Monthly Archives: February 2011

In defense of children….

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Marian Wright Edelman was born in and grew up in Bennettsville, South Carolina, one of five children. Her father, Arthur Wright, was a Baptist preacher who taught his children that Christianity required service in this world. Her father died when Marian was only fourteen, urging in his last words to her, “Don’t let anything get in the way of your education.”

Marian  went on to study at Spelman College, abroad on a Merrill scholarship, and she traveled to the Soviet Union with a Lisle fellowship. When she returned to Spelman in 1959, she became involved in the civil rights movement, inspiring her to drop her plans to enter the foreign service, and instead to study law. She studied law at Yale and worked as a student on a project to register African American voters in Mississippi.

In 1963, after graduating from Yale Law School, Marian Wright Edelman worked first in New York for the NAACP Legal and Defense Fund, and then in Mississippi for the same organization. There, she became the first African American woman to practice law.

During a tour by Robert Kennedy and Joseph Clark of Mississippi’s poverty-ridden Delta slums, Marian met Peter Edelman, an assistant to Kennedy, and the next year she moved to Washington, D.C., to marry him and to work for social justice in the center of America’s political scene.

Marian Wright Edelman established the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) in 1973 as a voice for poor, minority and handicapped children. She served as a public speaker on behalf of these children, and also as a lobbyist in Congress, as well as president and administrative head of the organization. The agency served not only as an advocacy organization, but as a research center, documenting the problems and possible solutions to children in need. To keep the agency independent, she saw that it was financed entirely with private funds.

Marian Wright Edelman also published her ideas in several books. The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours was a surprising success.

In the 1990s, when Bill Clinton was elected President, Hillary Clinton’s involvement with the Children’s Defense Fund meant that there was significantly more attention given to the organization. But Edelman did not pull her punches in criticizing the Clinton administration’s legislative agenda — such as its “welfare reform” initiatives — when she believed these would be disadvantageous to the nation’s neediest children.

As part of the efforts of Marian Wright Edelman and the Children’s Defense Fund on behalf of children, she has also advocated pregnancy prevention, child care funding, health care funding, prenatal care, parental responsibility for education in values, reducing the violent images presented to children, and selective gun control in the wake of school shootings.

Obama wasn’t the first Black Man in the White House

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Henry Ossawa Tanner (June 21, 1859 – May 25, 1937) was an African American artist best known for his style of painting. He was the first African American painter to gain international acclaim. In 1879 Tanner enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia Tanner’s non-confrontational personality and preference for subtle expression in his work seem to belie his difficulties, but his life was not without struggle. Although he gained confidence as an artist and began to sell his work, racism was a prevalent condition in Philadelphia, as massive numbers of African Americans left the rural South and settled in Northern urban centers.Tanner left for France in 1891. Tanner traveled to France in 1891, to the Académie Julian, and joined the American Art Students Club of Paris. Paris was a welcome escape for Tanner; within French art circles the issue of race mattered little. Tanner acclimated quickly to Parisian life.

 Henry Ossawa Tanner and the Clinton Administration

 His painting Sand Dunes at Sunset, Atlantic City is the first painting by an African American acquired by the White House for its permanent collection under the Clinton administration. The painting is considered one of Henry Tanner’s largest, most artistically ambitious and most beautiful pure landscapes .

In 1893  Tanner painted his most famous work, The Banjo Lesson painted in Philadelphia. The painting shows an elderly black man teaching what is assumed to be his grandson how to play the banjo. This deceptively simple-looking work explores several important themes. Blacks had long been stereotyped as entertainers in American culture, and the image of a black man playing the banjo appears throughout American art of the late 19th century. Thomas Worth, Willy Miller, Walter M. Dunk, Eastman Johnson and Tanner’s own teacher Thomas Eakins had tackled the subject in their artwork. These images however are often reduced to a minstrel type portrayal. Tanner works against this familiar stereotype by producing a sensitive reinterpretation. Instead of a generalization the painting portrays a specific moment of human interaction. The two characters concentrate intently on the task before them. They seem to be oblivious to the rest of the world which magnifies the sense of real contact and cooperation. Skillfully painted portraits of the individuals make it obvious that these are real people and not types.

Hampton University’s 1894 acquisition of two paintings by Henry O. Tanner, it established the world’s first collection of African American art. One of these paintings, The Banjo Lesson, is acknowledged as the most admired work by an African American artist..  The acquisition of this piece made  it the Today the collection numbers over 1,500 pieces and is one of the largest and strongest collections of African American art in the world.

Seeds of Education in Hampton Roads

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In the mid-1700s before the civil war the only opportunity for education was through parochial, private or apprenticeship means.  It wasn’t until Thomas Jefferson proposed a Literary Fund that was adopted by the General Assembly in 1796 did education become available to the white masses for the cost of tuition. Throughout Norfolk county several schools opened under this mandate.  In 1845 however the General assembly specified that the money from this literary fund be diverted to local town and counties to support “free” schools.   These “free” schools in Hampton Roads differed from their northern counterparts because they restricted attendance to whites only.  Within Hampton Roads, Elizabeth City County (now the city of Hampton) was the earliest municipality to adopt a public school system. 

Many churches  feeling it was their “Christian duty” to educate their young members did so in Sunday school bible classes which was the beginning of some rudimentary education among blacks and poor whites. African Americans, enslaved and free, participated in classes at Methodist and Episcopal churches in urban areas.  After the Nat Turner rebellion in 1831, instruction for free blacks was outlawed and the education of African Americans went underground. 

Mary Kelsey Peake (1823-1862) Educator

A month prior to the civil war, Major General Benjamin F Butler, send to command Ft. Monroe, determined  that Hampton village needed to be captured.  After he accepted three runaway slaves as “contraband of war” two contraband camps (known as Slabtown and the Grand Contraband) were established in Hampton to accommodate the influx of refugees that followed.  Because so many escaped slaves were starving and scattered, many relief organizations from the north sent people and supplies to Fort Monroe. Butler allowed the American Missionary Association (AMA) to establish schools for the enslaved African Americans.  The Rev. Lewis Lockwood of the AMA secured the services of Mary Kelsey Peake – a free black native of Norfolk, Mary was the first person engaged to tech the contrabands to read and write.  Peake first taught under a giant live oak tree (Emanciption Oak). The AMA continued to employ free blacks, many of whom secretly instructed blacks in churches throughout Hampton Roads.   Early education efforts also included aging Union solders.  Between 1862 and 1870 more than two hundred northern teachers, black and white, instructed blacks in Virginia. Three fourths of them taught in Hampton roads. 

Hampton Roads: Remembering Our Schools. Newby-Alexander, Littlejohn, Ford, Yaco & The Norfolk Historical Society