Honoring A.P. Tureaud Sr.

Historical marker designating the
home of A.P. Tureaud Sr.

On Saturday, May 19, staff from the Amistad Research Center were honored to attend the unveiling ceremony for a historical marker designating the residence of civil rights leader Alexander Pierre "A.P." Tureaud. Born in New Orleans in 1899, Tureaud studied at Howard University's law school in Washington, DC. He returned to New Orleans after graduation and began a career that would lead him to the forefront of legal battles to challenge Jim Crow laws throughout the state of Louisiana. He served as the state's only active African American lawyer between 1937 and 1947. Tureaud challenged segregation of schools throughout Louisiana, as well as city parks and public facilities, and pay inequality for teachers and principals.

A.P. Tureaud's papers are one of the most frequently used resources at the Amistad Research Center, and he was the subject of a recent biography by A.P. Tureaud Jr. and Rachel L. Emanuel. The historical marker and public unveiling were the result of the dedicated work by the A.P. Tureaud Sr. Legacy Committee. Amistad extends its congratulations on an honor well-deserved.

Summer Maintenance at Amistad

Due to facilities maintenance on the Center's ventilation system, the Center may close for a short period during the summer or experience disruptions to its reading room services. Although a date has not been set for this project, the Center wishes to make this announcement to potential researchers wishing to visit Amistad this summer. Details are forthcoming, and the staff will work to minimize disruptions to researcher services during the project. For more information, please contact the Reference Desk at (504) 862-3222 or reference (at) amistadresearchcenter.org.

e-Amistad Reports May 2012 edition now online

The May 2012 edition of e-Amistad Reports is now online. Amistad's quarterly electronic newsletter features news about the Center, its staff and collections, as well as upcoming events.  This issue features articles on recent visits by students and alumni, new online finding aids, as well new staff and the passing of old friends. Check it out!

Celebrating Poetry, Part 3

Bob Kaufman's Golden Sardine
(City Lights Books, 1967)

"Abomunists reject everything except snowmen"

So ends the Abomunist Manifesto written by Bob Kaufman, one of the leading figures of the San Fransicsco Poetry Renaissance of the 1950s. Kaufman's poetry embraced the oral nature of the art, as well as the sounds and rhythms of jazz music, and influenced a generation of poets across the United States and in Europe. As Amistad winds up its recognition of National Poetry Month, we celebrate the life and writing of Bob Kaufman and announce the acquistion of a number of his works.

Kaufman was born Robert Garnell Kaufman in New Orleans on April 18, 1925, to Joseph Kaufman, a Pullman porter, and Lillian Vigne, a schoolteacher. Kaufman's upbringing was often shrouded in myths and stories, often perpetuated by Kaufman himself, about a voodoo mother, joining the merchant marines at age 13, and spending much of his early years at sea. In truth, Kaufman came from an established Jewish and Roman Catholic family in New Orleans, and was one of 13 children. Kaufman did join the merchant marines when he was 18-years-old, afterwhich he worked as a labor organizer in New York City and San Francisco.

After settling in San Francisco, Kaufman took up poetry and became one of the leading proponents of jazz poetry, often performing in various clubs and cafes in the North Beach area and on the streets. In 1959, Kaufman founded Beatitude magazine, along with Allen Ginsberg, John Kelly, and William Margolis, which became one of the leading mimeograph literary magazines of the era.

Kaufman struggled with drugs and alcohol during his adult life, and was once given shock treatments in Bellevue Hospital after being arrested for walking on the grass in Washington Square Park in New York City. Following the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963, Kaufman took a vow of silence that lasted until the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam almost ten years later.

Despite his troubles and withdrawal from public speaking, Kaufman authored a number of poetry books and broadsides, including the broadsides Abomunist Manifesto, Second April, and Does the Mind Whisper?, and poetry collections such as Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness, Golden Sardine, and The Ancient Rain. The Amistad Research Center has recently acquired copies Kaufman's oeuvre in its entirety, which adds his voice to its growing collection of contemporary African American literature -- a voice that can be described as..."Brief, beautiful shadows, burned on walls of night." (from Kaufman's "Bagel Shop Jazz").

Posted by Christopher Harter

Celebrating Poetry, Part 2

Umbra No. 2

Prior to joining the staff of the Amistad Research Center, I had studied and collected "little magazines" - small circulation, avant-garde literary magazines - for a number of years. One of my favorite titles was Umbra, which was published by a group of African American poets in New York City beginning in 1963. Like many "littles," Umbra was short-lived, lasting only a few issues, but it had a profound influence on African American writing and gave voice to many leading poets of the era. One of the greatest (and pleasant!) surprises I found when I came to Amistad was that the Center housed the papers and library of Umbra co-founder and editor Tom Dent.

Dent's library houses the first two issues of Umbra, and his papers provide a wonderful look into the lives and works of the group of writers that became known as the Umbra Writers' Workshop or the Society of Umbra. One of the best histories of the group is Calvin Hernton's "Umbra: A Personal Recounting." Along with Dent and Hernton, members of the workshop included David Henderson, Calvin Hicks, Rolland Snellings, Ishmael Reed, Alvin Simon, Lorenzo Thomas and others.

