Woodson Museum to unveil ‘Black Americana’ exhibit
Making its debut Jan. 2 at the Woodson African American Museum of Florida, Resilience & Revolution: An Immersion of Black Americana brings together elements from a one-sided cultural view of the African-American experience.
These include vintage art, marketing, products, photographs and more dating back as far as the mid 19th century.
The pieces are curated by the Tallahassee-based Montague Collection, one of the largest private assemblages of Black cultural ephemera in the country, and by Dr. Cody Clark, who taught for more than 35 years at Gibbs High School’s arts magnet program.
Sheet music, “Jump Jim Crow,” circa 1832.
“We’ve got advertisements, sheet music from various coon and minstrel songs, show posters going all the way back to various blackfaced performers from that time period,” explained the Woodson Museum’s Manager of Education, Outreach and Program Design Patrick Arthur Jackson. “So that we can really understand that post-Civil War, whites had created a caricature of what they assumed the Black man to be. Lazy and shiftless, with ‘coon eyes.'”
They had a pejorative name for him, too: Jim Crow.
And “Jim Crow” became the catch-all name for all the racial injustices, indignities and inequalities that followed in America.
From an educational standpoint, Jackson believes the lessons here are invaluable. “How do these stereotypes and caricatures exist today? Where do we see those on social media? Where do we see them in our current pop culture?
“I think it’s important to recognize that this is something the white community created as a form of entertainment. And on the other side of that, the Black community had to lean into it in order to succeed. There were also Black performers who had to lean into performing in blackface, because that was the only route for them to succeed at the time.”
Vaudeville’s Bert Williams was a Black man who performed – with his stage partner George Walker – in burnt-cork blackface makeup. Williams and Walker had many of their greatest successes using the format.
Gone With the Wind actress Hattie McDaniel won an Academy Award – “but she had to do it playing a stereotypical ‘Mammy’ character,” Jackson points out. “And that was how we had to enter in.”
Jackson, also an actor and theatrical director, can see a positive in the long road of stereotyping and derision. “I’m grateful for the Mammys and the Uncle Moe’s and the Sambos – those performers, specifically, who had to inhabit that, because without that I wouldn’t be the artist that I am today,” he explained.
While the Woodson Museum remains at its longtime home in Jordan Park, the next few years will also bring transformative change to the facility, and to the city, as a new, state-of-the-art building is planned as part of the upcoming redesign of the Historic Gas Plant/Tropicana Field area.
Ideally, the Montague Collection will provide material from its vast archive for the new museum.
“And since we first started talking about this exhibit,” Jackson said, “we’ve perceived five or six phone calls and emails from people in the area that have their own private collections, whether they were from family members who have since passed away, and they don’t know what to do with them … they’re saying ‘Hey, we would love to be part of this exhibit.’”
The exhibit is locked and finalized, “but if there are people who are looking to donate, we would love to have some items that are part of our permanent collection, as we move toward our new space down the road.”
Resilience & Revolution: An Immersion of Black Americana will remain on view through March 1.
Woodson African American Museum of Florida website.
