The Contraband Schottische

Contraband Schottisches

Location:            Historic American Sheet Music Collection, Duke University  (Durham, North Carolina)

Title of Song:     Contraband schottische

Composer:         Winner, Septimus

Publisher:          Oliver Ditson: Lee & Walker

Year & Place:    1861; Boston, Massachusetts

Collection/Call Number/Copies:                Music B-1016

Historic American Sheet Music Item #:  hasm.b1016

Basic Description

This sheet music’s cover shows its viewer one moment from a longer narrative involving five characters.  A white male stands with his fist raised on two steps at the very top of the composition.  With a stern countenance, he wears a collared shirt as well as a bowtie, vest and sports jacket.  In his right hand he grasps a cane.  Below him in a pictorial space separated horizontally by a set of stairs are four black boys.  The child in the upper-right hand section of the pictorial space has turned his head to look back at the older man in the midst of running.  The other three seem to have stumbled and fallen over on to the ground.  The artist here has outfitted all four boys in the same attire which includes a billowy shirt and knickers.  While some have no shoes, other boys are in various stages of ‘shoelessness’.  The children, while in general disarray, maintain a jovial disposition as evidenced by the slight smiles of those in the foreground.

Personal Description

The composition, body language and written language of this image  suggest ambiguity.  While the comportment of the black bodies suggests that they are in trouble, having transgressed some unwritten rule, the term contraband that makes up part of the title could mean that they are the trouble.  The term contraband during this period referred to escaped slaves who fled from the South.  The lack of specific spatial markers disables the viewer from being certain.  Still, the positions of their bodies remaind curious.  The child in the upper-left portion of the space is practically upside down.  Similarly, the boy in the very front sits with his legs splayed open and the child in back of him lies on the ground horizontally.  And the boy who turns his head around seems to be suspended in mid-air.  The import of these observation is elucidated when they are compared with the only body that stands firmly, vertically upright, that of the older white male.  In both analytical contexts, his is a body that polices all of the others.

Reality Check

John J. Smith

Born free in Richmond, Virginia, on November 2, 1820, John J. Smith moved to Boston at the age of twenty-eight. With an adventurous and pioneering spirit, Smith went West for the 1849 California Gold Rush but returned to Boston no richer than when he left.  At this time he became a barber and set up a shop on the corner of Howard and Bulfinch Streets.  His shop was a center for abolitionist activity and a rendezvous point for fugitive slaves. When abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner was not at his home or office, he was usually found at Smith’s shop.

Smith, his wife Georgiana, and other leaders such as Benjamin F. Roberts worked in the 1840s and 1850s in the fight for equal school rights. Boston’s public schools were integrated in 1855 and Smith’s daughter Elizabeth, in the early 1870s, became the first person of African descent to teach in Boston’s integrated schools. John Smith also worked to fight slavery and he was one of the men who played a key role in the rescue of the self-emancipated slave Shadrach Minkins from federal custody in 1851.

During the Civil War, Smith stationed himself in Washington, D.C., as a recruiting officer for the all-black 5th Cavalry. After the war, Smith was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1868, 1869 and 1872. In 1878, the year he moved to 86 Pinckney Street, he was appointed to the Boston Common Council. John J. Smith lived at this residence  until 1893.  He died on November 4, 1906.

(Source: Museum of African American History, Boston and Nantucket, http://www.afroammuseum.org/exhibits.htm; http://www.nps.gov/boaf/historyculture/john-j-smith-house.htm)

Walking for dat Cake

Walking for dat Cake

Location:            Historic American Sheet Music Collection, Duke University  (Durham, North Carolina)

