Tallahassee Was Once All Plantations

 Some excellent publications from The John G. Riley Museum 
on Tallahassee's African-American History. 

If these Live Oaks dripping with Spanish Moss

could talk, what tales they could tell.Mrs.Bernice

Walker Ford, a slave descendent recalled: 

"People used to tell stories about slaves being

hung from that tree." 

My sister Andy lives in northeastern Tallahassee in Leon County, Florida. I've learned that almost every inch of Tallahassee was all plantations up to the Civil War, and then tenant farms worked by the former slaves as sharecroppers after that. Leon County as a whole had the greatest cluster of plantations in the State, and the greatest clusters of Black communities from Reconstruction into the 20th century. Black folks outnumbered white folks here. Even smaller and moderate-sized farms had slaves working them.  

In 1860, Leon County's population was 73% black,  all of them slaves. It's no wonder that Tallahassee and Leon County, also the center of the domestic slave trade in Florida, led the state in the production of cotton. It may also have led the state in the selling of children and family members to other planters, one of the most painful terrors endured.  

Photo in Humanities Florida's FORUM magazine, article by 
Larry E. Rivers, Feb. 24, 2020, first published in Spring, 2010. 

Cotton plantations. The words evoke human bondage. White Supremacy, Slave masters, Slave overseers, whips, hard labor, free labor. The historical and literary scholarship on Cotton plantations and how slaves worked them is extensive.  And it is brutal. "African-American oral traditions emphasize the institution's severity," eminent Florida historian Larry Eugene Rivers writes. He is talking about Florida slaves.  They speak of beatings, rape, vicious assaults on women and children; being forced to work when sick, maimed, broken, worked to death; psychological cruelty, severe floggings. When I read slave narratives I flinch at the inhumanity, human beings being held as human chattel, the property of white men.  Property.

And to think that our country was created on this foundation.  America, and surely the Southern states and territories, were built on the backs of slaves from 1619 onward.  Actually, it was before that date in Florida. Historians note that as early as 1539, slavery arrived in Florida when slave trader and Spanish explorer Hernando DeSoto attempted to establish a permanent settlement and claim more territory for Spain.  

Various drawings of cotton plantations.
https://www.floridamemory.com/items/show/28794

Early Florida history down here in the state Capital, established in 1824 on lands of already-thriving plantations, is basically about  how their owners, masters of their domains, dominated economic, political and social life from the very beginning, and how slaves served them from sunup to sundown. For that matter this history includes moving Native Americans off their land as well, which affected slaves because they often found a safe haven from slave owners among them. 

There were not many safe havens around, but many slaves were driven to run away. Some took the precarious journey on the Underground Railroad to find the freedom for which they longed. Some went searching for children who had been traded away. Some ran away only to be hunted to their death, or tortured if captured. The gritty reality of Fugitive Slave Laws. The newspapers at the time were full of ads for runaway slaves, and Tallahassee was no exception. The plantations harbored brutality, and Tallahassee was once all plantations.

Goodwood,now a museum, is building a memorial

to the slaves listing their names, "a site for sober

reflection, remembrance, teaching, healing."

Many of the plantations, like Goodwood down the street from Andy's, are now tourist attractions selling the beauty of these former sites built by slaves. Over 58 slaves worked this 1,676 acre plantation up to the Civil War, where they were then forced to work as sharecroppers or to take their chances and move on.

On the revisionist side of the scholarship on plantation slavery, which grew during the 1870s and after, are the stories and oral traditions of how slaves and their descendants survived. 

It's the history of how enslaved African Americans created families and kinship networks, sought to reunite with relatives who had been sold, sang about the jubilee in the cotton fields, formed their own religious beliefs and practices; taught each other how to read and write. 

From the Freedmen and
Southern Society Project.  

Most important, the revisionist scholarship, meticulously documented, reveals how slaves and their descendants sought to define "freedom" for themselves. I think of Peter Woods, Herb Gutman, John Blasingame, Ira Berlin. I recall working briefly on The Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland, a multi-volume documentary history of the transition from slavery to freedom based on army records in the National Archives. The voices of the slaves rise up and are amplified. If only all Americans heard them.   

For former slaves, freedom was not working for wages for the profit of a boss. They resisted and resented the sharecropping system forced on them after the Civil War. Freedom was being your own boss, farming your own land, choosing your own path. 40 acres and a mule. 

