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We Are A Part of the Story: A LGBTQ Legacy Literacy Campaign

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April Parker ACE Scholar MLIS Candidate May 2013 Lead Student Worker at the Harold Schiffman Music Library Inspiration Queer People of Color Collective of the Triad a : educated, cultured a : versed in literature c : having knowledge or competence a connected series of operations

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The second issue of I Don't Do Boxes, Out Loud!, brings together a diverse collection of stories, poems, artworks and sounds exploring LGBTQ experience. This issue invited queer youth, musicians and artists to explore the power of voice in different ways.

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"Reading OUTLoud,", is a captured opportunity to combine activism, books and identity through art. Using the medium of photography, this exhibit addresses the absence of LGBTQ lives in literacy campaigns, mainstream education, and the healing through bibliotherapy. Bibliotherapy is "the healing through books" and can lead to one's journey towards self actualization.

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Greensboro, N.C. - I'm reporting alive from the campus of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, inside the Elliott University Center's art gallery with graduate student and organizer April Parker. Parker, who is president of the Progressive Library Guild at UNCG, has brought some of Brooklyn's finest Lesbian Survival literature to the south through a traveling exhibit called Queer Covers curated by Morgan Gwenwald and Miki Trager, of the Lesbian Herstory Archives.

Queer Covers focuses on mainstream publishers and on those representatives of the classic lesbian pulps that were best known and most widely available from 1939-1965. The cover art can be seen as lesbian camp, or butch/femme icons. Although tame by today's standards of lesbian literature and erotica, these volumes were so threatening then that women hid them, burned them and threw them out. At the same time, they were cherished and passed from woman to woman in the underground community.

The exhibit is on view March 13-28 at the EUC Gallery (507 Stirling Street, Greensboro, NC) and then moves to Guilford College's West Gallery in Founders Hall (5800 West Friendly Ave., Greensboro, NC) April 1-13, 2013. During the artist talk at UNCG, I Don't Do Boxes foreign correspondent Chris Kennedy had a chance to talk with Parker about the exhibit and the histories and cultures they reclaim. Have a listen below:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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Greensboro, N.C. - I'm reporting alive from the campus of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, inside the Elliott University Center's art gallery with graduate student and organizer April Parker.

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The Black Lunch Table is an ongoing collaboration between artists Jina Valentine and Heather Hart which intends to fill holes in the documentation of contemporary art history. Our aim is the production of discursive sites, at literal and metaphorical lunch tables, wherein cultural producers of color engage in critical dialogue on topics directly affecting our communities. We endeavor to create spaces, online and off, mirroring the activity and creativity present in sites where Blackness and Art are performed.

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Black Lunch Table - performance + archive

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The Black Lunch Table is an ongoing collaboration between artists Jina Valentine and Heather Hart which intends to fill holes in the documentation of contemporary art history. Our aim is the production of discursive sites, at literal and metaphorical lunch tables, wherein cultural producers of color engage in critical dialogue on topics directly affecting our communities.

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'Black is beautiful' at Historic Magnolia House benefit concert | The NC Triad's altweekly

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The smell of freshly fried chicken hangs heavy in the humid summer air as Demeanor begins to strum the strings on his electric banjo. The plinky-plunky sounds of the instrument mingles with chirping cicadas as the sun sets beyond Plott Street in Greensboro, illuminating the Bennett College water tower.

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She sits rather than stands atop the concrete slab, the heel of her left foot planted firmly on the surface while her right leg dangles off the side. She leans back, her long skirt opening ever so slightly and she gives off an air of ease, a sense of superiority over the space like she belongs there, like she is claiming the plinth. She wears all black, mostly lace; the only other color is a crown of deep red roses that adorn her head. She looks out at the viewer, her gaze more akin to a stare, one that challenges and commands respect.

Fuck with me, I dare you: That's the vibe.

Artist and activist April Parker likes to tell people that she's not from the South, but that she's of the South.

"I'm from New Jersey, but my entire adult life has been spent in the South," she says. "My people were sharecroppers; I'm from red-clay land."

Parker's Southern roots weave a thread throughout her latest work, Unveiling Monuments, which will be shown in multiple formats starting Friday.

A series of portraits for the project includes shots of Parker standing on top of the base of the Confederate monument that was toppled in Green Hill Cemetery this past July.

As she looked back on her work from this past summer, which included street protests and funerary processions, Parker reflected on a piece by poet Caroline Randall Williams published in the New York Times in June. The work, titled, "You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body is a Confederate Monument," starts with a single, stunning line: "I have rape-colored skin."

According to Parker, two white male relatives on her grandmother's side of the family were a part of the Confederacy.

"I definitely have rape-colored skin," she says. "It speaks to how my blood is in the Confederacy, but it also honors the fact that it was toppled and how monuments have been such a conversation around the South and how to continue that conversation."

Parker has been working at the intersection of art and activism for the past decade. She helped found Greensboro's Black Lives Matter group and Queer People of Color Collective in 2014, before anyone really knew what the movement looked like.

"We had to convince people and explain to them what 'Black Lives Matter' meant," she says. "I was really rage filled."

After taking a few years to rest, the radical librarian, as she calls herself, returned to the streets this summer, bringing with her a renewed energy and focus to the work. She launched multiple projects and initiatives in conjunction with Elsewhere as its creative catalyst fellow, including this latest series.

While the project is titled Unveiling Monuments, Parker uses the term broadly, applying it to anything that holds historical or cultural significance.

