Weekly 9 - Feb 27-Mar 5, 2011

One of 20 images of Ruby from my portrait studio self-image project
An Interior Design graduate from the American Inter-Continental University, London

The 28^th was the last day of Black History Month [USA] and the start of International Women’s month for March.  Black History Studies recognize black woman who have made a mark upon our history in different forms or another.

I remember writing a speech on Ida B. Wells while in high school.  We all had to make a speech as part of the English curriculum requirements, one a year to pass.  She was many things: a journalist, activist, suffragist and anti-lynching crusader of the post-Reconstruction period.  She had a passion for justice for her people. 

Billy Holiday’s classic song, Strange Fruit, examined the history of lynching and its play of the black race.  Actually the song was written by a Jewish schoolteacher and union activist [Bronx].  The teacher [Abel Meeropol] was disturbed by a photograph of two black men being lynched, to write and put to music, the song Strange Fruit.  This poem is a reminder when racial terror raged through Southern America, only to see blacks and whites working together to stop it.  You can view my own image of a lynching as part of my collection of slavery images, Twist in Time Story of the Ancestors.

Strange Fruit by Abel Meeropol

Southern trees bear strange fruit,

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant South,

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,

Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,

Then the sudden smell of burning flesh!

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,

For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop,

Here is a strange and bitter crop.

Zora Neale Hurston is another black woman, first, to enter American literary establishment as a novelist, pioneering anthropologist.  She established the African American vernacular as one of the most vital and inventive voices in American literature.  She had an inspiring upbringing, as her father was a preacher, mayor and carpenter; and she was surrounded by a community of proud, self-sufficient, self-governing black people who were immersed into African American folklore traditions.  Her mother encouraged her often to [in her way] “jump at de’ sun” and never let being black and being a woman stand in her way of her dreams.  She has achieved beyond her wildest dreams.  I see myself in this woman.  My grandmothers [teacher and housewife] did the same for me in the encouragement department.  

Other women to give honor to this month are grandmothers Susie Anna Hattie Elizabeth Myers and Anna McCuller, aunts Mattie Thompson and Ida Jane Myers, Rachel Gray Galliant and Katherine Mallory [educators & writers], Arletta Thomas Boles [IT Administrator] and Miriam Ruth Neely Holder [classmate & first black female Mayor of Lumberton, Mississippi] and myself, of course [educator of the year, IT Admin & Executive PA, photographer, painter, singer, poet & writer and a up and coming printmaker.