Title of Song:     Walking for Dat Cake

Composer:         Braham, David

Publisher:          Wm. A. Pond

Year & Place:    1877; New York, New York

Collection/Call Number/Copies:               Music B-156

Historic American Sheet Music Item #:  hasm.b0156

Basic Description

This image depicts a warm scene of revelry and dance inside of a wooden dwelling.  Young couples move about the floor in formal attire with the boys in suits and the women in dresses. The adults in this image line the walls and the outskirts of the floor. One couple, consisting of a male and a female watch the festivities from the back, far left portion of the space. while another couple stands in the far right of the background near the entrance of the house. Dancing in the far left foreground, a matronly woman balances a plate of food on her head. She wears glasses as well as an apron. Mirroring her movements and creating a symmetrical composition, directly across from her is an older gentleman with a pipe in his right hand. In the background, directly in front of the window, a small, thin boy participates in the festivities by dancing on top of a table. Illuminating this joyous evening is a large, lit, fireplace as well as a candle on top of the mantle. Portraits, chairs pushed against the walls and a clock lining the wall remind the viewer of the space’s domestic character.

Personal Description

The fifteen individuals packed into this small space make this image extraordinarily crowded.   The source of the music is also conspicuously absent. The occasion for this dance and the individual identities of these people are also missing pieces of contextual information that the viewer cannot visually access. One might infer that these constitute free blacks from their fancy dress and participation in an activity of leisure.  All that the viewer can know for sure, however, about this image is that there is a group of black people dancing. In this way, it contains elements of caricature, as it reduces black identity to dance. Still, there are other dichotomies exist in this image. First, the artist chose not to create a grotesque illustration scene of debauchery that would have been more in line with the hypersexualized, revival-esque dance with which African-Americans were associated. Instead, the illustrator drew a restrained scene of civilized dance. This is, however, punctured by anomalies. A woman dances with food on her head and a boy dances on top of a table. Other characters are not clearly adults or children, straddling a strange space between youth and maturation.  It is as if the artist wanted to suggest that they can’t quite get it right. Thus, this image combines subtle stereotyping with an indirect critique of middle-class African-American life.

Reality Check

Sketch from February 26, 1870 Harper’s Weekly

“There are now about one hundred buildings occupied by the schools of this [New York] city.  While all of these buildings are convenient and healthful, the newer buildings are a great improvement on those erected in former years.  They have been constructed on the best principles of arrangement, fitted with conveniences for teachers and pupils, supplied with the best kind of furniture, and are warmed and ventilated by the best apparatus.  They vary in size, some occupying only two lots, other six or seven.  It has been found that large buildings are much more economical and convenient than small ones; and not infrequently two thousand pupils, and even a larger number are well accommodated.

The sketches that illustrate this article will give the reader a very complete idea of the internal arrangements of our common schools.  The first gives an exterior view of one of the school buildings; No. 2 shows a lesson in object teaching in a class-room in a colored school; No. 3 a girls’ class in calisthenics; No. 4, a girls’ class in drawing; No. 5, a writing lesson.  These sketches were all taken from actual scenes and are accurate representations of them.”

Wait, my Children, Wait!

Location:                Historic American Sheet Music Collection, Duke University  (Durham, North Carolina)

Title of Song:         Wait, My Childrem, Wait

Composer:             Dekress, Charles R

Publisher:              John Church

Year & Place:      1880; Cincinnati, Ohio

Collection/Call Number/Copies:                  Music B-152

Historic American Sheet Music Item #:    hasm.b0152

Basic Description

A raucous scene of a group of boys who have disrobed and swim in a large body of water near a shore takes place in this image.  One boy, completely naked, dives into the water while the other float displaying an assortment of body parts.  While some are almost completely submerged with only their heads peeking above the water’s surface, others are upside down with legs and feet visible to the viewer.  In the bushes on the shoreline are two personified animals who seem to stare at this curious scene.  With their rapt gaze and comportment exhibiting a verticality with two legs and feet firmly on the ground, their behavior recalls that of a human.  Above this aquatic adventure is an angel blowing a trumpet, to which two of children seem to both acknowledge and respond, while resting on a set of clouds.