She points out images of an empty brick storefront in downtown Greensboro, which used to be a Black-owned saloon. According to a 2017 article by the News & Record, the Cascade Saloon was owned by Wiley and Ida Weaver in the midst of a booming, predominantly white downtown. Warnersville, a few blocks away, however, existed as a thriving Black community with schools and Black businesses. All of it was virtually destroyed in the 1960s due to redlining and racist housing practices.

"I am defining who gets honored, who's story gets told," Parker explains. "So, when I think of monuments, it really is by definition. But what if the structure is no longer there or no longer functions? A monument can be something that is placed over a memory, like a grave."

In addition to honoring locations with significance to the Black community like the Beloved Community Center and the Historic Magnolia House, Parker made sure to center Black women and femmes in her work.

"I wanted Black women and femmes to be held and honored through the eye," Parker says. "It was about showing Black women as pillars in our community.... This is the coven."

In the series of portraits outside of the saloon, Parker honors Ingram Bell, the program director of Cure Violence, a community-led initiative that tackles gun violence as a public health problem. In different photos, Parker gathers organizers, academics and activists as they stand on the porch at Magnolia House or in the street at the Black Lives Matter mural downtown. She also took images at the A&T Four statue on the college's campus as well as the Nathanael Greene piece downtown. She points out to viewers how both were made by James Barnhill, a white man, just a few years apart in the mid 2000s.

Parker gathered her "Coven" and staged a protest in the middle of Elm Street in downtown Greensboro this summer. (photo by Irving Allen)

"It's really a critique on white creators," she says. "Whiteness doesn't have to be responsible. If you are a creator, sculptor, artist, what are you about other than this capitalism? You're not honoring Blackness.... That is the paradox of where we are as a city. We can't do emotional and intellectual gymnastics to avoid looking at the violence of white supremacy. You just have to name it what it is."

And that's something she's pushing Elsewhere, a historically white arts institution, as well as the greater Greensboro community, to do, too. It's not always about shining a light on the Black creatives and individuals, Parker says. It's about shifting the narrative and making sure to understand where the roots of oppression come from. Currently, she says she's working on relearning the names of powerful Black figures in Greensboro's past and thinking critically about how most of the city's streets are named after white people.

"All of these things that I'm unveiling are in plain sight," she says. "We don't have curiosity about these things. Where is the outrage?... It's really trying to highlight local Black history and make those connections and applying it to our present day."

In another image from the Confederate monument series, Parker holds a large key in one hand while cradling a crystal ball in the other. She says the key represents the key to Gate City while the crystal ball is a fortune for the community.

"I feel like Black folks hold the key to the real solutions," she says. "It's to say, 'Black people are in your future.'"

On Friday, Parker will be talking about her new work in a Zoom call and a reception will take place outside of Elsewhere later in the evening. Learn more here and here.

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Artist April Parker's 'Unveiling Monuments' is about reclaiming space and demanding accountability | The NC Triad's altweekly

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She sits rather than stands atop the concrete slab, the heel of her left foot planted firmly on the surface while her right leg dangles off the side. She leans back, her long skirt opening ever so slightly and she gives off an air of ease, a sense of superiority over the space like she belongs there, like she is claiming the plinth.

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Protesters in Greensboro traded marching for driving and chanting for honking on Tuesday evening in a processional for black lives. The event began in the Union Square Campus parking lot at the corner of Gate City Blvd. and Elm St. and made its way through downtown and alongside NC A&T campus all the way to Maplewood Cemetery where four of the five individuals killed during the Greensboro Massacre are buried. Triad City Beat did a livestream of the event on Facebook which can be viewed here.

Organizer of the event and co-founder of Black Lives Matter Greensboro April Parker spoke at the beginning of the event, which was titled " Mourning Drive " on Facebook.

"Honk your horns for black lives!" yelled Parker into a microphone in the back of a pickup truck.

After the hundreds of cars honked their horns, causing a cacophony of sound that resonated through the air, Parker asked for a moment of silence for those who had lost their lives to police brutality and to the coronavirus. In the event's description, Parker explained that the car protest was a way for individuals who didn't feel comfortable marching to show their support and maintain safe social distancing. She also said in an interview, that it was a way for elders and those who are differently-abled to also participate.

"This isn't about one person or behaviors," Parker said. "but institutions and systems we must resist."

As Parker and others led the processional out of the parking lot and into downtown, others on bikes helped lead the way and stop traffic at intersections to maintain safety. As the line of cars drove down Elm Street, shopkeepers and pedestrians walked to the street and raised their fists in their in support. Other cars joined in along the way, creating an even longer line.

One woman, who did not name herself, spoke to Triad City Beat in the parking lot and said that she decided to attend the processional because she wanted to fight for her children's futures.

"We're here because we are people of color, we are black folks, a black family with black children," she said. "And I don't want my children to be going through the same mess that we're going through. We shouldn't be going through the same mess that our grandparents through. It's about time that this community come together and get beyond the symbols and the platitudes and actually come together against racism and say 'Black lives matter.'"

Another woman, who is white and a part of the organization Guilford For All, said that it's white people's responsibility to show up for black lives.
"I'm out here because it's our obligation as white people to dismantle the systemic racism that we all benefit from," she said. "So many people are just learning now that through all of this awareness that it's so much worse than they knew and they need to come join us."
In planning the route, Parker stated that the stops were significant in showing how long individuals in Greensboro have been fighting for justice. As cars entered the Maplewood Cemetery, survivors Rev. Nelson Johnson and Signe Waller spoke about the 1979 Greensboro Massacre and how their friends with the Communist Worker's Party were killed by klansmen and members of the American Nazi Party.

