Our featured art print for the week comes from Paul Collins and is entitled “Madame C.J. Walker”. It is a beautiful portrait of a tremendous African American entrpreneur by the name of Madame C.J. Walker. Madame C.J. Walker will always be remembered as not only an incredible entrepreneur but also as the first female millionaire who became a millionaire by her own works and achievements.
Title: Madame C.J. Walker Artist: Paul Collins Size: 16×20 inches Edition: Open Edition Giclee Price: $175.00 +$8.50 shipping
We are proud to now have a full gallery that consists of Malcolm X pictures, prints and art. Just in time for Black History Month these Malcolm X pictures are one of many ways to pay respect, homage and give reverence to the late and great beloved leader and black nationalist. The pictures come from various periods of Malcolm’s life and most feature words from his powerful speeches. You can find some samples of images in the gallery below:
Please note that we will be adding many more Malcom X pictures to this gallery during the course of this week. Follow us on Twitter to keep up with what’s going on with the site!
The Black Art Depot wants to wish all of the men of Omega Psi Phi a Happy Founder’s Day and hopes that they will continue with all of the community service projects and other good works they do in the African American community day in and day out. Above you will find a slideshow that features a few famous Omega Psi Phi members as well as the founders of the fraternity.
November 9th marked the birthday of Dorothy Dandridge, the first African American actress to be nominated for an Academy Award. After being nominated for this award, many felt that she was on her way to becoming the first non-white actress to achieve the same kind of fame that had been achieved by her contemporaries like Marilyn Monroe and Ava Gardner. Although best known for her roles in Carmen Jones and Porgy Bess, Dorothy is also respected for the roles she didn’t play as well. For example, she turned down the role of Tuptim in the “King and I” because she refused to play a slave. Unfortunately, due to some bad decisions on her part, interracial marriages that were frowned upon by the Hollywood community, tax problems, a special-needs child, and the inability of Hollywood to create a suitable role for the light-skinned Dandridge, her career never fulfilled its enormous potential. At this point, her life began a downward spiral that led to her untimely death in 1965.
You can find more information about Dorothy Dandridge below.
With Veteran’s Day approaching fast, we wanted to share with you some of the places where you could find items on our site that would make great Veteran’s Day gifts!
Don’t forget to thank the Military Veteran in your family, the one that is your friend or the one that may just be a casual acquaintance for their service and sacrifice on November 11, 2009.
October 18, 2009 is Chuck Berry’s birthday and I can’t let this day go by without recognizing this Rock and Roll Pioneer. Below you will find a wealth of information about this African American icon that developed a style of music and performing that would later be emulated, copied and stolen by many.
Brief Biography
Chuck Berry, fountainhead of the rock guitar and first citizen of the hallowed halls of rock and roll music, has been hailed by rock and roll fanatics, guitarists and guitar-lovers of every generation as the ‘Father of Rock and Roll’
He comes closest to being the one individual that can rightfully be credited with inventing rock and roll as we’ve come to know it today. He is one of the greatest guitarists and song-writers the world has ever known. His seminal influence on the world of music has been acknowledged by every rock musician in his wake.
Chuck Berry not only breathed life into the rock and roll sound, he infused vital energy and spirit into the rock and roll attitude. His masterfully crafted compositions were an astonishing blend of traditional black rhythm and blues with white country, jazz and western licks, and they transcended race, class and age barriers to capture the imagination of a wide variety of cosmopolitan audiences.
The thumping, foot-tapping guitar licks and the magic of the witty, rapid-fire lyrics complete with sly references to cars, girls and growing-up pains became the anthems of a generation.
Berry’s music has managed to stand the test of time and reverberated through the ensuing decades to excite music connoisseurs even in the twenty-first century. To this day, his songs are essential listening for every true rock fan. Bequeathing his talent with the reverence it deserves, Rolling Stone magazine ranked Chuck Berry #6 on its list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time.
Below you will find the only two Chuck Berry photographic posters that we carry at this time. In both images he is doing his legendary duck walk. A fitting tribute to the indisputable King of Rock & Roll!
Title: Chuck Berry – Duck Walk I Size: 20×16 Price: $35.00
Title: Chuck Berry – Duck Walk II Size: 14×11 Price: $20.00
I know Columbus day has passed us by but I couldn’t help but post a link to this classic work by the late Dr. Ivan Van Sertima. This will be our featured book for this week and is one I think all people should read. A summary of the book’s contents is below for all who are not familiar with its contents.
Summary
A celebrated classic, They Came Before Columbus, deals with a number of contacts — both planned and accidental, between Africans and Americans in different historical periods. Evidence for a physical/cultural presence of Africans in Early America is methodically examined.
Dr. Van Sertima reveals to us a compelling, dramatic and superbly detailed documentation of the presence and legacy of black Africans in ancient America.
With his considerable scholarship, Van Sertima examines the facts of navigation and shipbuilding, the sources of latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates, the scores of cultural analogies found nowhere else except in America and Africa, African languages and the transportation of plants, cloth and animals from Africa to the Americas. And from the diaries, letters and journals of the explorers themselves; from Carbon-14 dated sculptures found in the Americas; from the Arabic documents, charts, maps from the recorded tales of the griots to the Kings of Mali; from dated skeletons found as recently as 1975, the author builds his pyramid of evidence.