Dent's correspondence includes numerous letters with Umbra members, in which they discuss their lives and their writing. In addition to the letters, the collection includes essays and interviews by Dent on his Umbra days, as well as a wonderful set of photographs of early Umbra meetings by Alvin Simon. The workshop and his former cohorts are also represented in Dent's poetry, including the following:

"Ten Years After Umbra"
                              - by Tom Dent
we had seen
                our minds reach out
                touch fingertips
                musics crawl in like
                lazy smoke on Friday nights
                taste the wine &
                leave us a whiff of real road

we had seen
                our fingertips recoil
                our minds reel
                from the impact
                of our tounged knives

                                but then

we were naked then
and we stripped our souls
easy as the sun rose
and what went on
in that tenement prison
was something in us
bursting free like
a flash fire.

do you too now feel
the drag of too many jammed years?
Stanley's fades into dream
and so with our touching
our hurting...

as for me
the dirt roads of Mississippi
are a long way
from anywhere

but then the sun will rise
just as easy tomorrow
over this black earth

join me there.

Posted by Christopher Harter

(Image from the Amistad Research Center library collection. May not be reproduced without permission.)

Amistad Completes Audiovisual Assessment

As Amistad’s Audiovisual Project Archivist, I have spent the past eighteen months working on an assessment of audiovisual items at the Center under a grant funded by the National Historic Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC). The Center is pleased to report that the assessment has been completed.

Examples of Amistad's diverse
audiovisual holdings.

The results of the project have been tremendous.

Over the past year and a half, Amistad has developed a greater understanding of the rich audiovisual collection in our care. All moving image and sound recordings in the Center have been identified and inventoried, and playback equipment has been obtained for many formats. Items have been organized by format and relocated to Amistad's offsite storage facility, which is equipped for preservation storage of delicate film and magnetic formats.

The experience has been extremely rewarding to me. As Amistad’s first dedicated audiovisual staff member, I have had the chance in many instances to listen to and to view items my fellow archivists and researchers have not had access to due to lack of equipment or item descriptions. I have also had occasion to research and learn about some of the more obscure formats I had not yet encountered in my professional experience.

But the truly captivating part of this job has been coming to know the breadth of the stories and information contained in our collections. From George M. Houser’s films of his travels in Africa, to 1930s recordings of the Talladega College choir in the Lillian Vorhees Papers, to the run of "Just For The Record," a New Orleans-based gay and lesbian themed television program, new worlds have been opened up to me and to the research community through the work done on this project. I look forward to spending more time getting to know these fascinating collections.

Posted by Brenda Flora

Celebrating Poetry



First page of "Margaret Garner and Her
Child" by John L. Buckner.

 April is National Poetry Month in the United States. This recognition of the poetic arts was inaugurated by the Academy of American Poets in 1996, and in celebration of all things poetry, as well as Amistad’s literary holdings, we will be posting multiple blog entries regarding our poetry-related holdings this month.

There is no better announcement to make as part of our poetry series than the posting of the new online finding aid to the Buckner-Barker Family papers. The Buckner-Barker Family papers pertain to several generations of an African American family with multi-generational ties to Kansas. The collection consists of typescripts of poems authored by John L. Buckner, but also contains photographs; newspaper clippings; a privately published book of poems by John D. Barker, son-in-law of John L. Buckner; as well as an interview and other documents that relate the family history.

The majority of the collection consists of typescripts and hand scripts of poetry composed by John L. Buckner, who was born in Canada and married Lynette Phillips, who was born into slavery in Kentucky. Buckner was self-educated and penned many poems, including several in the epic form. The poems demonstrate his knowledge of world history, the Haitian Revolution, the racial oppression of his time, and a keen sense of his African heritage.

Show here is the first page of a poem entitled “Margaret Garner and Her Child” by Buckner. The poem relates the story of Garner, an enslaved woman in Kentucky whose story of the 1856 killing of her daughter – rather than allowing her daughter to return to slavery – became a celebrated and notorious narrative of the horrors of slavery in the United States. Garner’s story became the basis for numerous artistic interpretations including of Frances Harper’s 1859 poem “Slave Mother: A Tale of Ohio,” Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s 1867 painting “The Modern Medea,” and Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved, as well as being the focus of numerous historical analyses.

The first page reads in part:

She fled from slaverys cruel grasp,
From bondage terrible and vile
And in her arms were tightly clasped
Her only darling child.

She reached Ohio’s swolen flood,
The waters deep and dark,
Behind her bayed the fierce bloodhounds –
She heard their dismal bark.

Although undated, Buckner’s poem represents an early poetic treatment of the Garner theme. Given his marriage and wife’s upbringing in Kentucky, he likely would have been familiar with the various tales of Garner’s story. Buckner’s work provides an example of late 19th century African American poetry in the Amistad Research Center’s archival and library collections. Look for more examples in upcoming blog posts…

Posted by Christopher Harter

(Image from the Buckner-Barker Family papers. May not be used without permission.)