"This story is so distorted and unknown," Johnson said at the cemetery. "You know there are moments in history where there is a convergence of energy. You can't quite explain it. But the police have been killing people for a long time and black people.... But at a certain time, something happens and all of that energy comes together. And for us, who have been relatively isolated, this is a moment of deep meaning to see so many people, and so many young people.

"We're gonna win," Johnson continued. "People of this nation are going to bend this nation in a different direction. Part of my smile is in anticipation of what is going to happen. I'm happy about what is happening.
"Every city is like a stream and the water is flowing and after a while streams don't stay by themselves, they connect with other streams and they form creeks," Johnson continued. "And the creeks form a river and the river doesn't have to beg anybody about how to get to the ocean. It has the power to carve through all of the obstacles and land in the ocean of peace and new possibility."
Parker, who has organized many protests for black lives throughout the years said that ending the processional at the grave site of those killed during the Greensboro Massacre has deep significance during the current protests.

"The route has a lot of significance for us," Parker said. "It was connecting the legacy of violence.... We're talking a lot about what's happening in the current world and Greensboro has done a good job of erasing that history.... We have been building with these folks for a very long time and we want to make sure that our elders get justice in their lifetime as well. I was just trying to make sure that we're tying those connections to what's happening now to what happened then. A lot of folks don't know that they were organizers and protesters just like us which I think is super powerful. These folks lost their lives doing exactly what we're trying to do right now."

Parker said she hopes to plan another event like this one in the future and said she's excited about the newer young black leadership that has been organizing protests throughout the city.

Joining the protest in person was Greensboro city councilwoman Sharon Hightower who stood outside of her car at the cemetery as others laid flowers on top of the tombstones of those killed.

"I think this is a great way to bring awareness to many of the issues in our community" Hightower said. "Obviously this is a result of George Floyd but I really feel like this is a movement and not a moment. So we will keep this up and keep it going and I really appreciate the spirit that this is done in to really bring emphasis to 'Black lives matter,' because we do matter and we have so much to give and have given but we shouldn't give it in death."

Watch TCB's full video footage from the processional here.

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GALLERY: Hundreds of cars drive through Greensboro in processional for black lives | The NC Triad's altweekly

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Protesters in Greensboro traded marching for driving and chanting for honking on Tuesday evening in a processional for black lives. The event began in the Union Square Campus parking lot at the corner of Gate City Blvd. and Elm St.

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Then in lifes goblet freely press
The leaves that give it bitterness,
Nor prize the colored waters less,
For in thy darkness and distress
New light and strength they give

And he who hae not learned to know
How false its sparkling bnbbles flow,
How bitter are the drops of woe
With which its brim may overflow,
He has not learned to live.

-Longfellow

It was sunset. The day had been twenty-four hours had melted it like the one of the sultriest of August. It would pearl in the golden cup of Cleopatra, and seem as if the fierce alembic of the last it lay in the West a fused mass of transparent brightness. The reflection from the edges of a hundred clouds wandered hither and thither, over rock and tree and flower, giving a strange, unearthly brilliancy to the most familiar things.

A group of children had gathered about their mother in the summer-house of a garden which faced the sunset sky. The house was one of those square, stately, wooden structures, white, with green blinds, in which of old times the better classes of New England delighted, and which remain to us as memorials of a respectable past. It stood under the arches of two gigantic elms, and was flanked on either side with gardens and grounds which seemed designed on purpose for hospitality and family freedom.

The evening light colored huge bosquets of petunias, which stood with their white or crimson faces looking westward, as if they were thinking creatures. It illumined flame-colored verbenas, and tall columns of pink and snowy phioxes, and hedges of August roses, making them radiant as the flowers of a dream.

The group in the summer-house requires more particular attention. The father and mother, whom we shall call Albert and Olivia, were of the wealthiest class of the neighbouring city, and had been induced by the facility of railroad travelling, and a sensible way of viewing things, to fix their permanent residence in the quiet little village of Q-. Albert had nothing in him different from multitudes of hearty, joyous, healthily constituted men, who subsist epon daily newspapers, and find the world a most comfortable place to live in. As to Olivia, she was in the warm noon of life, and a picture of vitality and enjoyment. A plump, firm cheek, a dark eye, a motherly fulness of form, spoke the being made to receive and enjoy the things of earth, the warm-hearted wife, the indulgent mother, the hospitable mistress of the mansion. It is true that the smile on the lip had something of earthly pride blended with womanly sweetness,the pride of one who has as yet known only prosperity and success, to whom no mischance has yet shown the frail basis on which human hopes are built. Her foot had as yet trod only the high places of life, but she walked there with a natural grace and nobleness that made every one feel that she was made for them and they for her.

Around the parents were gathered at this moment a charming group of children, who with much merriment were proceeding to undo a bundle the father had just brought from the city.

"Here, Rose," said little Amy, a blue eyed, flaxen-haired pet, who seemed to be a privileged character, "let me come dont be all night with your orderly ways; let me cut that string." A sharp flash of the scissors, a quick report of the bursting string, and the package lay opened to the little marauder. Rose drew back, smiled, and gave an indulgent look at her eager younger sister and the two little ones who immediately gathered around. She was one of those calm, thoughtful, womanly young girls, that seem born for pattern elder sisters, and for the stay and support of mothers hearts. She watched with a gentle, quiet curiosity the quick and eager fingers that soon were busy in exposing the mysteries of the parcel.

"There's a dress for Rose," said Amy, triumphantly drawing out a delicate muslin; "I can always tell whats for her."

"How?" put in the father, who stood regarding the proceeding with that air of amused superiority with which the wearers of broadcloth look down on the mysteries of muslin and bar~ge.

