February 2022 Issue
Black History
Past - Present - Future
“Fellow-citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, "may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!" To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow-citizens, is American slavery.”
From a speech delivered by Frederick Douglass on July 5th, 1852, as a keynote address at an Independence Day celebration commemorating the signing of the Declaration of Independence, held at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York.
Frederick Douglass was an African-American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, becoming famous for his oratory and incisive antislavery writings. Click HERE for an article on the speech of 1852 and Click HERE to hear the descendants of Douglass deliver excerpts from that speech
Dr. Payne’s Electroshock Apparatus
By Tania Love Abramson & Paul R. Abramson
We weren’t exactly sure where it was, except to say that it was in Joshua Tree, California. There were no signs on the highway, nor were there any markers on the side street, Yucca Mesa, which purportedly would bring us close to what we were looking for. We did, nonetheless, find the place, after a wrong turn or two. It was smack dab in the middle of a rambling desert neighborhood, filled with funky houses, barking dogs, and skinny horses. What made Noah Purifoy’s Outdoor Museum truly stand out were all of the castoff - but clearly visionary – assemblages, one of which was especially memorable to us. Made in the year 2000 – its title – White/Colored.
It was a simple assemblage, with only two pieces, each separated by about 4 feet. One was a standard 1960s drinking fountain, and the other was a toilet. So, what’s the big deal, you might think to ask? What staggered the viewer was the signage. Above the drinking foundation was the word White and above the toilet was the word Colored. With one quick stroke of genius, Purifoy found a way to say it all. The despicable legacy of U.S. racist Jim Crow policies.
We wanted to achieve something similar, but without limiting ourselves to racial animus. The history of America is stained with countless atrocities, and we didn’t want to forget any of them. But like Purifoy, we wanted to make our point in one fell swoop. We thus needed to create an assemblage that would lend itself to modification, depending on the iniquity we were targeting. American racist polices, for example, or perhaps the chronicle of police torture.
Our inspiration was then to create a 1950s electroshock therapy apparatus. Those machines came in small wooden boxes, with plenty of gauges and dials. We found a perfect facsimile, and then created the signage. Harking back again to Noah Purifoy, we wanted to say something without spelling it all out. We thus created many forms of this signage that we would place individually in the inside lid of our device, now titled Dr. Payne’s Electroshock Apparatus.
For police torture, for example, we created a label that said, The City of New York Police Department’s 1955 Interrogation Facilitator. For the contemptible history of American racism, we created signage that said, The U.S. Department of Education’s 1955 Negro Job Aptitude Test. The latter is pictured herein.
Tania Love Abramson, MFA, is a visual/conceptual artist, performer, videographer and writer/poet, as well as a Lecturer in the Honors Collegium at UCLA. She is the author of three art books, Shame and the Eternal Abyss, Concern, and Truth Lies, as well as the co-creator and co-instructor of the UCLA Art & Trauma class. More of her work can be found at tanialoveabramson.com. Paul R. Abramson is the lyricist and lead singer of the band Crying 4 Kafka. Crying 4 Kafka has been memorialized in Erika Blair’s book The Sanctity of Rhyme: The Metaphysics of Crying 4 Kafka in Prose and Verse (Asylum 4 Renegades Press, 2018). Paul is also an artist of note, and an Editor at Breathe. Otherwise, Paul is a professor of psychology at UCLA. Photo Credit: Photo-Automat, basement level, C/O Exhibitions, February 2016, Berlin.
By Halford H. Fairchild, Ph.D.
February is celebrated as “Black History Month.” It was expanded from a week to month in 1970. During this month, people are encouraged to explore the many facets of Black History. That exploration reveals the achievements of civic leaders, freedom fighters, inventors, athletes, artists, musicians and others.
Deep study of Black history reveals that every human on Earth has African ancestry. Black history is African history is Human history.
Our Black ancestors created language, community organization, art, music, dance, mathematics, cosmology, horticulture, the domestication of animals, architecture and indoor plumbing. The pyramids are lasting testimony to the heights of ancient Black civilizations.
We celebrate Black History because it has been given short shrift in public, private and higher education. An African proverb states, “If the lion wrote history, the hunter would not be a hero.”