The Secret Histories Project

micropolisnyc:

In the 1800s, part of the West Village was known as “Little Africa, or less kindly as Coontown,” writes John Strausbaugh in his fascinating new book “The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues, a History of Greenwich Village.”

“Little Africa also drew free blacks and ‘mulattoes’ who’d come to New York from the West Indies. Often better educated and with more skills than the city’s freed slaves, some of them thrived, within the limits imposed on them. One [William Henry Brown] started America’s first black professional theater company in Greenwich Village in 1821….the African Grove, with an all-black company….Its first full-lengthproduction was Richard III.” 

“As other productions followed — Othello, some farces and pantomines, and most controversially Brown’s own The Drama of King Shotaway, about a slave rebellion in the Indies — whites began to join blacks in the audience. They didn’t sit in respectful silence. Black actors performing Shakespeare represented to them an amusing novelty. A newspaper from 1822 reports that ‘the audience was generally of a riotous character, and amused themselves by throwing crackers on the stage, and cracking their jokes with the actors.’ 

“The seating policy at the African Grove, amazingly, instituted reverse segregation: whites were relegated to the back rows because, as a handbill stated, they didn’t know ‘how to conduct themselves at entertainments for ladies and gentlemen of color.’”

Brown closed down the Grove in 1823, but one of the company’s star actors, Ira Aldridge (shown above, in Titus Andronicus) moved to England, “where he became renowned for his Othello, as well as his Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, and Shylock, the latter roles sometimes performed in whiteface makeup.”

More on “The Village,” by John Strausbaugh

auntada:

“I was born March 23, 1850 in Kentucky, somewhere near Louisville. I am goin’ on 88 years right now. (1937). I was brought to Missouri when I was six months old, along with my mama, who was a slave owned by a man named Shaw, who had allotted her to a man named Jimmie Graves, who came to Missouri to live with his daughter Emily Graves Crowdes. I always lived with Emily Crowdes.”

The matter of allotment was confusing to the interviewer and Aunt Sally endeavored to explain.

“Yes’m. Allotted? Yes’m. I’m goin’ to explain that, ” she replied. “You see there was slave traders in those days, jes’ like you got horse and mule an’ auto traders now. They bought and sold slaves and hired ‘em out. Yes’m, rented ‘em out. Allotted means somethin’ like hired out. But the slave never got no wages. That all went to the master. The man they was allotted to paid the master.”

“I was never sold. My mama was sold only once, but she was hired out many times. Yes’m when a slave was allotted, somebody made a down payment and gave a mortgage for the rest. A chattel mortgage… .”

“Allotments made a lot of grief for the slaves,” Aunt Sally asserted. “We left my papa in Kentucky, ‘cause he was allotted to another man. My papa never knew where my mama went, an’ my mama never knew where papa went.” Aunt Sally paused a moment, then went on bitterly. “They never wanted mama to know, ‘cause they knowed she would never marry so long she knew where he was. Our master wanted her to marry again and raise more children to be slaves. They never wanted mama to know where papa was, an’ she never did,” sighed Aunt Sally.

Sarah Frances Shaw Graves, Age 87

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938

Library of Congress, Digital ID mesnp 100126

harperperennial:

megzam:

weirdvintage:

Mystery writer Agatha Christie with her surf board “Fred” in 1922.  She was one of the earliest Britons to master stand-up surfing while visiting Hawaii. (via Retronaut)

OH MY

BAMF.

zuky:

beyondvictoriana:

The Forgotten Story of the “First Chinese American”

America’s civil rights movements have all had their Martin Luther Kings, their César Chávezes and Gloria Steinems. But to whom can Chinese Americans point? Chinese have been in the United States in sizeable numbers since the California Gold Rush. They were shamefully mistreated, denied rights for most of a century and are generally thought to have borne everything the American establishment dished out passively and without much protest. This canard does an injustice to a little-known Bucknell alumnus, however. Nineteenth-century Chinese in America had a leader and a fighter in Wong Chin Foo (1847–98), a compelling and controversial figure whose story is a forgotten chapter in the history of the struggle for equal rights for all.

(Source)

I wrote about Wong Chin Foo in 2010 with the lede, “His name is now forgotten to the US mainstream, but his recorded legacy of brash, outspoken, irreverant pro-Chinese activism, in an era of unbridled anti-Chinese racism, stands as a monument of resistance. He was a 19th-century agitator who is believed to have coined the phrase ‘Chinese American’ when he boldly emblazened those words across the banner of New York’s first Chinese newspaper which he founded in 1883.”

coolchicksfromhistory:

Plant physiologist Helen Kemp Archbold Porter, the first woman to head a department at the Imperial College of Science and Technology.

littlehistorythings:

Convict love token from Samuel Smith, 1839.

