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kathleenseiber · 5 years

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African Americans forged free lives in Civil War refugee camps

Refugee camps for African Americans during the Civil War show how they built a future from the ashes of slavery, a historian explains.

More than 300 refugee camps sprang up during the war with more than 800,000 African Americans passing through them at some point. Most residents were slaves or ex-slaves fleeing the clutches of their enslavers and the Confederate army, estimates Abigail Cooper, an assistant professor of history at Brandeis University who has a joint appointment in African and African American Studies.

Others came to find family members who had been sold to different slave owners.

“By looking at this in-between moment when slavery’s end was possible but not assured, we can look to how African Americans made and lived out freedom on their own terms,” Cooper says.

“African Americans gathered to forge a monumental psychological transformation from knowing America as their enslaver to envisioning America as their home.”

Cooper wrote about the camps in her 2015 PhD dissertation and more recently in the Journal of African American History.

Mary Armstrong’s story

In 1863, newly freed from bondage and living in St. Louis, 17-year-old Mary Armstrong did the unthinkable—she journeyed to the slave-holding South.

Armstrong, one of more than 2,000 former slaves who told their stories to the New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project in the late 1930s, had been separated from her parents as a child when they were sold to other owners.

Mary Armstrong in 1937. (Credit: Library of Congress)

Armstrong learned through the grapevine that her kin might be in Texas so, as she says in her interview, “away I goin’ to find my mamma.”

With the Civil War raging, she set out with two baskets full of food and clothing and a small amount of money, traveling more than 1,000 miles by boat and then stagecoach to Texas.

In Austin, she was captured and put up for bid, securing her freedom only at the last minute by showing her papers to the Texas official in charge of the auction.

Armstrong eventually found her mother in the city of Wharton, some 150 miles south of Austin, at a refugee camp for African Americans.

Armstrong described the reunion: “Lawd me, talk ’bout cryin’ and singin’ and cryin’ some more, we sure done it.”

Armstrong later went on to become a nurse in the Houston area, saving numerous lives in the yellow fever epidemic of 1875.

What were the refugee camps like?

A camp could hold anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand people, most of them living in barracks or fabric tents.

The Union set up some of the camps, the first two in 1861 along the coast in Virginia and South Carolina, followed by others in Kentucky and Tennessee and along the Mississippi River from New Orleans to St. Louis, Missouri. Officially, they were called “contraband camps,” because freed people were considered property confiscated from the South.

Another group of camps located mainly in the South behind Confederate lines was created ad hoc by blacks themselves. (Cooper has posted an interactive map of the locations of the camps).

At a camp in Hampton, Virginia called Slabtown and later the Grand Contraband Camp, African Americans built houses so sturdy the Union later appropriated them to house troops.

There were also four black schools in the camp, one of which became the future site of Hampton University, one of the premier historically black educational institutions in the country.

Life as a refugee

Conditions in many of the camps were squalid and disease was common. Black refugees lived in constant fear and terror of raids from southern whites. At one point, the Confederate army plundered and burned Slabtown to the ground.

Whites also lived in the camps, most of them seeking shelter from the war. They were treated differently from blacks. A rations list Cooper discovered for a camp in New Bern, North Carolina, shows that 1,800 whites received 76½ barrels of flour over the course of three months in 1862-63. During the same period, the 7,500 blacks there received 19 barrels.

But despite the hardships and oppression, Cooper says that the camps offered the formerly enslaved people their first opportunity to savor freedom, reunite as families and lay the groundwork for a new society and religion.

Fugitive African Americans fording the Rappahannock River in Virginia, August 1862. (Credit: Library of Congress)

Never before had so many former slaves of so many different cultures gathered in such concentrations with the possibility of freedom near. There was an exchange of ideas, traditions, and rituals that fostered literacy and education and led to religious revivals.

Camp inhabitants compared their plight to the Israelites in the desert in the book of Exodus, freed from slavery but not yet delivered to their new country.

“More than anything, we should make careful study of the remarkable amount of resourcefulness it took for refugee slaves to gather their families into Union lines, to build information networks, to pray, eat, hoe, sing, give birth, share living space, take care of each other’s children, to imagine home while in a place outside a ‘household,'” Cooper wrote in her dissertation.

