I spend a lot of hours these days in an easy chair facing a budding pear tree nestled in a tall bamboo hedge. Its branches provide perches for all kinds of small birds, sparrows and chickadees, juncos and bush tits who disappear into the shelter of the bamboo the second they sense some change.
They certainly scatter when the Rufus Towhee, depicted below, appears to lord it over them all, choosing the highest branch and admiring his own colorful feathers, turning slow circles, spreading his wings and generally pretending he owns the place. Except for one pesky little brown sparrow who won’t have it, starting low on the tree and hopping with fierce determination ever higher until he is in Rufus’ face who is stunned enough at the chutzpah that he flies off.
And since we are on a roll with the anthropomorphizing, let’s hear it for the story that came to mind as an analogy – having just picked it up a couple of days ago in my insatiable appetite for narratives about unusual individuals who defy constraints and expectations.
Meet Zamor, a Bangladeshi boy who, at age 11, was captured by British slave traders who trafficked him to France via Madagascar and sold him to Louis XVI. He gave the boy as a gift to his mistress, Madame du Barry. The countess, by her on words, used him as a plaything and invited courtiers to tease and ridicule her “little African.”
At first I looked upon him as a puppet or plaything, but… I became passionately fond of my little page, nor was the young urchin slow in perceiving the ascendancy he had gained over me, and, in the end… attained an incredible degree of insolence and effrontery.”
The boy craved and received education, devouring Rousseau and studying the classics. At the start of the French revolution he joined the Jacobins and became an office-bearer in the Committee of Public Safety. Using his influential position he got the police to arrest the Countess in 1792, who was released from jail on this round eventually. Further charges by Zamor who was done with a slave’s existence, led to her second arrest, trial and execution by guillotine. It is sort of tragic, given that the Countess was born out of wedlock to a working class mother, made her way out of poverty and up the social ladder as a hired prostitute in ever more aristocratic circles due to her uncommon beauty, and eventually ended up as the King’s courtesan, an association that doomed her during the revolution.
Not exactly a happy ending in the wings for Zamor either. He was arrested by the Girondins on suspicion of being an accomplice of the Countess and a Jacobin. Friends secured his release from prison and helped him to flee France, only for him to return to a life of poverty and premature death after the 1815 fall of Napoleon.
The lavish pretender at the top of the social ladder was brought down by a small Jacobin hooked on big ideas about inequality, social contracts and other tenets of enlightenment. Let’s hope the colorful Towhee and the assertive small rebel sparrow do not exactly reenact the ultimate fate of their counter-parts. Just getting things shaken at the top is joy enough.
Here is Pola Negri as Madame du Barry in a 1919 silent movie directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Spectacular mass scenes. Alas, explanatory text in French and German only. Zamor is played by a Victor Janson, hmmmmm.
For a more short lived musical amusement – La Piaf in It’ll be fine…..
Inauguration – today we rejoice! Tomorrow we remind ourselves that the mascot is gone but the team remains intact.
It is surely no coincidence that I have been thinking about South Africa’s long history of colonial racism, eventually codified in laws imposed by the Apartheid regime. Racist practices had begun with the arrival of the Dutch East India Company in the 17th century, were later fortified by the British colonizers in the 19th century, but then legally structured (and then some) by the Nationalist Party which ruled South Africa between 1948 and 1994.
Despite the vanquishing of the racist German National Socialistic regime in 1945, South Africa decidedly went for its own version of White supremacy just three years later. Laws prohibited marriage and sex between the races, required registration of your race, enacted a prohibition for Blacks to vote and assigned them to certain areas or homelands through The Group Areas Act (1950.) This law partitioned the country into different areas, allocated to different racial groups. It represented the very heart of apartheid because it was the basis upon which political and social separation was to be constructed.
Gone are the Sacrificial Lambs (2011) (Series: Affirmation&Negation)
There were laws segregating universities, and those banning opposition parties. Laws drew divisions between the homeland areas themselves to prevent solidarity or joint action among different groups of Blacks. There were laws to formalize discriminations in employment, laws that controlled migration in and out of areas and protected forced and violent expropriation of property and relocations of Blacks to poor areas. As late as 1970 the Black Homeland Citizenship Act (1970) changed the status of the inhabitants of the ‘homelands’ so that they were no longer citizens of South Africa. The aim was to ensure Whites became the demographic majority within ‘white’ South Africa.