'

They persisted in this pursuit in the face of ruthless white supremacy and racism: Black Codes, terror and lynching, cruel and inhumane violence beyond endurance. They had to.  After the horrors of Reconstruction, the ongoing virulent Black Codes followed by merciless "Jim Crow" laws, they organized, advocated and fought for their own dreams of freedom. They fought for the right to own land, to learn, to vote. They fought for political and civil rights up through the 1960s Civil Rights Movement to the present. It's a centuries-long history of persistence, courage, and achievement against insurmountable odds.

John G. Riley Museum for African-American History is near the Capital,
 where former slaves built communities like Frenchtown after the Civil War. John Riley,
born in 1857, determined to educate himself when education for slaves was illegal.
He became a teacher, principal of Lincoln High School, and community leader. The House he built in the 1890s stands as a testament to the persistence and contributions of African Americans.

                                                                                                                                                                   

When the Civil War ended in 1865, Tallahassee's slaves were ready for the Jubilee, the promise of freedom that had sustained them for hundreds of years. What plantation owners and city officials had kept hidden from the slaves was that they were already free. Had been for two years. The cruelty was in the deception.

                                                                                                                    
They were freed when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, proclaiming “That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be thenceforward, and forever free...."  

The Knott House, built by George Proctor,
a black builder. Photo taken while 
 on a plantation tour with Andy.

It was more than two years later, on May 20, 1865, that Union Brigadier General Edward M. McCook arrived in Tallahassee, stood on the steps of the Knott house, and read that Proclamation. He had taken possession of the city from Southern forces, establishing his headquarters at the Knott House, located four blocks from the State Capitol. He declared the Emancipation Proclamation in effect.  A freedman remembered: 

"I remember that day, when word came, that word that made free men and women of our black people" (notes 4 and 18 below). 

Could this be a rendering of Emancipation
Day 1865? from FORUM, Feb.2020.

An announcement also arrived that day from Major General Quincy A. Gillmore via train from Jacksonville that confirmed the news.  General Gillmore's Special Order Number 63 proclaimed that "the people of the black race are free citizens of the United States."  

"Free citizens of the United States!" Over 2,000 former slaves had gathered to hear the news, and they rejoiced. "It was that day when us black men an' women and lil' chillun crowded roun' each other, cryin' for joy, shouting we's free, we's  free! Glory! Glory! We's free."

The newly freed slaves celebrated all day at a picnic at Bull's Pond, which is today called Lake Ella, just north of downtown. It seemed fitting they would celebrate at the place where Black churches had held baptisms and slaves had prayed for freedom. 

Since that first celebration in 1865, communities in Tallahassee have annually celebrated May 20th as Emancipation Day, and today activities are still held throughout the city. The freedpeople turned that day into what Larry Rivers calls "a sacred moment of popular celebration."  And that it was.  

May 20, 1930, celebrated on former
Horseshoe Plantation.

Local newspapers often reported the event in their "colored sections."  Here's a news item from the Weekly Floridian on May 20, 1884, for example, almost 20 years later, reporting that "A large number of colored excursionists [travelers from plantations outside of Leon County] arrived from the east last night for the purpose of today's participation in the celebration of the emancipation of their race. The exercises of the day will consist of a grand parade in which all the colored lodges and societies will join, decoration of graves of Federal soldiers, addresses, etc." (Colored News of Tallahassee, p.9). 

Of course, not all the celebrants that day were "excursionists," but exuberant freedmen and freedwomen who had worked the plantations of Tallahassee and Leon county. It was a day when former slaves and their descendants got together with old friends, shared stories, took up collections to benefit the community. It was noted that during one of these celebrations "the money collected was enough to extend the school term of the public school (note 4).

Emancipation Day 2015.Tallahassee.
 Historical re-enactment, 
Sara Brockman photo.

"African Americans stayed alert to the ways that past struggle was related to current strivings." wrote Rivers (note 4 below).

This is the heart of the matter. This is what inspired Tallahassee and Leon County African Americans to keep up the freedom struggle in the face of  such relentless hostility and formidable odds. It's what inspired activists like Althemese Pemberton Barnes to preserve the past for the present. It's what motivated her and fellow Tallahasseans to restore an old house built by a former slave and turn it into the Riley Museum of African-American History.    

The freedpeople who celebrated Emancipation Day were survivors of slavery, and they "lived with the consequences of human bondage for the rest of their lives," Larry Rivers poignantly reminds us.  Many had the scars to show for it, more bore the emotional scars. In 1900, Mary Ann Harris was still searching for her mother. The pain of it. Thirty-five years after emancipation. 

Former slaves carried that pain to their deaths, and they didn't want us to forget. 

