February 20, 2025<\/span><\/p>\nBy: Ellen Liberman, Rhode Island Monthly<\/strong><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
At thirteen, Randall Ashe was a skinny kid\u00a0<\/b><\/span>from South Providence on the precipice of his career as an entertainer. He wasn\u2019t old enough to drive a car or order a cocktail \u2014 even if he had the means to get either \u2014 but a talent contest won him a gig at the Celebrity Club.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nIn the first half of the twentieth century, African Americans would step out at private neighborhood speakeasies. Opened in 1949, the Celebrity Club in Providence was Paul Filippi\u2019s bold social experiment \u2014 a public, interracial music venue. The authorities didn\u2019t care much for it and the police raided it regularly over the club\u2019s ten-year life, but it became a must-stop on the circuit. Filippi knew another jazz lover when he met one, so he let young Ashe sit in the kitchen and peek through the swinging doors to soak up inspiration from the best artists of their day \u2014 Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cThe city was bustling and the Navy was here and they just kept the nightlife going. Growing up in that era, there were some problems at the Celebrity Club, because they really didn\u2019t want Blacks and whites to mix. But, Paul Filippi was able to pull it off and he had a very successful run,\u201d Ashe recalls. \u201cIt was a great time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sitting on the blond-wood stage of the Rhode Island School of Design Auditorium, looking dapper and younger than his eighty-five years, Ashe recounts the seminal experiences of his life as a jazz musician in response to questions posed by students of the YouthBuild Preparatory Academy. The exchange was among several events hosted by the nascent African American Museum of Rhode Island. Officially established last March, the AAMRI\u2019s eventual goal is to establish a permanent collection in a physical space focused on Black life in post-World War II Providence. For now, it is hiring high school students as museum apprentices to gather oral histories of living icons like Ashe, for digital exhibits that will be distributed on social media.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThe idea is to combine job training with the arts, says AAMRI Executive Director Christopher West.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cWe want to build a museum that is\u00a0curated by, with metadata records driven<\/span>\u00a0by, with provenance created by oral histories connected to youth in the community,\u201d he says. \u201cThis museum is being born with the youth, who are doing the research and making it into a promise and an object.\u201d<\/p>\nThe AAMRI is one of two new Rhode Island African American museums in the planning stages. In August, the Newport\u00a0Historical Society kicked off a $4.5 million fundraising campaign with a federal\u00a0<\/span>grant and a large private donation to transform the Wanton-Lyman-Hazard House, a national historic landmark, into a Black history center. When finished, the two museums will join three other African American historical repository and exhibition spaces in the state.<\/p>\nThe oldest is the Rhode Island Black Heritage Society\u2019s collection of historical documents and artifacts, established in 1975. Stages of Freedom, founded in 2016 by Ray Rickman and Robb Dimmick, is a museum, library and bookstore offering a variety of educational and community-building programs. The Rhode Island Slave History Medallions mark historic buildings around the state with bronze plaques featuring QR codes, which visitors can access via their phones to learn how the sites are associated with slavery. The organization is also raising funds to erect Newport\u2019s first statue of a person of color, nineteenth-century Black entrepreneur and abolitionist George T. Downing.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n\u201cA lot of people think that Black history is a separate history \u2014 whether it\u2019s Rhode Island or elsewhere. And it is not. It is a shared history. It comes out of the horrors and the pain of slavery, and in Rhode Island it merges into this extraordinary cultural experience that actually\u00a0informs not only the nation, but the world,\u201d says Rickman.<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cSadly, this is not a well-known history because it\u2019s not taught in our schools, and that\u2019s why Stages of Freedom came into existence \u2014 to celebrate and elevate people\u2019s history and to make sure that it is shared across the racial divide.\u201d<\/p>\n
Slaves first arrived in Rhode Island in 1652, and during the eighteenth century, the colony\u2019s merchants sponsored about a thousand slave voyages, shipping West Africans here and to the West Indies. Newport was one of Colonial America\u2019s largest slave trading ports, and home to thousands of enslaved individuals. In 1755, Black people accounted for 18 percent of its population. They often worked in skilled trades \u2014 chocolate, barrel and rope-making, for example. Some of Newport\u2019s most iconic structures \u2014 such as the Touro Synagogue and Redwood Library & Athenaeum \u2014 were built by enslaved and free Africans or funded by the slave trade.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nAquidneck Island resident John M. Rice can trace his family back six generations in Newport, from enslavement to prominence. His fourth great-grandfather, Abraham Casey, co-founded the city\u2019s Free African Union Society in 1780. His great-great grandfather, Issac Rice, was a successful gardener, caterer and nineteenth-century abolitionist leader who regularly hosted national movement figures like Frederick Douglass. Rice grew up next door to the family homestead at the corner of Williams and Thomas streets \u2014 once a stop on the Underground Railroad \u2014 surrounded\u00a0by stories and photos of his eminent\u00a0<\/span>Newport ancestors.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThe experience has given Rice \u201cthat sense of being fixed in a place over such a long period of time\u201d and a responsibility to bring his family\u2019s story forward. While his cousin, UMass Amherst Foundation Vice President of Advancement Kimberly Dumpson, works on a book about the Rice family, the two also use the family trove of 500 letters and other materials as the foundation of occasional community lectures and articles.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cI think there has been a resurgence in Black history in Newport because of the rich Black history and interesting Black Newporters and their contribution to civil rights. Newport was on the front line of the abolitionist movement, wealthy plantation owners visiting in the summer versus Black and white abolitionists,\u201d he says.\u00a0\u201cAll this makes for interesting history in a historic town attracting international visitors.