La Couturière (2010) (Series: (S)Elective Affinities)
By the mid to late 1980s opposition had become strong and vocal in a Defiance Campaign, and the regime reacted with violent oppression and police power. One of the ways the protest movements mobilized people and signaled meanings was through the use of color. Orange, white and blue, associated with the Nationalist Party, the colors of the first flag of the Republic of South Africa, were shunned. Visual graphics in posters and leaflets used black, green and gold instead, which stood for the color of the People, the green of the land and the gold for the wealth of the land. They had been chosen by the African National Congress, the main opposition party, since its inception in 1912. Those colors went underground in 1960 with the banning of the ANC, since people found by the regime to be in possession of items bearing these colours (no additional writing or image necessary) ran the risk of being beaten up, arrested or even killed.
But then came purple:
“On 2 September (1989,) police turned a powerful water cannon on thousands of protesters attempting to march to parliament. The water contained a strong purple dye, the intention being to mark all those who were protesting so they could face arrest at a later time, even if they managed to run away. Hundreds were arrested and for days it seemed a large part of the Cape Town population had become various shades of purple. This flew in the face of racial segregation laws and became a standing joke. People filled out ‘purple’ on the section of the arrest forms that demanded information about race and the defiance campaign slogan was changed temporarily to ‘the purple shall govern’. Ironically, the event contributed successfully to the Defiance Campaign in that people with different skin colour looked more alike. ‘Purple people’ signified the ultimate embodiment of the mode of colour as a political statement, more than the media of clothes mentioned earlier.” (Ref.)
The Moor (2010) (Series: (S)Elective Affinities)
A year later, the color red was added to the protest vocabulary.
Joe Slovo, General Secretary of the Communist Party of South Africa, on returning home for the first time in 1990 after 25 years in exile, sent a message to his supporters anticipating his arrival. ‘Wear red socks’, he said and thousands did. No written explanations, images or verbal slogans were needed. When people put on their red socks for Slovo, they were acknowledging their own history of concurring with the senti-ments, politics and strategies of the South African Communist Party, and joining these thoughts with the quirky humour of the leadership. The choice of media, namely socks, was deliberate because socks are not immediately and overtly discernible and can be shown or hidden at will. (Ref.)
I’m going on about this at length for two reasons. For one, it is timely to remind ourselves of how racism has governed historical developments not even 100 years ago and how a mass movement could break some of the spell. Secondly, the mind-blowing sculptures by South African sculptor and photographer Mary Sibande, who I want to introduce today, can only be appreciated if we understand the historical significance of both color and costume.
Sibande casts life-sized sculptures of her face and body molded in fiber glass, creating an alter ego, Sophie. She then dresses these sculptures in gowns filled with enough symbolic references that it compares to decoding a renaissance portrait. Sophie is the silent narrator of the history of South African Black women, often in servitude or barely paid domestic workers, who are allowed to express their fantasies of what the world should look like if they weren’t indentured.
Silent Symphony (2010)
Blue was the chosen color in her early work, the blue of the traditional maid’s uniform; the shapes of the gowns are of Victorian splendor, and the activities enacted are undermining the racial and class hierarchy. (Below Sophie, with eyes closed as always, is repairing a superman cape.)
More recently the artist has added the color purple and now even red to her repertoire and the alternate versions of Sophie are juxtaposed as those representing her maternal past and those standing for the future of the progressive movement with an allusion to the events of 1989 described above.
A Reversed Retrogress: Scene 1 (The Purple Shall Govern). (2013)
“Sophie” straddles time, pre-, during and post-Apartheid, as well as roles. There is the specific inheritance of stories and dreams of the women in the artist’s family, four generations who were maids or other kinds of domestic workers. There is Mary as Sophie, now, drawing on the repository of African myths, beliefs and wisdom.
There is also, it seems, a general representation of the struggle of Black women in the system, their marginalization in a post-colonial world as well. In each configuration she is confident, alive, a subject that tells the story, her story, rather than someone subjugated.
