THE FOUNDING BLACK FAMILIES OF AMERICA

From thriving villages in West Africa, people of color were brought to Maryland to plant, tend, and harvest tobacco. Loaded into the lowest level of crowded ships, they were brought to many other places including South Carolina where they cultivated millions of acres of low country rice. From Mozambique Island, they were brought to New York in shackles and bartered to fell trees for New England’s lucrative shipbuilding industry. However conflicted they may have been, the Founding Fathers of America acknowledged that slavery was a critical building block toward creating the solid foundation of democracy. Enslaved persons fueled the engine that would become the new democracy. They made up the backbone of America’s deepest stain—the global slave trade. These were America’s enslaved Africans, and in their way, Founding Fathers of America. On African soil, they knew themselves as Ota Bendi, Kunta Kinte, Olaudah Equiano, and Ayubah Suileman Diallo. Once they were relocated to a plantation they were given new names: Hercules, Nero, Toby, Kizzie, and Modesty.

The Water’s Edge Museum embraces the complex stories of the Founding Black Families who harnessed their power, and placed it quietly but resolutely into the hands of their descendants. The museum honors how they lived, and how their lives mattered. Privately aware of the accomplishments of their forebears as African tribesmen and nobility, these individuals were resilient, and excelled as professionals, exemplary in their own right. In spite of pervasive racial injustice, they forged ahead to stake a claim in the America that needed them, but continued to refuse to acknowledge them for their crucial role. At least until now.

Presenting the Founding Black Families of America as a portrait of a people on the Eastern Shore, The Water’s Edge Museum offers a first look at the invaluable role played by people of color through their loyalty, devotion, and bedrock spiritual foundation. The museum sets out to showcase the powerful work ethic, patriotism, religious history, and musical integrity of a culture that had been either ignored, underestimated, or undervalued. The primary goal is to support people of today in finding their place in history and identifying their own positive and unique voice when tackling inequity. 

This story is relevant to all audiences—from underrepresented youth to their elders—as it delivers important lessons of collaborating with others outside of one’s own comfort zone to create a better world.

Exploring through art the portraiture, patriotism, spiritual beliefs, and earliest sacred music handed down to families of early African American leaders, the exhibition fosters the kind of community spirit that celebrates America for its diversity. Focusing on the Eastern Shore, the exhibition makes a side glance to its greater American context. The Water’s Edge compares the visual arts, music, and written words of Hervey Allen, Mabel Dwight, Dubose Heyward, Langston Hughes, Victoria Hutson Huntley, Zora Neale Hurston, Julia Mood Peterkin, Josephine Pinckney, Paul Robeson, Ruth Starr Rose, Gertrude Stein, Doris Ulmann, and Waters Turpin.

Many of the artists behind the work were women of European descent. This in itself is a revelation. The artists were able to live comfortably in a shared community–one which fostered an extraordinary documentation of oral histories, achievements, spiritual beliefs, and melody of people outside of their own social circle. This exhibition provides a view of integrated worlds in which diverse populations lived harmoniously, despite being set in times of harsh racial segregation.  

As an example, Gertrude Stein was credited as the first to depict black people not as a “spectacle,” but as natural members of the human family. Julia Mood Peterkin is noted as the first Southerner to win a Pulitzer prize for Scarlet Sister Mary; a book written largely in the Gullah dialect that honestly portrays the plight of a 1920s woman of color laboring to become independent. Peterkin and New York-based photographer Doris Ulmann collaborated to professionally photograph and record the daily life and spirituality of black people from South Carolina and Alabama. After graduating from Vassar College, Rose spent decades at the New York Art Students League, ferrying her liberal professors and peers to her family’s isolated plantation on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. It was there that she and her small circle of urban friends honored her neighbors as direct descendants of African chiefs, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Ross Tubman. 

INTERPRETING AFRICAN AMERICAN SPIRITUALS

Perhaps most significant is the collection depicting African American spirituals as envisioned by the congregations of black families from the Eastern Shore. In 1956, Howard University Professor James Amos Porter singled out this set of prints as the most comprehensive and sympathetic set of illustrated African American spirituals to date. As such, they exemplify the visual representation of one of America’s earliest art forms. At the time, they were as radical as James Weldon Johnson’s books on spirituals; with his accounts of the dissonant harmony of songs embodying the marriage between the Anglo Saxon King James Bible and ancient African rhythm. The illustrations are enhanced by recorded histories from the descendants of founding families of color, which explain the important untold histories of enslavement and freedom that were hidden in these songs. The words were deeply coded; in most cases forbidden on plantations, as they often marked the prelude to a rebellion.

Despite its rural isolation, Howard University’s exhibition put the spirituals as visual art and the Eastern Shore on a greater map of cultural excellence. Recognizing the popular reponse, Porter extended the dates of the exhibition, declaring it unrivaled for its directness and honesty. The interpretations of African American spirituals were thoughtfully executed with a compassion so that many assumed that the artist—like the student population—was also black.

Made a century ago, the spirituals presented in The Water’s Edge illustrate the early spirituals exactly as the congregation envisioned them and recorded the words precisely as the choir sang them. 

