Chadwick Boseman as Jackie Robinson. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Entertainment

In 1947, when Jackie Robinson signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers and broke major league baseball’s color barrier, the world was still 16 years away from the March on Washington and the Civil Rights Movement as just getting organized. The Montgomery bus boycott was eight years away and housing discrimination based on race would remain legal until 1968. In his first season with the MLB, Robinson would win the league’s Rookie of the Year award. He was a perpetual All-Star. And in 1955, he helped his team secure the championship. Robinson’s success was, by no means, inevitable and in fact he earned it in a society that sought to make it altogether impossible.

Unsurprisingly, his story seemed bound for Hollywood and in 1950, still in the midst of his career, he starred as himself in “The Jackie Robinson Story.” Now Robinson’s story returns to the screen in the new film “42,” this time played by Howard University graduate, Chadwick Boseman, who was at the American History Museum Monday evening for a special screening for members of the Congressional Black Caucus. We caught up with him there.

Are you happy to be back in D.C.?

I’m excited, you know, this room got me a little hyped. It’s fun coming here after having been here a few weeks ago after meeting the First Lady and the President for the screening at the White House. I went to college here and you always think, oh, I’m never going to get to go in that building, I’m never going to get to do this or that so coming here and doing it, it’s like wow, it’s a whole new world.

You said you can’t remember ever not knowing who Jackie Robinson was, but that it was important not to play him as just a hero. How did you get all those details? Did speaking with his wife, Rachel Robinson, play a big part?

The first thing that I did was, I went to meet her at her office on Varick Street. She sat me down on a couch, just like this, she just talked to me very frankly and told me the reasons why she was attracted to him, what she thought of him before she met him, what attracted her once they actually started conversing, how they dated, how shy he was, everything you could possibly imagine. She just went through who they were.

I think she sort of just started me on the research process as well because at the foundation, they have all the books that have been written about him. It was just a matter of hearing that firsthand information.

Then I met her again with children and grandchildren and in that case, they were sort of examining me physically, prodding and poking and measuring and asking me questions: Are you married, why aren’t you married? You know, anything that you could imagine. Actually, before they ever spoke to me, they were prodding and poking and measuring me and I was like, who are these people? And they said, you’re playing my granddad, we gotta check you out. It was as much them investigating me as it was me investigating him.

So they gave you a seal of approval?

They did not give me a seal of approval, but they didn’t not give it. They were willing to gamble, I guess.

Boseman met with Robinson’s family members in preparation for the role. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Entertainment

He describes the relationship Robinson had with his wife (played by Nicole Beharie) as a safe haven. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Entertainment

What were they looking for, what did they want to make sure you got right?

She was adamant about the fact that she didn’t want him to be portrayed as angry. That’s a stereotype that is often used, just untrue and one-dimensional with black characters and it was something that he had been accused of, of having a temper. In some senses, he did have a temper but it wasn’t in a negative sense.

I, on the other hand, after reading the script knew that it was necessary to not show him as being passive or a victim, which is another stereotype that’s often used in movies. I didn’t want him to be inactive, because if he’s passive, he’s inactive and you run the risk of doing another story that’s supposed to be about a black character, but there’s the white guy, there, who is the savior. There’s a point where you have to be active and you have to have this fire and passion. I view it more as competitive passion as Tom Brokaw and Ken Burns said to me today, that he had a competitive passion, competitive temper that any great athlete, whether it be Larry Bird or Babe Ruth or Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant, they all have that passion. That’s what he brought to the table. . . .My grandmother probably would call it holy anger.

Was that dynamic something you were able to talk about with Harrison Ford, who plays the team executive Branch Rickey, and the writer?

First of all yes. But they already had really advanced and progressive points of view about it anyway and were very aware. Harrison was also very clear, even in our first conversations about it, that he was playing a character and I was playing the lead and that there are differences in the two.

There were instances where I might voice, this is what we need to do, and everybody listened to it and that’s definitely not always the case, definitely not always what you experience on the set. But I think everybody wanted to get it right. I can’t really think of a moment, I know that they came up where it was like, well I’m black so I understand this in a different way, but they do happen and everybody was very receptive to it.

Was there any story that Mrs. Robinson told you about him that stuck in the back of your head during the process?

She just talked about how he adapted after very difficult scenes where he was being abused verbally or threatened. She said he would go hit golf balls because he would never bring that into the house. The question that I asked that brought her to that was:  Did he ever have moments where he secluded himself at home, or where he was depressed, or you saw it weighing on him? And she said: ‘No, when he came into our space, he did whatever he needed to do to get rid of it, so that our space could be a safe haven, and he could refuel, and could get back out into the world and be the man he had to be.’

And she’s going through it just as much as he is. She’s literally in the crowd. People are yelling right over, calling him names right over her or calling her names because they know who she is. That’s something people don’t really think about, that she was actually in the crowd. She has to hold that so she doesn’t bring that home to him and give him more to worry about and that’s a phenomenal thing to hold and to be strong. I love finding what those unspoken things were that are underneath what’s actually being said.

What do you hope people will take away from the film?

I hope they get a sense of who he really is. I think what’s interesting about it is that he played himself in that original 1949-1950 version. . .What I found is that him having to use the Hollywood script of that time does not allow him to tell his own story because he couldn’t really be Jackie Robinson in that version.

It wasn’t his exact story, if you look at the version it says all he ever wanted to do was play baseball and he didn’t. Baseball was his worst sport, he was a better football player, better basketball player, better at track and field. He had a tennis championship, he played golf, horse back riding, baseball was the worst thing he did. I’m not saying that he wasn’t good at it, I’m saying that it’s not the truth. He was a second lieutenant in the army, he was All-American, he led his conference in scoring in basketball and he could have been playing in the NFL, but he had to go to Hawaii and play instead.

So what is that? Why did he end up playing baseball? Because baseball was where he could actualize his greatness, it wasn’t the only thing that he was great at and so just that little untruth in the script skips all of the struggle that he had getting to the point of being in the minor leagues. He’s doing this because it’s one more thing that he’s trying to do in that United States at that time that maybe will allow him to be the man that he wants to be. He could have done any of those other things, it just wasn’t an avenue for him to actualize his full humanity, his full manhood and so that version doesn’t allow him to be Jackie Robinson.