Over and over again, the residents in the camps talk about the importance of shoes. On plantations, masters kept slaves’ footwear locked up at night so they couldn’t escape. A good pair of shoes was necessary to make the difficult trek, sometimes through forests and rocky terrain, to the camps. Without shoes, you could more easily be picked out in a crowd as an escaped slave, and kidnappers lurked, attempting to sell people back into slavery.

Refugees carried money and protective charms in their shoes. They also fashioned footwear from plantain leaves. Their pungent smell was useful in throwing off the scent of the hounds patrollers and former owners used to track them down.

A common song went, “I got shoes, you got shoes, All o’ God’s chillun got shoes. When I get to heav’n I’m goin’ to put on my shoes.”

Religious freedom

Cooper says folk religion informed black visions for their new society. Emancipation as a divine reckoning was the lens through which they defined liberty. Freedom meant the right to practice their religion.

It was through refugee camps, Cooper wrote in her thesis, that black refugees “sought to transform the Egypt of the Slave South into a New Canaan.”

“Their great soul-hungering desire was freedom.”

Critical to this was the ability to read the Bible for themselves for the first time in their lives. Southern slaveholders had used selected passages to justify slavery.

African Americans in the camps now formed Bible study groups and found scripture to support their liberation. The Jubilee in the Old Testament marks the day when Hebrew slaves would be freed from bondage in Egypt. African Americans created their own Emancipation Jubilee on January 1, 1863, the day the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect.

Another jubilee was celebrated in 1865 with the passage of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery. And a grand jubilee celebrated annually well into the 20th century as “Juneteenth” commemorated June 19th, 1865, when word of southern surrender reached black camps in Texas.

Grieving was an all too common experience in the camps, but black refugees in the camps turned mourning rituals into opportunities for empowerment. “There was all this death going on around them,” Cooper says, “but they were dying in freedom, and that meant something. Many saw going back to slavery as even worse.”

One woman who had three of her children die in a camp expressed relief because she knew where her children were buried. If they had been sold away from her, she would not know whether they lived or died or how to mourn them.

In what were called “watch meetings” or “watch-night meetings” or “setting up,” adults at all-night funerals danced, clapped, prayed, and experienced ecstatic visions.

“The slaves would sing, pray, and relate experiences all night long,” former slave Mary Gladdy says. “Their great soul-hungering desire was freedom.”

Jennie Boyd’s story

Jennie Boyd’s contractions had already started when her family realized they had to move on. She had been hiding out in Springfield, Missouri, but now her owners were close to finding her. Meanwhile, the Wilson’s Creek battle on August 10, 1861, raged nearby, making it dangerous to stay any longer.

The Boyds headed west toward Arizona accompanied at times by a retreating regiment of the Confederate army. Jennie told her 4-year-old daughter Emma to stay close and not go near anything that was smoking in case it was an explosive.

Jennie was in full labor by the time the family arrived in Bethphage, some 80 miles to the southwest. It was little more than a camping ground in the wilderness, but it was here that Jennie gave birth.

The baby was born “sick and delicate,” Emma later recalled, but she survived. Jennie honored the camp by naming her newborn after it—Priscilla Bethpage.

The Boyds continued west but soon crossed paths with a band of Union soldiers who offered to take them back to Springfield where one of Jennie’s other daughters remained enslaved. The family found refuge there in the home of a white Union sympathizer.

When the war ended in 1865, the family moved to a black settlement known as “Dink-town” in central Arkansas. Emma says freed people there “dug holes in the ground, made dug-outs, brush houses, with a piece of board here and there, whenever they could find one, until finally they had a little village.”

They were staking their claims on making homes in freedom as best they could. It was here, Emma says, that “they sang and prayed and rejoiced.”

Views of freedom

Cooper’s research points to a new way of understanding the political emancipation of African Americans. Often cast in terms of African Americans winning the right to vote or running candidates for office, Cooper believes there were other, equally fundamental ways that blacks viewed freedom.

Freedom had a spiritual dimension that fueled a radical transformation of what it meant to be a black American.