Personal Description

This out-of-control, ambiguous, scene combines the fantastic, with revival-esque religious undertones.  Rather than render an apparition, the angel looks just like the other figures and interacts with them.  Additionally, it is unclear from the lyrics whether the angel is there to warn the children of an impending danger or to issue more malicious taunts about their ‘wooly’ hair as the lyrics suggest.  The two animals present look and behave like humans and stand up vertically, while children are upside down and several limbs appear without attached bodies.  The eerily static animals have a sinister manner as they silently watch the kids, who seem in a curious reversal, to act like animals.  All of these elements push this scene beyond the denigrating humor of caricature to a visual realm that is disordered, sub-human and out of this world.

Reality Check

Wallace Shelton Polk, 1874 – 1877

Wallace Shelton Polk was born around 1870 to Elias J. and Sarah Polk. At the time this photo was taken the family was living on West Canal St. Elias was a laborer and a foreman at the city stables. Wallace became a porter and tacker and later an advertising agent. He had an older brother, James.  Wallace Shelton Polk was about four years old when this photograph was taken.  The photographer was James Presley Ball, an African-American photographer based in Cincinnati, Ohio.   He is standing on an arm-less upholstered chair. The chair is velvet with heavy fringe around the seat and buttons in the back. There is a tassel hanging from the curved back. He is leaning on a round table covered with a solid cloth. There is a painted background with a column and a drape on the left. His dark hair is parted on the side. He is wearing a bolero style jacket with buttons on each side. The top button is buttoned. The card is on thicker stock and has been trimmed all around. The imprint is lengthwise on the back in purple with “P. B Thomas, Retoucher” printed in the corner. Wallace’s name is written in pencil on the back.  Wallace died Sept. 27, 1915 and is buried in the Union Baptist Cemetery.

(Source: http://library.cincymuseum.org/starweb/photos/servlet.starweb)

We’ll Raise de Roof To-Night

We'll Raise de Roof Tonight

Location:             Historic American Sheet Music Collection, Duke University  (Durham, North Carolina)

Title of Song:     We’ll Raise De Roof To-Night

Composer:          Wheeler, J. W.

Illustrator:         Cinthy Johnson

Publisher:           Blair & Lydon

Year & Place:    1884; Boston, Massachusetts

Collection/Call Number/Copies:                 Music B-167

Historic American Sheet Music Item #:    hasm.b0167

Basic Description

The image here shows four men rowing a small boat close by an isolated wooden house.  While the viewer is unable to see what lies behind the dwelling, its seems that the land on which the house sits constitutes its own island.  Another boat leans against the shore in front of several trees on the left side of the building while a full-moon lights the night sky.  Bright windows indicate that there are other light on or candles burning.  There are no other signs, however, of human presence.  Each of the four men in the boat has a distinct posture.  Rowing the boat on the far left, one male sharply reclines with his face aimed directly at the sky.  Another male in the center languidly plays a banjo while a character to his right pushes his oar through with the water with his feet up.  Finally, piercing the calm water is a large frog.

Personal Description

The figures in this image look as though they are inebriated or altered state of being.  And they’re solemn movement though the water stands in stark contrast to the title of the music which, indicates a raucous celebration.  What both suggest however is a break moment of quotidian activities.  Still, it seems as though the illustration is meant to stand apart from its accompanying music.  And its visual strategy and subject matter stand in an ambiguous space with the potential for transgression or capitulation.

Reality Check

Lewis Hayden, 1811 - 1889

Lewis Hayden was one of Boston’s most visible and militant African American abolitionists. He was born enslaved in Lexington, Kentucky in 1812. His first wife, Esther Harvey, and a son were sold to U.S. Senator Henry Clay, who in turn sold them into the deep south. Hayden was never able to discover their ultimate whereabouts. Eventually, Hayden was remarried to a woman named Harriet Bell and they escaped with their son Joseph to Canada in 1844, and then to Detroit in 1845.