Engraved on a copper penny-sized blank coin. Engraved on the reverse:

“Samuel / Smith aged / 34, 7, Ys, 1839 / Remember me / when far away”.

Convict love tokens, typically made of smoothed down coins and engraved or stippled with a message, provide a poignant, personal insight into the transportation system, as well as its transnational character. Also known as ‘leaden hearts’, the tokens stem from traditional sailors’ farewells. Convict tokens were made for the whole of the Transportation period in New South Wales and Tasmania, with the majority produced during the 1820s and 1830s. As objects purposely made by or for convicts to give as mementoes, to be left behind when the prisoner was transported, the tokens are a unique part of the record of a convict’s transportation experience.

Source: National Museum Australia

tranqualizer:

Mabel Hampton, lesbian activist and archivist

Known fondly as Miss Mabel during her later years, Mabel Hampton (1902-1989) was truly “in the life.” A major contributor of her time and personal materials to The Lesbian Herstory Archives, she witnessed and helped document gay and black life during the 20th century, from the Harlem Renaissance to her own 25-year relationship with her partner Lillian Foster.

Hailing from Winston-Salem, NC, Hampton moved to New York in the 1920s to become a dancer and singer, and found a home in the Harlem Renaissance scene alongside queer black icon Langston Hughes and bisexual blues singer Bessie Smith. She was sent to a women’s reformatory for 13 months for prostitution in the early 1920s, but spoke openly about the kindess she received from other women there: 

“[Another prisoner] says, ‘I like you,’ ‘I like you too,’ [I reply]… we went to bed and she took me in her bed and held me in her arms and I went to sleep. She put her arms around me like Ellen used to do, you know, and I went to sleep.” 

In 1932, she met Foster (right) and the two remained a couple until Foster’s death in 1978. 

Throughout the years, Hampton squirreled away hundreds of letters, photos and other items that chronicled African-American and gay life and history, including her own. She became a prolific philanthropist, volunteer and a piece of living history, appearing in the 1980s documentaries, Silent Pioneers and Before Stonewall. In one of the many oral histories she recorded before her death in 1989, Hampton mused:

“I’m glad I became [a lesbian]. I have nothing to regret. Not a thing. All these people run around going, ‘I’m not this, I’m not that.’ [Being gay] doesn’t bother me. If I had to do it over again, I’d do the same thing. I’d be a lesbian. Oh boy, I would really be one, then! I’d really be one! Oh boy!” 

morenamagialaleontyne:

deafmuslimpunx:

An Indian woman, a Japanese woman, and a Syrian woman, all training to be doctors at Women’s Medical College of Philadelphia, 1880s. (Image courtesy Legacy Center, Drexel University College of Medicine Archives, Philadelphia, PA. Image #p0103) (x)

I’m here for this. 

coolchicksfromhistory:

Portrait of Sarah Loguen Fraser, M.D. painted by Susan Keeter, 2000.  On display in the Health Sciences Library of Upstate Medical University, Syracuse, NY.

Sarah was born to a former slave turned conductor of the Underground Railroad in 1855.  Sarah decided to become a physician after seeing a young boy pinned beneath a wagon, vowing “I will never, never see a human being in need of aid again and not be able to help.”  Her 1873 enrollment in medical school was celebrated by a local Syracuse newspaper which wrote “This is women’s rights in the right direction, and we cordially wish the estimable young lady every success in the pursuit of the profession of her choice.”

Sarah completed her medical school training in 1876 which made her the fourth black female physician in the US, the second in New York, and the first to graduate from a coeducational medical school.  She went on to intern in pediatrics and obstetrics in Philadelphia and Boston before opening her own practice in Washington, DC.  While in Washington, Sarah met pharmacist Charles Fraser.  They married and moved to the Dominican Republic where Sarah became the country’s first female physician.  By law, Sarah was only allowed to treat women and children in the Dominican Republic because of her gender.

Widowed in 1894, Sarah lived in Paris and Washington before returning to Syracuse where she mentored black midwives.  Sarah later moved back to the DC area before passing away in 1933.  After her death, flags in Santo Domingo flew at half mast in her honor for nine days.  A small park in Syracuse honors the Loguen family while the Child Care Center at Upstate Medical University is named in Sarah’s honor.

More about Sarah Loguen Fraser:

Celebrating Sarah Loguen Fraser (Hobart & William Smith Colleges)

Dr. Sarah Loguen’s Dominican Republic (Upstate Medical College)