“W.E.B. DuBois says it almost a century ago: ‘To most of the four million black folk emancipated by the Civil War, God was real,'” Cooper says.

“The postwar period will present new forms of oppression and exploitation, but black Americans will still celebrate emancipation and how they made it. This will feed their ongoing freedom struggle and their resilience,” she says.

Source: Brandeis University

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djgblogger-blog · 7 years

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For tech giants, a cautionary tale from 19th century railroads on the limits of competition

http://bit.ly/2I98OyG

Southern Pacific steam engine No. 1364 in 1891. Wikimedia Commons

Late 19th-century Americans loved railroads, which seemed to eradicate time and space, moving goods and people more cheaply and more conveniently than ever before. And they feared railroads because in most of the country it was impossible to do business without them.

Businesses, and the republic itself, seemed to be at the mercy of the monopoly power of railroad corporations. American farmers, businessmen and consumers thought of competition as a way to ensure fairness in the marketplace. But with no real competitors over many routes, railroads could charge different rates to different customers. This power to decide economic winners and losers threatened not only individual businesses but also the conditions that sustained the republic.

An 1882 political cartoon portrays the railroad industry as a monopolistic octopus, with its tentacles controlling many businesses. G. Frederick Keller

That may sound familiar. As a historian of that first Gilded Age, I see parallels between the power of the railroads and today’s internet giants like Verizon and Comcast. The current regulators – the Federal Communications Commission’s Republican majority – and many of its critics both embrace a solution that 19th-century Americans tried and dismissed: market competition.

Monopolies as natural and efficient

In the 1880s, the most sophisticated railroad managers and some economists argued that railroads were “natural monopolies,” the inevitable consequence of an industry that required huge investments in rights of way over land, constructing railways, and building train engines and rail cars.

Competition was expensive and wasteful. In 1886 the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway and the Missouri Pacific Railroad both built railroad tracks heading west from the Great Bend of the Arkansas River in Kansas to Greeley County on the western border, roughly 200 miles away. The tracks ran parallel to each other, about two miles apart. Charles Francis Adams, president of the Union Pacific Railroad, called this redundancy the “maddest specimen of railroad construction of which” he had ever heard. And then his own railroad built new tracks into western Kansas, too.

After ruinous bouts of competition like this, rival railroad companies would agree to cooperate, pooling the business in certain areas and setting common rates. These agreements effectively established monopolies, even if more than one company was involved.

Monopolies as unfairly subsidized

Anti-monopolists who opposed the railroads’ power argued that monopolies originated not as a result of efficient investment strategies, but rather from special privileges afforded by the government. Railroads had the ability to condemn land to build their routes. They got subsidies of land, loans, bonds and other financial aid from federal, state and local governments. Their political contributions and favors secured them supporters in legislatures, Congress and the courts.

As stronger railroads bought up weaker companies and divided up markets with the remaining competitors, the dangers of monopoly became more and more apparent. Railroad companies made decisions on innovation based on the effects on their bottom line, not societal values. For instance, the death toll was enormous: In 1893, 1,567 trainmen died and 18,877 were injured on the rails. Congress enacted the first national railroad safety legislation that year because the companies had insisted it was too expensive to put automatic braking systems and couplers on freight trains.

But a monopoly’s great economic and societal danger was its ability to decide who succeeded in business and who failed. For example, in 1883 the Northern Pacific Railway raised the rates it charged O.A. Dodge’s Idaho lumber company. The new rates left Dodge unable to compete with the rival Montana Improvement Company, reputedly owned by Northern Pacific executives and investors. Dodge knew the game was up. All he could do was ask if they wanted to buy his company.

For anti-monopolists, Dodge’s dilemma went to the heart of the issue. Monopolies were intrinsically wrong because they unfairly influenced businesses’ likelihood of success or failure. In an 1886 report on the railroad industry, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Interstate Commerce agreed, stating clearly that the “great desideratum is to secure equality.”

