David Langhorst; Riché Richardson
Interviewee: David Langhorst; Riché Richardson
Interviewer: Doug Exton
Description: In this talk, Riché Richardson reflects on the life, activism, and lasting impact of Rosa Parks. She explores Parks’ legacy, her work with children, and how it shaped Richardson’s own journey—from student activism at St. Jude Educational Institute in Montgomery, Alabama, to her career as a professor and artist engaging with Parks through writing and art. Richardson discusses her book, Emancipation’s Daughters: Reimagining Black Femininity and the National Body, which includes a chapter on Parks, along with her art quilts featured in solo shows at the Rosa Parks Museum in 2008 and 2015. Riché Richardson is a professor of African American literature at Cornell University’s Africana Studies and Research Center. A Montgomery native, she received a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2001. Her work has been featured in NBC’s Today Show, CNN, Al Jazeera, and the New York Times, and her Op-Eds have appeared in Public Books and HuffPost. She has published nearly 40 essays and is the author of Black Masculinity and the U.S. South: From Uncle Tom to Gangsta, named an ‘Outstanding Academic Title of 2008’ by Choice Books. Emancipation's Daughters was published by Duke University Press in 2021. She is also the editor of the New Southern Studies book series at the University of Georgia Press and a visual artist whose quilts have been featured in national exhibitions.
Date: 2021-10-05
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Doug Exton: Thank you so much for joining us for today's Connected Conversation, a program conducted by the Idaho Humanities Council. If you're not familiar with our organization, I encourage you to check out our website, idahohumanities.org. I also like to remind you that you may submit any questions using either the Q&A feature or the chat feature located at the bottom of your screen. With me today is two wonderful people. We have Doctor Richardson and we also have David Langhorst. I turn it over to you, David.
David Langhorst: Well, thank you very much. Some of you may wonder what I'm doing here, and I'll tell you the story. Some of you who know me might know that in the late 1980s, I had the pleasure of being a history and government teacher at, Saint Jude's Educational Institute in Montgomery, Alabama.
It was one of the most enlightening and fulfilling times in my life, for sure. And, but it was also challenging. And if you can imagine, a young guy out of graduate school teaching civil rights units to students whose grandparents, had participated in the Montgomery bus boycott and many of whose parents remembered, the civil rights movement in real time.
And, in fact, Saint Jude's served as camp number four on the last evening of the famous Selma to Montgomery march. Now, during my time there, teachers usually try not to pick favorites, you know. But I do remember one stand out. Very well. And I knew that she'd be a powerhouse in whatever path she chose. Riché, if I can call you day, chose academia and really has, indeed distinguished herself and it's on those coattails.
When she found out that I was, here in Idaho, and active in public affairs. Asked if I would, And it is a pleasure, but I asked if I would take the pleasure of introducing her. So, Idaho Humanities Council doctor Riché Richardson was born and raised in Montgomery, Alabama. She's an associate professor of African American literature in the Africana Center at Cornell, Cornell University in Ithaca.
She received her bachelor's of arts from Spelman College and her PhD from Duke University. She taught at UC Davis from 1998 until 2008. She's a 2017 Public Voices for leadership Fellow, and are op ed and nearly 40 essays have appeared in The New York Times, American Literature, HuffPost, and a long list of scholarly journals and news media. Her first book, "Black Masculinity in the US South From Uncle Tom to Gangster".
There's a provocative title. While that book was selected as one of the outstanding Academic titles of 2008, both by Choice Books and by the Eastern Book Company. Her new book, "Emancipation Daughters Reimagining Black Femininity and the National Body", was published by Duke University Press just this last January. She's, Doctor Richardson is editor of the new Southern Studies book series at the University of Georgia Press.
And on top of all that. Doctor Richardson is a visual artist whose work stretches the definition of quilt, and it ties in with her scholarly work, as you will. I think no doubt here. Later. But check them out online if you have a chance. And so with that, I, am proud to introduce Doctor Richardson.
Riché Richardson : Thank you so, so much, Mister David Langhorst, for your kind and generous introduction. I appreciate it and continue to treasure the memories of the time when you were my teacher. I want to begin by sharing a poem that I wrote honoring Rosa Parks when I was 17. So that is about a year later after my course, with with David, the title is Together We will.
We're. I am very tired today. My work has made me weary. But I really need to pay. Why must my day speech dreary? Get up. Lady, we need your chair. There's no room in the front. Who cares if you're in despair? Just give us what we want. I work so hard to make ends meet. Yet many write sadly.
And he won't let me rest my feet. I'm hated because I'm black. My ancestor had to fight and die. And I'll be just as brave. This unjust system I will defy. I won't be made a slave. I am a parent. The mother of.
A future generation, a planet I will share a love. I'll be its foundation. The children don't deserve this sorrow, this harsh reality. They deserve a better tomorrow. In short, equality. Now I wonder what I can do to change these harsh conditions. How can I make our dreams come true? I'll take a new position. Tomorrow is not good enough.