When I look at this version, we live in a different time where you can tell the story more honestly. Ultimately I think that’s what you should take away from the film, I get to see who he is now because we’re more ready to see it.

A later piece shows Thomas Day’s uniquely “Exuberant Style” in full bloom. Whatnot, 1853-1860. Collection of Margaret Walker Brunson Hill, courtesy of the Renwick Gallery

North Carolina’s most in-demand, pre-Civil War, master cabinetmaker Thomas Day had everything it took to be Southern royalty–land, money, education. Yet, Day was a black man. Born in a community of free African-Americans in southern Virginia, Day was able to achieve such fame that his customers created a double meaning for the term “daybed,” a convenient play on his name. His story is as striking as his unique creations, marked by his very own “Exuberant Style,” of which a collection of 39 exemplary works can be seen at the Renwick Gallery for its new show “Thomas Day: Master Craftsman and Free Man of Color.”

Day came from educated and well-to-do parents. His mother, Mourning Stewart, was the daughter of a free mulatto who owned some 800 acres of land as well as slaves. His father, John Day, was the son of a white woman from South Carolina, who was sent away to a Quaker community to have her child. Because he was born free, John Day was required by law to learn a trade by the time he was 18, in this case cabinetmaking. Day, then, settled with his wife and two sons—Thomas and John, Jr—in Petersburg, Virginia, a community of free people. The family eventually relocated to North Carolina.

With his father’s tutelage and training, Thomas Day set up his own shop in 1827 in Milton, North Carolina. Though being a black cabinetmaker was a rarity–96 percent of the cabinetmakers in the state were white–Southern society was actually somewhat less restrictive in the early 1800s than in the period directly before the Civil War, according to Renwick Gallery chief Robyn Kennedy, who brought the show to the gallery from the North Carolina Museum of History. “He was accepted into elite mercantile plantation society,” says Kennedy. The exhibit opens with proof of his standing: a petition signed by members of the community to allow Day’s bride to travel from Virginia to North Carolina (something not allowed at the time for a free person) as well as a pew he designed for the otherwise white church he attended.

Even in simpler works, the subtle undulation of an ogee curve gives character. Sofa, 1845-1855. Collection of the North Carolina Museum of History, courtesy of the Renwick Gallery

Day mixes Gothic arches with the sensuous ogee curves of the footboard for a dramatic bedstead. Collection of the North Carolina Museum of History, courtesy of the Renwick Gallery

“He was a very astute businessman,” Kennedy adds. In addition to owning his own workshop and fields to supply timber, Day also employed roughly 14 workers and owned slaves. He sought to compete with cities like Philadelphia and New York and established a reputation for his output. Even when he represented 11 percent of the state’s furniture market, he never lost his unique artistic flair that kept customers asking for more. Governor David S. Reid, for example, ordered no fewer than 47 pieces from Day.

Though he “worked in a variety of styles,” says Kennedy, “it was basically what was popular at the time.” Greek Revival architecture called for matching pieces and Day was adept at crafting works to suit his client’s tastes, from conservative to more adventurous.

The beauty of his pieces, says Kennedy, is that at first glance, they fit the style of the day, but upon examination, small touches emerge that are unlike anything else being produced. Curves, cutouts and shapes unique to Day’s studio characterize his wooden masterpieces, which included architectural enhancements and features done in clients’ homes as well. One cabinetmaker installing replicas of some of Day’s pieces from North Carolina’s homes said to Kennedy, “Who was this guy–all the swirls and curlicues!”

Day was given considerable freedom to create his playful style. “A lot of his work was done with a verbal description and a handshake,” says Kennedy. His own adaptation of the French Antique tradition was known as “Exuberant Style.” Kennedy says elements of his fluid forms don’t seem to show up again until Art Nouveau.

But 1857, however, even his reputation could not sustain him through an economic crash and impending Civil War. He had to sell his shop and fell from the state’s first to fourth most prominent cabinetmaker. Day died in 1861 and after the war, one of his sons bought the shop back and tried for a few years to revive the business. He would eventually move to Washington state, likely in response to KKK activity. His other son is lost in the records far before then. He was rumored to have “passed” for white, married a white woman and moved to Washington, D.C. to work in government. Meanwhile Day’s brother, John Jr., had traveled to Liberia as a minister. There he helped draft the country’s constitution and was eventually appointed to its Supreme Court in 1854.

Day’s great-grandson, William A. Robinson traveled back to Milton and says, “old aristocratic families, now poor, who have old rotting mansions and formal gardens ‘gone to pot’. . . still have antique furniture made by Thomas Day, which they now consider their most valuable possessions.”

Cutouts, curves and unusual shapes make this Grecian style rocking chair unique. 1855-1860. Collection of the North Carolina Museum of History, courtesy of the Renwick Gallery

The flared forms on either side of the mirror echo similar shapes used on Day’s staircases. Collection of the North Carolina Museum of History, courtesy of the Renwick Gallery

A faux rosewood finish over walnut gives this side chair its shine. 1855-1860. Collection of the North Carolina Museum of History, courtesy of the Renwick Gallery

The skillful carving on the sewing stand’s feet testify to Day’s mastery. 1840. Collection of Margaret Walker Brunson Hill

Day also did architectural work inside clients’ home, adding his flourish to facades, staircases and archways. Newel, 1855, Glass-Dameron House, North Carolina. Photo by Tim Buchman, 2013

Day’s work lives on in the homes of many in North Carolina. Parlor Window, 1861, James Marlone House, Leasburg, North Carolina. Photo by Tim Buchman, 2013

Playful peaks and balanced symmetries characterize his architectural work. Parlor, 1861, James Malone House, Leasburg, North Carolina. Photo by Tim Buchman, 2013

Clients chose areas in their home that got significant traffic to show off Day’s handiwork. Passage from Parlor to Sitting Room, 1860, Garland-Buford House, North Carolina. Photo by Tim Buchman, 2013

Day’s cutouts and molding liven up a front porch. 1860, Garland-Buford House, North Carolina. Photo by Tim Buchman, 2013

“Thomas Day: Master Craftsman and Free Man of Color” is on view through July 28, 2013 at the Renwick Gallery.