My sister and I have driven around the city and its environs for years, with Andy telling me stories of old plantations and the free black communities that grew out of them. This trip it became more real as I donned my historian's hat and did a little research to gather some basic facts. I look at the landmarks, the former plantations, the African-American historic trail, the buildings, homes, institutions and historical markers, the names of streets and roads, with fresh eyes, and more understanding. 

Andy recalled a story about an African-American women realtor who sold land in the area around her neighborhood to the descendants of former slaves and free blacks. She wasn't sure of the details. Some of these landowners still own the land they farmed and the houses they built on it. Many others have sold their holdings. They are now worth a lot of money. "A lot of money," Andy emphasizes.

About 250 slave descendants are
buried here, most in unmarked graves.

Lucrative housing developments and PUDs, office buildings, medical complexes, and malls have grown on the old plantations. The construction is constant, full speed ahead, and the developments are massive. Andy and I marvel at their size and the speed at which they go up, changing the landscape forever, like the old Lonnie Road developments on lands that free men and women built and farmed, like Welaunee Estates less than a mile from Andy's house, built on the large Fleischmann plantation, which was built in the early 1900s on the lands of several former cotton plantations.

Now when we make a right from Miccosukee onto Fleischmann Road, I'll think of the plantations that once flourished here. I'll know that Udu Fleischmann, a New York banker, built a quail hunting plantation in 1919 that employed former slaves who once worked the cotton fields and served as domestic servants for their antebellum-era owners. Other northern  industrialists joined him in buying up former plantations. It was entertainment, but I can't help but realize that these new owners were dancing on sacred ground, on lands worked by enslaved people, on African-American burial grounds. 

This morning we drove along Lonnie and Dempsey Mayo on the way to Walmart's, passing a few of the old houses and shacks still extant on parts of the land, small clusters here and there, until we hit Mahan Drive, which is Route 90. "Pretty soon these will be gone too," Andy comments, "and the areas along Route 319, Thomasville Road, which takes you to Thomasville, Georgia, once a Plantation alley extraordinaire. Today it's a builder's dream extraordinaire."  

The stories of slaves, free blacks and their descendants touch me deeply. If ever there were lessons in determination, perseverance and courage, it lies with the African-American people of Tallahassee who built the Capital city and made it their home.                                      

SOURCES/NOTES: 

1.   Althemese Barnes and Ann Roberts, Tallahassee, Florida: Black America Series (Arcadia Publishing, 2000).

2.  "In Their Own Words,"  nd,  a booklet relating some of the oral histories preserved by the John Riley Museum (www.rileymuseum.org). 

3, "Colored News of Tallahassee: A Walk through Time, 1855-1995," nd,  collected by the Riley Museum with thanks to Claude Kennison, Devon Johnson, an FSU student, and Mary Headly for typesetting the contents.  This booklet contains articles from Tallahassee newspapers, "when colored news occupied a separate section."

4.  https://floridahumanities.org/floridas-culture-of-slavery/  "Florida's Culture of Slavery," an article by Florida historian Larry Eugene Rivers in Humanities Florida's award winning FORUM magazine, February 24, 2020. It was originally published in The FORUM, Vol. XXXII, No. 1, Spring 2010. I'm searching for Larry E. Rivers, "Slavery in Microcosm: Leon County, Florida, 1820-1860," Journal of Negro History, Vol. 66, No. 3 (Autumn, 1980), pp. 235-245. 

Another excellent source, brilliantly researched and written, full of detail, every one documented, is Julia Floyd Smith, Slavery and Plantation Growth in Antebellum Florida, 1821-1860, (Gainesville, University of Florida Press, 1973. ISBN 0813003237). I was moved to read that Smith worked under David Colburn, her dissertation advisor. 

++++++++++++++++++++++++

Althemese Barnes, founder of Riley
House, "Widens Sense of History with
 Emancipation Conference," Tallahassee
Democrat, Dec. 5, 2021.

5.  https://rileymuseum.org/tours/  The John G. Riley House Museum, located near the State Capitol building, is a 126-year old structure that embodies one of Tallahassee’s most influential men of his generation. Principal of the first public high school for blacks, Secretary of the Florida NAACP, member of the Negro Business League and Grand High Priest of the Royal Arch Masons, Mr. Riley made a lasting impact. I also want to mention a good pamphlet on Black soldiers, "Blacks in Blue and Gray, 1861-1865." Here also are some African-American sites that a Riley House tour will take you on: The Union Bank Building, The Old Capitol Building, The Historic Frenchtown Community, Old Lincoln High School, Florida A&M University, Meek-Eaton Black Archives, and the Knott House. Taken together, these sites tell the history of a committed and hard-working Black Community overtime.   