“Uninhibited by radio or Broadway fame, African Americans on the Eastern Shore sang to their God with a kind of religious urgency and humbling purity. Life on the Eastern Shore plantation was based on ships in the beginning. The water was a highway and sustenance and the great world beckoning. It was everywhere around us and we grew to watch its every mood. Like a brood of ducks that has been hatched out by a hen, we took to the water. Though we did not know it, we were being taught in a hundred ways by the colored people. We learned about the winds and the tides, those mysterious forces that changed the face of our world twice a day.” –Ruth Starr Rose

“Way down yonder by myself, I couldn’t hear nobody pray. From the time that the first Negro landed in America to the Great World War is two hundred years or more. Now again the colored man goes back to the jungles of the equator, this time to fight for his country. The old spiritual that expresses the fundamental and inevitable loneliness of man – here has a new meaning – yet keeps its eternal truth and power. The soldier in the South Pacific is trying to contact his outfit, all around him are the noises and confusion of battle – overhead the forces of evil are coming down to battle with him from the skies. Here all alone deserted he listens desperately and ‘He couldn’t hear nobody pray.’ Because if all people were really praying, for the fine things he expects of prayer – there would be no forces of evil descending and there would be no wars any more.” –Words of the artist

“You love life and living quality; here is life all around you. Paint what God has given you, the life of the people who work for you, who live all unnoticed in this remote community. So, the idea came to make a record of the life of the Negroes of the Eastern Shore. It had never been done and is still unique in the annals of art.” -Ruth Starr Rose

ABOUT RUTH STARR ROSE

Painter and printmaker Ruth Starr Rose (1887–1965) wrote these words after realizing that her lifelong pursuit would be to document and celebrate the lives of her African American friends and neighbors in the tiny, historically black towns of Copperville and Unionville, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Descending from Wisconsin abolitionists, Rose came from a wealthy white family that was also endowed with a keen, progressive, social conscience. As she grew up, she developed an abiding love and respect for her friends who were of African descent–who taught her not only practical but spiritual life lessons. She also labored to chronicle through art the religious beliefs she shared with her neighbors as she worshipped alongside them in an A.M.E. church. Although her work on spirituals was never published, it has recently been rediscovered, along with her notes for it.

BLACK LIVES MATTERED ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO

The story behind this exhibition unfolds in the first half of the 20th century, within a remote region of the Chesapeake Bay where abolitionist Frederick Douglass once lived as an enslaved child. It includes the Hill in Easton, Oxford, St. Michaels, and the historic settlements of Unionville and Copperville, which were vibrant African American communities, each with its own A.M.E. church. Located near the 17th-century town of St. Michaels, Unionville and Copperville were comprised of small parcels of land awarded to courageous African American soldiers who fought during the Civil War.

The chronicling of people of African descent, portrayed with innate nobility and dignity, created decades prior to the civil rights movement, and at a time when the scar of slavery was still within living memory, was visionary in its content and healing qualities. The prints, drawings, and words weave together visual and written accounts leaving a remarkable account of African American daily life, religious beliefs, and genealogy. The legacy is more than a rare portrait of a people: It is a history teaching us how images of people’s strength were presented to overcome adversity. This is a story of how art and culture validated lives and promoted true societal integration.

Rose’s mother was an accomplished musician, who also wrote for elite gardening publications, publishing as early as 1909 about the African American wisdom that allowed her garden to flourish on her Talbot County property. Rather than showcasing herself with secateurs, she arranged for glossy magazines such as Country Life and Gardening to feature the tall, slender gardener Isaac Copper, whose grandfather had been a chief in Africa.

Rose knew that her work was important. Encouraged by supportive family, friends, and her colleagues at the Art Students League of New York, Rose embarked as early as 1930 on a what was regarded at the time as a visionary project to create an illustrated book about her friends’ peaceful, meaningful lives. In her mission statement, Rose outlined the originality and breadth of her undertaking:

“I plan to show in paintings and lithographs the life and industries of the Eastern Shore of Maryland, with special reference to all native customs and activities of the Negroes and white tenant farmer. This rather remote and not very well known part of the world has great possibilities that have never been explored.”

The community benefited in the fact that the artist was in the position of being able to travel to unusual, often challenging, destinations. Assuming the mantle of a cultural anthropologist, she was able to overcome her outsider status by building local relationships and unobtrusively observing religious customs. Her portraits and scenes go beyond realism or mere representation to achieve a creative, truthful documentation of black life throughout the world. She also documented daily life and religious festivals of Native Americans in New Mexico and Florida, as well as creating works that shed light on the people of Mexico and Haiti.

Fueled by a natural curiosity and with a progressive education from Vassar College, Rose was able to ask difficult questions. She bravely crossed gender, economic, social, and color lines to chronicle an overlooked chapter in American history: everyday life on the Eastern Shore. Rose never forgot the important lessons she learned from her African American neighbors. Even though she spent the last twenty years of her life in places as varied as Mexico and Montana, at her death, her ashes were returned to the water’s edge of the Chesapeake Bay.