Jason Moran, Alicia Hall Moran, The Bandwagon and Bill Frisell in the KC Jazz Club October 26, 2012. Photo by Scott Suchman

A museum exhibition can showcase a collection. But music gives it soul, emotionally connecting the public to the spirit and rhythms of people and unknown stories behind objects. The Smithsonian National Museum of American History is among a vanguard of museums who have used live music performances and commissions for decades to interpret and showcase American history and collections.

The Chamber Music Society performs on the Smithsonian’s quartet of rare Stradivarius instruments bringing cultural and artistic context to classical music scholarship.  The Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra (SJMO) enriches jazz collections with live performances of unpublished music from the collections and appearances by jazz masters representing living history. The Rubin Museum of Art in New York City—a Smithsonian Affiliate—has musicians of diverse genres interpret art on exhibition and musically engage the public in themes inherent in Himalayan art and culture.

Other museums are catching onto the music-collections connections.

In 2008, Moran, artistic adviser for jazz at the Kennedy Center, was commissioned by The Philadelphia Art Museum to compose music for a Gees Bends Quilts exhibition. The result was a jazz symphony that melded rhythms from the community’s past with improvisational jazz felt in the moment. When the quilts and the stories were put away, the music remained in their stead. Recently, Moran staged his Gees Bend jazz at the Kennedy Center. During this Black History Month, jazz vocalist Dee Dee Bridgewater is taking the music and the Gees Bend story to the nation via the first national broadcast of the composition, offered over NPR’s JazzSet.

Women from Gee’s Bend work on a quilt during the 2005 ONB Magic City Art Connection in Birmingham, Alabama’s Linn Park. Photo by Andre Natta, courtesy of Wikimedia

To develop the piece, Moran, his wife Alicia, an accomplished opera singer, and members of his band traveled to Gees Bend to conduct research and embrace the people of the remote community. Their improvisational conversation is recorded in musical masterpieces ranging from Alica’s rendition of the Quilter’s Song, first recorded in the field in 1941 for the compilation How We Got Over: Sacred Songs of Gees Bend, to the band’s musical interpretation of  a quilt pattern. The Morans have created similar music commissions to help museum’s present history and collections. A case in point is Bleed, created for the Whitney Museum of Art.

Baltimore photographer Linda Day Clark  has traveled to Gees Bend annually since 2002 after discovering the community on assignment for The New York Times. In a podcast for the Philadelphia quilt exhibition, she discusses the “amazing microcosm of culture” in Gees Bend, calling it both “a blessing and a curse” for its historic authenticity.

Day related a conversation she’d had with Gees Bend elder Arlonza Pettway, a descendant of slaves. Pettway told Day about sitting on her great grandmother’s quilt to hear the stories of her great grandmother’s capture in Africa, being held captive with other slaves, lured onto a ship, and their experiences during the Middle Passage.

“We’re looking at a group of Africans brought over during slavery,” says Day, ”and when slavery ended, they stayed. Very few people in Gees Bend have moved in or out.”

Located in a bend of the Alabama River, with one road leading into and out of the community, Gees Bend was founded by a North Carolina cotton grower, Joseph Gee, and 18 slaves who relocated with him to the region to farm cotton. The Gee family later sold the plantation to a relative, Mark H. Pettway.

During this 150th Anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington, the Smithsonian is presenting the exhibition Changing America to commemorate African Americans’ quest for freedom and equity in America. It may be argued that little has changed in Gees Bend in 150 years. Yet the stories this community has preserved and the artwork  it creates continues to inspire and inform a rapidly changing world outside its reach.  And with artists’ like Moran history is becoming music to their ears.

Joann Stevens of the American History Museum.

Joann Stevens is program manager of Jazz Appreciation Month (JAM), an initiative to advance appreciation and recognition of jazz as America’s original music, a global cultural treasure.  JAM is celebrated in every state in the U.S. and the District of Columbia and some 40 countries every April. Recent posts include Take 5! Where Old Jazz Heads Meet Jazz Novices Over Sweet Notes and Wynton Marsalis, Honoring Duke Ellington.

At the Omega Mardi Gras party in Washington D.C., 1930. Scurlock Studio, courtesy of the American History Museum

The photos of revelers celebrating Mardi Gras in the 1930s and 40s in Washington, D.C. seem familiar—a little fancier maybe, but the costumes and merriment are transcendent. These particular photos, documenting Howard University’s Omega Psi Phi fraternity’s festivities, tell a story as much about Mardi Gras as they do about D.C.’s prosperous African American middle class.

At the time, the district’s black population represented a little less than a third of the total population, but it was steadily growing; and by 1960, a full half of the city’s residents were African Americans. Founded at Howard University in 1911 the Omega Psi Phi was the first predominantly African American fraternity at a historically black college.  And more often than not, their celebrations were captured by Addison Scurlock, a black photographer whose work in the community would span nearly three-quarters of a century and whose U Street studio would become home to an unofficial archive of African American life in D.C.

Addison with his sons, Robert and George, 1951.

Addison Scurlock came to Washington, D.C. in 1900 at age 17. In the census that year, he would list his profession as “photographer.” By 1911, he had opened his studio on U Street and was quickly on his way to becoming one of the city’s most prolific chroniclers of black life, documenting everything from concerts to birthday parties, dances to baptisms. Business at the Scurlock studio, spanned nearly a century, after his sons, George and Robert, took it over in 1963—just a year before their father died—and ran it until 1994. In 1997, the Smithsonian acquired the Scurlock Studio Collection, including 250,000 negatives and 10,000 prints.