6.  https://www.museumoffloridahistory.com/about/the-knott-house-museum/20th-of-may/ Here on May 20, 1865, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which had freed the slaves in the South on January 1, 1863, was finally read to Tallahassee freedpeople. 

7.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tallahassee,_Fl

8.  https://visittallahassee.com/african-american-history-is-a-vital-part-of-the-tallahassee-story/

9.  https://www.sevenhillssuites.com/post/black-history-in-tallahassee

10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welaunee_Plantation,_Florida

11. http://genealogytrails.com/fla/leon/plantations_1860.html  This is a list of plantations and various size farms showing owners, acreage, number of slaves. During the 1820s through 1850s, Leon County attracted planters from Georgia, Virginia, Maryland, and North/South Carolina because it was great for growing cotton. There are maps showing locations and some interesting photos. This is also a good source for some census material, biographies, and plantation history.

12.  https://www.nps.gov/jeff/blogs/Days-of-Jubilee-The-End-of-Slavery-in-the-United-States.htm        

         

13. https://www.museumoffloridahistory.com/about/the-knott-house-museum/20th-of-may/ Here on May 20, 1865, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation issued on January 1, 1863, was finally read to Tallahassee slaves.   Notice in the Floridian and Journal, May 20, 1865 regarding the Emancipation Proclamation: "Newly freed slaves in Tallahassee celebrated this announcement with a picnic at Bull's Pond," now Lake Ella.

14. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_A%26M_University. Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU) began as a state Normal School for Black students after the Civil War, in October 1887, and evolved into Florida A&M in 1953, when it became a funded historically black college and university (HBCU). An interesting story that belongs in the History books along with the better known Rosa Parks story involves the arrest of Wilhemina Jakes and Carrie Patterson in 1956 by the Tallahassee Police Department for "placing themselves in a position to incite a riot," which led to the Tallahassee Bus Boycott that sought to end racial segregation in the employment and seating arrangements of city buses. In the fall of 1997, Time Magazine selected FAMU as "College of the Year." 

15. https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2395019/munree-cemetery . This is one of the thousands of black cemeteries across America that were hidden, neglected, discovered, and restored.  It was used by descendants of slaves, tenant farmers & sharecroppers from nearby plantations in the Welaunee area, purchased by Udo Fleishmann in 1912. It's near my sister Andy's house. The land is now occupied by a huge housing development. I was involved in a history of Black Nantucket when we discovered a black cemetery across from the old Windmill, and found the gravesites of the Absalom F. Boston family and others among the weeds of the hidden and forgotten burial ground.                           

16. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frenchtown_(Tallahassee)

17.  https://wfsu.org/local-routes/2019-09-26/tallahassees-smokey-hollow-in-the-shadow-of-the-capitol/

This volume was published by 
Applewood Press.

18.Patricia and Frederick McKissak point out in their book Days of Jubilee: The End of Slavery in the United States, that early on there was no single day when slavery ended in the United States. The day a slave was told of his or her freedom was the day of emancipation--their "day of jubilee."  For Former slaves in Florida the day was May 20, 1865, celebrated as "Emancipation Day" thereafter.  For slaves in Texas, it was June 19, 1865, now Juneteenth, a national holiday. 

 Added after posting. Interesting article about George Proctor and his father, free blacks. There were about 4 in Tallahasssee in 1830s: https://www.tallahasseemagazine.com/the-puzzling-story-of-george-proctor-a-free-black-man-during-the-time-of-slavery/

                                                                                                                                           

The Guggenheim Effect: New York City Reunions and the Circle of Life

Elissa and I at the Guggenheim, November 2016. Thrilling. The
glass dome and a painting from the exhibit that was up.
My photo, a rare good one.

The Guggenheim was in the news recently for getting another grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to continue to digitize its collections, and the news brought me full circle to some wonderful memories. 

The circular, curved architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum on the Upper East Side of Manhattan continues to draw comments good and bad as it did when it first opened in 1959. A unique architectural style, iconic, Wright took 16 years to draw up its various plans and died before it was finished. So did its founder Solomon Guggenheim. Wider at the top than at the bottom, Wright wanted it to be "a temple of the spirit." It housed all kinds of impressionist and modern art at one time, but we thought it looked rather bare in November 2016 when we wound our way up the curved ramps to the top and fixated on the dome skylight.  

Natalia and me, together, joyful.

My daughter Elissa and I were in New York City to reunion with my dear friend Natalia from Ukraine. She was visiting her son Ivan, who had an IT job in NYC, and his family.  They lived across the river in Jersey City, New Jersey, which turned out to be a fabulous sight for viewing the new World Trade Center.

