This February, as we celebrate Black History Month, we at the Tom and Ethel Bradley Center take this opportunity to feature some of the work that highlights important segments of the Black experience in Los Angeles and across the Americas.
Teaching Black History
By Guillermo Márquez
Our work here at the Tom and Ethel Bradley Center is multi-faceted and multi-disciplinary. In the course of our daily work processing photographic collections, writing, and researching, we also strive to develop educational materials that are inclusive and discuss the points of view of historically marginalized communities that are too often omitted from traditional hegemonic discourses.
The Bradley Center is home to the Black Power Archives Oral History Project, which documents the experiences of Black Power activists in Los Angeles such as Ngoma Ali, Tamu McFalls, and Kumasi, with interviews conducted by Dr. Karin Stanford, professor of Africana Studies at CSUN, and the Bradley Center’s very own Archivist and Historian Keith Rice.
The Bradley Center is also a founding partner of CSUN’s Afro-Latinx Project, which brings together a multi-disciplinary group of students, faculty, and staff to create digital and physical resources that make visible the histories and achievements of Afro-Latinxs in the United States and abroad while making CSUN more inclusive.
Furthermore, the Bradley Center hosts a teaching curriculum designed for K-12 and university classrooms. As the home of the Richard Cross Collection, we, in conjunction with the Departments of Art and Education, developed Conflict and Culture in Central and Latin America, which includes teaching materials based on issues related to colonial and 20th century Latin America, focusing on history and on visual anthropology, using photographs of the environment and experiences of San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia, a community created and maintained by the descendants of Africans and Afro-Latinxs who escaped enslavement for the safety of eastern Colombia’s María Mountains. Additionally, the Bradley Center also created a curriculum designed to highlight local efforts aimed at achieving fair housing and civil rights, and school desegregations as seen from the eyes of the Black community in Los Angeles, such as Race, Housing, and the Fight for Civil rights in Los Angeles, and The Struggle to Desegregate Los Angeles Schools, 1940-1970. Take a peek!
Exploring the Black American Transnational Connection
Join us as we explore the hidden history of the Black Americans in Mexico during slavery. Presented by historian and public scholar Dr. María Esther Hammack, this virtual lecture will take us through a journey on the Underground Railroad to the U.S.-Mexico border as we explore how Black liberation connected and shaped the histories of Mexico, the United States, and Canada, and examine Afromexican communities today. The lecture will be virtual (Zoom). Register here!
Deported Veterans Photo Exhibition
This exhibition of photographs by our own Joseph Silva opens on February 24 at the Museum of Social Justice. Silva, a veteran himself, seeks to create in this exhibition a visual space in which some of these deported veterans not only recover their denied citizenship but also expose the damage inflicted on them by unjust government policies. From Mexico to the Dominican Republic to England to Costa Rica, veterans proudly display the objects that confirm their American citizenship, from their uniform and flag to baseball and apple pie. They want to remind us that their struggle to gain citizen status is a struggle for social justice. You can watch our interview with Silva here.
Mourning Mrs. Gwen Green
by Keith Rice
On July 6, 2013, the LA Times ran an article on the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center (formerly the Institute for Arts and Media) receiving an NEH grant to digitize 20,000 images of three African American photographers, Harry Adams, Charles Williams, and Guy Crowder. A few days later Dr. Kent Kirkton received a phone call from Vicki Phillips on behalf of her friend Mrs. Gwen Green. Vicki told Kent that Mrs. Green had worked with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) and served as the executive director of its west coast affiliate the WCLC (Western Christian Leadership Conference). Vicki informed Kent that Mrs. Green had her call because she wanted to offer her help on the grant. We were well aware of the SCLC and the WCLC but were not aware of Mrs. Green.