Turning to regulators for help

To achieve equality, anti-monopolists wanted more government regulation and enforcement. By the late 1880s, some railroad executives were starting to agree. Their efforts at cooperation had failed because railroads treated each other no better than they did their customers. As Charles Francis Adams put it, his own industry’s “method of doing business is founded upon lying, cheating, and stealing: all bad things.”

The consensus was that the railroads needed the federal government to enforce the rules, bringing greater efficiency and ultimately lower rates. But Congress ran into a problem: If an even, competitive playing field depended on regulation, the marketplace wasn’t truly open or free.

The solution was no clearer then than it is now. The technologies of railroads inherently gave large operators advantages of efficiency and profitability. Large customers also got benefits: John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil, for example, could guarantee large shipments and provide his own tank cars – so he got special rates and rebates. Newcomers and small enterprises were left out.

Some reformers suggested accepting monopolies, so long as their rates were carefully regulated. But the calculations were complex: Charges by the mile ignored the fact that most costs came not from transport but rather from loading, unloading and transferring freight. And even the best bookkeepers had a hard time unraveling railway accounts.

Managing power

The simplest solution, advanced by the Populist party and others, was the most difficult politically: nationalize the railroad routes. Turning them into a publicly owned network, like today’s interstate highway system, would give the government the responsibility to create clear, fair rules for private companies wishing to use them. But profitable railroads opposed it tooth and nail, and skeptical reformers did not want the government to buy derelict and unprofitable railroads.

The current controversy about the monopolistic power of internet service providers echoes those concerns from the first Gilded Age. As anti-monopolists did in the 19th century, advocates of an open internet argue that regulation will advance competition by creating a level playing field for all comers, big and small, resulting in more innovation and better products. (There was even a radical, if short-lived, proposal to nationalize high-speed wireless service.)

However, no proposed regulations for an open internet address the existing power of either the service providers or the “Big Five” internet giants: Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft. Like Standard Oil, they have the power to wring enormous advantages from the internet service providers, to the detriment of smaller competitors.

The most important element of the debate – both then and now – is not the particular regulations that are or are not enacted. What’s crucial is the wider concerns about the effects on society. The Gilded Age’s anti-monopolists had political and moral concerns, not economic ones. They believed, as many in the U.S. still do, that a democracy’s economy should be judged not only – nor even primarily – by its financial output. Rather, success is how well it sustains the ideals, values and engaged citizenship on which free societies depend.

When monopoly threatens something as fundamental as the free circulation of information and the equal access of citizens to technologies central to their daily life, the issues are no longer economic.

Richard White receives funding from Stanford Humanities Center, Huntington Library. They gave me money but neither is connected to this subject.

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veale2006-blog · 8 years

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American History!!

February 6, 2017 *Nannie Helen Burroughs, (May 2, 1879 – May 20, 1961) was an African-American educator, orator, religious leader, civil rights activist, feminist and businesswoman in the United States. Her speech "How the Sisters Are Hindered from Helping," at the 1900 National Baptist Convention in Virginia, instantly won her fame and recognition.

In 1909, she founded the National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington, DC. She continued to work there until her death in 1961. In 1964, it was renamed the Nannie Helen Burroughs School in her honor and began operating as a co-ed elementary school. Constructed in 1927-1928, its Trades Hall has a National Historic Landmark designation.

Early life and education Nannie H. Burroughs born on May 2, 1879, in Orange, Virginia. She is considered to be the eldest of the daughters of John and Jennie Burroughs. Around the time she was 5 years old, her youngest sister died in utero and her father, who was a farmer and Baptist preacher, died a few years later. Her mother and father belonged to a small fortune of ex-slaves which compelled them to start toward prosperity by the time the war ended and freed them.

She had a grandfather known as Lija the carpenter, during the slave era. He was capable of buying his way out to freedom.

By 1883, Burroughs and her mother relocated to D.C. and stayed with Cordelia Mercer, Nannie Burroughs' aunt and older sister of Jennie Burroughs. In D.C., there were better opportunities for employment and education. She attended M Street High School. It was here she organized the Harriet Beecher Stowe Literary Society, and studied business and domestic science. There she met her role models Anna J. Cooper and Mary Church Terrell, who were active in the suffrage movement and civil rights.