"How?" said Amy, why, "because they look just like her. If I were to see that lilac muslin in China, I should say it was meant for Rose. Now this is mine, I know,this bright pink; isnt it, mamma? No half shades about me!"

"No, indeed," said her mother; "that is your greatest fault, Amy."

" Oh, well, mamma, Rose has enough for both; you must rub us together, as they do light red and Prussian blue, to make a neutral tint. But oh, what a ribboa! oh, mother, what a love of a ribbon!"

"Rose! Rose! look at this ribbon! And oh, those buttons! Fred, I do believe they are for your new coat! Oh, and those studs, father, where did you get them? Whats in that box? a bracelet for Rose, I know! oh, how beautiful! perfectly exquisite! And here-oh!"

Here something happened to check the volubility of the little speaker; for as she hastily, and with the license of a petted child, pulled the articles from the parcel, she was startled to find lying among the numerous colored things a black crape veil. Sombre, dark, and illomened enough it looked there, with pink, and lilac, and blue, and glittering b~jouterie around it!

Amy dropped it with instinctive repugnance, and there was a general exclamation, "Mamma, whats this? how came it here? what did you get this for?"

"Strange!" said Olivia; "it is a mourning veil. Of course I did not order it. How it came in here nobody knows; it must have been a mistake of the clerk."

"Certainly it is a mistake," said Amy; "we have nothing to do with mourning, have we?"

"No, to be sure; what should we mourn for?" chimed in little Fred and Mary.

"What a dark, ugly thing it is!" said Amy, unfolding and throwing it over her head; "how dismal it must be to see the world through such a veil as this!"

"And yet till one has seen the world through a veil like that, one has never truly lived," said another voice, joining in the conversation.

"Ah, Father Payson, are you there?" said two or three voices at once.

Father Payson was the minister of the village, and their nearest neighbor; and not only their nearest neighbor, but their nearest friend. In the afternoon of his years, lifes day with him now stood at that hour when, though the shadows fall eastward, yet the colors are warmer, and the songs of the birds sweeter, than even in its jubilant morning.

God sometimes gives to good men a guileless and holy second childhood, in which the soul becomes childlike, not childish, and the faculties in full fruit and ripeness are mellow without sign of decay. This is that songful land of Beulah, where they who have travelled manfully the Christian way abide awhile to show the world a perfected manhood. Life, with its battles and its sorrows, lies far behind them; the soul has thrown off its armor, and sits in an evening undress of calm and holy leisure. Thrice blessed the family or neighborhood that numbers among it one of these not yet ascended saints! Gentle are they and tolerant, apt to play with little children, easy to be pleased with simple pleasures, and with a pitying wisdom guiding those who err. New England has been blessed in numbering many such among her country pastors; and a spontaneous, instinctive deference honors them with the title of Father.

Father Payson was the welcome inmate of every family in the village, the chosen friend even of the young and thoughtless. He had stories for children, jokes for the young, and wisdom for all. He talked good, as the phrase goes, not because he was the minister, but because, being good, he could not help it; yet his words, unconsciously to himself, were often parables, because life to him had become all spiritualized, and he saw sacred meanings under worldly things.

The children seized him lovingly by either hand and seated him in the arbor.

"Isnt it strange," said Amy, "to see this ugly black thing among all these bright colors? Such a strange mistake in the clerk!"

"If one were inclined to be superstitious," said Albert, he might call this an omen.

"What did you mean, sir," asked Rose, quietly seating herself at his feet, "by seeing life through this veil?"

"It was a parable, my daughter," he said, laying his hand on her head.

"I never have had any deep sorrow," said Olivia, musingly; "we have been favored ones hitherto. But why did you say one must see the world through such a medium as this?"

"Sorrow is God's school," said the old man. "Even God's own Son was not made perfect without it; though a son, yet learned he obedience by the things that he suffered. Many of the brightest virtues are like stars; there must be night or they cannot shine. Without suffering, there could be no fortitude, no patience, no compassion, no sympathy. Take all sorrow out of life, and you take away all richness and depth and tenderness. Sorrow is the furnace that melts selfish hearts together in love. Many are hard and inconsiderate, not because they lack capability of feeling, but because the vase that holds the sweet waters has never been broken."

"Is it, then, an imperfection and misfortune never to have suffered?" said Olivia.

Father Payson looked down. Rose was looking into his face. There was a bright, eager, yet subdued expression in her eyes that struck him; it had often struck him before in the village church. It was as if his words had awakened an internal angel, that looked fluttering out behind them. Rose had been from childhood one of those thoughtful, listening children with whom one seems to commune without words. We spend hours talking with them, and fancy they have said many things to us, which, on reflection, we find have been said only with their silent answering eyes. Those who talk much often reply to you less than those who silently and thoughtfully listen. And so it came to pass, that, on account of this quietly absorbent nature, Rose had grown to her parents hearts with a peculiar nearness. Eighteen summers had perfected her beauty. The miracle of the growth and perfection of a human body and soul never waxes old; parents marvel at it in every household as if a child had never grown before; and so Olivia and Albert looked on their fair Rose daily with a restful and trusting pride.

At this moment she laid her hand on Father Paysons knee, and said earuestly, Ought we to pray for sorrow, then? Oh, no, no, no! interrupted Olivia, with an instinctive shudder,such a shudder as a warm, earnest, prosperous heart always gives as the shadow of the grave falls across it, dont say yes! I do not say we should pray for it, said Father Payson; yet the Master says, Blessed are they that mourn, not Blessed are they that prosper. So heaven and earth differ in their judgments.

