Two Black History Month exhibits have embraced this year’s theme for Black History month, African Americans and Labor, putting on display the many contributions Black people have made in Westchester County and across the country.
“History Restored: Black Entrepreneurship,” on display at the New Rochelle Public Library, and “Black History & Culture: Eyes Wide Open,” on display at Bethany Arts Community in Ossining, have each highlighted ways in which Black people have built and bettered their communities while exploring how those contributions continue to impact us today.
According to the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), which founded Black History Month, the theme “focuses on the various and profound ways that work and working of all kinds – free and unfree, skilled, and unskilled, vocational and voluntary – intersect with the collective experiences of Black people.”
‘History Restored: Black Entrepreneurship,’ an exhibit at New Rochelle Public Library
Set in downtown New Rochelle, “History Restored: Black Entrepreneurship” explores the Black businesses of once-thriving Lincoln Corridor.
“That community, originally, it was integrated,” said Linda Tarrant-Reid, who is the curator of the ‘History Restored’ exhibit and the executive director of The Lincoln Park Conservancy, a nonprofit organization that preserves and educates people about the Black history of New Rochelle.
“It had Jewish families, Italian, Irish and Black (families),” she said. “And then after the war, when they built the housing projects, as they did across the country to house returning veterans.
“Eventually those projects in New Rochelle, Hartley Apartments (now known as Heritage Homes), they became predominantly Black as the white families moved out and were able to purchase homes.”
As a result of this exodus and redlining, Tarrant-Reid said, Black-owned businesses began to spring up. Recreational businesses, like billiards parlors, snack shacks and restaurants, came first. Then came establishments like beauty parlors, barber shops and funeral homes, like the Barney T. McClanahan Funeral Home, on Winthrop Ave., which is still in operation today.
Tarrant-Reid used photographs from the Library of Congress’s digital archives and the Henry Ford digital archives along with photographs she took herself to tell the stories of some of the Black-owned businesses of the area and across the United States.
“All of the things that we’ve been taught, that we didn’t own anything, we don’t do anything,” Tarrant-Reid said, “Not true. This exhibit puts in front of people, in photographs, how Black businesses grew.”
If you go to ‘History Restored: Black Entrepreneurship’
When: Now through Friday, Feb. 28. (See the New Rochelle Library’s website, nrpl.org, for exact hours.)
Where: Lumen Winter Gallery at the New Rochelle Public Library, 1 Library Plaza, New Rochelle.
For more information: Contact The Lincoln Park Conservancy, Inc. at 914-224-4243.
‘Black History & Culture: Eyes Wide Open,’ an exhibit at Ossining’s Bethany Arts Community
While “History Restored” focuses on Black-owned businesses, “Black History & Culture: Eyes Wide Open” explores Black people’s contributions – locally, nationally and internationally – to a variety of other industries.
“I was a little tired of the February special, where we get Martin, Malcolm and Rosa on the wall with a few posters,” said Joyce Sharrock Cole, who’s Ossining’s village historian and the curator of the exhibit.
“They are wonderful,” she continued. “But I always felt like, why aren’t we celebrating the heroes in our backyard?”
“Eyes Wide Open,” Sharrock Cole said, “Is walking into history – American history, world history – but seeing us in it. It’s really pulling from the African proverb, ‘“Until the lion tells his side of the story, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”
Now in its fifth year, this Black History Month exhibit features seven rooms, each themed around an industry or a person. One of the rooms highlights Black people’s contributions to the U.S. military.
“There’s nothing more patriotic than building a country and then fighting for it, and hoping that the ideals of the country (will) apply to you when you know right now that they don’t,” Sharrock Cole said while describing Black people’s legacy in the military.
“This is the heaviest of the exhibits I’ve ever curated. But I think it’s necessary because as a Black person, that’s my history,” she said.
“It’s part of this country’s history,” Sharrock Cole continued. “Whether it’s good, bad or indifferent.”
The exhibit also highlights the history of Black press in Westchester and Black culinary influences on America while exploring Black people’s contributions to medicine alongside the things that were done to Black people to advance the medical field. There’s a room dedicated exclusively to Henry Gourdine, who was a master boat builder, commercial fisherman and the ‘dean of the Hudson River,’ another with a mural created by the 3rd and 4th graders of Claremont School in Ossining, and a room the features Black inventors with their inventions.
The Black inventors room has been especially engaging for children. Sharrock Cole said kids are big fans of the traffic signal and the gas mask on display, which were both invented by Garrett Morgan.
“Black people invented so many things that I couldn’t even fit everything in the room,” Sharrock Cole said. “They’re always shocked (by) the things that they use every day that (are) invented by Black people.”
If you go to “Black History & Culture: Eyes Wide Open”
When: now through Mar. 14. (See the Bethany Arts Community’s website, bethanyarts.org, for exact hours.)
Where: Bethany Arts Community, 40 Somerstown Rd., Ossining.
For more information: Check out the Bethany Arts Community’s website at bethanyarts.org/calendar/bhceyeswideopen/ to purchase tickets.