The sculptures really strike me as a celebration of strength.
Detail from the series “In the Midst of Chaos There is Also Opportunity” (2017)
I assume anyone not familiar with the politics of South Africa would still be moved and made to think by this emotive work. If you are able to fill in the necessary facts around the use of color, or other symbolism of note in the fight against Apartheid, the full power of these sculptures unfolds. Oh, when can we travel again to see all this in a museum in the country where it come from? Or at least in a gallery in our own nation?
Music today is interspersed with talk – I learned a lot. Music mobilizing protest.
Photomontages are from 2010 and 2011, chosen for the colors blue, purple and red and the fact that they, too, focused on narrative.
Photographer Gisèle Freund (1908 – 2000) was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin, growing up around art (her father was a notable collector) and receiving a first rate education. She studied art history and sociology at the University of Freiburg and then Frankfurt, becoming acquainted with the Frankfurt School folks around Adorno, friends with Walter Benjamin, portraitist of Berthold Brecht, and engaged in antifascist student organizations.
She barely made it to France in 1933, answering the threatening questions of the police patrolling the train “if they had ever heard someone Jewish being called Gisela,” a classic German name, and handing over her camera that she had intuitively emptied of film in the train’s loo.
She escaped with few funds, but a lot of negatives depicting mass demonstrations and violence by the Nazis against leftist protests which introduced her as a photographer to an ever widening circle of friends and aquaintances in the literary and publishing circles in Paris. Her works can now be found at the Washington State University Libraries Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, depicting a veritable Who’s Who of (mostly) European intellectuals.
Prints include numerous portraits of: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Andre Malraux, Simone de Beauvoir, Man Ray, W.H. Auden, Samuel Beckett, Andre Breton, Andre Gide, Colette, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Eluard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau, Henri Matisse, T.S. Eliot, Leonard Woolf, Henri Michaux, David Siqueiros, Andrienne Monnier, Sylvia Beach, Max Ernst, G.B. Shaw, J.B. Priestley, Diego Rivera, Henry Moore, Herman Hesse, Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, Paul Valery, Elsa Triolet, Simone De Beauvoir, Pierre Bonnard, Vita Sackville-West, Georges Mathieu, Ivan Illich, Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, Marguerite Yourcenar, John Steinbeck, Philippe Soupault, Eugene Ionesco, Le Corbusier, Samuel Beckett, Jose Clemente Orosco, Iris Murdoch, Ivy Compton Burnett, Rosamund Lehmann, Christopher Fry. 1933-1974 She took the official photograph at the presidential inauguration of Socialist Francois Mitterrand in 1981.
Here are some of the images:
Previous travels to Paris had already brought friendship with some of the surrealists, more doors opened after she became friends and then lovers (she was bi-sexual) with the famous bookstore owner Adrienne Monnier, which left the latter’s previous partner, Sylvia Beach, in the dust. Monnier published her doctoral thesis (part of the book I reviewed yesterday,) made the connections to the literary illuminati, and helped to find a marriage of convenience with a resistance fighter so that Freund could stay in France.
Until she couldn’t. In 1940 she had to flee Paris, eventually traveling to South America, all the while being published by major publications like Life Magazine, Time Magazine, Paris-Match and Magnum, starting a year after its founding, and being written out of its history when she became politically risky. Argentina threw her out of the country after she photographed Evita Perón in heaps of her jewels and with stashes of accumulated riches. She found a harbor in Mexico City, became friends with Diego Riviera and Frida Kahlo and their circle, and was banned from entry to the US until the 1970s (!) because of her leftists associates.
She was described as a difficult person, temperamental, but I am in awe of the independence, the power to take risks and explore while forced to relocate under threat, and the flexibility to adapt to ever changing conditions. She also embraced color photography as one of the first influential photographers, scorned by many in the male establishment.
Postwar return to France saw her fame rise, details found here in an obituary that lamented, 20 years ago, that her work had been hidden from history for too long.
That is no longer true, and brings me to the question that reading her book and articles about her raised for me. How do you understand a person and feel free to interpret her motives for her work, when you can no longer talk to her? It is of course a task for many a biographer, but looking at photographs and interpreting them to infer the motivations of the photographer strikes me as difficult, particularly when their own recorded words stand in contrast to your interpretations.
