As I sat in the theater, I tried to summon their excitement and anxiety. It wasn’t often that they could sit anywhere they wanted in a Broadway theater, much less watch black performers sing and…
Category: Black history
Panther Bobby Seale fires them up at black history showcase
Posted in Black history, and Ephemera/Paper/Documents
Bobby Seale looked at me stonily, wearily. He had spoken for an hour on the founding of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in 1966, and then had spent another 60 minutes signing his 1996…
Flash! magazine and the “fair skin jinx”
Posted in Black history, Culture, Music, and Uncategorized
To be honest, you could not tell from the cover photo that it was a magazine aimed at African Americans. The fair-skinned man had all the markings of what I would normally expect to see…
Reader seeks info on slave depot in Columbus, GA
Posted in Black history, and slavery
Friday at Auction Finds is readers’ questions day. I try to guide readers to resources to help them determine the value of their items, and sometimes help them to gather historical information about a subject or item. Today’s…
I wasn’t paying too much attention to Eric the auctioneer as he peered at a ring in his hand. He was selling jewelry, and I had already looked casually at the carousel of jewelry on the table and…
Signed Robb Armstrong ‘JumpStart’ comic strip
Posted in Art, Black history, and Comic books
We all watched raptly and in awe as cartoonist Robb Armstrong drew the famous husband and wife duo and their children from his newspaper comic-strip “JumpStart.” This occurred about 12 years ago, when my organization…
A few weeks ago, I took a bus trip to New York to see James Earl Jones play a crotchety elderly man and Cicely Tyson an enduring woman in the Broadway production of “The Gin…
Mr. Peanut costume leads to African American comic illustrator
Posted in Advertising, Art, Black history, and Comic books
I watched as the man picked up the stiff Mr. Peanut costume from a table in the back lot of the auction house and tried it on for his friends. It was one of those…
Engravings of African Americans from Civil War book
Posted in Black history, Books, Civil War, and history
The engravings of blacks were the first that caught my eye. They were among a group of eight from a book published in the late 19th century by a woman named Mary A. Livermore, a…
Photos of Victorian blacks & Maya Angelou art auction
Posted in Art, Black history, and Photos
“This looks interesting,” my auction buddy Janet wrote in the email. The first words that caught my eye in the story she had sent were “Victorian Era Blacks” and “Rare photos of 19th-century blacks.” I…