I lived with Natalia at the end of my Peace Corps service in Starobilsk. She later moved to Kyiv to be closer to her children. I didn't think I'd see her again when I left Ukraine, and the language barrier was the worst with Natalia because she was a soulmate. We both felt it, we knew it through pantomime, efforts at understanding, and laughter, lots of laughter. Not being able to communicate fully, to become immersed in those long intimate conversations among friends that bring comfort and joy, was almost painful.

Seeing Natalia in New York brought tears of joy.  She gave me a beautiful work of art she had created, but seeing her again was the best gift of all. It was a fantastic, emotional reunion, and we repeated it when she and Ivan visited us in Sylvania a month later.  That was the best Christmas gift ever! Thank goodness that Ivan was our translator.

Natalia & son Ivan in Sylvania, Ohio. How fantastic that was!
On Main St, with my family, at Wildwood, a tour of Toledo.
December 2016

It felt like life coming full circle. It felt like being in the Guggenheim, strolling up pathways to meet old friends and loved ones, finding surprises along the way. The circle of life. A temple of the spirit, what Frank Lloyd Wright wanted it to be, what he bequeathed to future generations.

The Guggenheim effect! This New York visit brought even more reunions on top of the precious visit with Natalia. Elissa and I came full circle with several friends whom we hadn't seen for years.

I got to see my friend Alice Twombly after many years doing our own things, living our lives. It was as if we had never been apart. We carried on where we  had left off, a seamless narrative between forever friends.  She remembered her father's business in Jersey City, we reminisced about our time together in Madison, Wisconsin, took a slow walk up memory lane, up and down the ramps of our lives' experiences.  

Me with Natalia, Alice, and Christine and Elissa with Eric at the
Guggenheim. Powerful experiences, happy moments.

We met world-traveler Christine Comerford, who lives on Long Island, a friend my sister Andy and I made on a fabulous Gate I tour in Sicily. We shared a beer at a pub on the East River, near the new World Trade Center, just like we had done in Taormina. 

It was, however, bittersweet to visit the new glass tower that replaced the Twin Towers tragically destroyed on 9/11. The view from Jersey City across the river was amazing, moving, and it was even more so when we got up close and could touch the mementos, salvaged pieces of metal, the names of first responders and the thousands lost.  We were standing on sacred ground.

And finally on this trip, Elissa got to see her friend Eric, from her Maumee Valley high school class, whom she had lost touch with. In fact we met up with Eric, who had long lived in NYC, at the Guggenheim. He and Elissa reminisced about mutual friends and high school antics as they went full circle to the top.  I remembered Eric's father, a Math professor at the University of Toledo when we were there, and his mother, a great cook. 

Being at the Guggenheim. It was a passage in the present through time, the stuff memories are made of and that sustain us as we move up and down the ramps of life. Coming full circle.  

SOURCES: 

* https://www.guggenheim.org/news/guggenheim-neh-grant & https://www.guggenheim.org/library-archives/library-archives-projects/guggenheim-listening-project-reel-to-reel-collection-digitization

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_R._Guggenheim_Museum.  There's a Guggenheim Museum in Bilboa, Spain too, designed by renowned Canadian architect Frank Gehry. Amazing isn't it? Frank Gehry also designed a Center for the Arts building closer to home, next to the Toledo Museum of Art. 

Guggenheim in Bilboa.

This is the University of Toledo's Center for the Arts,
a Frank Gehry building built next to the Toledo Museum of Art

..

Actually, He Never Stopped Hiking: Loren's Paths

                                       

A lovely green tree-lined path at Broadstairs, England,
one of Charles Dickens' favorite vacation spots, and
also my friend Edward Sellick's, who took this photo.
I think his husband Jim is on this path with Loren. 

On one of Loren's favorite paths,
at Shenandoah National Park. 
 photo, Eric Trefney. 

My brother Loren would have been 75 years old on November 12, but age doesn't matter a whit where he is now, on some path or another beyond the horizon. 

He died while hiking along the Aucilla River in northern Florida.  I used to call it his last hike.  But actually, I see it now, it wasn't his last hike. He just kept on going, hiking into the unknown toward the moon, on paths inspired by the Goddess, by the natural beauty of our planet, the endless vastness of space.   

He's still hiking. I try to imagine the paths he's on, the paths he's exploring, wherever his curious mind takes him. The works of artists and photographers help me imagine it. They inspire Loren too.

He travels the world, free as a bird.  He's in eastern Europe now and then. I remember seeing him on morning walks and evening moon rises in Starobilsk when I served in Ukraine with the Peace Corps. He was curious. He wanted to know everything. He died when I was there, in May 2010, suddenly took off on a new journey, although I knew only grief at the time, devastating grief. 

