Americans on their quest for freedom, self-actualization, and self-expression in America,” one Black Masking Indian queen proudly explains.

Each Black Masking tribe mirrors a typical native tribe’s hierarchy with a Big Chief, Big Queen, Spy Boy (scout) and Flag Boy (banner man). Tribes throughout New Orleans’ neighborhoods bear names as colorful as their suits, like the Young Maasai Hunters, Bayou Renegades, Black Seminoles and Yellow Pocahontas, many referencing the deep Native American, African and creole cultures that thrived together secretly for centuries. And the suits they hand-sew in the tradition of their allies and ancestors can cost up to $30,000, but are only worn for a single season. It’s a small price to pay to preserve and perpetuate such a beautiful expression of history.

Those who preserve that history today stress its importance to a cultural future in New Orleans, especially in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. “We still have some depressed neighborhoods in New Orleans,” one chief acknowledges. “When the Black Masking Indians meander through their communities, they provide a sense of belonging, a sense of self. It’s about uplifting and empowering [people] to feel good about themselves rather than feeling ‘less than.’”

Some of the Black Masking Indians can trace their lineage back to the original black and indigenous people of Louisiana, others were welcomed and initiated into the society by existing members. But either way, when the Black Masking Indians dance down the streets of New Orleans, cultures that once had to go into hiding come back to life in a bold, storied, and most of all, public display, of black and indigenous southern history at its most beautiful.

KEEP GOING BLACK IN HISTORY:

Watch Huffington Post’s short on the “tradition rooted in rebellion.”
Dive deeper into the customs of the Black Feather Tribe.

Learn more about the Black Masking Indians’ motto of “killin’ em dead with needle and thread.”

Read one queen’s account of what masking means to her.
THE AMERICAN BLACKSTORY 2020

DAY 1 — The Sugar Land 95

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A single backhoe’s load of dirt in early 2018 was all it took to unearth 95 battered and discarded skeletons and a history that the Imperial Sugar Corporation, the State of Texas, and the entire southern United States might have preferred remain buried.

But they had been well-warned. Reginald Moore, a former prison guard and caretaker of the state’s Old Imperial Farm Prison Cemetery had spent over 25 years researching the history of prisons, plantations and slavery in the southeastern “Sugar Bowl of Texas,” and he’d pleaded with city officials to conduct archaeological surveys before continuing development. He cautioned them that eventually, the dark history of the region’s sugar economy would come back to haunt the town just outside of Houston so aptly named Sugar Land.

Sugar caning had a long-standing reputation of being such miserable, back-breaking work that farms couldn’t even pay people to work the fields. It didn’t take long for most of the local sugar plantations to go entirely bankrupt once their unwilling workforce found freedom in 1865 when Texas was emancipated.

But the enterprising owners of a successful plantation that would go on to become the Imperial Sugar Company had another gambit to play. Since 1844, their neighbors in Louisiana had engaged in a practice known as “convict leasing.” Despite its relatively unassuming name, convict leasing was state-sanctioned slavery that was mutually beneficial for both plantation owners AND southern states. The enactment of “Black Codes” in southern states ensured a constant supply of prisoners (and thus constant income) by frivolously jailing black men for things like failing to get their employer’s permission to change jobs or flirting with white women, and plantation owners now had hassle-free labor with an added bonus: unlike slaves, leased convicts were easily replaceable and didn’t need to be well-fed or particularly cared for at all. If they died, plantation owners buried them where they fell, chains and all, and simply requisitioned another.

Victims of the “Black Codes” at work as prison laborers. Children.

And so in 1878, just 13 years after slaves were freed in Texas, the Imperial Sugar Company became one of the largest convict lease owners in American history, buying rights to the ENTIRE state’s prison population, and gaining a brand new nickname that reflected the horrific conditions that convict leasing allowed them to inflict on workers: “The Hellhole on the Brazos.” One inmate wrote that Imperial’s prison guards routinely reminded them that “the men did not cost them any money and the mules did,” a mentality that led to treatment so bad that “nobody was relieved until he dropped in his tracks.”

The painful legacy that Reginald Moore had begged Sugar Land officials to face was now one that they couldn’t look away from.

“The Sugar Land 95” (94 men and 1 woman) unearthed that day ranged from 14 to 70 years old, all with significant trauma to their bones. Despite outcry by 225 Texas historians asking the Fort Bend county officials to “make choices that acknowledge the national significance of this discovery… a burial ground [like which none other] has been found,” after DNA collection and artifact cataloguing, the Sugar Land 95 were reinterred back at the Fort Bend ISD construction site where they were found, with a memorial ceremony planned for this Spring.

