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American Artists
Above: Rashid Johnson. The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club (Thurgood), 2008. Lambda print, Ed. 2/5, 69 x 55 1/2 in. Courtesy of Rubell Family Collection. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Art school at Rutgers was just 45 minutes away from New York City by train, and it was the 1980s with a cast of artists showing at museums and galleries and populating art magazines that still consisted mostly of white men, with some white women artists, such as Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, and Jenny Holzer, and a scant few...
read morePortraits from a Revolt
On July 2, 1839, Sengbe Pieh, better known as Joseph Cinqué, and some 50 or more fellow Africans killed the captain and three of the crew of the Spanish schooner La Amistad. The plan was to turn the vessel around and go back to Africa, from where they had been kidnapped and enslaved. They entrusted the Spanish navigator, Don Pedro Montez, whose life they spared, with steering the ship. He steered it along the North American coast off Montauk Point on Long. The Africans—Mende from Sierre Leone—surrendered the ship to the U.S. Navy only...
read moreThe First “March on Washington”
At 74, A. (Asa) Philip Randolph (1889-1979), the founder and president of the powerful union the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, approached the planning of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom with the full knowledge of the impact it would have. More than two decades earlier, in 1941, Randolph had threatened President Franklin D. Roosevelt with a similar peaceful demonstration, “A Call to Negro America to March on Washington for Jobs and Equal Participation in National Defense.” Despite an all-out effort by President Roosevelt...
read moreActivists Among Us: Memories of the March on Washington
With the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington just a week away, it’s a good time to think about the folks who dedicated and sometimes sacrificed their lives to the civil rights movement. Too often, though, we remember those individuals who have become icons, MLK, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, a few names come easily to mind. We dig deeper: A. Philip Randolph, Medgar Evers, Ida B. Wells, Fannie Lou Hamer, John Lewis, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth—there are many more, of course, all key players, (almost all since passed on)....
read moreAthlon Sports and American Legacy announce partnership
Athlon Sports and American Legacy announce partnership to publish a special co-branded insert that will appear in the February 2014 issue of Athlon Sports Magazine. This insert will celebrate the historical achievements of African-Americans in Sports! Circulation: 10.8 million!!! Visit www.athlonsports.com. Follow American Legacy on Twitter...
read moreLensman Activists at MOAD
Above from left: “American Gothic, Washington, D.C.,” 1942; “A Choice of Weapons,” 1965; Ethel Shariff in Chicago, 1963. The late, great Gordon Parks—who died in March 2006 was, among other things, a social activist artist. Setting aside his films—The Learning Tree and Shaft—his poetry, and musical compositions, Parks was a prolific recorder of history. He was pragmatic enough to know, early on, that if he wanted to keep taking photos he had to earn a living at it—and so he got his first chance at learning to...
read moreOut from the Shadows: A snapshot of early black Philadelphia
Above Image: Pepper Pot, A Scene in the Philadelphia Market, by John Lewis Krimmel, 1811. From the time the Isabella, carrying 150 Africans, arrived from Bristol, England, until 1780, when Pennsylvania passed the first emancipation law in the United States, the city had watched enslaved Africans disembark onto its docks in chains, to be sold on the corner of Front and Market Streets in front of the London Coffee House. Today on that corner you’ll see only a shuttered brick building; this is often the way—we must see beyond the long-gone...
read morePinkster
For most of us the name Sleepy Hollow brings forth images from Washington Irving’s 1819 legend of the hapless schoolteacher Ichabod Crane, who is chased one night by a terrifying headless horseman and mysteriously disappears, never to be heard from again. But there is another picture of the Dutch enclave Irving lovingly paints, one of a bucolic place where life moves slowly and tradition holds sway: “I mention this peaceful spot with all possible laud,” writes Irving early in the story, “for it is in such little retired Dutch valleys,...
read morePictures of Nashville’s Past
In 2008 I stood in what was the nursery in a house called Travellers Rest in Nashville, Tennessee. I say “house,” although its former owner John Overton, a judge, banker, planter, the founder of the city of Memphis, and a slave owner—might have objected what he might have considered a puny term. It was a sizable home, built in 1799 and added on to and renovated over the next 120 or so years. Still, as part of a tour of the city, I had already seen Belle Meade, a Greek Revival mansion on what was once a 5,400-acre plantation, and I’d...
read moreCooking With Soul
In a previous issue of American Legacy we published an excerpt from Carolyn Quick Tillery’s cookbook The African-American Heritage Cookbook: Traditional Recipes and Fond Remembrances from Alabama’s Renowned Tuskegee Institute (1996). Tillery’s cookbook was a loving tribute to the foods and people of Tuskegee, Alabama and Tuskegee Institute. In it she mixed biographical sketches, historical photographs, reminiscences, even poetry, with the dishes she celebrated. Tillery herself a graduate of Tuskegee Institute also included in the book...
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