Barbara Fox, New York State watercolor artist.

Sometimes he stops in Toledo, Ohio. My daughter Elissa and I thought we saw him when a red cardinal followed us along a hiking path we were on at Wildwood Metropark. He flew alongside us, stopped on a branch when we stopped, tilted his head and listened to us. "I think it's Uncle Loren," Elissa smiled. We had a nice conversation. Loren's at peace.

I've felt his presence in Michigan too. At the secret enchanted forest in Osseo, on Bird Lake. Chase and a friend were there too, examining lovely stones placed there by visitors. Wouldn't surprise me if Loren left a few of those stones, the ones with "peace" written on them.  

Autumn in Teton National Park.

William Shaftner takes off!

Our sister Andy thinks Loren was on that Blue Origin space flight with Star Trek actor William Shaftner a few weeks ago, that's how far his paths take him. 

I wondered if Loren would like the idea of "Tourist Rockets" by  the likes of ultra-billionaire Jeff Bezos, but our sister Andy thinks Loren would have been on that ride for sure.  "Are you kidding me, sis? It was one of his dearest wishes. He dreamed about it!"           

That's true. He was the biggest fan of space exploration early on, inspired by Star Wars and his endless research. He followed NASA like a hawk. He was one of the founders of the Greater Orlando Space Society when he lived there, because he wanted to get people excited about space exploration and its benefits. He was at most space launches. Yep, Andy's right. He was cruising along on that space flight.

Loren returns to Florida a lot, too. He lived there for a long time, became a booster and enthusiastic environmental volunteer. From Orlando he moved to Tallahassee in 2009. Our mother was not doing well, and he joined Andy in caring for her.  

Loren knew a lot about Florida's natural environment, worked hard to preserve it.  He took that Aucilla River hike with the Florida Trails Association. He volunteered at St. Marks and Birdsong. He was a faithful member of the Sierra Club. I have a feeling he was down at the Loxahatchee Nature Preserve recently when a full moon reflected its awesome glory. 

The moon shines on the Loxahatchee Wildlife Preserve, part of the northern Everglades near Jupiter, Florida. That's where the Moon and the Earth meet. Loren is its witness.

Photo by Bill Kiert, Dept. of Interior. 

Bob Thompson, Artist: A Shooting Star in a Brief Life

I love this painting by Bob Thompson, which reminds me of Romare Bearden
and Jacob Lawrence, but whose inspiration is uniquely Thompson's. Thanks
to Peter Stebbins and the Studio House at Walbridge, DC, for sharing this. 

An important new traveling exhibition, "Bob Thompson: This House is Mine," is offering a rich reconsideration of a visionary African-American artist. 

Robert Louis Thompson (1937–1966), born in Louisville, KY,  earned critical acclaim in the late 1950s and 1960s "for his paintings of figurative complexity and chromatic intensity." He lived in New York, and travelled to and lived in Europe for long periods of time. Representation by the pioneering Martha Jackson Gallery in New York City while he was painting and creating his oeuvre, not only after he died, assured his recognition in the art world. 

These galleries deserve more recognition as well. Martha Jackson (1907-1969) was born in Buffalo, New York, attended Smith College, and opened her gallery at E. 65th Street in Manhattan in 1953.  She was far-sighted, ahead of her times.                 

"Blue Madonna." A unique figurative style.

Forever young.

 This House is Mine is the first museum exhibition devoted to the artist in more than twenty years, organized by the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine.  The New England college museums are doing good work these days.* 

The Whitney Museum in New York held a retrospective of his work in 1998, important to mention because the Whitney, like Gallery owners such as Martha Jackson, pioneered in presenting black and women artists early on. Also worthy of acknowledgement is the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery in Chelsea, NYC, the owner of the Estate of Bob Thompson I learned. Thompson's works are in Rosenfeld's collection, and also in numerous private and public collections. 

I must say I am only now discovering him. What's amazing to me is how much wonderful art Thompson created in his too-brief life, dying from drug addiction and complications of gall bladder surgery when he was only 28 years old and living in Rome.  Thompson created more than 1,000 works in an eight-year career, and has influenced and inspired several generations of young African-American artists. A shooting star in the darkness. 