In his 2010 article, “The Scurlock Studio: Picture of Prosperity,” Smithsonian reporter David Zax wrote:

Dashing all over town—to baptisms and weddings, to balls and cotillions, to high-school graduations and to countless events at Howard, where he was the official photographer—Addison Scurlock became black Washington’s “photographic Boswell—the keeper of the visual memory of the community in all its quotidian ordinariness and occasional flashes of grandeur and moment,” says Jeffrey Fearing, a historian who is also a Scurlock relative.

What made his work so unique was not just his subjects but the respect he gave them:

At a time when minstrel caricature was common, Scurlock’s pictures captured black culture in its complexity and showed black people as they saw themselves.

And the annual Mardi Gras celebrations were certainly a big part of that. Covering the party all the way in Pennsylvania, the New Pittsburgh Courier wrote in 1963 that the:

Alpha Omega Chapter of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity had its annual Mardi Gras, at the National Armory last Friday evening. It was a howling success with over 5,000 guests enjoying the festivities. Those who did not wear costumes came in formal attire.

The Washington Post covered the 1996 affair, describing a lavish scene:

Bright eyes flashed through sequined masks. Feathers flew as disguises were donned. The magic of Mardis Gras melted all mindfulness of the mounting snow outside, and the march began. The New Orleans Strut, they called it–a leisurely, lounging gait. A circular stroll that skirted the ballroom thrice. Two abreast here, four astride there, a single now and again. The Dixieland band was booming–its tuba, trombone and bass drum exclaiming, proclaiming about “those saints, come marching in…”

The 1995 Mardi Gras king, Frank Patterson told the Post, “Fraternalism among African Americans is a little different than it is among whites…We started out bonding with each years ago when we couldn’t be Lions or Kiwanis.” He added, “For black Greek organizations, there’s life after college.”

More from the 1930 Mardi Gras ball.

Dancing for Mardi Gras, 1930.

More gifts for the queen of the ball, 1930.

More costumes from a 1942 Mardi Gras bash.

Ezell A. Blair, Jr. (now Jibreel Khazan), Franklin E. McCain, Joseph A. McNeil, and David L. Richmond leave the Woolworth store after the first sit-in on February 1, 1960. (Courtesy of Greensboro News and Record)

In 1960, Joseph McNeil looked at the world of Jim Crow segregation around him and asked, ”My God, when is it going to stop? Who’s going to stand up and say no?” As one of the four college freshmen who led the now famous sit-in that began February 1 at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, McNeil decided he would be the one to say no. His story, along with the stories of Ezell Blair Jr. (now Jibreel Khazan), Franklin McCain, and David Richmond, is featured in the Smithsonian Channel program, Seizing Justice: The Greensboro 4, airing February 11, 10 p.m. EST.

One of the nine students who desegregated Little Rock, Carlotta Walls LaNier (top row, third from right) recently donated her dress (left) from what would have been her first day of school. The group is pictured in 1957 with civil rights activist Daisy Bates, who helped lead the effort to integrate Little Rock. Photo by Cecil Layne, courtesy of the Library of Congress

Carlotta Walls set out for her first day of 10th grade in a new dress. The year was 1957, and the school was Little Rock Central High. Walls and eight other African-American students were stopped by a white mob opposed to desegregation, and the ensuing confrontation between Arkansas and federal authorities took 20 days and Army troops to quell.

Walls recently donated the dress—patterned with numbers and letters—to the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Bill Pretzer, a curator, says her great-uncle bought it thinking, “Desegregating Little Rock merits a store-bought dress.” Walls graduated from Little Rock Central in 1960, after her home was bombed that February.

“I really did want that diploma,” she says, “to validate all of the crap that I had gone through.” Carlotta Walls LaNier, now 70, is president of the Little Rock Nine Foundation, which works for equal access to education.

National Guardsman prevents the students (including Carlotta Walls on the left) from entering the school, September 4, 1957. Photo by Will Counts, courtesy of Arkansas History Commission

For your first day of school at Little Rock Central High School, why was that store-bought dress so special?

“We didn’t purchase too often, to be honest with you, if you understand the Jim Crow South, you couldn’t try on clothes, and so forth, as I grew up. My mother was an expert seamstress, so she just made all of our clothes, including hers. My great uncle, knew that that was the case and he wanted me to have a  store-bought dress to go to my new school, so he stopped by the house and asked my mother, he said, here’s the money and I want you to go get her a store-bought dress.”

Of the nine students, pictured here in their 1957 yearbook photographs, Carlotta Walls was the youngest. Courtesy of Chestnutt Library

What were you thinking life at your new school would be like?

“I knew that we could not do any extracurricular activity…I knew I was giving that piece up but I just figured that the following year I’d be able to get back to extracurricular activities. That part was okay. It was excitement for me, to be going to a new high school, and to be the one that was in my neighborhood. So that was what was going on in my mind.”

“Yes, I saw all of the anger, and the ugly faces across the street, but I ignored them, and I really did consider them ignorant people. To be honest with you, that is what really got me through the whole year, that I knew this was ignorance that was making these statements and not the type of people that I would associate with.”

The evening newspaper’s front page after the students were denied entrance to the school. Courtesy of the Little Rock Nine Foundation

Were your parents worried to send you?

“I think they were more proud of the fact that I had signed up to go without a discussion with them.”

“I know they were nervous by what they were reading, but they also felt confident that we were doing the right thing. When I wrote my book, I read some quotes of my father’s and he felt that, he had served in World War II, I had a right to go to that school and his tax dollars helped pay for that school, for the schooling that went on. And he felt that they didn’t separate his taxes, so why should we be separated as far as going to school?”

“Black Monday” was coined to mark the date of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Monday, May 17, 1954. In protest, the White Citizens’ Council movement in Mississippi, led by Thomas Pickens Brady, a circuit court judge, published this handbook, Black Monday, calling for the nullification of the NAACP, the creation of a 49th state for African Americans, and the abolition of public schools. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

As the youngest, how did you relate to the rest of the Little Rock Nine?

“I listened to the seniors and juniors, even when I was in junior high school, I looked up to those who were older and were doing well, they were role models for me.”