"Ah, me!" said Olivia, "I am afraid I have not courage to wish to be among the blessed."

"Well," said Albert, whom the gravity of the discussion somewhat disturbed, "let us not borrow trouble; time enough to think of it when it happens. Come, the dew is falling, let us go in. I want to show Father Payson some peaches that will tempt his Christian graces to envy. Come, Rose, gather up here."

Rose, in a few moments, gathered the parcel together, and quietly flitted before them into the house.

"Now,"said Albert, "you''ll see that girl will have everything quietly tucked away in just the right place; not a word said. She is a born housewife; its in her, as much as it is in a pointer to show game."

"Rose is my right hand," said Olivia; "I should be lost without her."

Whence comes it, that, just on the verge of the great crises and afflictions of life, words are often spoken, that, to after view, seem to have had a prophetic meanino? So often do we hear people saying, "Ah, the very day before I heard of this or that, we were saying so and so" ! It would seem sometimes as if the soul felt itself being drawn within the dark sphere of a coming evil, of which as yet nothing outward tells. Then the thoughts and conversation flow in an almost prophetic channel, which a coming future too well interprets.

The evening passed cheerfully with our friends, notwithstanding the grave conversation in the arbor. The mourning veil was laid away in a drawer along with many of its brilliant companions, and with it the thoughts it had suggested; and the merry laugh ringing from the half-open parlor-door showed that Father Payson was no despiser of the command to rejoice with them that do rejoice.

Rose played and sung, the children danced, and the mirth was prolonged till a late hour in the evening.

Olivia and Albert were lingering in the parlor after the departure of the family, busy in shutting windows, setting back chairs, and attending to all the last duties of orderly householders.

A sudden shriek startled them; such a shriek as, once heard, is never forgotten. With an answering cry of horror, they rushed up the stairs. The hail lamp had been extinguished, but the passage and staircase were red with a broad glare from the open door of the nursery.

A moment more showed them the drapery of the bed in which their youngest child was sleeping all in flames; then they saw a light form tearing down the blazing curtains.

"Oh, Rose! Rose! take care, for God's sake! your dress! you'll kill yourself! oh, God help us!"

There were a few momentsawful moments of strugglewhen none knew or remembered what they did; a moment more and Rose lay panting in her fathers arms, enveloped in a thick blanket which he had thrown around her burning night-dress. The fire was extinguished, the babe lay unawakened, and only the dark flecks of tinder scattered over the bed, and the trampled mass on the floor, told what had been. But Rose had breathed the hot breath of the flame, deadly to human life, and no water could quench that inward fire.

A word serves to explain all. The childs nurse had carelessly set a lamp too near the curtains, and the night breeze had wafted them into the flame. The apartment of Rose opened into the nursery, and as she stood in her nightdress before her mirror, arranging her hair, she saw the flashing of the flame, and, in the one idea of saving her little sister, forgot every other. That act of self-forgetfulness was her last earthly act; a few short hours of patient suffering were all that remained to her. Peacefully as she had lived, she died, looking tenderly on her parents out of her large blue eyes, and only intent to soothe their pain.

"Yes, I suffer," she said, "but only a short pain. We must all suffer something. My Father thinks a very little enough for me. I have had such a happy life, I might bear just a little pain at the last."

A little later her mind seemed to wander. Mnmma, mamma, she said, hurriedly, I put the things all away; the lilac muslin and the barge. Mamma, that veil, the mourning veil, is in the drawer. Oh, mamma, that veil was for you; dont refuse it; our Father sends it, and he knows best. Perhaps you will see heaven through that veil.

It is appalling to think how near to the happiest and most prosperous scene of life stands the saddest despair. All homes are haunted with awful possibilities, for whose realization no array of threatening agents is required,no lightning, or tempest, or battle; a peaceful household lamp, a gust of perfumed evening air, a false step in a moment of gayety, a draught taken by mistake, a match overlooked or mislaid, a moments oversight in handling a deadly weapon,and the whole scene of life is irretrievably changed!

It was but a day after the scene in the arbor, and all was mourning in the so lately happy, hospitable house; everybody looked through tears. There were subdued breathings, a low murmur, as of many listeners, a voice of prayer, and the wail of a funeral hymn,and then the heavy tread of bearers, as, beneath the black pall, she was carried over the threshold of her home, never to return.

And Olivia and Albert came forth behind their dead. The folds of the dark veil seemed a refuge for the mothers sorrow. But how did the flowers of home, the familiar elms, the distant smiling prospect look through its gloomy folds,emblem of the shadow which had fallen between her heart and life? When she looked at the dark moving hearse, she wondered that the sun still shone, that birds could sing, and that even her own flowers could be so bright.

Ah, mother! the world had been just as full of sorrow the day before; the air as full of farewells to the dying and mournings for the dead; but thou knewest it not! Now the outer world comes to thee through the mourning veil!

But after the funeral comes life again, hard, cold, inexorable life, knocking with business-like sound at the mourners door, obtruding its common-place pertinacity on the dull ear of sorrow. The world cannot wait for us; the world knows no leisure for tears; it moves onward, and drags along with its motion the weary and heavy-laden who would fain rest.

Olivia would have buried herself in her sorrows. There are those who refuse to be comforted. The condolence of friends seems only a mockery; and truly, nothing so shows the emptiness and poverty of human nature as its efforts at condolence.