According to the Colby museum, the traveling exhibition is significant for several reasons: 

"This House Is Mine traces Thompson’s brief but prolific transatlantic career, examining his formal inventiveness and his engagement with universal themes of collectivity, bearing witness, struggle, and justice. Over a mere eight years, he grappled with the exclusionary Western canon, developing a lexicon of enigmatic forms that he threaded through his work. Human and animal figures, often silhouetted and relatively featureless, populate mysterious vignettes set in wooded landscapes or haunt theatrically compressed spaces. Thompson reconfigures well-known compositions by European artists such as Piero della Francesca and Francisco de Goya through brilliant acts of formal distortion and elision, recasting these scenes in sumptuous colors. On occasion, familiar individuals appear: the jazz greats Nina Simone and Ornette Coleman, and the writers LeRoi Jones (later Amiri+ Baraka) and Allen Ginsberg."

For me, an interesting aspect of Thompson's work is the source of his inspiration. I immediately associated his colorful expressionist works with fantastic African-American painters like Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, William H. Johnson, Lois Mallou Jones, Beaufort DeLaney and so many others whose figurative paintings, depictions of African- American daily life and culture, and use of shapes and color stand out as distinctive and unique contributions to expanding the Western art canon.  Many of these artists, icons of the Harlem Renaissance, were around when the young Thompson was in NY, many still painting and exhibiting their art. 

And yet, everything I've read about Thompson's inspiration points to his love of the art of the Western canon, the Baroque and the Renaissance, Italian painters, the old masters. Still, he did riff off of these artists to create his own interpretation and images, a blend of traditions. I would like to know how he viewed the African-American art tradition, There seems to be some connection for sure. Thompson was good friends with jazz singer Nina Simone, saxophonist Ornette Coleman, the poet Amiri Bakara and Allen Ginsburg, all  precious and singular voices.  He must have known of the works of contemporary and older generations of Black artists. Maybe there's more to discover in his private collections and communications.  I checked to see if Thompson was included in the Smithsonian's National Museum of Art's fabulous catalogue, "Twentieth Century African American Painters," but he's not there. 

This House is Mine exhibition will surely garner more public recognition of a shooting star who left an important legacy. Here is the current exhibit catalogue, which looks beautiful. There are also earlier catalogues of Thompson's work, like the one for the Whitney exhibit, that are still available.    

The Yale University Press Catalogue. The title of the exhibition

           is taken from this painting, which Thompson called "This House is Mine."

 "Thompson drew upon the Western art-historical canon to formulate a highly personal, expressive language. Tracing the African American artist’s prolific, yet tragically brief, transatlantic career, this volume examines Thompson’s outlier status and pays close attention to his sustained engagements with themes of community, visibility, and justice. As the contributors contextualize the artist’s ambitions and his unique creative process, they reposition Thompson as a predecessor to contemporary artists such as Kerry James Marshall and Kehinde Wiley. Featuring an array of artwork, and never-before-published poems and archival materials, this study situates Thompson’s extraordinary output within ongoing dialogues about the politics of representation." Yale University Press

 

Thompson, "An Allegory."

Sources:  

*  https://www.artfixdaily.com/artwire/release/2174-reshaping-the-field-arts-of-the-african-diasporas-conference?  Bard is another NE college focusing on black art. This is a conference, "Reshaping the Field." So is the University of Vermont, Fleming Museum, which mounts regular exhibitions.  https://www.uvm.edu/news/story/fleming-opens-its-doors-visitors-and-conversations-about-institutional-racism.  And here's another, a Bowdon college collaborative exhibit of  photographer Marcia Resnick: https://www.artfixdaily.com/news_feed/2021/11/07/3623-first-museum-retrospective-of-martha-resnick-examines-the-photogr?  Thanks again to Peter Stebbins of the Studio House at Walbridge and the Earle and Lily Pilgrim Foundation in DC for keeping me posted. 

1. https://www.artfixdaily.com/news_feed/2021/11/01/8095-bob-thompson-exhibition-examines-his-brilliant-artworks-from-a-to?  

"Bob Thompson: This House Is Mine is organized by the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, and will travel after debuting at Colby (on view now through January 9, 2022) to: Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, Chicago, February 10–May 15, 2022; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, June 18–September 11, 2022; Hammer Museum at UCLA , Los Angeles, October 9, 2022–January 8, 2023....Bringing together paintings and works on paper from more than fifty public and private collections across the United States, This House Is Mine centers Bob Thompson’s work within expansive art historical narratives and ongoing dialogues about the politics of representation, charting his enduring influence. The exhibition is accompanied by a lavishly illustrated catalogue featuring scholars, artists, and poets, published in association with Yale University Press."

2.  https://americanart.si.edu/artist/bob-thompson-4784 

3.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Thompson_(painter)

4.  https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/20/arts/design/bob-thompson-influence.html

5.  https://www.michaelrosenfeldart.com/about. This gallery is now in Chelsea. Hope to visit next time I'm in New York with Doris Wohl! 