The Hayden family made their way to Boston by January 1846. Lewis ran a clothing store and quickly became a leader in the black community. In 1850, the Haydens moved into the house at 66 Phillips Street. The Hayden’s routinely cared for self-emancipated African Americans at their home, which served as a boarding house. Records from the Boston Vigilance Committee indicate that scores of people received aid and shelter at the Hayden home between 1850 and 1860. Lewis Hayden was one of the men who helped rescue Shadrach Minkins from federal custody in 1851 and he played a significant role in the attempted rescue of Anthony Burns. Hayden also contributed money to John Brown, in preparation for his raid on Harper’s Ferry.

William and Ellen Craft were among Lewis and Harriet Hayden’s most famous boarders. The Crafts escaped from slavery by riding a passenger train to the north. Lewis Hayden was determined to fight for their protection. Hayden threatened that two kegs of gun powder were kept near the entryway of his home. Should slave catchers come and attempt to reclaim their “property,” Hayden would sooner have blown up the house than surrender the Crafts.

During the Civil War, Lewis Hayden worked as a recruiter for the 54th Regiment. Later he served a term in the Massachusetts House of Representatives and worked for the Massachusetts Secretary of State. Lewis Hayden died on April 7, 1889.

(Source: National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior; http://www.nps.gov/boaf/historyculture/lewis-and-harriet-hayden-house.htm)

Patrol Comique

Patrol Comique

Location:            Historic American Sheet Music Collection, Duke University  (Durham, North Carolina)

Title of Song:     Patrol Comique

Composer:         Hindley, Thomas

Illustrator:        Zimmerman

Publisher:          Standard Music

Year & Place:    1886; New York, New York

Collection/Call Number/Copies:              Music #719

Historic American Sheet Music Item #: hasm.n0719

Basic Description

This image depicts four African-American individuals. Three stand in a row in the foreground while one sits in the background playing a banjo and tapping his feet.  The raised legs of the characters closer to the viewer indicate that they are dancing.  Everyone in the group sports formal attire with the men in double breasted suits.  The male in the far left of the pictorial space wears a top hat while his counterpart at the very right stands out with his bayonet and darker boots. In combination with his hat and long pants, his garments mark him as a member of the military.  The woman moving gracefully in the center of these men wears a long, short-sleeved dress as well as a hat adorned with feathers.  With an open fan in her left hand, she daintily grasps and raises her dress in the other.  The woman looks to the man to her right in an adoring manner.  While their racial distinction is clear, little attention, has been given to their distinct facial features.  Similarly, the group stands in an indistinguishable setting.  The vertical floorboards, however, suggest that they are indoors.

Personal Description

The lack of attention to details suggests that the illustrator was not keenly concerned with their individual identities.   There is nothing particularly striking, extravagant, overdone or especially poignant about this image.  Rather, what seems important is conveying the general idea of music and dance and the jovial interactions.  These festivities, however, do not reference a real social situation located in a specific date and time.  It is one that seems both real and imagined.  The male characters recall the prototypical respectable gentleman while the female recalls the chaste, graceful, properly reared, Victorian notion of femininity.  And it seems from the title, “Patrol Comique” that there is an attempt to derisively mock these people.  Rendered beautifully above the characters it suggests that this is a humorous rendition of black characters in this social setting.  One might look to what is only subtly pronounced in the image – dark Skin and formal dress – as pointing to a contradictory social situation.  Nevertheless, there are other elements that make this an odd social situation.  These characters are dressed up as if they will attend a fancy ball and they awkwardly dance with only the aid of a musician and a banjo.  Additionally, the presence of two males dancing with one female is another source of tension.

Reality Check

A Fancy Dress Ball on Seventh Avenue, 1872; New York, NY.

Source: Dodson, Howard, Christopher Paul Moore, and Roberta Yancy. The Black New Yorkers : The Schomburg Illustrated Chronology. New York: John Wiley, 2000.

