"A Ride to NEW Futures with Rosa Parks: Producing Scholarship and Community Art" by Riché Richardson
1. A Ride to New Futures with Rosa
Parks: Producing Public Scholarship
and Community Art
By Riché Richardson
2. In dealing with what the human means to scholars as someone
who works in an interdisciplinary department of Africana
studies in the humanities in fields such as African American
literature, gender studies, Southern studies, and black
feminism
I think and talk a lot about the long history of
black dehumanization within the system of
Western slavery.
I frequently discuss the long history of freedom
struggles within the black liberation movement
that have been developed to confront subjection
within slavery and Jim Crow, along with the
lingering manifestations of these systems that
have persisted.
3. Riché Richardson, Age 8, School Day Picture at St. John
the Baptist Catholic School, Montgomery, AL, 1979
Because I was born and raised in Montgomery,
Alabama in the post-civil rights era, the Civil Rights
Movement, including the activism of Rosa Parks, is an
aspect of this long history of black liberation struggle
that has most viscerally impacted my life and work.
4. Riché Richardson, Age 17,
Graduation photo at St.
Jude, 1989
At ages 16 and 17 as student
council vice-president and then
president at the historic St. Jude
Educational Institute, I
developed a leadership program
at the Cleveland Avenue YMCA
under the supervision of its
director Robert James with the
goal of making a difference in the
community. For two years, I
volunteered every Friday
afternoon coordinating this
program for children and
preteens in the surrounding
community, the same
community in which Rosa Parks
had once lived at the time that
she refused to give up her seat
when the bus driver James Blake
ordered her to do so on the
Montgomery bus that fateful
evening of December 1, 1955.
5. At this point in life nearly thirty years later and in the work that I do as a university
professor at Cornell University, I continue to find deep inspiration in the legacy of
Rosa Parks as both a scholar and artist. In my research, I have written several essays
on her and she is also the topic of a chapter in my second book, which examines the
impact of black women leaders on national femininity in the public sphere of
politics. It analyzes how the public voices that they have claimed, alongside their
cultural representations, unsettle stereotypes of black womanhood as they challenge
conventional white-centered narratives of U.S. selfhood.
6. Georgette Norman and I first met after I graduated from
Spelman College in the summer of 1993 when we were
assigned to the same unit as volunteers for a week at a Girl
Scout day camp for economically disadvantaged girls, Camp
Sunshine, in Montgomery.
At the time, she was serving as director of the Alabama
African American Arts Alliance, which she had founded to
help support and promote African American and African
diasporan art in the state, in keeping with her outstanding
leadership legacy of building arts institutions in Alabama to
make a positive and transformative community impact.
Her cultural contributions have situated her among the
South’s foremost black women institution leaders and
curators in the arts.
7. I had made my first art quilt as a senior at
Spelman College in 1993, months before we
met. She became a mentor in the arts for me
and also encouraged me to keep making quilts
and to exhibit them at some point. In my life,
her mentoring is just one illustration of her
deep commitment to mentoring youth in the
Montgomery community, a commitment that
has also been important in my life, and that
was important in the life of Rosa Parks.
8. As a scholar, the public reception for my first
book, Black Masculinity and the U.S. South: From
Uncle Tom to Gangsta, was held at Rosa Parks
Museum in Montgomery when it was published
in 2007 and organized by Georgette Norman.
As an art quilter, my first two solo exhibitions of
my mixed-media appliqué art quilts in 2008 and
2015 were also both held at Rosa Parks Museum
and curated when Georgette was its director. She
was named as its founding director in 2000 and
led the institution until 2014.
9. In 2008 and as part of the community-based programming for my first art show,
dialoguing with fourth and fifth graders from E.D. Nixon Elementary School in a
workshop, a school located a few blocks away from the Y, brought me full circle and
back to the community in which I had volunteered during my teen years.
10. On February 4, 2013 I was honored to serve as the invited speaker for Rosa Parks’s
gala 100th birthday celebration at the museum on a program that included a special
letter from First Lady Michelle Obama read by Georgette, a poetry reading by National
Book Award recipient Nikky Finney, Montgomery’s Mayor Todd Strange and other city
officials, along with administrators from Troy University. I had an opportunity to
present an excerpt from my academic work on Rosa Parks.
