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Changing History on the Blackside: Yesterday and Tomorrow in Music, Photography, Art, and Drama

Youth today are cutting the world to their pattern, and pushing forward a new agenda.  They are doing so in politics, witness the difference they’re making for Barack Obama.  With hip-hop as their beat of choice, they are the voice and thrust of now.   Hip-hop is real, it’s insistent.  At least that’s what its fans say.  Historian Jeffry Ogbar agrees.  His new book, Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap, argues for the emergence of a new spin on the real.  On February 13, he will talk about the contemporary slant in hip-hop lyrics and the break between yesterday and today.  For Black History Month 2008, UMASS Boston is putting the two in conversation, as we look back over some of the high points of yesterday, and consider where we stand today, the precursor of tomorrow.    

The twentieth century was a century of change broken abruptly in half during a two-decade span in the middle.  In the 1950s, segregation ended in the midst of tumult.  In the 1960s, the youth stood up and demanded that the world be remade more to their liking.  LeRoy Henderson, documentary photographer, has been capturing the street drama of change for over forty years.  On February 20, he will take us on a visual excursion, showing us how a century morphed and shifted.  Henderson’s work has been shown at the Brooklyn Museum, the Schomburg in Harlem, and Soho’s June Kelly Gallery.    

   
Barry Gaither, head of the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists in Roxbury, will acquaint us, on February 26, with some of the leading African Americans artists.  Several, for example Edward Bannister, Lois Mailou Jones, Meta Fuller, and Elizabeth Prophet were from New England, and they all used color and form to dignify and humanize black subjects, to feature them in the center of their own narrative spaces.  More recently, Allan Rohan Crite, local representative to the Harlem Renaissance, celebrated the streets and stoops of Boston from the 1930s through the 1990s.

August Wilson created a ten-play, decade by decade panorama of African Americans in the twentieth century, as they struggled to establish themselves in the cities and shake free of the taint of two plus centuries of slavery.  Wilson, who died in 2005, was an American Shakespeare, a bard and chronicler who gave voice to the man and woman on the street.  One of his most popular dramas is Fences, which won a Pulitzer in 1987.  Set in the 1950s, the play features Troy Maxson, who, in his youth, was a legendary baseball player for the Negro Leagues.  In his maturity, Maxson is too bitter to comprehend how sports has changed and opened up for his son.   The Boston director and UMASS Boston student, Akiba Abaka, who worked with Wilson, will direct a staged reading of Fences on February 27.  It is fitting that we end our series with a look at baseball since this town loves its Sox, but the home team was the last of the majors to integrate, dragging its feet to change until 1959.   

 Join us at UMASS Boston for Black History Month 2008 as we look at then and now, and contemplate what tomorrow might bright.  It was a roller coaster century, with many highs and lows.  As we rush off into tomorrow, let’s give some thought to how we have changed together and yet in some ways stayed far apart, recalling the milestones that have brought us forward.  Changing History on the Blackside: Yesterday and Tomorrow in Music, Photography, Art, and Drama is sponsored by the William Monroe Trotter Institute and the Office of Student Activities.

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