Burroughs expected to work as a teacher in the District of Columbia Public Schools. She was told she was "too dark" — they preferred lighter-complexioned black teachers. It wasn't just skin color that seemed to be the issue — her social pull had thwarted her for the appointment she was chosen for (if, in fact true, or not). Burroughs said it herself "the die was cast [to] beat and ignore both until death." This zeal opened a door to a whole new set of opportunities for low-income and social status Black women. This is what led Burroughs into a whole new path of opportunities such as establishing a training school for women and girls to fight injustice.

Career Burroughs holding Woman's National Baptist Convention banner.

From 1898 to 1909, Burroughs was employed in Louisville, Kentucky, as an editorial secretary and bookkeeper of the Foreign Mission Board of the National Baptist Convention. In her time in Louisville, the Women's Industrial Club had formed. Here they held domestic science and management courses. One of the founders of the Women's Convention was Nannie Burroughs, providing additional help to the National Baptist Convention and serving from 1900 to 1947: nearly half a century. She was president for 13 years in the Women's Convention. This convention had the largest form [attendance?] of African-Americans ever seen, and help from this convention was highly important for black religious groups thanks to the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) which formed in 1896, the largest of three and including more than 100 local women's clubs. Because of her contribution to the NACW, the National Association of Wage Earners was founded to draw the public's attention to the dilemma of Negro women. Nannie Burroughs was president, with other well-known club women such as vice president Mary McLeod Bethune and treasurer Maggie Lena Walker. These women placed more emphasis on public interest educational forums than trade-union activities. Burroughs' other memberships included Ladies' Union Band, Saint Lukes, Saturday Evening, and Daughters of the Round Table Clubs.

By 1928 Burroughs was working in the system. She was appointed to committee chairwoman by the administration of Herbert Hoover, which was associated with Negro housing, for the White House Conference of 1931 Home Building and Ownership, straight from the stock market crash of 1929 just as the Great Depression began. Burroughs spoke at the Virginia Women's Missionary Union at Richmond with the address "How White and Colored Women Can Cooperate in Building a Christian Civilization." in 1933

Training school and racial uplift During the first 40 years of the 20th century, young African-American women were being prepared by the National Training School to "uplift the race" and obtain a livelihood. With the incorporation of industrial education into training in morality, religion, and cleanliness, Nannie Helen Burroughs and her staff needed to resolve a conflict central to many African-American women: "wage laborer" was their main role of the service occupations of the ghetto, as well as their biggest role model as guardians for "the race" of the community. The dominant culture of African-Americans' immoral image had to be challenged by the National Training School, training African-American women from a young age to become efficient wage workers as well as community activists, reinforcing the ideal of respectability, as it is extremely important to "racial uplift." Racial pride, respectability, and work ethic were all key factors in training being offered by the National Training School and racial uplift ideology. These qualities were seen as extremely important for African-American women's success as fund-raisers, wage workers, and "race women." All these gathered from the school would bring African-American women into the labor of public sphere including politics, uplifting racial aid, and the domestic sphere expanded. By understanding the uplift ideology of its grassroots nature, Burroughs had used it to promote her school.

Death and legacy On May 20, 1961 she was found dead in Washington D.C. of natural causes. She had died alone; she never married because she had dedicated her life to the National Trade and Professional School. She was buried at the Nineteenth Street Baptist Church where she was a member.

Three years after her death the institution was renamed the Nannie Burroughs School and has remained that way since. Even though more than a century has passed since her death, her history and legacy continue to motivate modern African-American women. The Manuscript Division in The Library of Congress holds 110,000 items in her papers.

Nannie Burroughs, 1913. 1907, she received an honorary M.A. from Eckstein Norton University, a historically black college in Cane Spring, Bullitt County, Kentucky. (It merged with Simpson University in 1912.) In 1976, the school that Burroughs had founded in 1909 as the National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington, DC, was renamed the Nannie Helen Burroughs School in her honor. Its Trades Hall has been designated as a National Historic Landmark. Nannie Helen Burroughs Avenue NE, a street in the Deanwood neighborhood of Washington, DC, is named for her. In 1997 the National Women's History Project honored Burroughs during Women's History Month.