Father Payson, however, was a visitor who would not be denied; there was something of gentle authority in his white hairs that might not be resisted. Old, and long schooled in sorrow, his heart many times broken in past years, he knew all the ways of mourning. His was no official common-place about afflictive dispensations. He came first with that tender and reverent silence with which the man acquainted with grief approaches the divine mysteries of sorrow; and from time to time he cast on the troubled waters words, dropped like seeds, not for present fruitfulness, but to germinate after the floods had subsided.

He watched beside a soul in affliction as a mother waits on the crisis of a fever whose turning is to be for life or for death; for he well knew that great sorrows never leave us as they find u~ that the broken spirit, ill set, grows callous and distorted ever after.

He had wise patience with every stage of sorrow; he knew that at first the soul is blind, and deaf, and dumb. He was not alarmed when returning vitality showed itself only in moral spasms and convulsions; for in all great griefs come hours of conflict, when the soul is tempted, and complaining, murmuring, dark, skeptical thoughts are whirled like withered leaves through all its desolate chambers.

"What have I learned by looking through this veil?" said Olivia to him, bitterly, one day when they were coming out of a house where they had been visiting a mourning family. "I was trusting in God as an indulgent Father; life seemed beautiful to me in the light or his goodness; now I see only his inflexible severity. I never knew before how much mourning and sorrow there had been even in this little village. There is scarcely a house where something dreadful has not at some time happened. How many families here have been called to mourning since we have! I have not taken up a paper in which I have not seen a record of two or three accidental deaths; some of them even more bitter and cruel than what has befallen us. I read this morning of a poor washerwoman, whose house was burned, and all her children consumed, while she was away working for her bread. I read the other day of a blind man whose only son was drowned in his very presence, while he could do nothing to help him. I was visiting yesterday that joor dress-maker whom you know. She has by toil and pains been educating a fine and dutiful son. He is smitten down with hopeless disease, while her idiot child, who can do nobody any good, is spared. Ah, this mourning veil has indeed opened my eyes; but it has taught me to add all the sorrows of the world to my own; and can I believe in God's love?"

"Daughter," said the old man, "I am not ignorant of these things. I have buried seven children; I have buried my wife; and God has laid on me in my time reproach, and controversy, and contempt. Each cross seemed, at the time, heavier than the others. Each in its day seemed to be what I least could bear; and I would have cried, Anything but this! And yet, now when I look back, I cannot see one of these sorrows that has not been made a joy to me. With every one some perversity or sin has been subdued, some chain unbound, some good purpose perfected. God has taken my loved ones, but he has given me love. lie has given me the power of submission and of consolation; and I have blessed him many times in my ministry for all I have suffered, for by it I have stayed up many that were ready to perish."

"Ah," said Olivia, "you indeed have reason to be comforted, because you can see in yourself the fruit of your sorrows; but I am not improving; I am only crushed and darkened, not amended."

"Have patience with thyself, child; weeping must endure for a night; all comes not at once. No trial for the present seemeth joyous; but afterwards it yieldeth the peaceable fruit ;have faith in this afterwards. Some one says that it is not in the tempest one walks the beach to look for the treasures of wrecked ships; but when the storm is past we find pearls and precious stones washed ashore. Are there not even now some of these in your path? Is not the love between you and your husband deeper and more intimate since this affliction? Do you not love your other children more tenderly? Did you not tell me that you had thought on the sorrows of every house in this village? Courage, my child! that is a good sign. Once, as you read the papers, you thought nothing of those who lost friends; now you notice and feel. Take the sorrows of others to your heart; they shall widen and deepen it. Ours is a religion of sorrow. The Captain of our salvation was made perfect through suffering; our Father is the God of all consolation; our Teacher is named the Comforter; and all other mysteries are swallowed up in the mystery of the Divine sorrow. In all our afflictions He is afflicted. God refuseth not to suffer; shall we?"

There is no grave so desolate that flowers will not at last spring on it. Time passed with Albert and Olivia with healing in its wings. The secret place of tears became first a temple of prayer, and afterwards of praise; and the heavy cloud was remembered by the flowers that sprung up after the rain~ The vacant chair in the household circle had grown to be a tender influence, not a harrowing one; and the virtues of the lost one seemed to sow themselves like the scattered seeds of a fallen flower, and to spring up in the hearts of the surviving ones. More tender and more blessed is often the brooding influence of the sacred dead than the words of the living.

Olivia became known in the abodes of sorrow, and a deep power seemed given her to console the suffering and distressed. A deeper power of love sprung up within her; and love, though born of sorrow, ever brings peace with it. Many were the hearts that reposed on her; many the wandering that she reclaimed, the wavering that she upheld, the desolate that she comforted. As a soul in heaven may look back on earth, and smile at its past sorrows, so, even here, it may rise to a sphere where it may look down on the storm that once threatened to overwhelm it.

It was on the afternoon of just such another summer day as we have described at the opening of our story, that Olivia was in her apartment, directing the folding and laying away of mourning garments. She took up the dark veil and looked on it kindly, as on a faithful friend. How much had she seen and learned behind the refuge of its sheltering folds! She turned her thoughts within herself. She was calm once more, and happy,happy with a wider and steadier basis than ever before. A new world seemed opened within her; and with a heart raised in thankfulness she placed the veil among her most sacred treasures.

Yes, there by the smiling image of the lost one,by the curls of her glossy hair, by the faded flowers taken from her bier, was laid in solemn thankfulness the Mourning Veil.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Harriet Beecher Stowe was an author and social activist, best known for her abolitionist novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. She was a founder of The Atlantic.

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Then in lifes goblet freely press The leaves that give it bitterness, Nor prize the colored waters less, For in thy darkness and distress New light and strength they give And he who hae not learned to know How false its sparkling bnbbles flow, How bitter are the drops of woe With which its brim may overflow, He has not learned to live.