11. Georgette had developed a “100 Birthday
Wishes” community project in Montgomery in
which children shared their thoughts about their
city, their country and the world and changes that
they suggested to make them better places,
which were shared in the Montgomery Advertiser
and on the night of the celebration, had been
printed on paper handmade by children in a
traveling mobile throughout the region and were
presented to the city officials.
12. I also donated my art quilt honoring Parks to
the museum’s permanent collection
13. “Rosa Parks, Whose ‘No’ in 1955 Launched the
Montgomery Bus Boycott and Was Heard Around
the World”(Commemorating 100 years, 1913-2013)
Civil Rights Movement Series, Black History Series,
& Alabama Women Series
Dedicated to Georgette Norman
By Riché Deianne Richardson
Photography by Frank Williams
14. I was presented with a framed set of the stamps and also invited to be a part of the
historic stamp unveiling with the postmaster Donald Snipes and Georgette Norman,
along with Rosa Parks’s family members who had traveled from Atlanta.
15. In 2015, Portraits II: From Montgomery to Paris, which
featured 60 of my art quilts, was highlighted on public
tours to help honor the 60th anniversary of the
Montgomery Bus Boycott and the 50th anniversary of
the Selma-to-Montgomery March and dedicated to the
memory of my grandparents, Joe Richardson and
Emma Lou Jenkins Richardson. Rosa Parks was the
centerpiece of the civil rights quilting series that I
developed for this show in tribute to the Montgomery
Bus Boycott, which features pieces honoring her,
Martin Luther King, Jr. and E.D. Nixon.
16. The other centerpiece that grounds the show is a large triple-panel quilt installation in the
Debutante Series that features my grandparents on either side of my aunt Pamela at age 16
during her cotillion in Montgomery in April of 1976 at Garrett Coliseum. It incorporates digital
media such as spotlighting and a soundtrack, and also draws on principles of geometry,
engineering, and architecture in its development.
17. The exhibition, which ran from January 10-
March 27, 2015, was launched by Troy
University with a major public reception held
on Dr. King’s January 15th birthday that drew
a large public audience. I also released a print
card featuring the quilt of him on the
occasion.
18. “Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: From the Montgomery Bus Boycott to a Dream for
America” (Black History Series). Composition 2012-2014.
Photography by Daniel Neil
19. On the eve of the Selma-to-Montgomery March’s historic fiftieth commemoration in Selma, the
museum held a gala reception in the gallery room at the Rosa Parks Museum with my quilt
exhibition for a host of local leaders as well as many national leaders, including House Minority
Leader Nancy Pelosi, Rev. Martin Luther King, III, Rev. Jesse Jackson, and Rev. Bernice King.
21. My work as both a scholar and visual artist helped me to
make a strong public impact during this moment.
While my academic work has begun to draw public and media
interest on its own terms, I often find myself working on
similar research questions in my art but for very different
audiences and value working in both contexts.
I find that those who may never read my written work can
nevertheless reflect on philosophical questions that my
exhibitions raise when they encounter my visual work and
attend my receptions in public gallery spaces.
22. In this essay, in light of my training in fields
such as literary and cultural studies, I begin by
discussing the assault of slavery and its
continuing pathologization of blackness
through images such as the Aunt Jemima
stereotype.
23. Rosa Parks and her scripts as a national mother, I
suggest, importantly challenge conventional
white-centered notions of national femininity. In
particular, I consider the Rosa Parks Children’s
Museum added in 2006 and its dynamic and
futuristic engagement with Parks’s legacy
designed to facilitate public encounters with her
legacy at the site of her arrest. I conclude by
discussing how Rosa Parks has continued to
shape my commitments to public and community
art.