*Blanche Kelso Bruce (March 1, 1841 – March 17, 1898) was a U.S. politician who represented Mississippi as a Republican in the U.S. Senate from 1875 to 1881; of mixed race, he was the first elected black senator to serve a full term. Hiram R. Revels, also of Mississippi, was the first African American to serve in the U.S. Senate, but did not serve a full term.

Life and Politics Bruce's house at 909 M Street NW in Washington, D.C. was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1975

Bruce was born into slavery in 1841 in Prince Edward County, Virginia near Farmville to Polly Bruce, an enslaved African-American woman who served as a domestic slave. His father was her master, Pettis Perkinson, a white Virginia planter. Bruce was treated comparatively well by his father, who educated him together with a legitimate half-brother. When Blanche Bruce was young, he played with his half-brother. His father legally freed Blanche and arranged for an apprenticeship so he could learn a trade.

Summary of Mr. Bruce's accomplishments through 1890. Bruce taught school and attended Oberlin College in Ohio for two years. He next worked as a steamboat porter on the Mississippi River. In 1864, he moved to Hannibal, Missouri, where he established a school for black children.

In 1868, during Reconstruction, Bruce moved to Bolivar, Mississippi and bought a plantation. He became a wealthy landowner of several thousand acres in the Mississippi Delta. He was appointed to the positions of Tallahatchie County registrar of voters and tax assessor before winning an election for sheriff in Bolivar County. He later was elected to other county positions, including tax collector and supervisor of education, while he also edited a local newspaper. He became sergeant-at-arms for the Mississippi state senate in 1870.

In February 1874, Bruce was elected by the state legislature to the Senate as a Republican, becoming the second African American to serve in the upper house of Congress. On February 14, 1879, Bruce presided over the U.S.

Senate, becoming the first African American (and the only former slave) to do so. In 1880, James Z. George was elected to succeed Bruce.

At the 1880 Republican National Convention in Chicago, Bruce became the first African American to win any votes for national office at a major party's nominating convention, winning 8 votes for vice president. The presidential nominee that year was James A. Garfield, who won election.

May 28, 1880 Herald of Kansas article (page 2) promoting the Blaine - Bruce ticket.

In 1881, Bruce was appointed by President Garfield to be the Register of the Treasury, becoming the first African American to have his signature featured on U.S. paper currency.

Bruce was appointed as the District of Columbia recorder of deeds in 1890–93, which was expected to yield fees of up to $30,000 per year. He also served on the District of Columbia Board of Trustees of Public Schools from 1892-95. He was a participant in the March 5, 1897 meeting to celebrate the memory of Frederick Douglass which founded the American Negro Academy led by Alexander Crummell.He was appointed as Register of the Treasury a second time in 1897 by President William McKinley and served until his death in 1898.

Relationship with other African Americans On the Bruce plantation in Mississippi, black sharecroppers lived in "flimsy wooden shacks," working in the same oppressive conditions as on white-owned estates.

After his Senate term expired, Bruce remained in Washington, D.C., where he secured a succession of Republican patronage jobs and stumped for Republican candidates across the country. There, he also acquired a large townhouse and summer home, and presided over black high society.

One newspaper wrote that Bruce did not approve of the phrase "colored men." He often said, "I am a Negro and proud of it."

Marriage and Family On June 24, 1878, Bruce married Josephine Beal Willson (1853–February 15, 1923), a fair-skinned socialite of Cleveland, Ohio amid great publicity; the couple traveled to Europe for a four-month honeymoon.

Their only child, Roscoe Conkling Bruce was born in 1879. He was named for New York Senator Roscoe Conkling, Bruce's mentor in the Senate. In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Blanche Bruce on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.

In the fall of 1899, Josephine, accepted the position of Lady Principal at Tuskegee. While visiting Josephine at Tuskegee, during the summer break of his senior year at Harvard, Roscoe won a fan in Booker T. Washington and secured a position at Tuskegee as head of the Academic Department.

