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The Poetics of Place and Expressions of Oppositional Memory
No full textThe Black Atlantic creation of alternative archives illustrated in Parisa Urquhart’s 2019 documentary Strike for Freedom, which chronicles the unveiling of a historical plaque in Edinburgh to commemorate Frederick Douglass’s activism while he was in exile in Scotland, has a long and meaningful history. People without control over—or even access to—papers of state, conquerors’ memoirs, or officially commissioned histories have carried out the work of recovering, remembering, and reimagining the past through creative deployment of the meager tools at their disposal: stories, songs, and other forms of expressive culture and decoration, including three-dimensional artifacts of material culture such as medallions, buttons, drums, coins, statues, and Masonic aprons. In this article, we survey past and present manifestations of countermemory, place making, and place marking to locate Strike for Freedom within a larger story of oppositional countermemory
Framing Frederick Douglass: The Female Talented Tenth Who Shaped America
No full textIn this era of “My Brother’s Keeper,” we have been blinded from fully recognizing the Black woman’s race-, gender-, and class-based persecution and oppression. This daunting reality, though, has existed since 1619. She has lived through the dehumanizing experience of slavery and the unfulfilled promises of Reconstruction, lynching, Jim Crow, and segregation, and today she often finds herself left out or at the margins of our concern with regard to her humanity. Even during the life of the great Frederick Douglass, who spoke out against America’s torturous evils, the Black woman was unchampioned. She was never offered a pedestal to speak, yet she spoke boldly nonetheless. America wanted her to be the footstool for white society, but she vehemently refused. Anna Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Rosetta Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, and others were the thought leaders who shaped and defined the truest sense of humanity and morality for nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. They are the talented tenth who saved Black America and, in so doing, the heart and soul of our nation
“Any Leadership Would Have to Be the Type of Frederick Douglass”: Black History, Black Heroism, and Black Resistance in Jacob Lawrence’s Frederick Douglass Series (1938–1939)
No full textThe inspiration for twentieth-century activist-artist Jacob Lawrence’s multipart narrative series Frederick Douglass (1938–1939), a thirty-two-panel work he painted while he was living in Harlem, emerged from his exposure to the stories of “strong, daring and heroic black heroes and heroines.” Whereas it had been an act of philosophical and political liberation for Frederick Douglass to focus on the “multitudinous” possibilities of textual experimentation and visual reimagining when it came to his own face and body, let alone his life story and his intellectual and moral power as an orator and author, for social justice artists such as Jacob Lawrence who were building new languages of liberation from Douglass’s activism and authorship, it was imperative that he become a point of origin, a Founding Father in a Black revolutionary tradition, and a steadying compass point for acts of radicalism, reform, and resistance in the African Atlantic world
Conjuring Black Freedom: Art as the Way to Other Worlds
No full textCommunity-based art making and art-based community making have been key components in the Black freedom struggle. The collective intelligence honed in struggle that Cedric Robinson identifies and honors has often resided in creating objects produced by creative acts. This tradition survives and thrives today as an engine driving many different projects. For Afro-diasporic peoples, survival has required relentless resistance to enslavement, exploitation, suppression, and segregation. Resistance alone, however, has never been enough. Responding to the forms of social death prescribed by white supremacy has required the creation of a rich collective, communal, and convivial social life. In this struggle, art and authorship are not merely illustration and ornamentation. They are weapons: mechanisms that cultivate a collective capacity to find value in undervalued places and undervalued people. The articles in this issue of Kalfou emphasize the ways in which Black Atlantic authorship and art across the centuries have been part of an effort to create a new kind of human, one that does not need to make others lesser in order to become greater. In the midst of centuries of suffering, sacrifice, and struggle, the greatest achievement of the Black community has been itself: its constitution as an aggrieved, insurgent, and imaginative polity using invention, inversion, surprise, and disguise to forge mechanisms for refusing unlivable destinies and decorating the way to other worlds
Commonwealth Forum: Would Mandated Paid Leave Be a Competitive Disadvantage for Pennsylvania?
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Frederick Douglass: Justice and Progress Go Together
No full textFrederick Douglass, Black abolitionist, author, and statesman, was born into chattel slavery in the United States in 1818. Douglass’s antislavery activism inspired his sons to fight in the Civil War to end slavery in the nation (1861–1865). It also enabled him to meet other U.S. abolitionists such as James McCune Smith, the first Black American graduate in medicine (Glasgow University, 1837), as well as John Brown and Abraham Lincoln. Douglass arrived in Scotland in 1846, where he gave many lectures on the evils of chattel slavery and was aware of the roles politicians and the church played in maintaining this institution. He argued that if the Free Church of Scotland refused to help to abolish slavery in the United States, it should “Send Back The Money” that it acquired from slaveholding investors. A commemorative plaque to Frederick Douglass was unveiled in Edinburgh in November 2018. This article reflects on Frederick Douglass’s activism in Scotland and what it means for Scotland’s African diasporic residents. 