24. While no narratives of “founding mothers” figure
as saliently in the national imagination as those
related to the “founding fathers” and white
women have typically been marginalized and
excluded in these dominant narratives, stories
related to figures such as Betsey Ross, who by
legend is reputed to have sewn the first American
flag, have nevertheless been passed down
frequently throughout American history. In the
earliest years of the American republic, figures
such as Ross and Dolly Madison emerged as
national emblems of American patriotism.
25. However, black women are far less likely to be
linked to the prevailing national narratives or
to the nation’s sense of selfhood and what it
means to be a representative American
woman. Blackness has been an inadmissible
and unthinkable quality in defining universal
or normative notions of American subjectivity
and citizenship.
26. Yet, black women leaders have unsettled the
conventional white- and male-centered narratives
of American selfhood through recurring scripts in
the public sphere as nationally representative
women and in relation to notions of national
family while using their platforms to challenge
prevailing pathological images and narratives
related to black motherhood and children in their
public voices as manifest in speeches and writing,
along with some of their most salient cultural
representations and citations.
27. The Aunt Jemima logo was
grounded in the mammy
myth that emerged in the
antebellum era and further
consolidated in the post-Civil
War era through Old South
plantation nostalgia and
romance, which typically
represented this figure as an
eager servant and caretaker
for her master’s family who
loved and doted upon his
children. In visual
representations, in keeping
with the mammy stereotype,
Aunt Jemima is typically
plump, asexual and wears a
bandana headscarf.
28. Nancy Green was the first of a series of black
women to bring Aunt Jemima to life by
portraying her flipping pancakes in an
oversized flour barrel at the World’s
Colombian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois in
1893. In effect, Aunt Jemima, in the context of
this historic event, was scripted as a
prominent national and global emblem of
black femininity. This spectacle proved to be
one of the most popular exhibits.
30. In a compelling piece in The Atlantic entitled “The Mammy
Washington Almost Had,” Tony Horwitz begins by making the
link between “Aunt Jemima” pancake mix and the mammy as
he discusses the famous campaign to erect a monument on
the U.S. capital in honor of mammy and as a paean to the
figure authorized by the U.S. Senate in 1923 “in memory of
the faithful slave mammies of the South.” The campaign was
largely spearheaded by the United Daughters of the
Confederacy and was grounded in myths of the Old South that
romanticized the work of slave women on Southern
plantations, including their relationships to the white children
for whom they cared, while extolling their devotion and
subservience to white masters and mistresses. The goal was
to locate the monument to mammy blocks away from the
newly dedicated Lincoln Memorial.
31. The enthusiastic campaigns to erect this monument to
mammy, like the infamous Aunt Jemima display at the
World’s Columbian Exposition, dramatize longstanding and
highly racialized conventional scripts of black femininity
that have figured black women as abject, subordinate and
alien within the national imagination. The outcry against
this monument in the nation’s public sphere also spoke to
longstanding contestations and conflicts over national
representations of black women. At the same time, this
controversy over mammy anticipated later contestations
and challenges that have emerged related to memorializing
and monumentalizing black women linked to the nation’s
public sphere of politics.
32. On June 17, 2015, a young white supremacist male named Dylan
Roof, who heavily identified with racist and fascist symbols and the
Confederate flag, attended a Bible study and took the lives of nine
African American congregants at the historic Mother Emanuel AME
Church in Charleston, South Carolina, including the minister, South
Carolina state senator Rev. Clementa Pinckney. Confederate flags
and related merchandise have been widely regarded as symbols of
racism and hate by African Americans and as a primary aspect of
Southern heritage and culture linked to Civil War ancestors among
many white Southerners. The emblems were the subject of
widespread public discussion in the immediate aftermath of this
tragedy and were rapidly removed from commercial circulation by
many top companies. Public pressure also led to their removal from
some federal and state buildings.
33. In the days thereafter, I was invited to write an Op-Ed
piece for the New York Times on what other
problematic symbols need to go besides the flag. My
op-ed piece entitled “Can We Please, Finally, Get Rid of
Aunt Jemima?”addresses the linkages between Aunt
Jemima, the Mammy figure of the Old South, lingering
Confederate nostalgia and Southern racism. It raises
questions about what is at stake in the lingering
visibility of this antebellum stereotype for advertising
pancakes, syrup and other breakfast foods in the
twenty-first century. It provided a media platform for
me engage some of my research concerns at the
national level in the context of an urgent public debate.