 

Lucinda Cinda Jane

Lucinda Cinda Jane

Location:            Historic American Sheet Music Collection, Duke University  (Durham, North Carolina)

Title of Song:    Lucinda – Cinda – Jane

Composer:         Hart, Joseph (Hart & De Mar)

Illustrator:        American Lithographic

Publisher:          Schubert Piano Company

Year & Place:   1894; New York, New York

Collection/Call Number/Copies:                 Music B-864

Historic American Sheet Music Item #:   hasm.b0864

Basic Description

This cover depicts a portrait of a couple in a circular frame. This is centered against a floral and botanical background reminiscent of an arabesque pattern. The intertwined green broad-leafed plants and orange and purple flowers are also situated within a pale yellow background. With their heads leaning towards each other, the male and female subjects slightly open their mouths to reveal cloying, wide-toothed smiles as they look into each others eyes. On the left, the woman wears her hair in soft, full curls with a beaded headband and a large blue ribbon. Around her neck is a gold-toned necklace with a heart-shaped pendant. Because the couple is only shown from the shoulders upward, very little of the woman’s garments show. The viewer is only able to see the sheer fabric of the bodice and two large red ribbons at each shoulder. Her male partner in this image wears a black blazer with a blue and white striped shirt and a black-and-white polka-dot bow. Each of these figures has abnormally bright red lips and the whites of their eyes and teeth pop out of the image.

Personal Description

This image is striking on many levels. These portraits show two busts. In other words, most of the body is invisible. Other inaccessible pieces of information include their individual identities as well as their relationship to each other. The two characters seem as though they have been smiling for too long. Their smiles seem forced, fake and overdone. The two seem too happy and simultaneously, suffering from fatigue.  What is most bothersome about this image is its visual connections to minstrelsy. In particular, the saturated red color of the lips recalls the archetypal minstrel mask. The large, toothy, saccharine smiles work in the exact same way. What does it mean that the artist connects these two blacks with this type of masking? What does it mean that they are surrounded or framed by a flat pattern of leaves, plants and other phenomena from the natural world?

Reality Check

Susan Maria Smith McKinney Steward (1847-1918) and William G. McKinney

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Susan Maria Smith was the first black woman to graduate from medical college in New York state. After graduating as valedictorian from the New York Medical College for Women, she attended the Long Island Medical College Hospital, where she was the only woman in the entire college.

Married in 1874 to the Rev. William G. McKinney.  McKinney was an Episcopal minister originally from South Carolina. The couple lived in Steward’s parents’ home until 1874, when they moved to a predominantly white area of Brooklyn. McKinney was 17 years older than his wife. The couple had two children: Anna, who became a schoolteacher, and William Sylvanus, who, like his father, became an Episcopal priest. The family lived comfortably in Brooklyn.

In 1881, while the couple was still together, Smith McKinney co-founded the Women’s Hospital & Dispensary in Brooklyn, which later became the Memorial Hospital for Women and Children. She served on the staff of the New York Medical College and Hospital for Women in Manhattan, and from 1892 to 1896 was manager of the medical staff of the Brooklyn Home for Aged Colored People. She also served as church organist and choir director for Brooklyn’s Bridge Street Church.  In 1890, William McKinney suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and was unable to maintain his normal work schedule. Steward supported the family, as well as six of her relatives who lived in the McKinney home. William McKinney died on November 24, 1895 when Steward was 48.His wife practiced as Dr. Susan Smith McKinney until his death in 1896.

(Source: http://www.answers.com/topic/susan-mckinney-steward; http://www.aetna.com/foundation/aahcalendar/1986steward.html)

This image is striking on many levels.  These portraits show two busts.  In other words, most of the body is invisible.  Other inaccessible pieces of information include their individual identities as well as their relationship to each other.  The two characters seem as though they have been smiling for too long.  Their smiles seem forced, fake and overdone.  The two seem too happy.  What is most bothersome about this image is its visual connections to minstrelsy.  In particular, the saturated red color of the lips recalls the archetypal minstrel mask.  The large, toothy, saccharine smiles work in the exact same way.  What does it mean that the artist connects these two blacks with this type of masking?  What does it mean that they are surrounded or framed by a flat pattern of leaves, plants and other phenomena from the natural world?

