Negro History Museum Opens New Exhibit

Despite the staggering amount of matter written in recent years about civil rights and the American Negro, it is appalling how scant the knowledge of Negro history is among the white portion of our society. But it is just as true that the Negroes themselves are by and large woefully ignorant of their own past and of the many important figures who have dotted it ever since the birth in James-town during 1624 of William Tucker, the first Negro child born in the United States. Part of the blame for this general ignorance can be squarely laid to the deficiencies in our public school textbooks, which are only now starting to receive the careful attention they should have elicited long ago.

It was partly to ameliorate this lamentable situation that a special series of programs was instituted a few years ago at Boston University. Out of this series developed the American Museum of Negro History, officially established in 1964 and today one of several such institutions operating throughout the land.

Boston is an appropriate location for such a museum since Massachusetts generally and Boston particularly have played a crucial role as a seat of activity both for Negroes and for whites working in their behalf.

Modest Quarters

The Museum currently has modest quarters on the ground floor of the Charles Street Meeting-House, which functions mainly as a Unitarian-Universalist church. Located at 70 Charles Street, the building is a handsome brick one in the Federalist style; erected in 1807, it was designed by Asher Benjamin (1773-1845), who was responsible for the even more impressive Old West Church and several Beacon Hill houses as well, and was Boston's foremost architectural contemporary of the great Charles Bul-finch.

The Meeting-House itself figured significantly in Negro history. From the middle of the nineteenth century on, it was an active center of abolitionism; from its pulpit spoke such famous Negroes as Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman, and such eminent whites as William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips. The building was also, from 1876 to 1936, the home of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which has since moved to Warren Street in Roxbury.

The Museum, of which Dr. Nathan I. Huggins is chairman and J. Marcus Mitchell curator, has just opened a substantial new exhibition, divided between the visual arts and documentary materials. Among the former is a selection of African sculpture and objets d'art from the collection of Kenneth Patton. More important, however, are the items of American provenance. Two of these are huge polychrome portrait quilts crafted by a group of southern Negroes who migrated to California.

One quilt depicts Harriet Tubman (1820-1913), the escaped slave who became the most famous conductor on the Underground Railroad and earned the title of "the Moses of her people." It is not so well known that she was also one of the more than 400,000 Negroes who took part one way or another in the Civil War. Commanding some 300 Union troops, she in 1863 led a highly successful and much-imitated foray into Confederate territory, freeing almost 800 slaves, driving the enemy inland, and inflicting losses estimated in the millions. An official dispatch at the time stated, "She became the only woman in American military history ever to plan and conduct an armed expedition against enemy forces." The distinction still stands.

The second quilt is a portrait of Frederick Douglass (1817-1895), perhaps the greatest Negro American of the 19th century. Despite frequent floggings, he taught himself to write, escaped from slavery, and took his surname from Sir Walter Scott's Lady of the Lake. He made his first abolitionist speech here in Massachusetts at the age of 24, and eventually rose to hold several government posts. He wrote one of the greatest autobiographies ever penned by an American, the first edition of which is on exhibition; and the U.S. Post Office this spring honored his sesquicentennial by issuing a special commemorative stamp.

Three portrait painters are included in the show. Laura Wheeler Waring is represented by a picture of W.E.B. DuBois '90 (1868-1963), one of the most formidable intellectuals in American history. DuBois was the first Negro to receive a Harvard Ph.D. (in 1895), and his doctoral dissertation had the honor of being published as the first volume in the famous Harvard University Historical Series. Peggy Strong did the dignified portrait of Dr. Howard Thurman, now Dean Emeritus of Marsh Chapel at Boston University.

