When I saw the two pendant necklaces, they brought back memories. I had one like them years ago, wearing it to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The pendant is a simple inexpensive piece of…
Category: Black history
Awe-inspiring interior of Memorial Hall
Posted in Architecture/Buildings, Art, Black history, Children, and history
It was a near-moonless night in November when I arrived at Memorial Hall in Fairmount Park for a meeting. This was my first visit to the place, although I had passed through the area many…
‘Little Brave Sambo’ is a new look on an old stereotype
Posted in Black history, Children, history, and Records
When I first saw the title, I thought I had misread it. “Little Brave Sambo.” That didn’t sound right. All of the books I had seen about this little boy’s encounter with four tigers were…
I’m sure I had seen the drawing somewhere before, but I apparently was so awed by its towering figure that I didn’t read past the title. This time, I did. I went to see the Charles…
A different take on black boy-with-watermelon stereotype
Posted in Art, Black history, Ephemera/Paper/Documents, and history
When I first saw the modern painting of a little black boy with a watermelon, I was torn. I have seen so many derogatory images of black-boy-with-watermelon that I shun them. Going to auctions, it’s…
Lynn & Leslie, Constance Bannister’s African American babies
Posted in Black history, Books, Children, history, and Photos
Leslie did most of the crying. She wouldn’t sit still for the shoot by famed baby photographer Constance Bannister that day in the early 1960s. Usually, her brother Kevin, about 5 years old, could get her…
Limiting black voting has always been a Georgia pastime
Posted in African American women, Black history, civil rights movement, and Politics
I don’t even remember what the white woman looked like, but I do recall her attitude. I was a junior at Paine College in Augusta, GA, a city on the tip of the northwest corner…
The ugly images of anti-Semitism & racism
Posted in Black history, Carvings, collectibles, Ephemera/Paper/Documents, history, and slavery
We’d like to think that we will someday somehow get past the hatred of those with the insane image in their heads that if you’re not like them – whatever that means – that you…
Anti-slavery pleas displayed in different forms
Posted in Black history, collectibles, history, and slavery
I’d often observed the “Am I Not a Man and a Brother” and the “Am I Not a Woman and a Sister” anti-slavery pleas on coins and medallions. The ones at this auction were in two new forms: a…
Enslaved woman in John Rogers’ “The Fugitive’s Story”
Posted in Art, Black history, slavery, and Statues
The three men in the sculpture were stalwarts of the abolitionist movement of the 19th century. Sculptor John Rogers had captured them for eternity in a grouping titled “The Fugitive’s Story.” Poet John Greenleaf Whittier,…