| Amistad to Host Major Exhibition |
Save the dates August 22, 2009 through October 25, 2009 for the upcoming major exhibition of over one hundred paintings, prints, drawings, and sculpture by African American artists selected from the Amistad Research Center's fine arts collection. The exhibition will be presented in collaboration with the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) and presented in the Museum's main gallery. Well known examples from Amistad's Aaron Douglas Collection, including representative works of Henry Ossawa Tanner, David Driskell, and Ellis Wilson, will be featured in the exhibition. NOMA is developing teacher guides and training museum docents to offer enhanced experiences with the works that will be on view, especially for young audiences. The exhibition will be complimented by a full-color catalog with essays by esteemed art historians Michael Harris, Lowery Stokes-Sims, Renee Ater, and Margaret Rose Vendryes. The catalog will document most of the Amistad Research Center's permanent collection, including several fine works not selected for the NOMA exhibition.
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| Teaching with Primary Sources Workshop |
The Amistad Research Center and NOMA are also pleased to collaborate on two workshops for New Orleans area educators. The first, "Sources of Inspiration," was held on December 2, 2008 at the New Orleans Museum of Art. This workshop focused on familiarizing educators with artists' work held within the permanent collection that represents a portion of the exciting scope of African American art available for study. The second workshop, "Teaching with Primary Sources," is scheduled for January 13, 2009 from 6:00-8:00pm at the Amistad Research Center. This workshop will introduce the use of primary sources (letters, diaries, oral histories, organizational records, etc.) as tools for classroom instruction. Topics covered will include how archivists conserve, catalog, and store materials; locating primary sources; working with libraries and archives regarding reproduction and copyright; and strategies for using sources at various grade levels and abilities. Educators will take away ideas and activities that can be adapted in their own classrooms. Pre-registration for the January workshop is required. Please call NOMA's Education Department at (504) 658-4128 or send an email to education@noma.org.
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| Amistad Receives Grants |
Christmas arrived early at the Amistad Research Center with news that Amistad has received two new grants. We are pleased to announce receipt of a multi-year grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), which will allow the Center to implement state of the art collections management software and make several collections containing records of civil rights organizations accessible to scholars and researchers for the first time. As part of a collaborative project, $900,000 was awarded to the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University, Emory University, and the Robert W. Woodruff Library at the Atlanta University Center. The institutions will create finding aids and cataloging records of their special collections holdings that can be accessed through the internet and web. The Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives Grant Program is made possible by funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
 A second award letter announced that "Amistad Research Center has been awarded a Daniel Hand Grant for 2009 in the amount of $81,019.04." Given by the United Church of Christ Local Church Ministries, the Daniel Hand Fund was established in 1888 to support the education of "colored people" of African descent residing in the former slave states of that time. The gift enabled the establishment and/or maintenance of schools, and provided assistance to individuals pursuing education. Amistad is excited about the potential to extend programming related to its collections for targeted benefit and increase access to special use programs.
Lee Hampton, Executive Director, said that "along with the desire to enhance participation in our annual fund, one of our goals at the outset of the year was to submit more proposals for private funding and increase philanthropy from diverse sources." Hampton added that staff persons have worked hard to realize the goals, and their efforts are now being rewarded by thoughtful and farsighted donors.
Photo: This collection of letters from civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer to her friend Rose Carver Fishman will be arranged and made available to researchers as part of Amistad's CLIR grant. |
| Author Seeks Information on New Orleans Black Baseball |
If you remember New Orleans black baseball teams from the late 1940s and early 1950s, author Martha Ackmann would like to hear from you. Ackmann is writing a book about Toni Stone, the first woman to play professional baseball on men's teams. Stone, an African-American woman, played for the Indianapolis Clowns and the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro Leagues of the 1950s. In the late 1940s, Stone played for the New Orleans Creoles. Alan Page owned the team and Wesley Barrows managed. Other players for the Creoles included Al Pinkston, Nat Peeples, and Buddy Lombard. Ackmann is interested in information about baseball at that time and also general knowledge of New Orleans during the Jim Crow post-war period. Ackmann is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She may be reached at (413) 222-4559 or martha_ackmann@radcliffe.edu.
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| Students Tour Amistad |
 Throughout the year, Amistad hosts a number of student groups who visit the Center to learn about its collections and the histories they contain. In this issue of e-Amistad Reports, we feature two groups of students that toured the Center recently.
