Black Gotham Experience - Sarah’s Fire 

As part of the opening Assignment for my fall senior elective, The Black Radical Tradition, students read Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery. Cugoano was stolen from present-day Ghana, enslaved on the island of Grenada, and was able to secure his freedom when he managed to find his way to England. Students engage with this slave narrative not simply as an abolitionist text but also as a carefully crafted piece of political discourse written by a political thinker who was preoccupied with the nature of natural liberty and natural rights as “common rights.” While I was excited for my students to work with this text, I also wanted them to understand that these stories from Ghana, Grenada, or London, while they seem distant, are in many ways inextricably connected to the place they call home.The first time I heard about the Black Gotham was actually two summers ago when I was driving my car across the country from California to New York. I was listening to an interview with the founder, Kamau Ware, on a podcast called the Bowery Boys. Ware was talking about how the Black Gotham Experience walking tours bring people into a reconstructed New Netherland and British New York, and the ways in which the power of insight and empathy allow for emotional connections to these character-based stories that stay with you after the tour ends. I wanted my students to take part in the Black Gotham Experience in order to witness the impact of the African Diaspora on the making of New York City and the birth of the United States of America through real people whose stories have been forgotten or erased.We chose to do the second of five in the core stories of the Black Gotham Experience that starts in 1664 in the small town known as “Land of the Blacks” on day two of British New York. Sarah’s Fire is a tale set on the southern tip of the island Manhattan that is home to both free and enslaved Black people. This walking tour illustrates the peculiar universe of urban slavery in a port city with deep ties to the sugar plantations of the West Indies. A key persona in this story is an enslaved woman named Sarah who is one of 29 people that participate in the first militarized Black rebellion on the island of Manhattan that took place April 6, 1712.The experience consisted of an open-studio talk, a presentation about history, narrative, and the ways British New York and this story of Sarah’s Fire was connected to larger narratives about geopolitics, empire, and the rise of the modern, global economy.

Brooklyn Museum - Soul of A Nation

One of the questions my students in The Black Radical Tradition have been exploring is how Black writers and artists working in the civil rights/Black Power era thought it best to express themselves at a time when matters of race and rights were dominating the national discourse. In many ways, this is one of the central organizing themes of “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,” which opened a few months ago at the Brooklyn Museum.“Soul of a Nation” spans 1963-1983 and considers the challenges artists faced in their quest to make art that was formally and materially complex, but that also spoke to their experiences as African Americans. The exhibit features more than 150 works of art by about 60 artists spanning a wide range of mediums, from painting, sculpture, and photography to clothing and performance. Amos, Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, Frank Bowling, Sam Gilliam, David Hammons, Barkley L. Hendricks, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, Jack Whitten, and William T. Williams, are among the artists represented in the exhibition. Works are arranged based on a variety of themes, including regional groups and aesthetic styles, such as Spiral, the Chicago collective AfriCOBRA, L.A. Assemblage, and East Coast Abstraction.The groundbreaking survey opened at the Tate Modern in London in 2017 and traveled to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark., earlier this year. The debut of “Soul of a Nation” in New York is particularly significant, writes Victoria Valentine, because “it marks the first time the exhibition is being presented in a city where many of the participating artists were based, their work was produced, and significant events around institutional politics and the state of opportunity for black artists occurred.”

Alvin Ailey Dance Company

After seeing the work displayed in the “Soul of a Nation” exhibit, I wanted my students to experience a performance by the Alvin Ailey Dance Company. I was able to secure a PA Grant to pay for the tickets, for which the students and I are deeply grateful. Ailey is a great example of these Black artists who were trying to explore issues connected to the Black experience in the post-WWII era. The Ailey Company has performed for an estimated 25 million people at theaters in 48 states and 71 countries on six continents – as well as millions more through television broadcasts, film screenings, and online platforms. In 2008, a U.S. Congressional resolution designated the Company as “a vital American cultural ambassador to the world” that celebrates the uniqueness of the African-American cultural experience and the preservation and enrichment of the American modern dance heritage. The program for this performance was Becoming Ailey, Memoria, Masakela Langage, and the world-renowned Revelations.Aside from the always-brilliant Revelations, I particularly wanted my students to see Masakela Langage, a searing piece set to the music of South African activist and artist, Hugh Masekela. In this piece, Ailey draws parallels between the era of South African apartheid and the race-induced violence of 1960s Chicago, delving into universal themes that are just as relevant today.I was also excited for the performance, as I had invited former Dalton HS English teacher, Mr. Fisher, who was kind enough to take the time to catch up with his former students and House advisees, while also regaling us with tales about his “new gig” across the Park, in classic Fisher-style, of course.