34. As someone who has come to view the Rosa Parks Museum as a kind
of artistic home in the sense that it has helped me to build upon my
early work in life related to Rosa Parks and to remain organically
connected to the grassroots community in Montgomery, I cherish this
institution as one of the premier sites in the nation for teaching and
learning about her legacy, along with the Raymond and Rosa Parks
Institute for Self-Development that she established with her friend
Elaine Steele. As someone who was already intellectually invested in
studying Rosa Parks as I took the tours, I increasingly began to draw on
critical frameworks at my disposal to think about the ingenuity in its
design. I particularly thought about about how we can use the newest
dimension focused on children that builds upon the conventional
mythology of Parks as Mother of the Civil Rights Movement to
recognize the levels on which it operates subversively by presenting a
counter-narrative to conventional stereotypes of black mothering, and
extending the platform that she outlines in her books and carried out
in her activism related to reaching out to children around the world.
35. The Rosa Parks Children’s Museum, a new wing
added to the Rosa Parks Museum in 2006, is
positioned at the Lee and Montgomery street
intersection where the famous encounter with
Blake occurred on the bus. It complements its
cutting edge technologies that develop its
primary exhibit of a futuristic bus with themes
that simultaneously situate Parks’s action on the
bus in relation to a longer history and draws on
futuristic themes related to time and space,
including a robotic bus driver for a virtual tour.
36. It frames her message as a universal one and is developed primarily
to speak to youth growing up in the twenty-first century in a digital
age. The installation draws a national and global audience of
thousands of tourists annually and is one of the foremost
institutions that have been established as a tribute to her national
legacy in civil rights. Visited by thousands of tourists annually,
including many from around the world, its popularity points to the
extent to which Parks has been embraced by an intergenerational
audience and to the timelessness of her message, including its
themes related to freedom. They are themes that run counter to
narratives in popular culture and hip hop that reductively frame
Parks in relation to the past or dismiss her altogether, such as those
of the rap group OutKast and Cedric the Entertainer, but relate her
legacy to the future. In this sense, they demonstrate the limits and
misperceptions in such popular readings of Parks.
37. Just as we have witnessed a profusion of documentaries,
dramatic films, and scholarly studies that have emerged in
the post-civil rights era to examine the history of the Civil
Rights Movement, the Rosa Parks Library and Museum in
Montgomery is among the primary institutions in the
nation that have been established in recent years to
explore those legacies. It is an institution established to
promote knowledge about Rosa Parks just as the King
Center in Atlanta, Georgia has been a central site for
teaching about the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr. Significantly, the Rosa Parks Museum is one of the most
prominent and elaborate tributes dedicated to a woman of
the Civil Rights Movement.
38. The location of the museum in the shadow of the state capitol
building evokes the memory of this architecture as a symbol of how
the state worked to legally disenfranchise the black population also
routinely targeted by forms of violence and terror to which the
state turned a blind eye. Yet, the juxtaposition of the Rosa Parks
Museum with the state capitol building, like its close proximity to
the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church where Dr. King once preached,
evokes Montgomery as part of “a New South.” Such buildings
register as key landmarks on the map of a renovated and
modernized downtown Montgomery area and affirm the relevance
of Parks and King to state history. Both institutions have helped
open the door and pave the way to the major permanent national
memorials related to these figures on the nation’s capital while
simultaneously constructing them as salient symbols of the national
body and speak profoundly to their impact on national identity.
39. The “Cleveland Avenue Time Machine” is the centerpiece of the
Children’s Museum at the Rosa Parks Library and Museum, which
opened in 2006. Georgette spearheaded this new expansion at the
museum, which occurred a year after Parks’s passing. In 2009, it
won a TEA Award for Outstanding Achievement in the category
“Exhibition on a Limited Budget” (from what was once the Themed
Entertainment Association) in March, 2009 at the 14th annual Thea
Awards Ceremony held at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim,
California. The installation was a collective design effort by
Eisterhold Associations of Kansas City, Missouri, Jan Bochenek of
Virginia, Ben Lawless of Maryland, Peter Vogt of Washington, DC,
and Hadley Exhibits of New York, which conceptualized its primary
features that include special lighting, a seven-projector video, audio
and fog. The large bus installation display most viscerally climaxes
the museum’s emphasis on temporal themes.