6. https://www.albrightknox.org/art/collection/major-gifts-collection/martha-jackson-collection Martha Jackson was a Buffalo, NY native and a far-sighted gallery owner in NYC, ahead of her time in her time. Her own collection of artworks went to the Albright-Knox Museum in Buffalo, NY, after she died, where she had maintained a long and close relationship. 

7.  https://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/20th-century-african-american-art  - This exhibition is still travelling, going to Yonkers, NY end of 2021 to January 2022. I'd love to see it.

"This exhibition presents nearly 50 paintings and sculptures by 32 African American artists from SAAM’s collection. These artists came to prominence during the period bracketed by the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights movement. The means of these artists varied—from modern abstraction to stained color to the postmodern assemblage of found objects—and their subjects are diverse. Benny Andrews, Ellis Wilson and William H. Johnson speak to the dignity and resilience of people who work the land. Jacob Lawrence and Thornton Dial, Sr. acknowledge the struggle for economic and civil rights. Sargent Johnson, Loïs Mailou Jones, and Melvin Edwards address the heritage of Africa, and images by Romare Bearden celebrate jazz musicians. Sam Gilliam, Felrath Hines and Alma Thomas conducted innovative experiments with color and form."

Keep Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Hopes Alive

“We need women who are so strong they can be gentle, so educated they can be humble, so fierce they can be compassionate, so passionate they can be rational, and so disciplined they can be free.” Kavita Ramdas

"When the Supreme Court hears arguments on the Texas and Mississippi abortion bans, remember that these cases didn’t spring up on their own. Right-wing donor interests spent decades and massive amounts of dark money to make it happen." Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, October 26, 2021

Ruth Bader Ginsburg will always be a role model and inspiration for women all over the world.  Her struggles are our struggles, her triumphs our triumphs. We must continue to keep her hopes and dreams alive.

Ginsburg struggled to become a lawyer when she was a young wife and mother. At Harvard she tackled the challenges of motherhood and a male-dominated school where she was one of nine women in a class of 500. Still, she became the first female member of the Harvard Law Review. 

She faced gender-based discrimination when she graduated from Columbia, having moved to New York City when her husband took on a job there. She graduated first in her Law School class at Columbia, but had a hard time getting a job because of her sex.

I don't even have to imagine it, because like many women I shared her experiences. Even her exceptional academic record did not shield her from the discrimination women faced in universities and the workplace in the 1960s and 1970s.  Ginsburg had trouble finding a job until one of her Law professors refused to recommend any other graduates before U.S. District Judge Edmund J. Palmiri, who then  hired Ginsburg as a clerk.  I know that experience well.  

And so Ruth Bader Ginsburg took flight, soared like an eagle, followed a self-made career path that eventually took her to the Supreme Court. She committed herself to ensuring equality, equity and justice for all people. She dedicated her life to defying and dismantling institutionalized gender discrimination, both on her own behalf and ours.  

We stand on her shoulders. That's why we are committed to continue the struggle for which she fought until her dying breath, when she told her loved ones that her "fervent wish" was that a new president choose her successor. 

That did not happen.  Mitch McConnell, the gravedigger of democracy, made sure of it. He, Leonard Leo's Federalist Society, the Koch dark money networks danced on her grave with glee that they could steal another Supreme Court seat. 

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse is, thankfully, fully aware of the extent of the damage, and how it happened. We now have  a Court so devalued, a  Judiciary branch so corrupted by Mitch McConnell and his Republicans, that the majority of Americans in this pluralistic nation have lost trust in its impartiality and integrity.  Changes have to happen. Mitch McConnell's tactics and dark money funders should be investigated. The whole Judiciary branch needs to be cleaned up.

It's hard not to get discouraged. It's hard to keep fighting the same battles that Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton began in the early 19th century, and that the Grimke sisters, Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Lucy Stone, and hundreds of other pioneers, silent warriors, took up along with their wish to end slavery. It's hard to carry RBG's mantel into the future for our grandchildren and their children. But what choice do we have? We have to fight for the things we care about. We have to keep hope alive.

When Great Trees Fall by Maya Angelou
When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.
When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.
When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile. . . .
And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly, irregularly.....
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.


Some sources
* Wikipedia for RBG biography; NYT and Washington Post obituaries.
* http://www.oyez.org/justices/ruth_bader_ginsburg
* https://www.scotusblog.com/2021/03/senate-judiciary-holds-hearing-on-dark-money-and-supreme-court/

Here's an option under consideration. I think it's time.