Pragmatic Obots Unite

Shooting down firebaggers & teabaggers one truth at a time...

Monday Open Thread: African-American Archaelogists

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Good Morning Obots!

This week we are featuring our very own versions of Indiana Jones! LOL, well not exactly, but these individuals are pioneers in the field of Archaeology. Today:

John Wesley Gilbert

John Wesley Gilbert (July 6, 1864 – November 19, 1923) was the first African American archaeologist, the first graduate of Paine College, the first African American professor of that school, and the first African American to receive a master’s degree from Brown University.

Born to slaves in Hephzibah, Georgia on July 6, 1864, Gilbert split time between grammar school and doing manual labor. After finishing public school, he enrolled in the Atlanta Baptist Seminary. In 1884, he enrolled in the newly-opened Paine Institute (later known as Paine College). In 1886, he was given financial assistance in order to transfer into the junior class of Brown University.
While at Brown, he received a scholarship to attend the American School of Classics in Athens, Greece.
He was the first African American to attend that school, and remained the only one to have through 1901. During his time, he was bestowed an award for “excellence” in Greek. He was there from 1890-1891 and conducted archaeological excavations on Eretria with Professor John Pickard. After his work there, he produced the first map of Ancient Eretria.

He received his bachelor’s degree from Brown in 1888. In 1891, he became the first African American to receive a master’s degree from Brown after the completion of this thesis, “The Demes of Attica.”

In 1891, he returned to Augusta, Georgia and began to teach the Greek language and English at his former school, Paine College. In 1913, he was appointed the president of Miles College. He served in that post for one year before returning to Paine College.

In 1889, he married Osceola K. Pleasant, a graduate of Fisk University and Paine College. Together, they had four children. He died on November 19, 1923.

Monday Open Thread: African-American Shoe Designers

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Good Morning Obots!

Alright, this week is for the fashionistas and fashionisters! We’ll take a look at shoe designers, not celebs with their names on a line shoes – but genuine, creative, wonderful designers!

Today, Etu Evans

Born in Orangeburg, South Carolina, even at the tender age of 6, Etu Evans exhibited entrepreneurial qualities. It was then that he started his first business in flower arrangement. Evans would later go on to study social work at South Carolina State University and work as a behavioral therapist internationally. He later gave in to his passion for fashion following an impromptu run in with a publicist from the Gucci fashion house, and the rest is history.

Since his foray into the world of accessories and shoe design, Evan’s custom pieces have graced the bodies and feet of celebs like Halle Berry, Queen Latifah, Danny Glover and Beyonce. Evan’s creations and business savvy have been recognized by both Ebony magazine and Black Enterprise. He won Crain’s Small Business of the Year Award.

Evans graduated from the prestigious Parsons School of Design with a degree in shoe design. But his extensive academic achievements don’t end there. He has a BA in Social Work from South Carolina State University, a Masters of Science in applied behavioral science from Columbia University, and is also a graduate of the Fashion Institute of Technology, specializing in footwear and accessories design. A magnificent list of accomplishments for a young man who during his early years was labeled as learning disabled.

 

Monday Open Thread: African-American Photographers

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Good Morning Obots! Hope you have a great week!

This week we are featuring the works of renowned African-American Photographers.
Today’s honoree: James Van Der Zee

In 1923 a young African-American couple dressed in their Sunday best stepped into a small photography studio on Harlem’s 135th Street. Inside, an eager black man with wide-set eyes took a long look at them. He smiled and seemed to watch how they smiled back. As he guided them toward the back room, he asked them where they were from, where they lived, how long they’d been married. He sat them before a fireplace painted on the wall, then went to a closet, pulled out a fur, and draped it on the woman’s shoulders. He glanced at the man’s arm and tucked in a fraying edge of sleeve. He circled them slowly, adjusted the lights, then went to his camera. What he saw when he looked through the lens was the Harlem he loved.


HARLEM’S FINEST FACE
During the glory days of the 1920s, hundreds of Harlem’s finest made the trip to James Van Der Zee’s studio for similar treatment. There, Van Der Zee took picture after picture, making sure that each one presented Harlem in the best light. In the process, he crafted a dazzling record of middle-class black life, a side of America rarely seen at the time.

Van Der Zee himself grew up in a world as privileged as the one his subjects inhabited. His parents, former servants of President Ulysses S. Grant, settled in Lenox, Massachusetts, a summer haven for New England’s wealthy that was home to only half a dozen black families. There Van Der Zee was raised on a steady diet of music and art. In 1906, at the age of 20, he moved to Harlem and started the five-piece Harlem Orchestra. The group had some success, but to eat, he returned to another childhood talent — photography. In fifth grade, Van Der Zee had become the second person in Lenox to own a camera. He had taken hundreds of pictures of his family and others and developed them all himself. So in 1914, he signed on as a darkroom technician in a department store. At times he would fill in behind the camera, and within three years, he had the courage and the reputation to open his own studio. He called it “Guarantee Photo.”

First and foremost, Van Der Zee’s operation was a business, and he shot the people who could pay his price. In addition to studio portraits, he photographed clubs and church groups, sports teams and family gatherings, barber shops and pool halls. He shot funerals and weddings, soldiers and celebrities. Heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr., entertainers Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and Sunshine Sammy, singers Florence Mills and Mamie Smith — all were subjects for Van Der Zee’s lens. And when Marcus Garvey was looking for someone to chronicle the life of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, he chose James Van Der Zee.

Whether they were famous or unknown, Van Der Zee treated his subjects with equal respect. He used elaborate backdrops or filled his studio with scenery as though it were a stage. “I tried to pose each person in such a way as to tell a story,” he explained. He would often set his subjects in dramatic situations: parents listening to their kids play piano, a child speaking on the telephone, a gypsy telling an old man’s fortune.

FILLING IN THE BALD SPOTS
Van Der Zee expressed his own great pride in the Harlem community by carefully “beautifying” the photographs he took. He would retouch negatives to straighten teeth, add jewelry, or fill in a bald spot. “I tried to see that every picture was better-looking than the person,” he said. “I had one women come to me and say, ‘Mr. Van Der Zee, my friends tell that’s a nice picture, but it doesn’t look like you.’ That was my style.”
The photo montage — multiple images in one picture — was another technique Van Der Zee developed. After the death of the Reverend Powell’s daughter, he superimposed a portrait of her above the funeral scene, giving the eerie effect of her presence. In a wedding portrait, he inserted a ghostly image of a child to suggest the couple’s future. Said Van Der Zee, “I wanted to make the camera take what I thought should be there.”

In 1932, as their business struggled through the Depression, Van Der Zee and his wife and partner, Gaynella, moved to a less-expensive studio. When personal cameras became more available, people had much less need for a professional photographer. Van Der Zee was forced to shoot passport pictures and do other odd photographic jobs to make ends meet.
Then in 1968, Van Der Zee was “discovered” at the age of 82, when a photo researcher named Reginald McGhee stumbled on his collection of 75,000 photos covering six decades of African-American life. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art featured his work in an exhibit called “Harlem On My Mind,” and almost overnight, Van Der Zee received national recognition. In the early 1980s, 60 years after the Harlem Renaissance, celebrities — this time with names like Bill Cosby, Muhammad Ali, and Lou Rawls — flocked to sit for Van Der Zee portraits.

Van Der Zee died in 1983 at the age of 96, leaving behind a legacy of images so compelling that it’s hard to see Harlem through any other eyes. “In these photographs,” writes McGhee, “you will not see the common images of black Americans — downtrodden rural or urban citizens. Instead, you will see a people of great pride and fascinating beauty”.

Scholastic: James Van Der Zee