Let me explain with an example, typical for many. A scholar of photographers in exile argues
“that exile by fascist regimes prompted certain European photographers to resort to human figuration in order to reconsider the possibilities of historical subjectivity at its moment of crisis…. Gisèle Freund, the color portraitist of the interwar French cultural luminaries, made a volte-face from the portrayal of the collective subject in the political demonstrations in pre-exile Frankfurt into the individual faces of the French intellectuals after her exile in Paris…led them to instrumentalize the photographic medium not only to address the aftermath of the European avant-garde—especially the end of its utopian quest to envision political collectives through human figuration—but also to measure and critique the new American mass culture and subjectivity.”
Ok, I have no clue what historical subjectivity is supposed to mean. Not for want of trying, but the literature explaining it is impenetrable for this aging brain. My bad. I do know, though, that Freund never gave up on photographing collective subjects, even during exile, as can be seen in work documenting the British poor, and political movements and working conditions all over the South American sub-continent in her years of exile. Never mind, that she also portrayed individual people with a passion pre-exile.
I have watched interviews with the photographer herself speaking late in life about her intentions. For one, being hired for portraits in the 1930s meant a means of economic survival (the print media were happy to display pictures of the rich and famous.) Shifting to color made her feel she could capture more life-like impressions, serving her goal to “familiarize strangers with each other, potentially decreasing enmity among them.” The close encounters with people also opened avenues for what she thought most important in all of the world: friendship and love.
The interview below is, alas, available only in German.
It ends with a comment that I translated here:
“I believed for many years that you could change the world with photography. I later realized that was an error. People used my photos to pursue their ideologies and I understood that photography lies even though people assume it tells the truth.”
She abandoned photography, her life’s passion, in 1980, a full 20 years before her death of a heart attack in the year 2000.
Photographs, selected for the color that Freund so cherished, are from Coyoacán, Mexico City, the neighborhood where Frida Kahlo, who was photographed extensively by Freund, lived. The blue house is now a museum – I wrote about Fridamaniahere.
So it goes. You learn some interesting things from a book you received for Hanukkah, and then you get caught up in much more fascinating questions about the book’s author. Let me report on both, today and tomorrow, respectively.
The book, Photography and Society, by German-French photographer Gisèle Freund, is a seminal study of the relationship between photography and society, including its political implications.
Freund had to flee Germany in 1933 where she was involved in political resistance against the rise of the Nazis. Finding shelter in Paris, she studied at the Sorbonne and began to photograph an ever widening circle of cultural icons and famous literary types, later published in Paris-Match, and Life Magazine, among others.
The book is an assessment of photography’s role up to the late 1970s, when the book was first written (published in translation in 1980). Freund could not have been more visionary in what was yet to come in the next half century than she was on those pages.
What could I, a photographer who is often thinking about politics, find more fascinating? I’ll get to that in tomorrow’s installment.
Here’s the Heuer’s Digest review:
Freund, using the dissertation she wrote at the Sorbonne in the 1930s, first lays out photography’s history, including how it was invented and how it displaced the many artists who had come to serve the demands of a growing and ever wealthier bourgeoisie for portraits: painters, engravers, lithographers. Originally hailed as an advancement to serve science, it soon dominated in the social realm as a token of status or a means of remembrance. The early phases of artistically creative photography were soon superseded by adjusting to the mediocre tastes of those who paid for the pictures. Eventually professional photographers, a trade that had grown like wildfire due to demand, were sent packing when do-it-yourself photography took over.
The second part of the book relegates the big question Is photography art?, to the dust bin where it belongs. Of course, it can be. Why not ask the much more relevant question instead, What is photography for?
For one, as a means of reproduction, it has been a wonderful tool to disseminate art (painting and sculpture included) – just think postcards in museum stores, or books that open the minds of generations to visual art otherwise confined to museums.
Secondly, there are many types of photography that impact society in other ways. There is “concern” photography, the documentation of suffering in poverty and war and general social justice issues, photography as personal artistic expression, photography as photojournalism, as a propaganda tool, and last but not least, its commercial aspects in the advertising industry. And, of course, always, always self-representation – although the term Selfie did not yet exist when she wrote.