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The signed North Carolina-based working and originating Black makers, performers, and artists are committed to building an equitable arts and cultural sector. It is our labor, dollars, sweat equity, and culture that make both burgeoning and prestigious North Carolina organizations culturally viable.

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The words "There Are Black People in the Future" was blazoned on a rooftop billboard in East Liberty last year, confusing and even offending some. Indeed, critics got the billboard art project taken down in April 2018, a move that sparked its own outcry.

The phrase, it seems, is both disarmingly straightforward and provocative. But while the original text is gone, a new artwork-in-residency program will explore exactly what those seven words might mean.

The residency was launched by Alisha B. Wormsley, the artist who coined the phrase, and Carnegie Mellon University art professor Jon Rubin, whose Last Billboard project gave the text a platform. Eleven artists or educators received micro-grants of $1,500 each to explore the concept further in ways that engaged the East End community. Thursday, all 11 will present their projects in a free event at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh - Homewood Branch.

The project is supported by the city's Office of Public Art and funded by the Heinz Endowments.

While Wormsley originated the phrase "There Are Black People in the Future" about eight years ago, in a conversation about representation of racial minorities in science fiction, the words on the billboard were widely understood as a commentary on gentrification. By design, all the artists in the program live or work in East Liberty or neighboring Garfield, where gentrification has displaced many long-time African-American residents.

The residencies range from music projects and storytelling to self-care initiatives. Thomas Agnew's "Navigating As a Black Creative in Pittsburgh," for instance, is a series of videotaped interviews with four local entrepreneurs (Wormsley among them) who described their career struggles.

Agnew, who is operations manager at Garfield-based gallery workspace BOOM Concepts, summarizes the challenges facing black creatives as "trying to get funding opportunities, trying to get job opportunities, being looked over by certain individuals. It's just way different, and how we interact with these people versus your average white person that [is] afforded better opportunities."

He said that his target audience isn't really African Americans, who are already acutely aware of these issues.

"It doesn't make sense to have that same discussion with each other, and we're not the ones that own the corporations or the businesses. Or the people that have the million dollar pockets, you know?" he said.

Instead, Agnew said, "I'm asking people to tell their white coworkers or their white peers. Because that's where the action really comes from."

"We hope that people come in, start to understand, start to actually feel and hear what we are going through and start to take action immediately."

Two days after the Oct. 24 group presentation, at 1 p.m. Sat., Oct. 26, Agnew will host a screening of the "Navigating as a Black Creative" interviews and a discussion at BOOM Concepts, at 5139 Penn Ave.

Other projects include "The Afro Future Has Arrived," a concept album by musician Ether; a vocal workshop with singer Anqwenique Kinsel; "Totems, Shrines and Sacraments," a series of art happenings by D.S. Kinsel; Amos Levy and Kay Bey's "There Are Black Teens in the Future," a science-fiction-storytelling workshop; The Black Dream Escape, "an immersive, sensory napping experience that caters to the rest needs of black people" by therapist Onkia Reigns and artist Windafire; and "Art+Engineering: Towards the Humanistic Technologist," Woodrow Winchester III's initiative to develop a speculative-art exhibition "that explores the future of East Liberty's Black community through the lens of the area's growing tech industry presence."
A complete list is available here.
Thursday's event includes a preview of a documentary video about the artwork-in-residence project, and a discussion hosted by Wormsley and Rubin.

Attendance is free but attendees are asked to register here.

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'There Are Black People In The Future' Resident Artists Present Their Projects

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The words "There Are Black People in the Future" was blazoned on a rooftop billboard in East Liberty last year, confusing and even offending some. Indeed, critics got the billboard art project taken down in April 2018, a move that sparked its own outcry. The phrase, it seems, is both disarmingly straightforward and provocative.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The signed North Carolina-based working and originating Black makers, performers, and artists are committed to building an equitable arts and cultural sector. It is our labor, dollars, sweat equity, and culture that make both burgeoning and prestigious North Carolina organizations culturally viable.

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How does an account of Black women's sculpture and Black women's labor in the last two centuries offer a different understanding of the monumental that we have yet to adequately address in the ongoing public monuments debates?

In the history of western aesthetics, making monuments and being depicted in monuments are normally the purview of men. Rarely do women get to make or be in monuments, even more rarely Black women.

During the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Edmonia Lewis, the first Black female sculptor to achieve international fame, crafted The Death of Cleopatra, a stunning 3,015 pound Neoclassical marble statue depicting Queen Cleopatra in the throes of death.

Edmonia Lewis, The Death of Cleopatra, carved 1876, marble, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Historical Society of Forest Park, Illinois, 1994.17.

Lewis' Cleopatra was represented as a woman with physiognomic features associated with white women, a fact that drew much acclaim for accuracy from white critics and disappointment from some Black visitors. The art historian Charmaine Nelson reads Lewis' decision to race Cleopatra as white rather than Black as a strategic one. Given the association of Cleopatra with Blackness in the 19 th century, it would not matter that Cleopatra was raced white, a viewer would still be able to make connections between Lewis' Cleopatra and discourses of Black abolition. Cleopatra's whiteness worked as a refusal to "facilitate the racial objectification of the artist's body" and to insist, instead, on Lewis' mastery of form (178). Since Lewis' Cleopatra was Neoclassical and white, art critics could not accuse Lewis of inserting herself as a subject, nor could they criticize her skills as a sculptor. The tradition she mastered required adhering to implicit whiteness for Black genius to, quite literally, matter. 1

The Death of Cleopatra was held in storage for nearly a decade until purchased by a gambler to mark the grave of his deceased racehorse named "Cleopatra" in Chicago. After a century, the U.S. Postal service purchased Lewis' sculpture in the early 1990s, eventually donating it to the Smithsonian in 1996. After 1875 Lewis' whereabouts and activities are unclear. Many of her later works are considered lost. Even the location of her final resting place is unknown, though official reports list her as living in Rome in 1911.