Lady Africa

Lady Africa

Location:             Historic American Sheet Music Collection, Duke University  (Durham, North Carolina)

Title of Song:      Lady Africa

Composer:          Reed Jr., Dave

Illustrator:         Davies

Publisher:           Howley, Haviland & Dresser

Year & Place:     1897; New York, New York

Collection/Call Number/Copies:                Music B-807

Historic American Sheet Music Item #:  hasm.b0807

Basic Description

This is a multi-colored portrait of a slender woman sporting an umbrella, a hat and gloves.  The frame only allows the viewer to see three-quarters of her body.  Her hat features large, undulating feathers that seem to spring out of the hat like volutes.  While the fabric of her sleeves hugs her wrists and forearms, it expands exponentially in a balloon-like fashion from her forearms to her shoulders.  The sleeves in this area are unsually large, approximating the width of her entire body.  This contrasts with the woman’s collar, which is wrapped tightly around her neck and is tied in a bow just below the nape of her neck with a broad, dark magenta ribbon.  It is her right hand that holds the umbrella in balance over her shoulders.  The dress is made of a printed fabric comprised of stripes in the sleeves and swirls reminiscent of an arabesque decoration in the bodice.  Additionally, the bodice is cinched at the waist and a brooch is pinned to the front of her neck.

Personal Description

This image seems to attempt to reference feminine, middle-class respectability and propriety as evidenced by the body’s lavish decoration and formal attire.  The main elements or accoutrements such as the gloves, hat and umbrella are  signifiers of a historically specific type of formality.   It is difficult to understand if this image takes steps towards caricature or of it it can be understood a serious representation of an individual.  This referencing of civil society does not seem completely out of line with what the actual social and stylistic demands of the day might have been.  There are few things that are odd such as the lack of visual context or background that would help the reader better identify her.  It is also striking that she wears both the hat and the umbrella as one would seem to counter the need for the other.   What may be most striking is the formality’s combination with a black body.  The title of this piece, “Lady Africa” offers few clues that help in constructing an interpretation.  The reference to Africa itself, however, does suggest that what the viewer sees here, a female of African-descent attempting to ascend to “lady-hood”  might have been a humorous spectacle for turn of the century viewers, in much the same way that viewing markers of indigenous culture might have been.  Still, it seems that there is an inaccessible aspect of this piece, which needs a late-nineteenth century audience to be activated.

Reality Check

Untitled, Missouri State Archives, circa 1890’s

This image from the Missouri State Archive depicts an woman (anonymous) wearing a long dress with lace embroidery.

Source:

Shaw, Gwendolyn DuBois., and Emily K. Shubert. Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century. Andover: Addison Gallery of American Art Phillips Academy, 2006.

Hello Ma Baby

Location:               Historic American Sheet Music Collection, Duke University  (Durham, North Carolina)

Title of Song:        Hello Ma Baby

Composer:            Howard, Joseph E.

Publisher:             T.B. Harms

Year & Place:       1899; New York, New York

Collection/Call Number/Copies:                Music #743

Historic American Sheet Music Item #:   hasm.n0743

Basic Description
The space of this lithograph is dominated by the text “Hello Ma Baby” written diagonally in large bold letters. In the upper left-hand corner is an African-American wearing a black jacket. He holds a telephone up to his ear and his mouth is slightly ajar indicating he is speaking. In the bottom, right corner of the pictorial space, a woman in a large hat, a printed blouse, a short black cape and a skirt fastened tightly around her waist. Holding a phone to her ear, the woman is engaged in a conversation. Visually linking these two characters are long, perpendicular faintly rendered wires lining the upper right corner of the image. These are connected to a telephone pole strengthening the notion that the male and female are speaking to each other. The title of the piece and its colloquial expression “ma baby” also suggests that the two subjects have an intimate relationship.

Personal Description

The apparent neutrality of this pastoral image stands in striking contrast to some of the grotesque, caricature-ish imagery of other covers from this century.  And one wonders where the humor and caricature-ish elements exist.  If this is apart of a performance that would accompany the music, one wonders where the performativity lies.