Freund provides memorable examples of how the “objectivity” of photography is laughable, given how what you select can shape an impression, how captions under a given image can completely change its meaning, or how juxtaposition of two photographs can manipulate opinion. For example: take a photograph of a Russian tank sent to squash the Hungarian uprising. Consider caption 1 vs. caption 2:
1. In contempt of the people’s right to self determination, the Soviet government has sent armored divisions to Budapest to suppress the uprising.
2, The Hungarian people have asked the Soviets for help. Russian tanks have been sent to protect the workers and restore order.
Freund concludes her book with thoughts roughly summarized below: What began as a means of self representation has become a powerful tool that penetrates all aspects of society. Yet finding photographs that go beyond representation, some that are truly art, is rare. The tool has democratized mankind’s knowledge and built bridges between people by providing a common language in civilization, but has also “played a dangerous role as an instrument of manipulation used to create needs, to sell goods and to mold minds.”
How was Freund’s life and photography influenced by these insights? Stay tuned.
Photographs today are street photography from my 2014 visit to Paris, Freund’s chosen home.
Music is mainly interesting for the vintage film clips of Paris in the background.
You surely know those days when everything, even the most innocuous bit, takes on a dark halo, a portent, a trigger for irrational thinking. I am in the middle of one of those days as I write this – hopefully behind me tomorrow when you read this.
Most of the Pentagon leadership fired? Must mean war in the offing, or a coup where the military sides with the ones clinging to power. You get the idea – thoughts so far out of the ordinary that one would laugh at them during normal times, would scold me for even uttering them, and yet here they take on a realistic sheen in my already anxious universe.
Time to look for role models who have survived far worse and risen to live meaningful lives, using art for resistance. None more fitting than Lin Jaldati, an extraordinary Dutch woman who survived Auschwitz when betrayed after years of living in hiding in Amsterdam.
I learned about her in a project researched, written up and at times performed by historian David Shneer, z”l.
Shneer who died a few days ago at age 48 of a brain tumor, held the Louis P. Singer Endowed Chair in Jewish History at the University of Colorado. He was an outstanding intellectual pursuing the history of Yiddish culture, but also a lively performer – some of the videos in the link below (Art is my Weapon) show him together with colleagues, in particular Jewlia Eisenberg, performing music and bringing the history of Jewish resistance to life.
The project is calledArt is my Weapon – the radical musical life of Lin Jaldati, and tells the story of the Dutch, communist, Jewish cabaret actress who immigrated to East Germany after liberation from Auschwitz to become a famous singer and political player keeping up the memory of the Holocaust until her death in 1988. I familiarized myself with her on the basis of the incredibly poignant title of Shneer’s biography of the artist: Trümmerfrau der Seele. (Woman who clears the soul from rubble.)
Trümmerfrauen were the women who cleared the rubble, the debris, the ruins of the bombed-out buildings of post-war German cities. To envision that act done to the soul, finding pathways to and clearing away the destruction wrought by persecution or trauma, in her case opening space for the memory of a culture that was not destroyed after all, is for me an image that holds incredible power. Humans can withstand and overcome catastrophe, picking up the pieces, refusing to be forced into oblivion. A timely reminder.
Below are a few samplings of her music. One of the most famous songs, from Yiddishe Lieder, published in 1981, is In Kamf (In Struggle.) I have attached the translation of the lyrics. The song is about justice and persecution in a political domain not just reserved for Jews.
Mir vern gehast un getribn, Mir vern geplogt un farfolgt; Un alts nor derfar vayl mir libn Dos oreme shmaktnde folk.
Mir vern dershosn, gehangen, Men roybt undz dos lebn un rekht; Derfar vayl emes farlangen Un frayhayt far oreme knekht.
Ober undz vet nit dershrekn Gefenkenish un tiranay, Mir muzn di mentshhayt dervekn Un makhn zi gliklekh un fray.
Shmidt undz in ayzerne keytn, Vi blutike khayes undz rayst; Ir kent undzer kerper nor teytn Nor keyn mol undzer heylikn gayst.