40. The bus is painted green, gold and beige to resemble the one on which Parks was
arrested in 1955. However, a number of features accord it a futuristic aura: the larger
size and rectangular shape; the larger than average bus seats; the wider aisle, and
the robot driver named “Mr. Rivets” poised over a dashboard with gadgets
resembling those on space ships in science fiction films.
41. As a space, the bus evokes the past through its color scheme as its
design and features evoke an image of the futuristic. The bus is
framed through its naming and appearance as a time machine. The
installation of the giant bus is a space designed to look larger than
life from the perspective of a child and to provide a more
imaginative tour to engage the history of the Montgomery Bus
Boycott. The bus is “parked” in a large, open warehouse-like display
space, framed by black metal posts, connected to a host of wires
and steam pumps that one might see in an industrial factory and
must be boarded by walking down a long, L-shaped ramp lined with
metal rails that lead up to its entrance. Once a passenger is seated,
Mr. Rivets starts the engine and the bus uses a host of special
effects such as vibrations, flashing lights, steam and sound to create
the sensation of motion, features that draw in the senses and
create the illusion that the bus itself is a machine.
42. Time travel in the sense popularized through science fiction
surfaces as the central motif in the video as the tourist goes
back in time 150 years, an imaginative journey into the past
signaled by the physical vibrations of the bus. It is notable
that the naming of this bus installation invokes the H. G.
Wells novel The Time Machine, which popularized the
concept of time travel and expanded the possibilities for
imagining the phenomenon, given this novel’s publication
in 1895, the year before the Plessy v. Ferguson decision was
issued by the Supreme Court that sanctioned the “Separate
but Equal” doctrine segregating public facilities, including
forms of public transportation. Navigating the trip forward
in time emerges as the main purpose of Mr. Rivets.
43. On the “Cleveland Avenue Time Machine,” which conserves original
coloration but otherwise fully re-imagines and redesigns the No. 2857
GM on which Parks was arrested, the robotic Mr. Rivets manifests
qualities associated with the cyborg and anticipates a post-human
subject, even as his status as a male bus driver might seems to
conserve the conventional logic of gender. He is also marked as post-
racial, but in a sense that lays bare rather than attempts to resist the
social impact of racism as is typically the case with this ideology. In
effect, Mr. Rivets replaces James Blake in his role as the navigator for a
diverse generation of passengers and realigns the significations of race,
gender and sexuality that had been related to Parks in 1955 that I
discuss as this chapter begins. He facilitates their encounter with the
past as he sits poised to transport them to a world of new possibilities
in the twenty-first century and beyond. The videos that unfold on
screens positioned outside of the bus windows create the sense that
one is surrounded by and traveling through history as Parks’s story is
narrated.
44. If a video is initially mobilized as a medium for thinking
about the history related to the Montgomery Bus
Boycott on the main tour, including Rosa Parks’s pivotal
encounter on the bus, the video highlighted in the
Children’s Museum is equally invested in launching its
young audience on an imaginative journey into the
future and draws on images associated with the space
age. Nomenclature for the Children’s Museum in
Montgomery, I want to suggest, by tacitly citing Parks
as a symbolic mother, further consolidated the
prevailing narratives linking Rosa Parks to national
femininity in the U.S.