Reality Check

Lewis Latimer (1848-1928)
Lewis Latimer was an engineer and inventor born in Chelsea, Massachusetts. He was the son of George W. Latimer, a barber, and Rebecca Smith, both former slaves who escaped from Norfolk Virginia in 1842. When not attending Phillips Grammar School In Boston, Latimer spent much of his youth working at his father’s barber shop, as a paper-hanger, and selling the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator.  Latimer’s family was placed in dire financial straits when his father mysteriously disappeared. Latimer and his brothers were bound out to a farm school for unpaid labor.  They escaped and moved back to Boston, and Latimer enlisted in the U.S. Navy late in the Civil War. In 1865, he was honorably discharged and began a technical career in Boston as an office worker for Crosby and Gould patent solicitors. Through his assiduous efforts to teach himself the art of drafting, he rose to assistant draftsman and eventually to the position of chief draftsman in the mid-1870s. He met a young woman at this time, named Mary Wilson Lewis, whom he married in 1873. They had two children.
Latimer began to invent during his tenure at Crosby and Gould. His first creation was a water closet for railway cars He drafted the diagrams for Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone patent application, which was approved in 1876.
In 1879, Latimer relocated to Bridgeport, Connecticut, and was hired by the U.S. Electric Lighting Company as a draftsman and private secretary. He was soon placed in charge of the production of carbon lamp filaments.  He was an integral part of the team that installed the company’s first commercial incandescent lighting system in the Equitable Building in New York City, in the fall of 1880.
In 1883, Latimer began working at Edison Electric Company. According to Latimer’s biographical sketch of himself for the Edison pioneers, he was transferred to the department “as a draughtsman inspector and expert witness as to facts in the early stages of the electric lighting business…[He] traveled extensively, securing witnesses’ affidavits, and early apparatus, and also testifying to the number of the basic patent cases to the advantage of his employers.” His complete knowledge of electrical technology was exemplified in his work Incandescent Electric Lighting, a Practical Description of the Edison System of 1890.
A stroke in 1924 forced Latimer to retire and he spent much of his last four years engaged in other activities important in his life, such as art and poetry. He died at his home in Flushing, New York, which in 1995 was made a New York City landmark.
(Source: African American Lives, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Oxford University Press, 2004)

Kingdom Coming

Kingdom Coming

Location:            Historic American Sheet Music Collection, Duke University  (Durham, North Carolina)

Title of Song:     Kingdom Coming

Composer:         Bryant, Dan

Publisher:         Charles Magnus & Co

Year & Place:   New York, New York

Collection/Call Number/Copies:               Bsvg 301458

Historic American Sheet Music Item #:  bsvg.301458

Basic Description

The image at the top of this broadside shows a male and a female of dark skin walking together arm in arm.  The man wears a straw hat, a white collared shirt and blue overalls.  His partner in this leisurely jaunt sports a long red dress, a matching straw hat and she is wrapped in a blue shawl.  For their large, rotund bodies, they are supported tenuously by unusually small feet.  The viewer is offered little specific information about their identities.  The background depicts a massive body of water littered sporadically with a large ship or a barge.  Each has tall structures and bright red flags wave from their peaks of several.  The variable shaded formations in the area of the sky and the horizon are too nebulous to certain of what they are or their function.  In pale orange there appear to be mountains, while grey and black could be smoke.  This coloring could also, however, reflect damage to the print.

Personal Description

Ambivalence and ambiguity abound in this image.   There is not enough information presented to determine the origin or destination of the ships nor the details of the cargo aboard.  The combination of the viewer’s vantage point behind the couple as well as the lack of any recognizable facial features prevent them from approaching individuality.  This suggests that the couple does not represent any specific black male or female.  In tandem with their abnormally small feet, and their large round bodies, discussed in the music’s lyrics, this piece has an element of caricature and malicious humor.  When read with the poem or song, the image might be construed as a moment of subversion in which the masters have run away in fear of the gunboats and Kingdom, or rightful order or things where anyone can take a stroll, has come.