Honors and Legacy In July 1898, the Board of Trustees of Public Schools of the District of Columbia ordered that a then new public school building on Marshall Street be named the Bruce School in his honor. Marshall Street later became Kenyon Street and the Bruce School became Caesar Chavez Prep Middle School in 2009. The name is still used as the Bruce School was combined with the James Monroe school to create Bruce-Monroe, located on Capitol Hill.

*Hallie Quinn Brown (March 10, 1849 – September 16, 1949) was an African-American educator, writer and activist.

Biography Brown was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, one of six children. Her parents, Frances Jane Scroggins and Thomas Arthur Brown, were freed slaves. She attended Wilberforce University in Ohio, gaining a Bachelor of Science degree.

Her brother, Jeremiah, later became a politician in Ohio. Brown graduated from Wilberforce in 1873 and then taught in schools in Mississippi and South Carolina.

She was dean of Allen University in Columbia, South Carolina from 1885 to 1887 and principal of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama during 1892–93 under Booker T. Washington.

She became a professor at Wilberforce in 1893, and was a frequent lecturer on African American issues and the temperance movement, speaking at the international Woman's Christian Temperance Union conference in London in 1895 and representing the United States at the International Congress of Women in London in 1899.

In 1893, Brown presented a paper at the World's Congress of Representative Women in Chicago. In addition to Brown, four more African American women presented at the conference: Anna Julia Cooper, Fannie Barrier Williams, Fanny Jackson Coppin, and Sarah Jane Woodson Early.

Hallie Brown, giving a speech at Poro College in 1920.

Brown was a founder of the Colored Woman's League of Washington, D.C., which in 1894 merged into the National Association of Colored Women. She was president of the Ohio State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs from 1905 until 1912, and of the National Association of Colored Women from 1920 until 1924. She spoke at the Republican National Convention in 1924 and later directed campaign work among African American women for President Calvin Coolidge. Brown was inducted as an honorary member of Delta Sigma Theta.

Published works Bits and Odds: A Choice Selection of Recitations (1880) First Lessons in Public Speaking (1920) Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction, with introduction by Josephine Turpin Washington (1926)

Have a blessed day and week. May Yeshua the Messiah bless you, Love, Debbie

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nofomoartworld · 8 years

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Why This Couple Gave Away Their Priceless Art Collection to All 50 States | #50StatesofArt

Dorothy and Herbert Vogel in the 1994 exhibition "From Minimal to Conceptual Art: Works from the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection" at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. John Tsantes. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Gallery Archives

In 2008, The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States disseminated 2,500 prestigious and valuable works of contemporary art across the country. Each state received 50 of them. Ruth Fine, lead curator at the time for The National Gallery of Art, who spearheaded the program, tells The Creators Project, “The idea for the project grew out of my seeing old master paintings from the Kress Collection in museums throughout the country. A great deal of work in the Vogel Collection was not being seen and I knew it would be possible for the collectors to do an even larger gifts program than the Kress Collection was. That was the inspiration for Fifty Works for Fifty States." The national bequest brought widespread public recognition to the collectors: a mailman and a librarian in Brooklyn.

This bizarre New York love story finds Herb Vogel, a postal worker from Harlem, and Dorothy Vogel, a librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library, the unlikely owners of one of the most important art collections in the country. Two government workers married and living in a claustrophobic one bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side with cats and turtles and tropical fish. Oh, and a floor to ceiling art collection eventually totaling over 4,000 works and worth millions of dollars.

Untitled Drawing, colored pencil on vellum, 23 5/8 x 20 in. Stephen Antonakos courtesy of the National Gallery of Art

When they married in 1962, Herb was studying art at NYU under Max Friedländer, Robert Goldwater, and Erwin Panofsky. Eventually, Dorothy joined him in his classes. They both worked at their day jobs, painted at nights in their Union Square studio, and visited galleries on the weekends. Within a few years, however, it was obvious they found more enjoyment in the art of others than in their own, so they began to collect in earnest. One of their first acquisitions was a Sol LeWitt sculpture. It also happened to be LeWitt’s first sale. LeWitt delivered the sculpture to the Vogels' apartment with Robert Mangold, and thus began a lifelong web of friendships that would influence the Vogel Collection and shed light upon many yet emerging artists.