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nFor the last four years, the Newport Historical Society has been building the stories of less prominent Black citizens by mining its manuscript archives and other regional historical collections for references to enslaved and free Black and Indigenous people. NHS\u2019s Collections and Digital Access Manager Kaela Bleho has identified more than 1,700 individuals, whose records have been catalogued and digitized in a publicly accessible database.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThe 328-year-old Wanton-Lyman-Hazard House, a brick-red clapboard structure with narrow, twelve-over-twelve windows, will become a teaching tool for public school students,\u00a0<\/span>a hub for scholarship, a destination for tourists and a place where residents can connect Colonial and contemporary Newport at events like exhibitions of Black artists. It is Newport\u2019s oldest surviving residence, and slaves once occupied its third floor. In 2006, an African spirit bundle was found under the attic floorboards.<\/p>\n\u201cFor a long time, people have been aware of Newport\u2019s role in the transatlantic slave trade, but are not aware of the extent of its involvement, of the wealth that was generated, of the volume of people that were trafficked from Africa and brought to Newport,\u201d says NHS Executive Director Rebecca Bertrand. \u201cThis will be one of the only spaces in New England that\u2019s dedicated to telling this story in a historic house. And I hope visitors will be taking away an understanding that this is not just one sliver of time, but part of a continuum of history.\u201d<\/p>\n
Union Army Brevet Brigadier General Samuel Chapman Armstrong established the first United States African American museum in 1868 as part of his new school for freed Black students, the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute. Armstrong, the son of missionaries and a former commander of the United States Colored Troops, opened the institute with two teachers, fifteen students and an idea to prepare his students through education and vocational training. The museum was meant to strengthen the connection to their own cultural history. Today, the Association of African American Museums counts among their members more than 350 physical and digital museums, cultural centers and historic homes, and their audience is much wider.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs a field, we\u2019ve observed an increase in visitation to African American museums. I attribute this to greater access and a growing thirst for knowledge,\u201d says AAAM CEO Vedet Coleman-Robinson in a written statement. \u201cOur museums remain committed to their missions of presenting the full truth, ensuring that visitors have the opportunity to learn, reflect and grow. Where there is a thirst for knowledge or gaps in understanding, museums provide the remedy. They are not just places of preservation but antidotes to historical deficiencies, offering clarity and truth to all who seek it.\u201d<\/p>\n
But telling the stories of marginalized peoples, and persuading patrons that they should be told with unflinching honesty, is often a struggle. In 1929, President Herbert Hoover appointed a committee to create a National Memorial Building celebrating the contributions of the Black community, touching off an eighty-seven-year battle over the funding, design, philosophy and location of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened on the National Mall in 2016. Recently, the National Archives Museum has been under fire for modifying or removing planned and existing exhibits showcasing dark chapters in American history, like the government\u2019s treatment of Native Americans. Southern plantation historic home museums have long been criticized for romanticizing, minimizing or erasing the roles of slaves who made their ostentatious displays of wealth possible.<\/p>\n
In Rhode Island, the Newport Middle Passage Port Marker Project has been working since 2016 to erect a monument to the Africans who landed in Newport on their way to lives as slaves. For years, the group had settled on Liberty Square, the old Colonial mustering ground between Farewell and Meeting streets, as a location. The site had been approved by the City Council in 2017, and the group regularly held events there in anticipation of a ribbon cutting. A year ago, the Aquidneck Island Daughters of the American Revolution and the Artillery Company of Newport, a ceremonial militia with its own armory museum, publicly opposed it as inappropriate. In a newspaper editorial in\u00a0Newport This Week<\/i>, the DAR argued that Liberty Square should remain \u201ca memorial to the first American veterans who sacrificed so much for the freedoms we have today.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThe irony of defending a space dedicated to Colonial freedom fighters against a monument to those who had none seemed to have escaped notice, but their remarks nonetheless stung the project committee, which was scouting a new location as of January.<\/p>\n
\u201cTheir remarks got to the point where they were very discouraging for me, and for the members of the committee,\u201d says Victoria Johnson, a project founder and the state\u2019s first female African American high school principal. \u201cWe said to the City Council, we will relinquish our position at Liberty Square, but you\u2019re going to have to help us find a spot which will be acceptable for all so that people know that the organizations in the city of Newport work together.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite the apparent setback in Newport, Rickman has seen progress in his appeals for donations for Stages of Freedom.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve gone to half a dozen foundations who had never given a dime for Black culture or history, and they have a better attitude. You have to sit and dialogue and stare at \u2019em. And often they would say ridiculous things,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd now they don\u2019t say those things, and I hope their belief pattern has changed.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nRead this story online: https:\/\/www.rimonthly.com\/memorializing-rhode-islands-african-american-history\/<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"February 20, 2025 By: Ellen Liberman, Rhode Island Monthly \u00a0 At thirteen, Randall Ashe was a skinny kid\u00a0from South Providence on the precipice of his career as an entertainer. He wasn\u2019t old enough to drive a car or order a cocktail \u2014 even if he had the means to get either \u2014 but a talent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":102763,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12032],"tags":[9229,204,16682,5801,3734,2876,5253,47519,4757,16128,13432,27123,3924],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-102761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-history","tag-african","tag-american","tag-dedicated","tag-historical","tag-history","tag-island","tag-islands","tag-memorializing","tag-monthly","tag-museums","tag-newport","tag-rhode","tag-society"],"yoast_head":"\n
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