In addition to a scholar’s fastidiousness, Van Sertima has the skill of a novelist, and with it recreates some of the most powerful scenes history has to offer: the launching of the great ships of Mali in 1310 (200 master boats and 200 supply boats); the sea expedition of the Mandingo king himself in 1311, and many others, equally as vivid.
It is the marriage of these twin crafts–the artist’s and the scholar’s–in the book that makes it possible for us to see clearly the unmistakable face and handprint of black Africans in Pre-Columbian America, and their overwhelming impact on the civilization they found here.
This Fourth of July we would like to pay homage to Frederick Douglass, who was a powerful voice for human rights and one of the foremost leaders of the abolitionist movement. Below you will find a video where various people read a portion of Frederick Douglass’ landmark speech “What to the Slave is the 4th of July?”. You will also find the full speech below for those who would like to read the speech for themselves.
Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men, great enough to give frame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory….
…Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?
Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the “lame man leap as an hart.”
But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common.ÑThe rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrevocable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people!
“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, 0 Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”
Fellow-citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!” To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow-citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave’s point of view. Standing there identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America.is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery Ñ the great sin and shame of America! “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse”; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.
But I fancy I hear some one of my audience say, “It is just in this circumstance that you and your brother abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more, an denounce less; would you persuade more, and rebuke less; your cause would be much more likely to succeed.” But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. There are seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia which, if committed by a black man (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of the same crimes will subject a white man to the like punishment. What is this but the acknowledgment that the slave is a moral, intellectual, and responsible being? The manhood of the slave is conceded. It is admitted in the fact that Southern statute books are covered with enactments forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to read or to write. When you can point to any such laws in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of the slave. When the dogs in your streets, when the fowls of the air, when the cattle on your hills, when the fish of the sea, and the reptiles that crawl, shall be unable to distinguish the slave from a brute, then will I argue with you that the slave is a man!
For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not astonishing that, while we are ploughing, planting, and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver and gold; that, while we are reading, writing and ciphering, acting as clerks, merchants and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators and teachers; that, while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hill-side, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives and children, and, above all, confessing and worshiping the Christian’s God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men!
Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? that he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for Republicans? Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard to be understood? How should I look to-day, in the presence of Amercans, dividing, and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom? speaking of it relatively and positively, negatively and affirmatively. To do so, would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer an insult to your understanding. There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.
What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their mastcrs? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employment for my time and strength than such arguments would imply.
What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument is passed.
At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.
Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival….
…Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented, of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. “The arm of the Lord is not shortened,” and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from “the Declaration of Independence,” the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age. Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference. The time was when such could be done. Long established customs of hurtful character could formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with social impunity. Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude walked on in mental darkness. But a change has now come over the affairs of mankind. Walled cities and empires have become unfashionable. The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe. It makes its pathway over and under the sea, as well as on the earth. Wind, steam, and lightning are its chartered agents. Oceans no longer divide, but link nations together. From Boston to London is now a holiday excursion. Space is comparatively annihilated. — Thoughts expressed on one side of the Atlantic are distinctly heard on the other.
The far off and almost fabulous Pacific rolls in grandeur at our feet. The Celestial Empire, the mystery of ages, is being solved. The fiat of the Almighty, “Let there be Light,” has not yet spent its force. No abuse, no outrage whether in taste, sport or avarice, can now hide itself from the all-pervading light. The iron shoe, and crippled foot of China must be seen in contrast with nature. Africa must rise and put on her yet unwoven garment. ‘Ethiopia, shall, stretch. out her hand unto Ood.” In the fervent aspirations of William Lloyd Garrison, I say, and let every heart join in saying it:
God speed the year of jubilee
The wide world o’er!
When from their galling chains set free,
Th’ oppress’d shall vilely bend the knee,
And wear the yoke of tyranny
Like brutes no more.
That year will come, and freedom’s reign,
To man his plundered rights again
Restore.
God speed the day when human blood
Shall cease to flow!
In every clime be understood,
The claims of human brotherhood,
And each return for evil, good,
Not blow for blow;
That day will come all feuds to end,
And change into a faithful friend
Each foe.
God speed the hour, the glorious hour,
When none on earth
Shall exercise a lordly power,
Nor in a tyrant’s presence cower;
But to all manhood’s stature tower,
By equal birth!
That hour will come, to each, to all,
And from his Prison-house, to thrall
Go forth.
Until that year, day, hour, arrive,
With head, and heart, and hand I’ll strive,
To break the rod, and rend the gyve,
The spoiler of his prey deprive –
So witness Heaven!
And never from my chosen post,
Whate’er the peril or the cost,
Be driven.
Vice Admiral Samuel Lee Gravely, Jr. accomplished many firsts during his illustrious military career. He was born on June 4, 1922 in Richmond, Virgina. He passed on National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland on October 22, 2004 and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. A true African American Navy pioneer, Vice Admiral Samuel Gravely was the first African American in the U.S. Navy to be commissioned an officer, the first to serve aboard a fighting ship as an officer, the first to command a Navy ship, the first fleet commander, and the first to become an admiral.
During his lifetime he was bestowed many medals and honors including the Legion of Merit, the Meritorious Service Medal, and the Navy Commendation Medal.
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