Earlier this year, Amistad welcomed the Moss Point High School Tiger Ambassadors from Moss Point, Mississippi, as part of their field trip to New Orleans. The Tiger Ambassadors are student leaders who recognize the importance of education not only in their lives, but in the lives of everyone in their immediate community. The group toured the Center, learned about its history and viewed some of the documents in the Center's collections.
More recently, members of the junior and senior classes of New Orleans' O. Perry Walker High School visited Amistad as part of a larger tour of Loyola, Tulane, and Xavier universities. Amistad staff gave a brief introduction to the Center, allowed the students to visit the Center's art gallery and spoke with the students about their future plans.
Photo: Dedrick Sims, Advisor of the Moss Point Tiger Ambassadors, reads from a book from Amistad's Reference Collection. Photo by Amistad staff. |
| Tulane English Class Researches Countée Cullen |
| In today's age of email and text messages, there is often something magical about a handwritten letter. But for students in Dr. Michael Kuczynski's Bibliography and Methods seminar, deciphering such letters was not always easy. During the fall semester, the class visited Amistad to learn more about the correspondence housed in the Countée Cullen Papers as part of a project to compile a small annotated collection of Cullen's letters. Students examined letters not only by Cullen, but Arna Bontemps, Ida Cullen, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Dorothy West, as well, and conducted research on names, events, and topics discussed within. After visiting Amistad for the introductory session, Dr. Kuczynski reported: "The students spoke of how helpful it was and of how excited they are to be embarking on such original work. This would not be possible without Amistad's assistance." A final copy of the class project will be presented to the Center in the near future. |
| History of the South at Amistad |
 It was a busy time at Amistad recently when the Southern History Association held its annual meeting in New Orleans and writer Arthur Lee Ford, Jr. visited the Center. We were pleased to host a number of SHA members who took time out of their conference schedules to conduct research. During that week, southern history scholars from the University of South Carolina, Carnegie Mellon University, Ohio State University, the University of South Alabama, East Stroudsburg University, and other institutions made extensive use of Amistad's collections.
 Arthur Lee Ford, Jr. visited Amistad to discuss his new book, When the Whippoorwill Sang: A Memoir of Rural Life During the Twilight of the Segregated South. In addition to relating the writing of the book, Mr. Ford also discussed his childhood in northwestern Louisiana, where he spent much of his youth working the cotton fields in the sharecropping community Wardview, (also known as the Lake Bottoms). His book was published by the Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette. It can be ordered directly from the Center at cls.louisiana.edu.
Photo: Upper right - Researchers visiting the Center during the Southern Historical Association annual meeting. Bottom left - Arthur Lee Ford, Jr. discusses his new book. Photos by Amistad staff. |
| Statement from a Young Scholar |
| Beginning in July 2007, Swarthmore College undergraduate Marissa Davis began visiting New Orleans and the Amistad Research Center to research her undergraduate thesis. The Center has been honored to assist Marissa and has become the repository for the oral histories conducted as part of her research. Marissa shares these thoughts on her research:
It began as a desire to learn more about a community I was trying to serve. I knew nothing about New Orleans before August 29, 2005, beyond the Zataran's commercials and bead throwing on Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras. But when Katrina and the complex history of race relations, economics, and politics in New Orleans reared its ugly head, I felt an impassioned desire to act.
I entered New Orleans as an outsider, but an outsider with a genuine openness to learn about the community around me and engage in a way that would yield mutual support and respect. Back at Swarthmore College, I started planning student trips to New Orleans, which ultimately evolved into a deep long-term investment in the city and its people through the recent establishment of my organization, NOLArize!
I wanted to learn more about the city's people and understand why rebuilding the city to liken its original state was so significant. I challenged myself as an activist, an academic, and a scholar to explore the social and political implication of cultural practices in New Orleans, particularly based in the Black communities across the city. I conducted over thirty-one interviews with cultural warriors, civil rights leaders, and activists in the community, from people like Cherice-Harrison Nelson, Darryl Montana, Charles Taylor, Charles Hamilton to Carol Bebelle, Kalamu ya Salaam, and Ronald Lewis. I read through numerous local newspapers and community-based publications, and was invited to participate in various cultural activities, all in an effort to get to the heart of my burning question: What is Black culture in New Orleans and what is its significance in the context of the city's complex history?