Violet/Black Zone Study, acrylic, charcoal, and graphite on 3 attached sheets of paper overall: 30 1/4 x 66 7/8 in., Robert Mangold courtesy of The National Gallery of Art

As the couple's friend circle widened, so, too, did their net of acquisitions. They communed with artists in the Greenwich Village art scene and never purchased art without a studio or personal visit with the artist, seeking out the artist’s input in an attempt to understand the process behind the works they were both drawn to. The Vogels only bought work they loved, whether the artist was known or not. This personalized acquisition process led to an eclectic collection, hailed mainly as minimalist and conceptual, but that also included important post-minimalist works by Richard Tuttle, John Torreano, and Judy Rifka, among others. The broad range of art was particularly significant decades later during the planning stages of Fifty Works for Fifty States. "It's extremely important for people throughout the country to have access to as much art as possible and as many kinds of art as possible,” Fine said of the dissemination process. “There were many areas throughout the country with no cutting-edge works at all, like a number of works in the Vogel Collection that could add this layer of the contemporary to many museum collections. One institution even changed its acquisition policy to accept works from the Vogels."

Untitled (Head Study). Michael Lucero. Courtesy of The National Gallery of Art

Collecting art was more than a hobby for the Vogels. It was a life. They had no children and so considered the works in their collection to be surrogates of sorts. The collection of mostly drawings was amassed over a lifetime and held all of the dedication of two state employees who worked full-time to support a shared love. In the 70s, as their collection and the reputation of artists within it grew, the Vogels began to receive attention from collectors and institutions in Europe and New York, and from artists as well. Aware of the Vogels' limited resources, artists who wanted to support their endeavor found ways to work around them. Christo and Jeanne-Claude even went so far as to give their work to the Vogels in exchange for cat-sitting. In the extensive catalogue for Fifty Works for Fifty States, Fine writes, “Any full description of the couple must convey their capacity for friendship. It is apparent from the many works of art they have received as gifts from artists to mark birthdays, anniversaries, and other special events, many of them bearing affectionate inscriptions.”

Tarascon, oil on canvas, 52 x 48 inches. Michael Goldberg courtesy of The National Gallery of Art

The Vogel Collection included both established artists and many artists at their humble beginnings. In addition to Christo, Jeanne-Claude, LeWitt, and Mangold, there are also works by Chuck Close, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Goldsworthy. Before they got serious about collecting, the Vogels purchased a small Picasso sculpture as a celebration of their engagement, then a John Chamberlain sculpture followed in honor of their marriage. Often, they asked artists for the initial plans of the works along with the finished product, considering the entire process to be the complete package. This thorough consideration of the artist and their practice turned the Vogel’s 450 square foot apartment into a warehouse. One with almost no space for them to live in, not to mention their menagerie of pets.

Robert Mangold drawing. Courtesy of The National Gallery of Art

Eventually, when there was nowhere left to store new acquisitions, the Vogels did something unexpected: they turned down the major institutions hoping to acquire their collection and, in 1992, signed it over to the National Gallery of Art. Lifelong public servants, the Vogels wanted their collection to be accessible to the public for free. They also sought to bring contemporary art to communities across the country where it was lacking, so, in collaboration with the NGA and Ruth Fine, began plans for their national gifts program, two decades prior to its release. Throughout that process Fine became familiar not only with their collection, but with the Vogels themselves. "I worked with them when the National Gallery of Art first acquired their collection and was with them through Fifty Works for Fifty States,” Fine recollects. “That personal connection was very important for me."

Meanwhile, the Vogels continued to add to their collection until it reached 4,782 works. After a lifetime of mutual love for each other and their family of artwork, Herb Vogel died in 2012. Dorothy, 13 years his junior, decided to pursue other creative avenues. “It was something we did together,” she said, “and I don’t want to water it down by continuing on without him.”

Portrait of Herb and Dorothy, acrylic on canvas 22 1/4 x 22 3/8 in. Daryl Trivieri courtesy of The National Gallery of Art

The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States can be viewed on a permanent exhibition website along with an extensive history of the Vogels themselves, whose life pursuit is memorialized in a PBS documentary as well.

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