I must start right away. Times are getting much too tough. That's why I'll start today. I'm tired of the strife and grief. So I am sitting down. It's time for my people to have relief. Thus I will hold my ground. Today. My race will start anew. This system will beat. So I'm not getting up for you. I'm staying in my seat.
Lady, are you forgetting your place? You know that I'm the master. I'll sit down and support my race. That's right. I'll quit. Disaster. I'll get the respect that I deserve. My people, I won't fail. Lady, you got a lot of nerve. So you will go to jail. Fine. I will gladly go today. And I would go again for my people.
I will make a way. Together we will win. Thank you, Rosa Parks, for being a leader for everyone. You gave us the eyes for seeing and feet to stand upon you are the mother of a quest, a proud quest for improvement. Indeed. You are the very best. The mother of our movement. You've given her life as a legacy.
And this will carry on. We'll fight until we are fully free, until we truly win.
He is now mainly known for his public service and the state. But for me at Saint Jude, David Langhorst who taught me American history at age 16 and also served as my advisor while I was student council vice president, was a beacon and extraordinary example because of his work in the classroom. He was one of my most treasured, impactful and admired teachers.
He was deeply dedicated to his work and created unique educational opportunities for his students, including introducing us to the documentary Eyes on the Prize, which gave me perspective on topics that I later researched in graduate school. And as he indicated in his opening remarks, it was part of his practice to teach us and exposes the civil rights just because we had been born and raised in many cases in Montgomery, Alabama, didn't necessarily mean that we knew the history.
We had to be taught. Like most others, he was ever kind and considerate toward everyone and always fair at his high expectations of the students were clear. He treated us more like college students, once inviting a group of us to his home for intellectual dialog to build upon instruction that he so brilliantly delivered in the classroom, and that inspired universal respect and admiration among us.
He was universally liked. I never once heard a student criticize Mr. Langhorst, who was literally never. And even now, as life has taken him and them to other roles and places far away, many of his former students remain connected to him to this day through social media. What he did and what he gave made a difference and epitomized some of the greatest possibilities in teaching, and I remain thankful for his impact on my life at that stage.
And that is, he is here to join us on this program today. In retrospect, I can say that Rosa Parks his legacy began to influence my life profoundly during my teen years at Saint Jude. In addition to our academic credits, students were required to earn eight service credits on the road to graduation by engaging and volunteering at the pace of two per year.
While I could have used my work on the student council to cover those spaces, I opted to roll up my sleeves and develop up community program at age 16 and 17 as Student Council vice president and then president at the historic Saint Jude Educational Institute, I developed a leadership program at the Cleveland Avenue YMCA under the supervision of its director, Robert James, with the goal of making a difference in the community.
Saint Jude is best historically known as the final camping place for Selma to Montgomery marchers in 1965 on its 40 acre campus that included a church, hospital, elementary and high school, social services, and other facilities. For two years, I volunteered every Friday afternoon coordinating the program at the Y on Cleveland Avenue for children and pre-teens and the surrounding community, the same community in which Rosa Parks had once lived at the time that she refused to give up her seat when the bus driver, James Blake, ordered her to do so on the Montgomery bus that fateful evening of December 1st, 1955.
It's now named Rosa Parks Avenue. My work with children in the vicinity reflected her longstanding commitment to supporting them through work, such as her leadership in Montgomery NAACP Youth Council, where she had mentored girls such as Mary Frances Witt, a friend and federated club sister of my mother, Joanne Richardson. Rosa Parks is early work with this group was extended, and her continuing engagement with children and her writings, and in her outreach to them through her work and the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-development in Detroit, Michigan, an organization whose mission focused on mentoring youth, encouraging their success, and taking them on trips to broaden and enhance their knowledge of history.
Her aim was never to indoctrinate students in any way but to support and encourage their success. Rosa Parks strongly believe that such organizations and their outreach were crucial to help ensure that every child has a chance, including children whose re whose families lack resources and privilege. At age 17, I want a first place prize and a poetry contest in the city of Montgomery for the point that I just shared together, we will win at this point in life.
Over 30 years later, and in the work that I do as a university professor at Cornell, at Cornell, I continue to find deep inspiration in the legacy of Rosa Parks as both a scholar and artist on the path of my life, that volunteer work. That volunteer work was foundational to my continuing commitment to making a difference as a black woman teacher, researcher, and artist, I frequently grapple with the system of slave antebellum slavery, including its impact on black mothers and dealing with what the human means to scholars.
Is someone who works in an interdisciplinary department of African Studies and the humanities field, and in films such as African American Literature, Gender Studies, Southern Studies, and Black Feminism. I think and talk a lot about that topic. Africana studies, a field founded on an embrace of activism and community service and outreach, is an ideal site from which to cultivate projects linked to public and community engagement, especially as the latter have gained more emphasis in academic institutions.
Concomitantly, I frequently discuss the long history of freedom struggles within the Black liberation movement, along with the lingering manifestations of these systems. Because I was born and raised in Montgomery and the post-Civil rights era, the civil rights movement, including the activism of Rosa Parks, is an aspect of this long history of black liberation that has most viscerally impacted my life and work.
