Season 3, Episode 4 of the Folklife Today Podcast is ready for listening! In this episode, John Fenn and I interview Candacy Taylor, whose latest project is documenting sites associated with the Negro Motorist Green Book, a travel guide for African Americans during the Jim Crow era. Taylor discusses the dangers inherent in travel for Black people during an era where racial discrimination was legal and open racism was common. She fills us in on the origins of the Green Book. We discuss sites such as Dooky Chase’s restaurant in New Orleans, where owner Leah Chase slapped the hand of President Barack Obama for adding hot sauce to her famous gumbo, and where she fed a young Michael Jackson her signature sweet potato pie. We also discuss the historic Hampton House, a Jewish-owned hotel in Miami, where a young boxer named Cassius Clay met Malcolm X and changed his name to Muhammad Ali, and where Martin Luther King, Jr. practiced his most famous speech.
New BARD additions this months include fascinating audio books on music from Mexico, Puerto Rico and Russia, instruction books that teach you how to play Jimi Hendix' "Purple Haze" and Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust." Also available for digital download are a music theory book on structural hearing in braille, and many braille music scores - check it out!
At the conclusion of his 2014 keynote address on guarantees enshrined in the Constitution but historically denied to African Americans, Bob Moses – freedom rights activist, educator, and MacArthur Genius award winner – summarized the state of the nation thus: “And we are a country that lurches. We lurch forward and backward, forward and backward. …
This piece, by Fayth M. Parks, is one in the collection of essays on the National Film Registry. The complete list can be found here. Zora Neale Hurston In the approximately 42 minutes of black and white 16mm film footage, during an outdoor church service scene, Zora Neale Hurston waves her hand directing a church …
The National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled (NLS), Library of Congress, will kick off its 90th anniversary celebration with a free virtual concert by jazz pianist Matthew Whitaker on Wednesday, March 3, at 8:00 p.m. (EST)—and you’re invited!
The following is a guest post by Josh Levy, Historian of Science and Technology in the Library’s Manuscript Division. What’s a historian to do with a born digital file? On Christmas Day, 1854, between family gatherings and fretting over the cost of living in Washington, engineer Montgomery Meigs was notating his plans to build a …
As it usually does this time of year, my California born-and-bred spirit has me already looking for signs of spring (the novelty of winter going only so far). And where better place to turn for a little spring — especially when nature won’t oblige — than the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog? But the results …
The following is a guest post by Annette James, a program coordinator at the U.S. Copyright Office. As I reflect upon the 2021 Black History Month theme, The Black Family: Representation, Identity, and Diversity, the word family captures a wealth of emotions. It calls up memories of childhood and retrospection on lessons learned. It brings …