Reality Check

One of the most remarkable exceptions is this painting by the leading mid-century figure painter Eastman Johnson.  Born in 1824 in Lovell, Maine, Eastman Johnson took to art early in life, setting up a portrait studio in Augusta when he was 18 years old. He later worked in Boston and Washington, D.C., and in 1849 traveled to Europe where he received extensive training in drawing and painting.  In 1859, Johnson opened an exhibit in New York which featured Negro Life in the South. It was a turning point in his career — one which would lead to his becoming, for many years, the foremost genre painter in the United States.

During and even immediately after the Civil War, very few American artists undertook direct representations of the catastrophic conflict or of the experience of the enslaved African Americans whose plight it decided. He claimed to have based the subject on an actual event he had witnessed near the Manassas, Virginia, battlefield on March 2, 1862, just days before the Confederate stronghold was ceded to Union forces. This painting, A Ride for Liberty depicts a black family fleeing toward freedom. It is based on an incident which Johnson witnessed during the Civil War battle of Manassas.  The mother, holding a small child in her arms, looks back apprehensively for possible pursuers.  In this powerfully simplified composition, a family of fugitive slaves charges for the safety of Union lines in the dull light of dawn. The absence of white figures in this liberation subject makes it virtually unique in American art of the period—these African Americans are the independent agents of their own freedom. Perhaps owing to the exceptional daring of the subject, Johnson appears never to have exhibited this work.

(Source: http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/495/A_Ride_for_Liberty_–_The_Fugitive_Slaves)

“She’s the Real Thing my Baby”

Location:              Historic American Sheet Music Collection, Duke University  (Durham, North Carolina)

Title of Song:       She’s The Real Thing My Baby

Composer:           Northrop, Theo A.

Illustrator:          American Lithographic

Publisher:            New York Sunday Press

Year & Place:     1901; New York, New York

Collection/Call Number/Copies:               Music B-0411

Historic American Sheet Music Item #:  hasm.b0411

Basic Description

This portrait of an African-American female framed with thick red lines depicts her embellished body from her head to the beginning of her chest.  Covered in a pink and white lace dress, a full head of ebony black curls frame her face and a large white hat with two black feather sits at the crown of her head.  Her pink and white collar is wrapped tightly around her neck as she turns her head slightly while gazing out towards the viewer.  With a slight shine, her soft, supple skin gleams in the light.

Personal Description

Loudly announcing that this female subject is the real thing, this lithograph paradoxically exhibits an abundance of artifice.  The woman looks as though her collar might cut off the circulation of air through her trachea while the treatment of her skin renders her a Mattel plastic product.  The only part of her body left without some degree of adornment is her face.  Even this, however, displays ambiguity with its Mona Lisa-esque smile in which it is not clearly smiling or grimacing bitterly.  And all of this ambiguity begs the question: Is Theo Northrop’s ‘baby’ really real, a figment of the author’s imagination, or a combination of both?

Reality Check

Born and educated in Richmond, Virginia, Adah Belle Samuels Thoms championed equal opportunity for African-American women first as a teacher in Virginia and later during her professional nursing career. A graduate of the Lincoln Hospital’s School of Nursing – the first in the nation to train black women as nurses when it started with six students in 1898 – she was the President of the Lincoln Hospital Alumnae Association in New York.

Samuels Thoms was the charter member for and hosted the organizational meeting of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses in New York City.  The American Nurses Association had a whites-only policy.  In August of 1908, fifty-two nurses gathered at St. Marks Episcopal Church to found the new group for Colored Graduate Nurses.

Thoms campaigned for the enrollment of black nurses by the American Red Cross during World War I and was influential in increasing the number of African-American nurses in public health nursing positions.  Later on in life she wrote Pathfinders, the first history of African-American nurses.

(Source: Dodson, Howard, Christopher Paul. Moore, and Roberta Yancy. The Black New Yorkers: The Schomburg Illustrated Chronology. New York: John Wiley, 2000)