“I must admit as the months went on, I recognized we were all equal in this, so you know my decision making got sharper and more focused, I think I was focused to start with, otherwise I wouldn’t have gone there anyway, but as far as decision making I was making some decisions that were somewhat different than some of the others because I looked at the landscape a little bit differently.”

“One in particular. . .I was thinking about Minnijean [Brown-Trickey] and Melba [Pattillo Beals] and a couple of others who bought their lunch every day in the cafeteria. That was a battleground in my mind that, you knew that you were going to have to deal with being pushed and shoved. . .in line to purchase your lunch. So I brought my lunch every day, so I wouldn’t have to deal with that. I dealt with it enough in the hallways and in the classrooms. My one break was having lunch, so why have to continue that sort of thing in the lunch line?”

Protestors, one with a Confederate flag, gather at the capitol building to protest the reopening of the public schools in 1959. Photo by John Bledsoe, courtesy of the Library of Congress

“Race Mixing Is Communism,” read one protestor’s sign. 1959. Photo by John Bledsoe, courtesy of the Library of Congress

A young kid watches the mob of protestors as they march from the capitol building to the high school. 1959. Photo by John Bledsoe, courtesy of the Library of Congress

But you made it through the first year and then came back your senior year, even after the governor closed the school for an entire year?

“I was determined to finish that year, I was not going to give up, because that way they would’ve won, and I was not about to let that happen. Because of my sports involvement, I was a pretty competitive person. I was just not going to let that happen. I didn’t have to go back, but after awhile, after that first and the second year the schools were closed, I went back my senior year to finish, because I really did want that diploma to validate all of the crap that I had gone through.”

“I remember being back on the campus and the fact that there were no guards there to protect us. I was cautious, there was no question about that, however, I also felt that the senior class members were in the 10th grade with me. . .they had suffered just like I had in a sense with school being out and they were low people on the totem pole too, so now that they were in a leadership position, they were determined not to have the same sort of things to go on. Not to say that they stopped a lot of things, but the tone was different and they didn’t want the schools to be closed either, they were happy to be back in school.”

New York Mayor Robert Wagner greets the Little Rock Nine students, shaking hands with Carlotta Walls on his right and Thelma Mothershed on his left, in 1958. Photo by Walter Albertin, courtesy of the Library of Congress

Why did your mom keep your first day of school dress all those years?

“She just packed it up and put it in the cedar chest. I think not knowing, but at the same feeling that it meant something, she kept it. And I’m just happy she did.”

A Sunday school class at Blackdom Baptist Church, circa 1925. Courtesy of the Museum of New Mexico

In the early 1900s, a small utopian settlement of African American families took shape in the New Mexico plains about 20 miles south of Roswell. Founded by homesteader Francis Marion Boyer, who was fleeing threats from the Ku Klux Klan, the town of Blackdom, New Mexico, became the state’s first community of African Americans. By 1908, the town had reached its zenith with a thriving population of 300, supporting local businesses, a newspaper and a church. However, after crop failures and other calamities, the town by the late 1920s had rapidly depopulated. Today little remains of the town—an ambitious alternative to the racist realities elsewhere—except a plaque on a lonely highway. But a small relic now lives on at the National Postal Museum, which recently acquired the postal account book kept for Blackdom from 1912 t0 1919.

“Here the black man has an equal chance with the white man. Here you are reckoned at the value which you place upon yourself. Your future is in your own hands.”

Lucy Henderson wrote these words to the editor of  The Chicago Defender, a black newspaper, in December, 1912, trying to persuade others to come settle in the home she had found in Blackdom. She said, “I feel I owe it to my people to tell them of this free land out here.”

Boyer traveled more than 1,000 miles on foot from Georgia to New Mexico to start a new life and a new town in the land his father once visited during the Mexican-American War. With a loan from the Pacific Mutual Company, Boyer dug a well and began farming. Boyer’s stationery proudly read, “Blackdom Townsite Co., Roswell, New Mexico. The only exclusive Negro settlement in New Mexico.” Though work on the homesteading town began in 1903, the post office would not open until 1912.

A sketch of Blackdom’s town plan. Courtesy of Maisha Baton and Henry Walt’s A History of Blackdom, N.M., in the Context of the African-American Post Civil War Colonization Movement, 1996.

David Profitt house, a typical house in Blackdom, New Mexico. Courtesy of the Museum of New Mexico

When it did, Henderson was able to brag to Chicago readers, “We have a post office, store, church, school house, pumping plant, office building and several residents already established.”

“The climate is ideal,” Henderson claimed in her letter. “I have only this to say,” she went on, “any one coming to Blackdom and deciding to throw in their lot with us will never have cause to regret it.”

By the late 1920s, the town was deserted, after a drought in 1916 and less-than-plentiful yields.

Blackdom’s cash book was passed down by three different postmasters, including the town’s final postmaster, a woman named Bessie E. Malone. Courtesy of the National Postal Museum

Blackdom’s post office. Courtesy of New Mexico PBS

The post office spanned nearly the entire life of the town, operating from 1912 to 1919. Records in the account book detail the money orders coming in and out of Blackdom. “When you look at a money order,” explains Postal Museum specialist Lynn Heidelbaugh, “particularly for a small community setting itself up, this is them sending money back home to their homes and families and setting up their new farms.”

Though Blackdom did not survive and never expanded to the size Lucy Henderson may have hoped, black settlements like it were common elsewhere during a period of migration sometimes called the Great Exodus following the Homestead Act of 1862, particularly in Kansas. According to a 2001 archaeological study on the Blackdom region from the Museum of New Mexico, “During the decade of the 1870s, 9,500 blacks from Kentucky and Tennessee migrated to Kansas. By 1880 there were 43,110 blacks in Kansas.”

Partly pushed out of the South after the failures of Reconstruction, many of the families were also pulled West. The report goes on, “Land speculators used a variety of methods in developing a town’s population. They advertised town lots by distributing handbills, newspapers, and pamphlets to a target population. They sponsored round-trip promotional excursions that featured reduced rail fares for Easterners and offered free land for schools and churches.”

