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The Black Cyclone
Often when we think of bicycle racing we think of the Tour de France, the multiple stage race held each year with teams of elite riders from around the world making their way on a grueling course through France and surrounding countries, ending with the winner crossing the finish line on the Champs Elysee in Paris. But years before the first ever Tour de France was held in 1903, bicycle racing gripped the American sports fan with a fervor that rivaled the one they held for another favorite sport, baseball. In the 1880s cycling as recreation...
read moreFrom the Walls Out: Whitfield Lovell at Hunter Museum of Art
About ten years ago American Legacy featured an artist named Whitfield Lovell in an article titled “Whispers from the Walls.” The Bronx-born Lovell, whose three-dimensional tableaux—life-size charcoal portraits on pine board, punctuated with everyday (and not so everyday) objects found in flea markets and antique malls, tel the life stories of ancestors, family, and once anonymous individuals from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The genesis of Lovell’s freestanding tableaux are installations in which he worked...
read moreSTILL ENDANGERED
Since 1988 the National Trust for Historic Preservation has selected eleven historic sites it considers the most endangered in the country. To qualify for this list a site must be threatened by neglect and deterioration and suffer from a lack of maintenance and funding. In 1998 the list included as a group 103 historically black colleges and universities. The oldest extant black college is Lincoln University, founded as Ashmun Institute in 1854. Cheney State University, sometimes considered the first, was established in 1837 as a high school...
read moreKentucky Hamlets
Photographer Sarah Hoskins’ mission is not so much to preserve history, as to keep people and places from passing into history, without acknowledgement or notice, understanding or regard. This has been her passion since she began 13 years ago to create a visual record of hamlets near Lexington, Kentucky, small villages founded by ex-slaves and populated by their fifth- and sixth-generation descendants. Because these hamlets are largely missing from academic literature, Sarah’s effort is the first real survey of an important part of black...
read moreThomas Day, Master Craftsman
A wealthy free black man in the antebellum South? A rare thing indeed. But master craftsman and cabinetmaker Thomas Day was such a man, sought after by the richest tobacco farmers for his hand built classically inspired furniture. He would count two governors and the University of North Carolina among his clients. Originally from Dinwiddie County, Virginia, Day had the great luck to be born, in 1801, into a family that had been free for generations. When laws became more restrictive for free blacks in Virginia, as they had been increasingly in...
read moreA Troublesome Thing
While the idea of black slave owners is nothing new to most people these days, it is nonetheless disturbing for a few reasons. It brings an ache to the gut, or heart. A sadness. A feeling of betrayal. It is that sinking feeling you get when you reach that point in a historical figure’s shining biography that isn’t so shiny. There is that way that folks who like to “excuse” slavery, level the black slaveholder at us as some sort of equalizer. “Blacks did it, so they were just as bad as whites” is the mantra. Those same folks refuse...
read moreIntroducing Our Two-Sides Newsletter
The black experience (as well as that of other races, ethnicities, and cultures) has been an essential part of the complex, centuries-old, many-layered thing called American history. We know this to be true, but we can’t always put our finger on the facts because they haven’t always been in our history books. The writer Ralph Ellison wrote in an essay in his 1986 book Going to the Territory that “it is well that we keep in mind the fact that not all American history is recorded” and that “we possess two basic versions of American...
read moreDavid Ruggles’ Revolution
Walking on Lispenard Street in downtown New York City, I was enjoying a perfect blue-sky, just crisp September Sunday when I caught the portrait of the late Gil Scott-Heron you see here. I wondered why the unknown person who created the poster chose that spot to showcase the man who told us the revolution will not be televised . The fact that the Arab Spring uprisings of the past couple of years were not only televised, but thrown worldwide on the Internet notwithstanding (and to be fair, Scott-Heron was making a different point, and a...
read moreRemembering Our Burial Sites
An all-too common occurrence is the loss of early black burial sites. Sometimes they are actively plowed under, built over. The memory of them dwindles, and once sacred ground becomes like one burial ground in Eufaula, Alabama. There are no headstones commemorating the once enslaved in the town graveyard there, just a plaque proclaiming a plain slope of grass the Negro Cemetery, a final resting place for ex-slaves. Anyone or no one could be buried under that grassy slope. Only trust and faith make it so. But a group of professors and...
read moreIn Case You Missed It . . .
Last month, a moment that was important to American history got lost in the swirl of the usual economic doom saying, political punditry, celebrity worship: On November 1, President Obama signed a proclamation designating Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia, a national monument. It is not glamorous or sexy or controversial, but it is significant. Using his authority under the Antiquities Act, (Theodore Roosevelt used it in 1906 to establish America’s first national monument, Devil’s Tower in Wyoming) President Obama’s stroke of a pen...
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