Ir kent undz dermordn, tiranen, naye kemfer vet brengen di tsayt; Un mir kemfn, mir kemfn biz vanen Di gantse velt vet vern bafrayt.
One of the most remarkable historical figures on the American Left was born to French immigrant parents on this day in 1855 in Terre Haute, Indiana. Growing up comfortably middle-class, supported by family throughout his life-time (his brother Theodore did the bulk of his administrative work forever, his wife was a strong supporter and intellectual soul mate,) Eugene Debs grew from being a moderate to being a socialist, a labor organizer, fighter for militant unions and a founding member of the Socialist Party of America.
Never heard of him? Here is a short documentary narrated in the late 70s by none other than Bernie Sanders.
During his three presidential runs in 1900, 1904 and 1908, Debs embraced the proclaimed ideals of American democracy – popular sovereignty, equality, republican liberty) – but argued, with speeches that were in turn hopeful and criticizing, full of revolutionary as well as religious fervor, that one could only reach these ideals if one broke the hold of industrial bondage, the reign of unevenly distributed power on the basis of capitalism. That revolution, he was convinced, was in the hand of the working class who had to realize its potential for changing an undemocratic system.
Democracy, under attack in what we currently are witnessing, in all of the vote suppression, manipulation of voting, legal attacks on voting and vote counting, was defined by Debs as the drive to replace unaccountable hierarchies with something approximating an equality of power. He understood that this could not be done without a broad coalition of forces fighting for change, and his party included an enormous range of constituents: Jewish garment workers in New York City, German brewery workers in Milwaukee, white tenant farmers in Oklahoma, black lumber workers in Louisiana.
In fact, outspoken anti-racist arguments filled a lot of Deb’s work.
The Socialist Party would be false to its historic mission, violate the fundamental principles of Socialism, deny its philosophy and repudiate its own teachings if, on account of race considerations, it sought to exclude any human being from political equality and economic freedom . . . Of course the Negro will “not be satisfied with ‘equality with reservation.’” Why should he be? Would you? Suppose you change places with the Negro just a year, then let us hear from you — “with reservation.” (Ref.) )1904!
In 1918 he gave his famous CantonSpeech linking capitalist mechanism and war efforts, calling for freedom for workers, and expressing hope for a commonwealth and fervor for Internationalism. It landed him in prison, sentenced for 10 years, serving 3 (his sentence eventually commuted, but his citizenship stripped) for “trying to cause and incite insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny and refusal of duty in the military,” as well as for trying “to obstruct the recruiting and enlistment service of the United States.”
He died a few years later, his health never recovering from the prison ordeal. A posthumously book, Walls and Bars published in 1927, spelled out his primary belief in the need to abolish the hierarchies that had come to replace those of ancient kings and feudalist lords, hierarchies that held people in bondage even if they were no longer owned by chattel slavery.
One of his rightful heiresses, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, framed the political goals of Democratic Socialism in terms relevant for today.
“I believe that in a modern, moral, and wealthy society, no person in America should be too poor to live. So what that means is health care as a human right. It means that every child, no matter where you are born, should have access to a college or trade school education if they so choose it. And, you know, I think that no person should be homeless if we can have public structures and public policies to allow for people to have homes and food and lead a dignified life in the United States.”
Seemingly straightforward, acceptable goals. We will not achieve them if we do not face, as Democrats, whom we are beholden to and how the distribution of power interferes with a pursuit of these goals. A democratic administration – should we be so lucky to get one – and a democratic party going into the next rounds of elections in decades to come, has to reckon with where their true power will come from and who to court as allies. As Eugene Debs would have it, true democracy should be our guiding principle, and reforms should be sought that tilt the balance of power away from those who unjustly wield it. (Ref. – the link here is to a superb historical overview of Deb’s life and the basis of much of my summary today.)
Now let’s continue to bite our nails hoping for the least worst outcome of this election. And listen to the people sing….