When he spoke to the school district on behalf of the Sugar Land 95 he’d long fought to see acknowledged, Mr. Moore mourned that they were “being treated today in death the way they were treated when they were alive,” but took comfort in knowing that finally their truth could not be denied: “They existed.”

“A contract for convict labor, used during the convict leasing system that forced thousands of African Americans to work as forced labor after slavery ended specifically asks for ‘Negro workers.’”
(Read on at USA Today)

KEEP GOING BLACK IN HISTORY:

Read details of Reginald Moore’s campaign for justice for the Sugar Land 95 at Texas Monthly.

The Houston Chronicle dives into the dark history of contract labor surrounding the “Hellhole on the Brazos.”
Sam Collins of the Convict Leasing and Labor Project speaks about their purpose and the history of convict leasing and the Sugar Land 95 on the Texas State Capitol, built by convict laborers.

In 2009, Douglas A. Blackmon’s book “Slavery By Another Name” won the Pulitzer Prize, and it’s another excellent source should you want to learn more about the convict leasing system.

Caleb McDaniel, a historian at Rice University, has been one of the most vocal allies of preserving the entire site where the Sugar Land 95 were found. Find his official statement and petition (endorsed by the 225 historians referenced above) here.

THE AMERICAN BLACKSTORY 2019

DAY 11 — Seneca Village

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Seneca Village - Central Park’s Stolen Foundation

There’s a dark secret buried beneath the greenery of Central Park.

In the mid-1850s, New York was was just beginning to blossom into the global city it’s now become. Brimming with tourists, businessmen and immigrants from around the world, the city needed a grand outdoor space to rival those of London, Paris and other European metropolises, according to New York’s officials and prominent residents too.

Where they didn’t have space to build, city planners took what they needed from the nearby “shanty wasteland” inhabited by “insects, squatters, and bloodsuckers,” as the local papers characterized the small enclave of Seneca Village and its people.

But those descriptions couldn’t have been further from the truth. No one was more invested in the well-being and upkeep of their small corner of the Big Apple than Seneca Village’s own citizens – it had stood as New York’s first community of free black people for 30 years.

Despite the fact that the state of New York didn’t officially free slaves until 1827 and the United States didn’t follow until 1863, the free black men and women of Seneca Village established their middle-class settlement by purchasing adjacent plots of property in 1825. But so much more than pride bound them so fiercely to their estates. In those days, black men were only eligible to vote if they owned at least $250 of land. Of the nearly 14,000 black people documented in New York at the time, only 91 had voting rights and of those, 10 lived in Seneca Village. For their small town, preservation was power.

Albro and Mary Beth Lyons were two prominent abolitionists who were also known citizens of Seneca Village.

But unbeknownst to all of them, just two weeks before the church’s cornerstone was set, city officials had ordered the entire village, from 81st to 89th Streets between 7th and 8th Avenues (near what’s now Central Park West), condemned to make space for their vanity.

With 3 churches, 3 schools, 2 cemeteries and dozens of free-standing homes up to three stories tall, Seneca Village was a thriving community with nearly 600 total residents during the 3 decades it existed. And they had plans for greater longevity. When the cornerstone for their First African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church was laid in 1853, a time capsule was placed inside to preserve the significance for future residents. As a suspected Underground Railroad stop due to the presence of so many abolitionists and the constant influx of new residents, it had become a place of hope for all who passed through and a realized vision of what free black people could be.

An article from the New York Herald documents the coffins unearthed in 1871, noting that they had not been there just 5 years before when trees were planted in the park. Unlikely, as excavations later established it as the location of one of Seneca Village’s cemeteries. (Also note the coffin’s description.)

4 years later in 1857, it was all gone. Despite protests from the citizens and lawsuits that they brought against the city for failing to pay what the property was worth, if they paid anything at all, the then 300 or so men, women and children of Seneca Village didn’t stand a chance against New York’s elite.

It wasn’t just black history that was destroyed either. By the time it was razed, Seneca Village was a shining example of an integrated community, with as many as 30% of its residents having been Irish or German, all attending the same schools, churches and local gatherings.

Seneca Village was only one of many black communities, cemeteries and landmarks lost to the rise of New York, and the city has begun to address this shameful history through places like the African Burial Ground National Monument and historical markers. But some mistakes can never be undone. As signified on the plaque where Seneca Village once stood, after their property and voting rights were lost, Seneca Village was never rebuilt, and while remains have been unearthed there sporadically since 1871, not a single living descendant of the community’s black citizens has ever been found. to make something brand new.

Where Seneca Village would have stood today

KEEP GOING BLACK IN HISTORY:

Explore the study & excavation of this historic community at Columbia University’s Seneca Village Project.