When my first book, "Black Masculinity in the U.S. South", was published in 2007, Troy University's Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery hosted a book signing and public reception as an art filter. My first two solo exhibitions of my mixed media appliqué art quilts in 2008 and 2015, were both held at Rosa Parks Museum and curated when George Norman was its director in 2008, and as part of a community based programming for my first art show, Dialoguing, with fourth and fifth graders from Eddie Nixon Elementary School in Montgomery in a workshop, a school located a few blocks away from the Y brought me full circle and back to the community in which I had volunteered during my
teen years. Georgette Norman and I first met after I graduated from Spelman College in 1993, when we were assigned to the same unit as volunteers for a week at a Girl Scout Day camp for economically disadvantaged girls, Camp Sunshine, which is now a camp for boys. At the time, she was serving as the director of the Alabama African-American Arts Alliance, which she had founded to help support and promote African American and African diaspora and art in the state.
In keeping with her outstanding leadership, legacy, and building arts institutions in Alabama to make a positive and transformative community impact, such cultural contributions have situated her among the South's foremost black women institution leaders and curators, and the arts. Like the girls, I called her Mr. Jet back then, and she and I kept in touch after sharing such an inspiring week together, mentoring the girls.
I had made my first quilt as a senior at Spelman, and she encouraged me to exhibit my work. At some point, our dialogues mirrored Rosa Parks continuing investments in youth, and demonstrated the difference that sustained commitment to mentoring and volunteering in the community can make, including building mentoring relationships among black women and girls. All my visits home from graduate school at Duke University, I would visit her and attend parties in her art salon at her home, also located in Rosa Parks.
This former community near the Y, where I had white volunteer actors from the Alabama Shakespeare Festival and musicians from the Montgomery City Orchestra, could often be spotted. And this intellectually dynamic and lively artistic community over the years. During these evenings, I enjoyed activities from participating in African drumming to hearing a blues band, and even shared my quilt work informally in this setting several times.
On January 31st, 2013, the historian Jeanne Theoharis was invited to the museum to speak about her newly released political biography of Parks, "The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks", which was organized and introduced by her dad and aired on C-Span two to launch Parks's centennial birthday celebration in Montgomery on February 4th, I was honored to serve as the invited speaker for Rosa Parks Gala 100th birthday celebration at the museum, on a program that included a special letter from First Lady Michelle Obama.
Read by Georgette, a poetry reading by National Book Award recipient Nikky Finney, and remarks by Montgomery's mayor Todd Strange and other city officials, along with administrators from Troy University. I had an opportunity to present an excerpt from my academic work on Rosa Parks. This moment was typical of how my art has also positioned me to engage the public and dialog across the political spectrum.
This was a mostly local Republican political establishment that organized and participated in this event. Related to Rosa Parks. The same was true in France in 2009, when I was invited to come to Paris as a cultural envoy of the U.S. embassy for the Exhibitions and Public Dialogs with multiple groups of high school and college students, and was honored at the ambassador's residence.
Events coordinated by the Cultural Affairs Office in the US embassy under the administration of the ambassador Craig Stapleton, who I understand was the cousin of George W Bush. They had also brought Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison to France the year before. The truth is that politics has nothing to do with who can conceivably make an impact on communities. My experiences have shown me that all of us have the potential to do so.
I was presented the night of Rosa Parks' birthday with a framed set of stamps, and also invited to be a part of the historic stamp unveiling with the postmaster, Donald Stites, and Georgette Norman, along with Rosa Parks, his family members who had traveled from Atlanta. Georgette had developed a 100 Birthday Wishes community project in Montgomery, in which children shared their thoughts about their city, their country and the world, and changes that they suggested be made to make them better places, which were shared in the Montgomery Advertiser newspaper and on the night of the celebration, had been printed on paper handmade by children in a traveling mobile through the region and present it to the
city officials. I was also presented with a framed display featuring the paper, whose main message was that wishes do come true. I took the stage again and I unveiled my art quilt honoring the heroine, and donated it to the museum at the celebration. All of my life's work came together that day, and it has been one of the happiest days of my life.
I felt that if I felt as if I had been born for that day and saw my life's purpose far more clearly, to the point that I am humbled enough to say that I enjoy celebrating Rosa Parks the Centennial birthday far more than I have ever enjoyed celebrating a birthday of my own. My Rosa Parks Art quilt is now on display in the permanent collection at three universities Rosa Parks Museum and is a part of the art montage that greets guests as they enter the museum.
So this is the location of the museum at Montgomery and Lee Streets in Montgomery, Alabama. And this was the stamp of the unveiling, which is pictured on the right. And then here I am. I mean, on the left and on the right here, I'm pictured with the quilt. Before it was, it was placed under glass. And this quilt is also the art piece featured in the cover design of my new book, Emancipation Daughters and its applique composition against a fabric front backdrop featuring a map invoking the longer history of modernity and a rainbow back my Art quilt frames parks in relation to the long history of black freedom, struggle and movements, while simultaneously
linking her to diverse global populations. As someone who was born, raised and educated in Montgomery until I graduated from high school, but who primarily lives and works in Ithaca, New York, far away from my home town, I value everything that keeps my work as both a scholar and artist connected to the Montgomery community. Rosa Parks this gala birthday experience gave me a sense of what can happen when academics, and especially humanists, are given a public platform on which to share ideas, and I discovered my work's potential to help open up dialogues between people positioned along opposite political lines who simply do not have opportunities to meet for dialog.