Two nights ago, purportedly enraged about what Columbus Day represents, some protesters in Portland, OR, toppled two statues in a city park and vandalized the Oregon Historical Society to the tune of $25.000 or more. Sheer lunacy. OHS has been involved in uncovering and teaching about the history of our state from a progressive perspective, most recently examining in depth the racist roots of so much what has happened in Oregon, including quarterly publications that were frank and unflinching in confronting an ugly past. This year they unveiled a cornerstone exhibit in cooperation with the nine federally recognized OR tribes, called Experience Oregon.
I will not enter the debate of when and whether violence and vandalism ever have a role to play in a struggle where power is unevenly distributed. But I will say, that actions like these – broken windows, fire torches thrown into the building, a mid-centennial quilt by African-American women stolen and left in the wet streets further down the block – undermine a larger struggle that has been heating up in the last few years: the fight for the integrity of history education, historical research, national identity, and collective memory.
If you blindly rage against any kind of “official” site or organization that engages in historical education you provide grist for the mills of those who are really actively trying to constrain and direct the kind of history we all are supposed to accept, and our children are supposed to learn.
There is an ideological divide between those who want to uncover historical truth, however shaming, ugly and unnerving it may be, on the one hand, and those who want to maintain an ideological view of our nation that distorts, white-washes or erases historical truth to be more in line with their preferred mode of operations, some of which include a active program to undermine democracy.
Making it harder for the former, in whatever fashion, vandalism included, plays into the hand of the latter. This is, of course, not just a theoretical consideration. Look at the very real 1776 Commission appointed by Trump with the mission to create a history curriculum for American schools, intended to be “pro-american,” and feared to deliver state-sponsored propaganda averse to true scientific historical research, just like all the other anti-science initiatives of this administration.
Add to this his promise to defund schools that use the 1619 Project (an in-depth exploration by numerous writers and historians of our slavery- defined past presented by the NYT) as well as other curricular platforms that bring attention to historical facts and truths that counter the “official” curriculum, and you put the nation’s collective historical memory under siege, with public education bearing the brunt.
“Critical race theory, the 1619 Project, and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda that if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together. It will destroy our country.”
And here is Weiner’s assessment:
“The Trumpist crusade against American history education needs to be understood against the backdrop of the administration’s recent actions against refugees, Black Lives Matter protestors, Muslims, and working people of all races and ethnicities. All of these actions suggest an administration hell-bent on breaking the civic bonds between whites and blacks; new immigrants and old; Christians, Jews and Muslims; LGBTQ peoples and heterosexuals; and the poor, working and middle-classes. Trumpism is an ideology of disunity, ignorance, and division; it thrives on conflict, dis-information, mis-education, and social chaos.”
We don’t have to add fuel to that chaos by rowdy actions that are politically unwise, providing grist for the mills of those trying to silence the truth.
Music today by Native American Artists in honor of Indigenous People Day!
The Women’s Building in the Mission district features one of the most frequently visited murals in all of San Francisco.
Panoramic photo fron their website
I walked by there on my way to the pharmacy yesterday, another errand within the two mile radius that I am determined to walk in this city, given that I am on war footing with the parking situation. War footing? Outright war more likely…. although the mural tells me to seek peace.
The building is a community center led by women, a safe space to engage in services and advocacy for women and girls, focussing on immigrant issues as well. They offer a weekly food pantry, finger printing for family reunion, and, pre-Covid 19, also tutoring for job seekers and those trying to figure out technology and provide access to computers and internet. Wellness classes and free consultation with immigration attorneys were slated, as were counseling for domestic violence situations, health care, housing information and job training, also before the virus shut everything down.
In short, an amazing program, in a building that has been chosen as one of the sites for this celebration:
This year, as the nation marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote, Benjamin Moore, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation are celebrating this historic milestone with a new program focused on the preservation of sites in the U.S. where women from all walks of life have made history. We are so excited to announce The Women’s Building as one of those sites, and we’re very happy our organization is recognized as trailblazers in the role of women and their impact on U.S. history. Our colorful mural façade depicts the power and contributions of women throughout history and the world. This year-long project will enhance the grand staircase that showcases the building’s colorful mural as it makes its way from outside, into the heart of the building.