Kent and I were intrigued by the idea of meeting Gwen, which she prefers for us to call her. When we met Gwen we quickly found out she was the real deal in the Civil Rights Movement. Gwen’s accomplishments such as being the assistant director of SCLC’s SCOPE (Summer Community Organization and Political Education) project, which took 3500 mostly white students to the South, to register Black voters could easily be overlooked because for Gwen she was just doing what she was supposed to do for her people. If you met Gwen out in the world she would probably never mention her accomplishments and sacrifices, which I could go on and on about.
Gwen was 88 years old when we met her. For me, she was the older cool kid in high school that let you hang out with them, in hopes that the “cool” would rub off on you. Since that first meeting, it has been an honor to know Gwen and call her my friend and a friend and supporter of the Bradley Center. Gwen was always straight with me. She would let me know when I was being naïve about the movement by saying in a motherly fashion, “baby, you’re being naïve, they were all just people like everyone else.” Still, I don’t think I became any less naïve. I was still in awe of her and everyone else who had made sacrifices for us all. How could I not be? I was lucky enough to drive her to some events and be in her presence while she might be having small talk with Andrew Young or when she would tell me about meeting Malcolm X.
If I was not a historian and Gwen had not helped change history I would like to have hoped that our paths would have crossed and our friendship developed anyway. Even though Gwen would tell me they were just people, she did admit that there was something special about Dr. King, that when he entered a room you could feel an indescribable presence. For me, I felt the same way about Gwen. They were a special people for a special time in history. Although we can no longer witness Gwen’s physical presence fill up a room, her spirit will always be with us, and her contributions to making our time here on earth a little better will never be forgotten.
You can take a look at these two video clips, here and here, where Gwen Green talks to Dr. Kent Kirkton and Keith Rice from the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center about the work she did for the Civil Rights movement. And you can check here to look at Gwen Green’s pictures in our archives.
Farmworker Movement Collection Spotlight
by Marta Valier
As the digitizing process of Emmon Clarke and John Kouns’s photographs from the Farmworker Movement Collection keeps advancing thanks to an NEH grant, we will regularly highlight some of the 22,000 images that are part of this collection, and the stories they tell. We are now in the process of creating the descriptions of Clarke’s images and we have received amazing support from those who were part of the movement. This month, we share a few photos of Teatro Campesino. We showed them to Luis Valdez, founder of this theatrical group in 1965 in Delano. He graciously agreed to help us identify who is in them and we are sharing some of his recollections with our readers.
“The photo you attached was taken in early Fall, 1966, after the DiGiorgio campaign in Delano, Lamont and Borrego Springs. We are standing in front of the Teatro's first store front headquarters on the corner of Eighth and Ellington in Delano's westside; which Cesar agreed to let us have after we proved our worth as artist activists in the struggle. The union rented it from my aunt Juanita Castillo, and was located a couple of blocks south of the site of the old labor camp where I was born in 1940 (now part of Highway 99). When El Teatro went on our coast to coast National Grape Boycott tour in summer ' 67, the old Azteca tortilla factory became the UFW's first ever historic hiring hall for farm workers. In the photo left to right (standing) are Beto Reyes, Robert Roman, Luis Valdez, Roy Valdez (no relation), Bob Fischer, and Felipe Cantú. Down below, with their respective guitars are (left to right) Eduardo "El Pirata" Del Rio, and Agustín Lira. This group was essentially the founding company of El Teatro Campesino in Delano. Missing for some curious reason is my brother, Daniel Valdez.
Founded by Valdez and Lira in 1965 in Delano, this theater group started doing some skits in the picket lines, on flatbed trucks, and at the regular Friday night farmworkers’ meetings at Filipino Hall. The Teatro Campesino quickly became a company that played not only to farmworker audiences but also to universities and city audiences, nationwide and in Europe. The very popular sketches were mostly satiric portraits of the farmworkers' enemies. The main characters of the sketches were: Patroncito (the Little Boss), Huelguista (the Striker), Coyote (the labor contractor), and Esquirol (the strikebreaker).