In 2013 and 14, the program aired regularly on the regional Capital Television network Capital City Connection, typically three times a day when on the programing schedule. This opportunity has allowed me to share my research projects related to her legacy with a large and diverse television audience in Alabama's public sphere, which also means a lot to me as a scholar who was born and raised in the state.
This is just one of the ways in which my project demonstrates the relevance and value of humanist oriented academic research in the public sphere and its potential to make an impact on communities. And 2015 portraits from Montgomery to Paris from Montgomery, which featured 60 of my art quilts, was highlighted on public tours to help honor the 60th anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery March, and dedicated to the memory of my grandparents, Joe Richardson and Emmylou Jenkins Richardson.
Rosa Parks was the centerpiece of the quilting series that I developed for this show and tribute to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which features pieces honoring her, Martin Luther King Jr and Ed Nixon. The exhibition, which ran from January 10th through March 27th, 2015, was launched by Troy University with a major public reception held on Doctor King's January 15th birthday and to a large public audience, and I also released a print card featuring a quilt of him on the occasion.
The exhibition was toured on a daily basis by busloads of schoolchildren and many other visitors, and featured in stories in the media and both the Montgomery Appetizer newspaper and the WSB television news. On the eve of the Selma to Montgomery marches historic 50th commemoration in Selma, the museum held a gala reception in the gallery room with my Quilt exhibition for a host of local leaders, as well as many national leaders, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Reverend Martin Luther King, the third Reverend Jesse Jackson, and Reverend Bernice King.
My work as, both a scholar and visual artist, helped me to make a strong public impact during these events at Rosa Parks Museum, which is fitting considering that her legacy has been a subject of investigation for me as both a scholar and artist. Now my academic work has begun to draw public and media interest on its own terms.
I have found myself. I have found, my artwork to be tremendously useful in expanding my opportunities for public and community engagement. I often find myself working on similar research questions in my art, but for very different audiences, and value working in both contexts for opportunities that I have to address some of the questions for vastly different audience is.
Those who may never read my written work can nevertheless reflect on the less topical questions that my exhibitions raise when they encounter my visual work and attend receptions and public gallery spaces, our audiences are often even more dynamic and energizing and help to expand my platforms for teaching. As an academic, I find that also being an artist expands my access to public and media platforms and allows me to participate more extensively in public art projects.
While I typically develop my work as an academic and artist for very different audiences, public spaces often bridge the work that I do in each simultaneous by simultaneously drawing on my voices. As a scholar and artist, my artwork also helps to broaden my understanding and practice of research, in the sense that I routinely do research and developing my art projects.
My sometimes overlapping research trajectories as both an artist and academic unsettle and challenge the separate spheres into which I am inclined to categorize to categorize my work as an artist and scholar. Rosa Parks, in honor of whom Congress commissioned a monument and national statue, a hall that opened in the United States Capitol on February 27th, 2013, has often been reduced to the myth of quiet strength and described as having remained seated on the bus that day because she was tired for me, mentioning words like very tired and weary, and my poem reveals the limited understanding that I had of Rosa Parks by my final months of high school, and levels on which I had internalized
the myth. Two invoking the back story of Rosa Parks this long day of work as a seamstress at the Montgomery Fair department store in Montgomery, making her, tired in a physical sense, often obscures the mental exhaustion that Rosa Parks has described herself. The shape, the choice that she made to remain seated that day and quote this is from Rosa Parks.
People always said that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired. People are, always said that I am didn't give up my seat was because I was tired. But that isn't true. I was not tired physically or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day, I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old.
Then I was 42. No, the tired I was was tired of giving in. In such instances, invoking the weariness of her body as a laborer supersedes the emphasis on her mind and fails to frame the story of Rosa Parks at a metaphysical level, which would complicate the narrative that so insistently reached the bus encounter through her physical human body and exhaustion of the flesh and light of my training and bills, such as literary and cultural studies, and building upon my work on Rosa Parks and her scripts.
As a national mother who has challenged conventional images of national femininity, I want to briefly discuss the Rosa Parks Children's Museum, add it to the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery in 2006, and is dynamic and futuristic. Engagement with parks. This legacy, designed to facilitate public encounters with her legacy at the site of her arrest by considering the children's Wing exhibition, add it to the Rosa Parks Museum and its dynamic, futuristic, images.
We can we can gain a sense of how the installation invokes Parks as a mother and echoes major themes that inflect. Her writings relate it to freedom, challenging children to help eliminate injustice and create a better world and the future. The installation invokes parks as a mother, and it echoes major themes that inflect her writings related to freedom.