The towns had varying degrees of success and many of the promises of paid passage and waiting success proved false. Still, the Topeka Colored Citizen declared in 1879, “If blacks come here and starve, all well. It is better to starve to death in Kansas than to be shot and killed in the South.”

After the Blackdom post office closed, the money book was handed off to a nearby station. The book sat in the back office for decades until a savvy clerk contacted a historian with the Postal Service, who helped the document find a new home at the Postal Museum, years after its old home had vanished.

Martin Robinson Delany worked to recruit soldiers for black Union regiments and met with Lincoln to allow these units to be led by black officers. He approved the plan and Delany became the first black major to receive a field command. Hand-colored lithograph, 1865. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery

Black soldiers could not officially join the Union army until the Emancipation Proclamation was issued on January 1, 1863. But, on the ground, they had been fighting and dying from the beginning.

When three escaped slaves arrived at Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia, in May, 1861, Union General Benjamin Butler had to make a choice. Under the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, he was compelled to return the men into the hands of the slaveowner. But Virginia had just signed the ordinances of secession. Butler determined that he was now operating in a foreign territory and declared the men “contraband of war.”

When more enslaved men, women and children arrived at the fort, Butler wrote to Washington for advice. In these early days of the Civil War, Lincoln avoided the issue of emancipation entirely. A member of his cabinet suggested Butler simply keep the people he found useful and return the rest. Butler replied, “So should I keep the mother and send back the child?” Washington left it up to him, and he decided to keep all of the 500 enslaved individuals who found their way to his fort.

“This was the beginning of an informal arrangement that enabled the union to protect fugitive slaves but without addressing the issue of emancipation,” says Ann Shumard, senior curator of photographs at the National Portrait and the curator behind the new exhibit opening February 1, “Bound For Freedom’s Light: African Americans and the Civil War.”

An abolitionist and former slave, Sojourner Truth also helped recruit soldiers in Michigan. Mathew Brady Studio, albumen silver print, circa 1864. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery

Though many know of the actions and names of people like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, hundreds of names have been more or less lost to history. Individuals like those who made the dangerous journey to Fort Monroe tell a very different story of the Civil War than usually rehearsed.

“They were very much active agents of their own emancipation in many instances and strong advocates for the right to participate in military operations,” says Shumard, who gathered 20 carte de visite portraits, newspaper illustrations, recruitment posters and more to tell this story.

Amid the stories of bravery both inside and outside of the military, though, rests a foreboding uncertainty. There are reminders throughout the exhibit that freedom was not necessarily what waited on the other side of the Union lines.

“There were no guarantees that permanent liberty would be the outcome,” says Shumard. Even grand gestures like the Emancipation Proclamation often fell flat in the daily lives of blacks in the South. “It didn’t really free anybody,” says Shumard. The Confederates, of course, did not recognize its legitimacy. All it truly ensured was that blacks could now fight in a war in which they were already inextricably involved.

Events like the July, 1863 draft riot in New York City, represented in the exhibit with a page of illustrations published in Harper’s Weekly, served as a reminder that, “New York was by no means a bastion of Northern support.” According to Shumard, “There was a strong amount of sympathy for the Confederacy.” Though the five-day riot began in protest against the unequal draft lottery policies that would allow wealthy people to simply pay their way out of service, anger quickly turned against the city’s freed black population. “No one was safe,” says Shumard. Shown in the illustrations, one black man was dragged into the street, beaten senseless and then hanged from a tree and burned before the crowd.

After escaping slavery on a Louisiana plantation, Gordon reached Union lines in Baton Rouge where doctors examined the horrific scarring on his back left from the whipping of his former overseer. Photographs of his back were published in Harper’s Weekly and served to refute the myth that slavery was a benign institution. Mathew Brady Studio albumen silver print, 1863. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery

Joining the Union cause was also an uncertain prospect. Before the emancipation proclamation, it was unclear what might happen to escaped slaves at the end of the war. One suggestion, according to Shumard, was to sell them back to Southern slaveowners to pay for the war.

“There were times when one might have thought that the outcome of a battle or something else would have discouraged enlistment when in fact it actually only made individuals more eager to fight,” Shumard says.

Meanwhile, black soldiers had to find their place in a white army. Officers from an early Louisiana guard of black troops organized by Butler, for instance, were demoted because white officers “objected to having to salute or otherwise recognize black peers.”

Frederick Douglass encouraged service nonetheless, calling on individuals “to claim their rightful place as citizens of the United States.”

Many did, and many, in fact, had already.

After his time in the Union army, Smalls went on to serve in South Carolina politics during Reconstruction. Wearn & Hix Studio albumen silver print, 1868. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery

A celebrated tale at the time, the story of deckhand Robert Smalls’ escape from the Confederates inspired the North. Smalls had been sent away as a young child in South Carolina to earn wages to send back to his slave master. By 1861, he was working on a Confederate ship. With his shipmates, he plotted to commandeer the vessel while the white crew was ashore. Before the sun rose one morning in May, 1862, the group set to work, navigating their way toward Union lines. Disguised with the captain’s straw hat and comfortable moving around the fortifications and submerged mines, Smalls made his way to safety and went on to pilot the same boat for the Union army. Shumard says, “There was great rejoicing in the North at this daring escape because he had not only escaped with his shipmates, but they had also picked up members of their families on the way out.”

But often these stories were treated with derision by the popular press, as in the instance of a man known simply as Abraham who was said to have been literally “blown to freedom.” As a slave working for the Confederate army, Abraham was reportedly blasted across enemy lines when Union soldiers detonated explosives beneath the Confederate’s earthen fortifications.

“The Harper’s Weekly article that was published after this happened tended to treat the whole episode as a humorous moment,” says Shumard. “You find that often in the mainstream coverage of incidents with African American troops, that it can sometimes devolve almost into minstrelsy. They asked him how far he had traveled and he was quoted as saying, about three miles.”

Abraham stayed with the Union troops as a cook for General McPherson.