45. However, if the “mother” metaphor is tacit in the Children’s Museum’s naming,
the museum effectively recasts it by eschewing its typical romanticization within
civil rights history while detaching it from its typical national and global moorings
and associating it with notions of futurity as much as the past. The naming is also
significant for alluding to the famous “Children’s March” in Birmingham, Alabama
that occurred in 1963. Moreover, the young audiences toward whom the
institution pitches this tour can be thought of an extension of the youth mentored
by Parks during her lifetime, a group whom the recurrent maternal metaphors
associated with her also played a vital role in constituting. Forced movements and
migration that attended the era of modernity and that were intricately linked to
slavery are replaced on this time machine by the imagining of a world with an
image of travel as voluntary and the removal of all limitations on time and space. It
ruptures the containment and marginalizing negotiations with which black
subjects have been associated in the schema of modernity since the era of slavery
by creating a futuristic space in which all human subjects are free from mental and
physical constraints with the entire universe at their disposal, and in which
alternative and more inclusive historical narratives of the past flow freely. In this
space, the hope and potential looking toward the year 2055 is an indispensable
complement for thinking back on the historic events of 1955.
46. The dynamic installation “The Cleveland Avenue Time Machine”
challenges this narrative of the civil rights era as passé beginning in its
accompanying video by making Rosa Parks a reigning emblem in the
longstanding African American struggles against segregation of public
facilities while simultaneously signifying her as a harbinger of African
American futurity. The bus serves as a symbol of the future as its
movement also prompts its tourists and passengers, with Mr. Rivets as
navigator, to reflect on the past. The installation registers the axis of
temporal nodes from past to present and constitutes a vision that
dislodges Parks from romantic and nostalgic narratives of civil rights
history as it facilitates her framing as a premier revolutionary and as a
woman who made a national impact on ending segregation, but whose
significance is global and universal. While the ship, given its materialist
linkages to the African slave trade, has recurrently functioned as a symbol
of slavery and the oppression of African diasporan subjects in the Western
world, the bus emerges in this installation as the primary symbol that
encompasses post-civil rights struggles against Jim Crow and the journey
on to new horizons.
47. The trajectory of time travel staged in this installation is primarily
backward. The “Cleveland Avenue Time Machine” creates an interactive
and inter-subjective engagement with the past as signaled by its visual
colorization, along with features such as the video and the animated
sound and light effects that it creates to simulate movement backward in
time. Yet, the main movement suggested is travel forward. The dynamic
installation mobilizes these features to ground the bus boycott in a
transcendent narrative of movement and time that signals the future, and
exceeds earthly dimensions and temporalities by drawing heavily on
science fiction, a genre in which black and female subjects have remained
largely invisible and marginal as characters and topics of interest with the
exception of writers such as Octavia Butler. Moreover, the accompanying
video’s narrative emphasizes Rosa Parks as a black feminine subject, along
with a range of black female precursors who challenged segregation in
public transportation and unsettles conventional male-focused chronicles
of African American history.
48. The dynamic installation in effect dislodges civil rights history,
including the Montgomery Bus Boycott, from the notions of stasis
to which it has been linked at times in the popular arena. This
approach is particularly significant when considering the diverse
audience of children and adolescents to whom this aspect of the
exhibition is primarily pitched. It is aimed at a new generation of
youth born in the post-millennium era that sometimes lack
knowledge about civil rights history and internalize the myth of its
obsolescence, who will stand at the forefront in rethinking and
retelling this history to future generations growing up in a digital
age, and who often learn most effectively though technology and
multimedia. The representations linking Rosa Parks to a journey
across time that I am describing here are classifiable as “Afro-
futuristic.”
49. I want to suggest that in historicizing and remembering the
Montgomery Bus Boycott and monumentalizing Rosa Parks
as a civil rights leader via video while drawing centrally on
features derived from technology and science fiction, the
“Cleveland Avenue Time Machine” installation poignantly
actualizes a visual and aural aesthetics in keeping with
Afrofuturism. Afrofuturism is a critical and cultural
discourse in areas such as literature and art that draws on
areas such as fantasy, magical realism, and science fiction,
to engage the past and present in relation to the lives of
minorities, including people of African descent, while
decentering Western-centered frames of reference. Mark
Dery, author of the seminal essay “Black to the Future,”
introduced the term itself in 1993.