Position at the Montgomery and Lee Street intersection, where the famous encounter with James Blake occurred on the bus it complements is cutting edge technologies that develop is primary exhibition of a futuristic past with themes that, simultaneously situate Parks's action on the bus in relation to a longer history and draws on themes related to time and space, including a robotic bus driver for a virtual tour.
I link these motifs to Afrofuturism. This installation frames Parks's message as a universal one and is developed primarily to speak to youth growing up in the 21st century in a digital age, so this is the lobby. Display them, a montage of art that greets visitors to the Rosa Parks Museum as they enter it. This is an image of Rosa Parks that features her and her her own, work and outreach through the, the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute in Detroit, Michigan.
Through this museum, though, this museum draws visitors from all over the world and literally busloads of schoolchildren for tours, its powerful message is not as widely known by those who have not had the opportunity to tour it up close. I have found it useful to analyze and write about in my research from a scholarly standpoint, because much of this design, innovation and ingenuity flies under the radar.
This is the tuition related to Rosa Parks is worthy of all critical reflection. Then it has received. Moreover, it is all the more important to reflect on because it is now juxtaposed with the new Nash, groundbreaking Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a project of Bryan Stevenson's Equal Justice Initiative, which is now nearby and has promoted critical reflection on civil rights in Montgomery and the media at the national level, with yet another monumental museum on African-American history opening as recently as this past weekend.
The Legacy Museum From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration has, an opening that both my mother and aunt attended over the weekend. And Montgomery, as I think more about my own art quilt featuring Rosa Parks that helps welcome audiences into the Rosa Parks Museum. I also realize the levels on which my piece mirrors and echoes the Children's Museum's installations, framing her as a figure who transcends, time and space as a quintessential symbol of freedom.
I have come to view the Rosa Parks Museum as a kind of artistic home, in the sense that it has helped me to build upon my early work and in life. I, related to Rosa Parks and to remain organically connected to the Montgomery community. The installation draws a national and global audience of thousands of tourists annually, and is one of the foremost institutions that have been established in, in the nation to commemorate legacies related to civil rights.
The themes that it foregrounds run counter to narratives in popular culture and hip hop that reductively frame parks in relation to the past, or dismiss her altogether, such as those of a rap group Outkast and Cedric the Entertainer, the actor, but relate her legacy to the future in this sense, they demonstrate the limits and misperceptions in such popular readings of parks.
Just as my early reading of her Loss Limit Limited, I have analyzed some of the misperceptions about her that have been circulated in black popular culture, and I've also valued and learned from how historians such as Jean Theo Harris and Danielle McGuire have nuanced thinking on her legacy and more. Recent years. In 2000, Troy University's Rosa Parks Library and Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, emerged as the nation's second major institution in the U.S designed to honor the life, work, and legacy of Rosa Parks and the history of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Georgette Norman was hired as the museum's director, and it opened to the public on December 1st, 2000 and a ceremony that featured parks as the guest of honor. The 55,000 square foot building on the site of a former Empire Theater where parks is famous. The rest occurred as a landmark institution and national tourist attraction. On top of this outstanding installations, the Rosa Parks Library and museums, extensive databases on Rosa Parks, all Rosa Parks and Montgomery bus boycott, and various legal cases that emerged during the Civil Rights era, also make it a premier institution for researching and learning about the life and legacy of Rosa Parks.
The Cleveland Avenue Time Machine is the centerpiece of the children's wing at the Rosa Parks Library and Museum. Which opened in 2006, Georgette spearheaded this new expansion at the museum, which occurred a year after Parks's passing. In 2009. It won a tier award for Outstanding Achievement in the category exhibition on a Limited Budget from what was once themed, the for from what was once the Themed Entertainment Association.
In March 2009, at the 14th annual, the award ceremony held at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, California. The installation was a collective design effort by Eisner Hold Associates of Kansas City, Missouri, Jane Botanic of Virginia, Ben Lawless of Maryland, Peter Vogt of Washington, DC, and Hadley Exhibits of New York, which conceptualized its primary features that include special lighting, a seven projector video, audio, and fog.
The large bus and is pictured here on screen installation display most viscerally climaxes the museum's emphasis on temporal things. The busses painted green, gold and beige to resemble the one on which parks was arrested in 1955. However, a number of features accorded a futuristic aura. The larger size and rectangular shape, the larger than average bus sees the wider owl and the robot driver named Mr. Rivers, hoist over a dashboard with gadgets resembling those on spaceships in science fiction films.
As a space, the bus evokes the past through its color scheme, as its design and features an image of the futuristic. The bus is framed through its naming and appearance as a time machine. The installation of the Giant bus is a space designed to look larger than life from the perspective of a child, and to provide a more imaginative tour to engage the history of the Montgomery Bus boycott.
The bus is parked in a large open warehouse. Light displays space framed by black metal poles connected to a host of wires and steam pumps that one might see in an industrial factory and must be boarded by walking down a long L-shaped ramp lined with metal rails that lead up to his entrance. Once the passenger is seated, Mr. Rivets starts the engine, and the bus uses a host of special effects such as vibrations, flashing lights, steam, and sound to create the sensation of motion features that draw in the senses and create the illusion that the bus itself is a machine.