“By the end of the Civil War, roughly 179,000 black men (10 percent of the Union Army) served as soldiers in the U.S. Army and another 19,000 served in the Navy,” according to the National Archives. “Nearly 40,000 black soldiers died over the course of the war—30,000 of infection or disease.”

Posed near the final print of the exhibit showing a triumphant Lincoln striding through crowds of adoring supporters in Richmond, Virginia, in 1865, are portraits of two unidentified black soldiers, a private and a corporal. The images are commonplace mementos from the war. Soldiers white and black would fill photography studios to get their pictures taken in order to have something to give to family left behind. The loved ones, “could only wait and hope for their soldier’s safe return.”

The now anonymous pair look brave, exchanging a steady gaze with the viewer. But they were not simply contemplating an uncertain fate of life or death, a soldier’s safe return. Instead, they stared down the uncertainty of life as it had been and life as it might be.

 ”Bound For Freedom’s Light: African Americans and The Civil War” is on view through March 2, 2014 at the National Portrait Gallery.

Last week’s holiday gift guide had a little something for everyone: science lover, wordsmiths, artsy types and history buffs. But this week, we’re bringing you the unabridged list of history picks, each of which were recommended by researchers, curators and staff at the Institution so they’ve got the smarty stamp of approval.

So stop sneezing over perfume samples and sorting through silk ties, this list of more than 30 titles, from hip-hop history for newcomers to the Civil War canon, is all you’ll need this holiday season.

Biography

Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff. The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer delivers a dramatic account of one of the most famed but misunderstood women of all time. The New York Times called it “a cinematic portrait of a historical figure far more complex and compelling than any fictional creation, and a wide, panning, panoramic picture of her world.” (Recommended by Laurel Fritzsch, project assistant at the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation)

The Lost World of James Smithson: Science, Revolution, and the Birth of the Smithsonian by Heather Ewing. Learn more about this British chemist and the Institution’s founder, who left his fortunes to a country he’d never even set foot in, all in the name of science and knowledge. (Recommended by Robyn Einhorn, project assistant for armed forces history at the American History Museum)

Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry’s Greatest Generation by Daisy Hay. In addition to the celebrated figures of Lord Byron, Mary Shelley and John Keats, Hay’s book also weaves in mistresses, journalists and in-laws for a riveting tale of personal drama. (Recommended by Laurel Fritzsch, project assistant at the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation)

Genius of Place: The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted by Justin Martin. “Olmsted did so many different things in life, that it’s like reading a history of the country to read about him,” says the Institution’s Amy Karazsia. Not just the landscape architect behind everything from Central Park to Stanford University, Olmsted was also an outspoken abolitionist, whose social values informed his design. (Recommended by Amy Karazsia, director of giving at the American History Museum)

Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss: How an Unlikely Couple Found Love, Dodged the FBI, and Transformed Children’s Literature by Philip Nel. Not as famous as their mentee Maurice Sendak, Johnson and Krauss lived just as colorful a life creating children’s classic, including Harold and the Purple Crayon, that endure even today. (Recommended by Peggy Kidwell, curator of medicine and science at the American History Museum)

American History

Big Chief Elizabeth: The Adventures and Fate of the First English Colonists in America by Giles Milton. A look at some of the first settlers, including a Native American who had been taken captive, traveled to England and then returned to America as Lord and Governor before disappearing. Milton unravels the mystery of what happened to those early settlers. (Recommended by Carol Slatick, museum specialist at the American History Museum)

The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilization, 1600-1675 by Bernard Bailyn. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author who has written profusely on early American history here turns his eye to the people already on North America’s shores when the British arrived and their interactions with the colonists. (Recommended by Rayna Green, curator of home and community life at the American History Museum)

Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different by Gordon S. Wood. For those who think they have the complete picture of the founding fathers, allow Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gordon S. Wood to fill in the details and explain what made each unique. (Recommended by Lee Woodman, senior advisor for the office of the director at the American History Museum)

Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 by Gordon S. Wood. And for those who like their Pulitzer Prize winners to take a broader look, Wood’s Empire of Liberty examines the larger context in which those greats from his Revolutionary Characters worked. (Recommended by Timothy Winkle, curator of home and community life at the American History Museum)

Six Frigates: The epic history of the founding of the US Navy, by Ian W. Toll. Our Smithsonian recommender wrote that this book is a, “real page-turner about the politics surrounding the creation of a navy, the shipbuilding process, the Navy culture of the time, characteristics of each ship and the characters who served on them,” from the War of 1812,  the Mediterranean naval actions and more. (Recommended by Brett Mcnish, supervisory horticulturalist at Smithsonian Gardens)

The Burning of Washington: The British Invasion of 1814 by Anthony Pitch. The story of how Dolly Madison rescued George Washington’s portrait from the White House when it was engulfed in flames during the British attack is by now common classroom stuff. But Pitch breathes new life into the now quaint tale, delivering a gripping account of the actions as they unfolded. (Recommended by Cathy Keen, archives curator at the American History Museum)

What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War by Chandra Manning. We remember the Civil War through the words of famous men, but Manning returns the struggle’s voice to those who fought, including both black and white soldiers as she pulls from journals, letters and regimental newspapers. (Recommended by Barbara Clark Smith, curator of political history at the American History Museum)

The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery by Eric Foner. Though we learn more about the man every year, Abraham Lincoln’s true relationship to the issue of slavery remains buried somewhere between pragmatism and indignation. This account from the Pulitzer Prize-winning Foner brings out the nuance of the full conversation, not shying away from the difficult and sometimes contradictory parts. (Recommended by Arthur Molella, director of the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation)

Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard. The best-selling book just released in June details the attempted assassination of President Garfield in 1881. Full of intrigue, the book found fans in the Smithsonian partly because the apparatus Alexander Graham Bell used to find the bullet which wounded the President is actually in the collections. (Recommended by Roger Sherman, curator of medicine and science for the American History Museum)