This quest to answer this question became the foundation of my Senior Honors Thesis and ultimately the fruit of my labor that I have appropriately entitled: From the "Feather" to the "Umbrella:" The Politics of Performance in the Mardi Gras Indian Tradition and Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs of New Orleans. I decided the best way of examining "Black culture" in New Orleans would be through two of the community's longstanding traditions: the Mardi Gras Indian tradition and Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs. As an Honors History major at Swarthmore, I tackled my work as a historian, placing these traditions in a historical conversation and narrative, from their inception to the present "post-Katrina" era. Equally, because of my background in community and social activism, I sought to push the envelope of cultural politics, challenging the notion that cultural expression and social and political activism could not co-exist.
Having now completed my work, I am extremely proud of what I have produced, but have an even deeper yearning to further explore the social significance of traditions that on the surface simply seem jovial and festively performative. While I have explored these questions in a new way, I have merely skimmed the surface and simply put: "The full story has yet to be told."
- Marissa Davis |
| New Book on Richmond Barthé |
 University Press of Mississippi has recently published Margaret Rose Vendryes' celebration of the acclaimed African American modern sculptor Richmond Barthé, titled Barthé: A Life in Sculpture. Much of Barthé's biography is recorded here for the first time in tandem with analyses and interpretations of his sculpture. Born to Creole parents in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, Barthé's art brought him out of poverty. At the height of his fame, he was often criticized for not talking about injustices African Americans faced. He expected his art to speak not only for itself, but for him. He fled the United States for an expatriate's life in Jamaica only to learn that, as an artist and a black man, he could not be accepted on his own terms, and there was no such thing as a perfect home. Utilizing the Richmond Barthé Papers at the Amistad Research Center and other sources, Vendryes' book reveals the breadth of Barthé's oeuvre through readings of his figurative masterworks.
Margaret Rose Vendryes is an independent scholar who has taught art history and African American studies at York College, Princeton University, and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She serves as the visual arts consultant at the Amistad Research Center. |
| Amistad Increases Access to Printed Collections |
| The Center is pleased to welcome Laura Kersting as a part-time cataloger in the Library and Reference Services Department. Laura has assisted the Center in the past with the processing of the Thomas C. Dent Papers, but has returned to her first love -- cataloging books. With experience working as a cataloger at Tulane University, Dillard University, and the Free Library of Philadelphia, Laura's work has greatly expanded access to the Center's library holdings, which are cataloged in Tulane University's online catalog and the OCLC national database. Center staff recently completed a cleaning and shifting of Amistad's library just in time for Laura to add newly cataloged books! |
| African American School Newspaper Collection |
 Amistad staff have recently identified a valuable resource for researchers in a collection of African American school newspapers from the first half of the twentieth century. This collection of newspapers consists of 167 titles from 121 African American elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, community colleges, and universities throughout the southern United States. Though the outlying dates are from 1912 to 1970, the bulk of this collection is from the 1930s and 1940s. There are over 1000 total issues in this collection, and over 90% of these are not reported as being held by other libraries.
Together, this collection is a rich resource that chronicles African American campus life, educational developments, and, more widely, social history at this crossroads in American history -- before, after, and during the Great Depression and World War II. Though the time periods represented reflect the nadir of American social history, this collection also covers early organizing on college campuses in the earliest stages of the modern Civil Rights Movement. "Together, this collection would be of great interest to historians of education, journalism, the Jim Crow South, and race relations," says the Center's Andrew Salinas, who is organizing the collection. The Center is currently pursuing grant funding to catalog this collection.
Photo: March 1934 issue of the Industrial High School Record (Birmingham, AL) from the School Newspaper Collection. |
| Staff News |
Congratulations to Director of Library and Reference Services Christopher Harter, who was recently named president of the Greater New Orleans Archivists (GNOA). The GNOA was established in 1982 to foster communication within the field and to develop a greater understanding among archivists in local repositories. Collectively, the group is a great resource for information on new trends and technologies in the profession as well as information regarding grant funding. The group meets three times a year and frequently collaborates on such ventures as newsletters and published guides to area repositories. These collaborative efforts have yielded the publication of Jews of New Orleans: An Archival Guide, as well as Guide to Resources in New Orleans Repositories for the Study of Carnival in New Orleans. Christopher's selection to head the Greater New Orleans Archivists, despite his relative newness to the New Orleans area, speaks to his reputation in the profession.
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