An overhead video screen on the bus becomes the focal point. As a video narrated by the actress Tanya Stewart emerges. Audiences may remember Doctor Stuart from film productions such as A Time to Kill, for instance, a parallel to the feature that begins the tour in the main museum, and by that I mean that in the General Rosa Parks Museum, the one that was, initially open to the public, there are video screens and backgrounds narrated by a video that help to prime and inform the audience and visitors about civil rights history so that they take a journey, into that past.
And it's made this very visceral and brought to life in that encounter. Even in the main museum.
The main exhibition cast is tourist as a pedestrian and ushers them on a walk through the main exhibition movement that alludes to the day to day material conditions and practices that enable the mass Montgomery bus boycott, but alternatively stages an imaginative ride at the Children's Museum. And so, while the main museum at the Rosa Parks Museum takes its visitors through the, you know, the literal historical, experience and narrative of the Montgomery Bus boycott, it's intriguing that the Children's Museum takes a very different approach because it encourages much more imaginative engagement and overview of history, even though they're like, on the bus, the, the story that's that Doctor Stewart narrates are also very,
historically grounded. And, there are reenactments of signal moments in history, including of the Dred Scott case that underscore that Rosa Parks, this encounter with James Blake on the bus wasn't the first one that, happened in history. It acknowledges all of the various precursors to show that, there was a longer lineage in terms of resistance to, humiliations and degradations of blacks in public spaces spanning back to the antebellum era.
Time and travel, in the sense popularized through science fiction, surfaces as the central motif in the video, as the tourist goes back in time 150 years, an imaginative journey into the past signaled by the physical vibrations of the bus. It is notable that the naming of this bus installation invokes the H.G. Wells novel The Time Machine, which popularized the concept of time travel and expanded the possibilities for imagining phenomenon.
Given this novel publication in 1895, the year before the Plessy versus Ferguson decision was issued by the Supreme Court, the sanction, the separate but equal doctrine segregating public facilities, including forms of public transportation, navigating the trip forward in time emerges as the main purpose of Mr. Rivets. The, and I should say about Mr. Rivets that he's interesting because he's a robot, and so he's the stand in, we might say, for James Blake on the bus, but, presented as a cyborg like figure.
And so it's intriguing. How Mr. Rivets as a figure invokes notions of the post-human as well as the post-racial in certain ways, but not in a reactionary way that, we we frequently hear that, repress the issues, but just acknowledge the, diversity of the human spectrum. So that's another intriguing thing to me about the display.
The Cleveland Avenue time machine conserves the original bus coloration, but otherwise fully reimagines and redesigns the number 2857 GM on which parks was arrested. And that museum is actually now on display in Detroit. I mean, that bus is now, available on display in a museum in Detroit. The young audiences toward whom the institution pitches this tour can be thought of as an extension of the youth mentored by parks during her lifetime, a group home the recurrent maternal metaphor is associated with her also played a vital role in constituting forced movements and migration that attended an era of modernity and that were intricately linked to slavery, are placed on this time machine by the imagining
of a world with an image of travel as voluntary, and the removal of all limitations on time and space. In this space, the hope and potential looking toward the year 2055 is an indispensable complement for thinking back on the historic 1955. The installation registers the axis of temporal notes from past to present, and constitutes a vision that dislodges parts from romantic and nostalgic narratives of civil rights history as it facilitates her framing as a premiere revolutionary and as a woman who made National a national impact on ending segregation, but whose significance is global and universal.
While the shift, given its materialist linkages to the African slave trade, has recurrently functioned as a symbol of slavery and the oppression of African diaspora and subjects in the Western world, the bus in this installation, as the, emerges as the primary symbol that encompasses post-civil rights struggles against Jim Crow and the journey on to New horizons. This approach is particularly significant when considering the diverse audiences of children and adolescents to whom this aspect of the exhibition is primarily pitched.
It is aimed at a new generation of youth born in the post. Millennium era. They sometimes lack knowledge about civil rights history and internalized the myth of this obsolescence that will stand at the forefront in rethinking and retelling this history to future generations growing up in a digital age, and that often learns most effectively through technology and multimedia.
Established as a pean to her status as a symbolic mother in the nation, the Rosa Parks Children's Museum is designed to help spread the message that matter to her most, and the Afro futuristic digital time machine to emphasize is timelessness and universality. Like her books, the museum in its conception and design, primarily addresses a young audience and challenges narratives of the civil rights movement as being passé by making its message to youth in the 21st century charged with caring for its work into the future.
The institution established to permanently commemorate parks at the site of her arrest is an outgrowth of her widely celebrated and broadly influential legacy as the mother of the Civil Rights movement and her national impact, Scripps as a national mother that have challenged conventional definitions of American identity and ideals of womanhood, including, I want to suggest, that she's challenged the mammy stereotype very powerfully in her figurine as a national mother in the public sphere.
That's one of the, main things that I argue in my recent book, Emancipation of Daughters. It embodies the triumph of the subject's position into a national ideal as one of this universal emblems of freedom and democracy. My great aunt Janie, Rebecca Carr, was a long time leader of the Montgomery Improvement Association and the best friend of Rosa Parks.