Guest of Honor: Booker T. Washington, Theodore Roosevelt and the White House Dinner That Shocked a Nation by Deborah Davis. Though enslaved African Americans built the White House, none had ever dined there until Booker T. Washington was invited to by President Roosevelt. The incredibly controversial dinner engulfed the country in outrage but Davis places it within a larger story, uniting the biographies of two very different men. (Recommended by Joann Stevens, program director of Jazz Appreciation Month at the American History Museum)

Freedom Summer: The Savage Season of 1964 That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy by Bruce Watson. Racism consumed the entire nation, but the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee chose Mississippi as one of the worst offenders. A modest army of hundreds of students and activists went to the state to man voter registration drives and fill the schools with teachers. Though the summer produced change, it also witnessed the murder of three young men whose deaths would not be solved until years later. (Recommended by Christopher Wilson, program director of African American culture at the American History Museum)

The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro. This four-volume monolith by the Pulitzer Prize winning Robert Caro runs more than 3,000 pages and yet it captured the adoration of nearly every reviewer for its painstakingly thorough and engaging biography of a complicated man and era. (Recommended by Rayna Green, curator of home and community life at the American History Museum)

Social History

Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James McPherson. As Alex Dencker says, this is, “not a typical Civil War book.” McPherson deftly handles the Civil War while also creating a portrait of what made America unique, from its infrastructure, to its agriculture to its populations, to set the stage in a new way. (Recommended by Alex Dencker, horticulturalist at Smithsonian Gardens)

City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago by Gary Krist. July 1919 proved particularly eventful in Chicago, with a race riot, the Goodyear blimp disaster and a dramatic police hunt for a missing girl. Krist looks beyond the buzz of headlines to capture a city in transformation. (Recommended by Bonnie Campbell Lilienfeld, supervisor curator of home and community life at the American History Museum)

Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America by Juan Gonzalez. A revised and updated edition of a comprehensive work from columnist Juan Gonzalez provides a contemporary look at the long history of a diverse group whose national profile continues to rise. (Recommended by Magdalena Mieri, program director in Latino history and culture at the American History Museum)

The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace by Lynn Povich. Valeska Hilbig, from the American History Museum, loved the way this book, “as compelling as any novel,” also provided “an accurate, intimate history of new women journalists invading the male journalistic world of the 1970s” to reveal how women’s struggle for recognition in the workplace may just be beginning. (Recommended by Valeska Hilbig, public affairs specialist at the American History Museum)

At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson. If you happen to, like Bill Bryson, live in a 19th century English rectory, you might assume your home is full of history. But Bryson shows us, in addition to touring his own home, that these private and often ignored spaces hold the story of human advancement. (Recommended by Laurel Fritzsch, project assistant at the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation)

Science History

Poisons of the Past: Molds, Epidemics, and History by Mary Kilbourne Matossian. Could food poisoning have been at the heart of some of Europe’s strangest moments in history? That’s what Matossian argues in her look at how everything from food preparation to climate may have shaped a region’s history. (Recommended by Carol Slatick, museum specialist at the American History Museum)

Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World by Adrienne Mayor. An easy read that looks at the often dark and very long history of biological warfare, using everything from Greek mythology to evidence from archeological dig sties. (Recommended by Carol Slatick, museum specialist at the American History Museum)

The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States by Mark Fiege. In a sweeping history, Fiege persuasively argues that no moment in time can be separated from its environment, brining together natural and social history. (Recommended by Jeffrey Stine, supervisory curator of medicine and science at the American History Museum)

Sea of Glory: America’s Voyage of Discovery, The U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842 by Nathaniel Philbrick. Our insider, Brett McNish, described the text and its connection to the institution saying it was, “a brilliant read about the U.S. Exploring Expedition (a.k.a. Wilkes Expedition) and what would become the basis of the Smithsonian’s collection,” noting that, “Smithsonian Gardens has descendants of some of the plants Wilkes brought back in our Orchid Collection and garden areas.” (Recommended by Brett McNish, supervisory horticulturalist of grounds management)

The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic–and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson. 1854 London was both a thriving young metropolis and the perfect breeding ground for a deadly cholera outbreak. Johnson tells the story not just of the outbreak, but how the outbreak influenced that era’s fledgling cities and scientific worldview. (Recommended by Judy Chelnick, curator of medicine and science at the American History Museum)

The Arcanum The Extraordinary True Story By Janet Gleeson. The search for an elixir has long obsessed man, but in the early 18th century, Europeans were hard at work on another mystery: how exactly the East made its famed and envied porcelain. Gleeson tells the diverting tale of that fevered search with flourish. (Recommended by Robyn Einhorn, project assistant for armed forces history at the American History Museum)

The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead by Ann Fabian. Perhaps not unsurprisingly, the story of skull collecting in a misguided effort to confirm racist stereotypes of the 1800s is a dark, even ghoulish tale. Fabian takes one noted naturalist, Samuel George Morton, who collected hundreds of skulls over his lifetime as she unpacks a society’s cranial obsession. (Recommended by Barbara Clark Smith, curator of political history at the American History Museum)

The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York by Deborah Blum. For years, poisons had been the preferred weapon of the country’s underworld. All that changed, however, in 1918 when Charles Norris was named New York City’s chief medical examiner  and made it his mission to apply science to his work. (Recommended by Laurel Fritzsch, project assistant at the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation)

Music History

Groove Music: The Art and Culture of the Hip-Hop DJ by Mark Katz. Told from the point of the view of the very people at the center of the genre’s creation, Katz’s history of hip-hop relies on the figure of the DJ to tell its story and reveal the true innovation of the craft that began in the Bronx. (Recommended by Laurel Fritzsch, project assistant at the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation)

Underground Dance Masters: Final History of a Forgotten Era by Thomas Guzmán Sánchez. According to the Institution’s Marvette Perez, the text “captures the essence of hip-hop culture in California, not only from a great student of hip hop and popular culture, but one who was part of the movement back in the day, a great account.” Looking at the break dance movement that predated hip-hop’s origins, Sánchez details what made California’s scene so unique. (Recommended by Marvette Perez, curator of culture and the arts at the American History Museum)

Read more articles about the holidays with our Smithsonian Holiday Guide here