In 1926 W.E.B. DuBois wrote in the "Criteria of Negro Art" that "[t]here is in New York tonight a Black woman molding clay by herself in a little bare room, because there is not a single school of sculpture in New York where she is welcome...This girl is working her hands off to get out of this country so that she can get some sort of training." DuBois might have been thinking of Augusta Savage, the gifted Harlem Renaissance sculptor whose scholarship to the Fountainebleu School of Arts in Paris was rescinded in 1930 when the committee discovered she was Black. Savage would eventually go to Paris anyway, returning to the U.S. and converting her Harlem studio into a school that gave free arts lessons to her community.

For the 1939 World's Fair, Savage was the only African American woman to receive a commission from the Board of Design. Her 16-foot tall sculpture Lift Every Voice and Sing, also known as The Harp, was the most popular and photographed piece at the fair. It exists now only through photographs and souvenir replicas. Because Savage could not afford the bronze to permanently cast it, her plaster sculpture was destroyed at the end of the fair.

Augusta Savage, The Harp, 1935-1945, New York Public Library Digital Collections.

Augusta Savage, The Harp, New York World's Fair 1939-1940, New York Public Library Digital Collections.

is primarily composed of an extended arm holding twelve singing figures. At the base of the statue, a figure kneels with outstretched hands and half-closed eyes. The kneeling figure's outstretched hands mimic the hands that hold the figures, as if generously offering and inviting those who pass by to see this world yet to come. The singing figures throw their voices and gazes in all directions as if simultaneously seeing towards, hailing, and singing forth a world more deserving of their dignity and grace.

Simone Leigh's , a 2019 commission for the new New York High Line, is a 16-ft sculpture of a Black woman with braided cornrows. Where one would expect eyes are soft indentations instead. The organs of vision rescind themselves from our view as if to indict a cultural blindness. The overdue arrival of Black women in the aesthetics of monumental form that coincides with the removal of racist monuments presents a seeming calculus of racial equality. But as Karyn Olivier's Brick House recent essay makes clear, removing a racist piece of public artwork does not absolve a racist history and might, in fact, further efface a history of Black woman's work. There is more to consider than taking down racist monuments.

Simone Leigh, Brick House, 2019, bronze, High Line, New York City. Source: Wikipedia.

Leigh's other sculptural works, like (2019), Las Meninas II (2019), and (2019) often merge the figure of the human body with the shape of jugs and huts. A poetics of the vessel, withdrawal, and shelter animate Leigh's sculptures, forming what Harriet Jacobs, in her 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl , described as a "loophole of retreat," the title of the 2019 Guggenheim show honoring Leigh's career. Rutted up in a small crawl space for seven years to escape her enslaver's persecution, Jacobs was able to experience retreat and freedom even in the most constrained physical circumstance. The enlargement of Jacob's small space into a public monument begins the overdue project of laying claim to what is owed: the restitution and recognition of their space, bodies, labor, freedoms, and monumental lives.

Simone Leigh, Jug, 2019, bronze. Credits: David Heald/The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Source: Artsy.

Simone Leigh, Las Meninas II, 2019, terracotta, steel, raffia, and porcelain. Source: Artsy.

Simone Leigh, Sentinel, 2019, bronze and raffia. Credits: David Heald/The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Source: Artsy.

Since the earliest days of this country's founding, Black women have taken on monumental labors while suffering monumental dispossession. The force of what Black feminist theorist Hortense Spillers calls, after Angela Davis, "ungendering" alienates Black women from the symbolic and material cultural logics that protect women while naturalizing their exploitation. We see this at play in the early demand for Black women to work the fields, bear children, do domestic work, and act as wet nurses and nannies for white children during legalized slavery, expectations and extractions of labor placed on no other body. In 2020, the fact that Black women who experience gender and racial discrimination are expected to do "diversity" work in professional and personal life, while still only making, on average, 62 cents to every dollar made by a white, non-Hispanic man , suggests an afterlife of racialized ungendering is still operative today. Yet both Spillers and Davis note that this distorted state of affairs has also generated radical change.

For Davis, the "deformed quality of equal oppression," during slavery led to a "profound consciousness of resistance" 2 From Harriet Tubman to Ida B. Wells, from Marsha P. Johnson to Toni Morrison, from Assata Shakur to Patrisse Cullors, Black women have been at the forefront of radical change in arts and politics even as they have faced some of the most extreme forms of oppression.

As we continue to pull down physical statues, what else must come down to bring us closer to the dreams that animate the eloquent existence recent (and not-so-recent) statues of and by Black women make evident? As we attend to what should come up in physical form, what values need to be established (and abolished) to rectify a history of monumental neglect and honor a history of monumental existence? The beauty of these Black women's monuments and monumental labors, seen and unseen shame as much as they inspire.

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Of Monuments and Black Women's Monumental Labors - Monument Lab

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"As we continue to pull down physical statues, [...] what values need to be established and abolished to rectify a history of monumental neglect and honor a history of monumental existence?" Dixon Li offers an account of Black women's sculpture and Black women's labor-from Edmonia Lewis to Simone Leigh-to offer a different understanding of 'the monumental' in our ongoing public debate around monuments.