50. It has been further advanced and developed
critically by scholars such as Alondra Nelson,
who founded an internet site called
“Afrofuturism” in 1998. Nelson acknowledges
that the site emerged in part because
dialogues about blacks and technology proved
limiting in their vacillation between a focus on
the utopian fantasy of technology in
eliminating race and an emphasis on the
rhetoric of a digital divide.
51. Birmingham, Alabama musician Sun Ra, who later migrated to
Chicago and founded a band known as the “Arkestra” in the 1950s,
stood at the forefront in developing an Afrofuturist discourse in
music through forms of synthesis that drew saliently on images of
Africa, space, and science fiction in costuming, sound and visual
aesthetics. While his groundbreaking innovations in jazz and
experiences in cities such as Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia
typically link his Afrofuturist musical production to urban contexts,
Sun Ra’s foundational musical training and performances in clubs in
Birmingham during the bitter years of the Jim Crow era shaped the
staging strategies and visual aesthetics that emerged later in his
career. These contours also organically link the origins of
Afrofuturism to Alabama and the U.S. South and make it all the
more compelling to draw on in thinking about an installation such
as the “Cleveland Avenue Time Machine” in Montgomery.
52. Tragically, during the final days of December of 2013, the popular Montgomery
rapper named Doe B. who had been produced and mentored by T.I., and two
other people lost their lives and six people were shot altogether during an ambush
at a local night club in the city, which culminated a year during which the city had
witnessed multiple homicides. Doe B. was known for both his talent and
generosity in the community. During this period, Michelle Browder, a grassroots
community artist and activist in Montgomery who has also worked on numerous
public art projects and initiatives related to civil rights history that have been
encouraged and supported by Georgette, and who is also well known for her
colorful paintings and murals and creative and visionary designs on Converse
sneakers as canvases, took an image of my Rosa Parks quilt and replaced the
broken arrest number on it with the words “#No More: Stand Up Against Violence”
as a call to end in the city, which has largely been perpetrated by black youth. She
posted her redesigned version of my quilt in social media on Facebook and
challenged others to join her as she “hit the streets” to take a stand against
violence. This was a powerful statement that not only underscored the continuing
significance of Parks’s civil rights legacy in Montgomery, but also affirmed its
relevance to her grassroots community organizing initiatives to help promote
peace. Browder’s statement was quite powerful and aimed to mobilize increasing
political and community action to address this issue.
53. The Artist Michelle Browder’s Compelling
Reinterpretation of My Rosa Parks Art Quilt.
54. In fall of 2016, I was invited to speak and exhibit my civil
rights quilts at the annual Westheimer Peace Symposium at
Wilmington College in Wilmington, Ohio. I was also invited
to contribute a block to a community quilt that was made
in tandem with this event to promote messages related to
peace, which I rendered in my typical appliqué style.
Browder’s provocative retooling of my Rosa Parks quilt and
use of it as part of her campaign to raise awareness within
her anti-violence campaign is in part what inspired me to
replace the arrest number on the Rosa Parks quilt block
that I created with the name “JOHN,” to honor on John
Crawford, who was tragically killed by a police officer in a
Walmart in Ohio in August of 2014.
55. I appreciated the dialogism that Browder established with me as an
artist through this gesture and it has inspired me to continue
designing Rosa Parks quilt blocks that foreground the first names of
victims to help ensure that they will not be forgotten.
I was honored to have my art quilts installed in the gallery room
alongside Gail Cyan’s powerful quilt featuring John Crawford, which
depicted his image in juxtaposition with a view of Black Panther
Party women giving the black power salute. For me, this quilt, like
Browder’s art and my representation of Parks in relation to John
Crawford, links the global freedom movement that Parks catalyzed
and earlier black liberation movement to newer political
movements, from Black Lives Matter to #SayHerName, that are
designed to critique and protest police violence.
56. My tribute to John Crawford developed for the community quilt as part of the
Westheimer Peace Symposium at Wilmington College in October, 2016
57. Like the installation in the Children’s Museum,
such art projects simultaneously link Parks’s
legacy to the past, present and future. At the
same time, the initiative out of which this
gesture emerged in Montgomery underscores
the importance of continuing work to combat
crime within black communities.