Betsy Graves Reyneau has four portraits on exhibit. She clearly has solid technical competence, but her work shows an excessively smooth slickness that I find somewhat distasteful. Her subjects are Mary McLeod Bethune (1876-1955), celebrated educator and social worker; Dr. Charles R. Drew (1904-1950), the developer of blood plasma; Paul Robeson in his role as Othello; and Thurgood Marshall, who has just been nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The gifted sculptress Meta Warrick Fuller (a student of Rodin) has a small plaster statue inscribed "In Memory of Mary Turner as a Silent Protest Against Mob Violence." Mary Turner, whose crime was that of vocally protesting the lynching of her innocent husband, was in turn lynched by a mob in Georgia on May 7, 1918. The standard account continues: "Mary Turner was pregnant and was hung by her feet. Gasoline was thrown on her clothing and it was set on fire. Her body was cut open and her infant fell to the ground with a little cry, to be crushed to death by the heel of one of the white men present." (The NAACP's useful monograph, Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, long out of print, has just been reprinted and is available from the New York office for a dollar.) Also on view here is Mrs. Fuller's powerful 1937 work, "The Talking Skull," which depicts a nearly naked lad kneeling on the ground before an unearthed skull.

Documentary Material

The display of documentary materials features manuscript letters of Negro and white abolitionists, including a number of Frederick Douglass items recently discovered in the South End and never before exhibited. Among the letter-writers are long-time Massachusetts senators Charles Sumner and Henry Cabot Lodge; Negro leader George T. Downing; and publisher-politician Cassius Marcellus Clay. A letter of President Grant, dated 1872, says in part: "I sympathize most cordially in any effort to secure for all our people, of whatever race, nativity or color, the exercise of those rights to which every citizen should be entitled."

The addressee of one letter was Mrs. George L. Ruffin, editor of Boston's Courant, the Negro newspaper published from 1883 to 1899. (Her husband was the first Negro to be graduated from Harvard Law School (1869), and he managed to sail through its entire curriculum in one year.) The writer of this 1891 letter, Thomas W. Higginson, appended a postscript to point out that all the work of grading and laying out the grounds around the Cambridge Public Library was done by Negroes. This is the same Higginson who was graduated from Harvard in 1841 and from 1862 to 1864 was the colonel in command of the first slave regiment mustered into the service of the United States. Among his extensive literary output was an account of his Civil War experiences and observations, Army Life in a Black Regiment, a magnificent classic that was recently reprinted in paperback; and he was the first to encourage Emily Dickinson, whose poetry he eventually edited.

Also on view are two versions of the Civil Rights Bill that Congress passed and President Grant signed into law in 1875. And there is material concerning Dr. John V. DeGrasse, an 1849 graduate of Bowdoin Medical School who set up an office at 17 Poplar Street on Beacon Hill, was in 1854 the first Negro to be admitted to the Massachusetts Medical Society, and later served as an assistant surgeon in the Union army.

One can see some newspaper accounts of the Boston Massacre of March 5, 1770, in which a Negro, Crispus Attucks, was the first to die. "On that night," John Adams wrote, "the foundation of American independence was laid." The Museum has, furthermore, gathered a sizable amount of material relating to the dedication on November 14, 1888, of an imposing monument to Attucks, which may still be seen on the Boston Common.

Book Display

Among the books on display are the autobiography of Sojourner Truth (1797-1883), the first Negro woman anti-slavery lecturer, a volume of verse by Phillis Wheatley, and a memoir of this poetess by B.B. Thatcher. Phillis Wheatley (1753?-1784) was a slave child sold on the Boston docks to a merchant. She became the first Negro woman--and second American woman--to write a book, and her poetry achieved international renown. She was also the first person to apply the phrase "First in Peace" to George Washington, who wrote to her and praised her literary gifts highly. On a visit to London, she was presented by the Lord Mayor with a fine folio edition of Milton's Paradise Lost, which is now owned by Harvard's Houghton Library.

One exhibit case is devoted to publications of the prolific and wide-ranging writer Langston Hughes (1902-1967). Only last April, Hughes gave a program of poetry and reminiscences here as a benefit for the Museum; and, sadly, this proved to be his last public appearance before his untimely death.

Curator Mitchell gives periodic tours and illustrated talks, especially to school children. And he hopes soon to expand the Museum's exhibition space in the Meeting-House. Those who desire to advance the Museum's work may become members for five dollars a year. The Museum also offers for sale a map, "Freedom Trails of Negro History in Boston," as well as postcards.

The Museum is open free to the public each week Tuesday through Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Only a couple of minutes' walk from the Charles subway station, it deserves widespread support.