The mural on the outside of the building is called MaestraPeace (Woman Teacher of Peace.) Juana Alicia, Miranda Bergman, Edythe Boone, Susan Kelk Cervantes, Meera Desai, Yvonne Littleton and Irene Perez painted the 5 stories high mural in 1992; it was restored to full glory in 2012. When I walked by, on an intensely sunny day, it almost felt like walking the streets of Mexico City again, the colors and motifs familiar from that hispanic context. A trip that now feels like a lifetime ago.
The mural brims with life and encouragement, a celebration of women, their skills, their roles, their courage. And no parking in sight – glad I walked!
Music today are some feminist songs from a variety of musicians.
“A Tribute to Ida B. Wells” published inThe Chicago Defender on April 18, 1931.
Weeping for you is lost—worthless
As a veil of sorrow tinged despair
That comes from the foul air
Of a clime where man’s access
Is defeat, hushed and desertness.
Your future is no turmoil bare
Of reward, etched in the glare
Of right and wrong, bubbling for
redress
Of black men. Yours is no death,
For you are not dead, but yet
With us in this realm where blatant
woc [sic]
Is out of its ken. buried beneath
Your always vibrant shining web.
Where the glow of justice yet will go.
Wallace Webb Scott
*
On Monday, Ida B. Wells was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, posthumously. Here is a link to a short biography and below a moving documentary, laying out the details of her political engagement, social activism, relentless pursuit of justice and truth, and above all her courage.
Born into slavery, she, too, lived through a pandemic – yellow fever – loosing both of her parents and a sibling to the illness. Only 16, she decided to work as a teacher to support her siblings. At every junction where despair hit, including losing anti-discrimination lawsuits at the Supreme Court, her anguish turned to fury and motivated her to increase her efforts to fight for social reform, to educate and to seek justice. She soon thrived on the work of being a journalist, even though it led to her losing her teaching job.
Lynch Laws were used to terrorize the Black population, and three of Well’s friends were murdered by a mob in 1883 when they opened a grocery store competing with White interests across the street. It is strongly believed that the local criminal court judge himself was one of the lynchers. No-one was brought to justice. And if you think that it’s all long ago: Read up on the modern day lynching of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, three months ago. A Black jogger hunted down and shot by two White men, three DAs doing nothing, the last of whom only convened a Grand Jury after a video of the crime surfaced two days ago. A reminder that nothing but nothing lies in only in the past. Wells is probably turning in her grave.
Wells took her power to the pen, and with her understanding of the politics of economics called for Blacks to leave Memphis – as they did by the thousands, migrating to Midwest locations. The White establishment was enraged, hit by the loss of business. Within Memphis she organized a boycott of the Trolley system that hurt the public transport people enough that they came to beg her to end the strike – she refused. She had discovered the power of organizing and devoted efforts towards it for all her life.
Lynching, of course continued and increased in numbers, attended by crowds up to 10.000 people who got voyeuristic pleasure out of the murders. So did violence against those who spoke out: Wells’ offices were ransacked, the printing presses destroyed, her life no longer safe in the South – she was in exile for a full 30 years before she returned, writing and organizing in NYC, creating the first national anti-lynching campaign (eventually she settled in Chicago). Her insight that slaves’s bodies were economically too valuable to be sacrificed, and therefor only harmed, not killed, but that freed Black bodies only represented competition and therefor had to be eliminated, drew national attention. People like Frederick Douglass started to correspond with her and acknowledge her contributions, although many Black leaders decried her for rocking the boat (and also having a problem with a woman being so powerful.)
It was when she visited Europe and founded an international-lynching organization that threatened to curtail the import of American cotton, an industry at the heart of the South, that lynchings became part of public debate among Whites and trailed off in reaction to the economic pressure. Her fight on two fronts – racism and sexism – continued. She joined the suffragist movement as well. The fight within the Black community – between the Radicals represented by DuBois whom she joined, and the Accommodationists, aligned with Booker T. Washington’s mission to keep segregation as a protective sphere for Blacks, also took a lot out of her, but she did not back down.
Before she died in 1931 she wrote about the Arkansas Race Riots, where her work had brought justice to 12 imprisoned, tortured men who had tried to unionize Black cotton-farmers. It’s worth a read if you care about organizing. Or justice.
She was a phenomenal woman, and the late recognition is something that should encourage us all.