However, that background has nothing to do with why I embrace Rosa Parks and my own work and art, my own dynamic and visceral encounters with the legacy of Rosa Parks, whom I never met in person, were the outgrowth of my work and investments as a community volunteer, which began during my teen years. My work on her is an intricate part of my identities as both a scholar and artist, and has inflected some of my most visible and meaningful public work.
I remain invested in learning from and researching her life's work focused on freedom, which is all the more urgent to study, reflect upon, and drawn at this point in time. The peace and freedom that parks symbolized are indispensable for building a better future for this nation and the world, including all of us children whom she embraced continually in her public work and who were ever dear to her heart.
Thank you all so much. And I just want to, as another view of the time machine and DC and Mr. Rivets at the bottom, pictured at the bottom here.
And these are just resources. My, own book, Emancipation Daughters that I mentioned, and also Jean Theo Harris's important historical study of Rosa Parks, The Rebellious Life of Rosa Parks cover to cover is such a beautiful and brilliant read, and I feel indispensable for anyone and everyone who wants to study and appreciate the life and legacy of Rosa Parks in a deeper and better way.
Doug Exton: Thank you so much for the wonderful presentation and all the information, the background you provided. I really appreciate it. And I would like to assume that all the attendees also appreciated it. The first question I was going to ask you is if you can describe the mammy stereotype a little bit, because for me, that's just something I haven't heard of.
So I was just curious if you can elaborate on that a little bit more on how, you know, she really moved forward with changing that.
Riché Richardson : Absolutely. So, and this drive and a lot of other things as well, I think. But, the mammy stereotype was really part of the plantation myth that began to crystallize in the antebellum era as, a way to rationalize slavery. During that time. And the mammy figure was typically presented as someone who was plump and, often asexual and who was dedicated to the care and nurturance of the, the children of the of the master class, even to the point of literally serving as a wet nurse and in ways that neglected her own children in some cases if she had children.
But the idea was that she was, she was she was idealized and romanticized as a servant who knew her place and stayed in it and didn't really question her status in any significant way. And there are counterparts like, you know, that the uncle figure of the antebellum era emerged as a key, stark stereotype of, black masculinity.
That's another image that I've studied in my research. But the mammy stereotype was materialized in American culture, in advertising, through the Aunt Jemima. Image, the the logo that eventually became a trademark during the mid 1920s of Quaker. And that was, recently removed. Actually, I, I wrote an op ed in the New York Times in 2015 urging the removal of Aunt Jemima precisely because of some of those deeper and more problematic, aspects of, her, her background on the surface, I think she was associated with, romance and even nostalgia.
But if we, we, we take a deeper look, you know, it's, it's a very unsettling image. And so that national conversation that I ended up, becoming a part of, last year. But the thing about figures such as Rosa Parks, the thing that I thought that's really fascinating is that notions of the maternal are associated with and attached to, Rosa Parks at the national level, but without replay those stereotypes or without being shadowed by their residue.
And I think this is important. It's she represents an interesting point of contrast as well, because if we look at the history of Aunt Jemima, she, she was nationally abstracted, and, and there was, a serious national fascination with her to the point that in, in 1923, the daughters of the Confederacy, petition to erect a monument like a national monument to her in her honor.
But it's unsettling and problematic that this spectacle of black femininity, often obscured and erased the concrete and real contributions of, black women in the United States and throughout the diaspora. An illustration for us. This goes back to 1893 at the World's Columbian Exposition, when civil rights leaders, prominent cultural figures such as Ida B Wells were denied the opportunity to participate and to be included.
But, Nancy Green was, featured in an exhibition and, larger than life flour barrel whipping pancakes. And that was a hit. You know, it was a top attraction. And so we have to raise questions about what we lose, what we don't see when the focus is so much on stereotypes.
Doug Exton: Yeah. I think that does raise a really good point. You know, even what you talked about earlier, that romance of like, the antebellum, you know, I think at surface level, a lot of it can seem very attractive. But once you start digging deeper, you know, and exploring the other aspects of it, but that aren't just the face value.
There is a lot larger of a story that went on.
Riché Richardson : Right? Right.
Doug Exton: And also in your book you do talk about, you know, other prominent women, you know, such as Marcell, Obama and Beyonce. And I was going to ask you, what role do you think? You know, music and pop culture have really played in, you know, the identity of black womanhood because I think, you know, especially in the rap and R&B scene now, you see a lot more black women come to the forefront.
You know, as musicians in those. Or so I was wondering, you kind of how pop culture has been a role in all of that?
Riché Richardson : Yes, yes. Well, I definitely think that, pop culture over time has served as a vital, platform on which many, black women have been able to establish voices, including and to the point that they become global icons. We can think, for instance, of, artists such as Diana Ross who are iconic at this point. Whitney Houston is another powerful illustration.
And yes, nowadays, artists such as Beyoncé have also gained salience and iconicity through music, circulation and commodification in the popular realm. For black women, can be a double edged sword, in part because, the visibility, as in the case of Aunt Jemima, for instance, visibility and sexual secularity are not always indicators of agency. And in fact, paradoxically, they can they can signal, voiceless ness and, and a lack of agency.
So that can be very complicated even when there's this, this fascination and visibility, it doesn't necessarily signal. It's not a signpost of, of power. So, I think that that's, that's a problem. But, you know, these realms of also and in my book, I'm talking about, how politics is the pathway to, shaping iconicity in a similar way for a range of of black women leaders, and activists, including Rosa Parks.
But, popular culture has also played a role in circulate stereotypes of black women as well. So, we have to, you know, raise questions about what is at stake when we have hip hop that that, yes, in some cases, we see, black women, you know, like Queen Latifah, for instance. MC Lyte, there's a, there's a history of black women who have come to voice within hip hop.
Salt-N-Pepa. Just a range of artists, but it's also a around that has has, circulated very demeaning and and misogynistic images of black women and, you know, linking them to, you know, pathological behavior and promoting their devaluation. And so I don't necessarily find much empowering in that aspect of popular music. In my work in BRC studies, I, I've really appreciated and, had a chance to analyze Beyonce's origins in the US South and Houston, Texas, and then her early days and Destiny's Child, and how she has come to draw on her position as a global icon to, participate in, in, activism and including more recent activist movements.
And so that's just interesting because she I've argued in my own research that she presents and like a more inclusive idea of democracy that we can all learn from regardless of, you know, what we might think about her or, or the politics that, you know, she, supports, you know, because we have to really think about, the best models and possibilities for advancing American democracy continuing forward.
And so in her project lemonade, and particularly in formation, I argue that Beyoncé birth, a formation nation of sorts. And so that's one of the things that fascinates me.
Doug Exton: Yeah. I mean, I've completely and I love the song formation, but the music video for that song in particular, I think was really impactful for a lot of people, in the sense that it really touched on a lot of cultural aspects, especially within black culture, that, you know, typically hadn't really been either talked about or even just seen, you know, on that national scale in such a digestible way.
Riché Richardson : Yes, yes, I love that word, digestible. And it's even snackable like in some ways, yeah, I think it was. And when it debuted the night before the Super Bowl, and then she went out and did the performance. Yeah, that there was a lot of power in that. And I think that visually it was very compelling and captivating, to be sure.
And if we look at the histories that she was dealing with this black liberation movement and civil rights, but more so looking at the Black power, some aspects of the Black Panther movement, even Malcolm X, and just, recollecting the imagery like, see, she literally used all of that in her Super Bowl performance. But the actual video, which just I think, it, it powerfully examines forms of violence that continues to be perpetrated in some cases.
And I think it was powerful for also presenting and, and going back to the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina for a new generation, because this came out in 2016. And so a little over a decade, after the incident, the tragedy in 2005. And so maybe younger audiences were not as aware of the impact of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.
And so, it's significant that formation, reflected on on that history and this continuing impact.
Doug Exton: You know, I, I totally agree, because, you know, for me, I don't really remember Hurricane Katrina, but, you know, all I know is that it was just a horrible, you know, event, you know, due to the impacts and stuff. So I think her being able to kind of refresh that, but not in your typical way. You're kind of giving it a new light and a new breath, you know, really helped.
Riché Richardson : Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And reminded, our audience of the environmental and ecological disaster that it was and that the importance of continuing to, you know, pay attention to, those, those issues. Yeah. And then homecoming, the more recent, production that she's done, I think was also interesting for, pay on to historically black colleges and universities and, and traditions associated with them, like sororities and fraternities and marching bands.
And again, you know, this isn't often, thought about in the American mainstream. You know, with Kamala Harris's, election as the vice president of the United States and her roots at Howard, we're hearing more in the national mainstream about HBCUs. And then there's also Reverend, Raphael Warnock, who was elected to the Senate, actually knew him as an undergraduate when I was in the Atlanta University Center at Spelman, when he was at Morehouse.
And then Stacey Abrams actually was also, at Spelman at the time that I was there. And so these are now prominent national figures with origins at HBCUs. But even, you know, when and I think that that reflects a much longer history and legacy. You know, Doctor Keene, for instance, was a graduate Morehouse, Julian Bond, Mary Ann Wright element and so many other figures.
But we don't necessarily hear about such institutions in the media, let alone traditions associated with them, like homecoming. And now it's actually about that time in, in a lot of places, although, you know, restructured in many ways because of the pandemic, but beyond, say, embraces and celebrates and showcases those legacies and without, interestingly enough, taking sides. If in homecoming, you don't see any specific schools, mention any specific bans mentioned, because that could get really out very quickly.
Doug Exton: Yeah, there's a lot of rivalries going on there, but unfortunately we are out of time. So I'd like to say thank you to everyone for attending and thank you to both of you, Doctor Richardson, and to David for the wonderful introduction and presentations.
Riché Richardson : Oh my pleasure, and thanks so much for having me.
Doug Exton: Have a good one, everyone.
Riché Richardson : Thank you David.