Joel Buchanan Archive of African American History: http://ufdc.ufl.edu/ohfb
Samuel Proctor Oral History Program
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Program Director: Dr. Paul Ortiz 241 Pugh Hall PO Box 115215 Gainesville, FL 32611 (352) 392-7168 https://oral.history.ufl.edu
AAHP 316 Johnetta Betsch Cole Interviewed by Elaine Sponholtz on December 13, 2013 1 hour 46 minutes | 41 pages
Abstract: Johnetta Betsch Cole is the director of the National Museum of African Art in Washington D.C., under the Smithsonian Institute. Cole was born in segregated Jacksonville. She talks about her earliest childhood influences in her family and what it was like to grow up in Jacksonville. Both of her parents were college educated, and pushed her to go to college. Since the Spanish-American War, Cole’s ancestors were part of the African American upper class. Cole’s grandfather, Abraham Lincoln Lewis, was the first African American Millionaire, and bought American Beach in Jacksonville after seeing that Blacks had nowhere to swim. Cole’s sister MaVynne fought to have the beach listed by the national registry and ultimately succeeded before her death. Later, Cole talks about her formative experience at Oberlin, both in that it was a more accepting environment than Jacksonville, but that it was also intellectually stimulating and made her realize she wanted to be an anthropologist. Finally, Cole also talks about African history and culture as an anthropologist and provides insights into the study of African art.
Keywords: [African American History; Jacksonville; Africa; Segregation; Anthropology; African Art; Abraham Lincoln Lewis; American Beach; Smithsonian Museum]
Standards: 1. SS.912.A.1.7 Describe various social, political, legal, and economic relationships in history. 2. SS.912.A.7.5 Social Activism 3. SS.912.A.7.5 Civil Rights Tactics
AAHP 316 Interviewee: Johnetta Betsch Cole Interviewer: Elaine Sponholtz Date: September 13, 2013
S: This is Elaine Sponholtz, doctoral student in Mass Communications at the
University of Florida, interviewing Dr. Johnetta Betsch Cole, director of the
National Museum of African Art in Washington D.C. This interview will become
part of one of the largest oral history archives in the United States, the Samuel
Proctor History Project at the University of Florida. It will be included in the
holdings as part of the African American History Project, a project that has as its
purpose to collect and archive the narratives of African American life and history
related to Florida. Well, Dr. Cole, it’s an honor to speak with you. Here, we’re in
your offices at the National Museum of African Art, a museum that’s affiliated with
the Smithsonian Institute. Thank you very much.
C: You are more than welcome.
S: I saw that the museum strategic plan, which was developed in 2010, includes a
Swahili proverb that says, “Good beginnings make good endings,” so let us call
upon the ancestors to benevolently guide us, especially in this endeavor where
we delve into the past. You are someone who is accomplished across a range of
academic disciplines and professions. The question is really where to begin. In
preparation for this interview, I searched the university’s archive, the database for
the library, to see if there were any books that you had authored in our libraries.
What I found was in order to check out your books, I had to go to the Latin
American Library, then downstairs to the anthropology section of the main library,
then across campus to the education library. You really don’t have pity on us
busy graduate students. AAHP 316; Cole; Page 2
C: So where did you find the Women Studies material?
S: I did find that in the anthropology section I believe—
C: Within the anthropology section. Okay.
S: I suppose there’s going to be one coming out for the art and architecture library
at UF one day.
C: Hm. I would like to think so if I can spend some time writing as opposed to
moving it around with my cup begging, begging, begging for the museum. But
yes, I do hope to do some writing.
S: In your book, Gender Talk, from 2003, which you coauthored with Beverly Guy-
Sheftall, you wrote that when you were both growing up in the [19]50s and
[19]60s, for the most part, women were viewed as belonging to the private
sphere of the home and men to the public sphere where they were the movers
and shakers, so to speak. As an anthropologist, educator, corporate board
member, humanitarian, and public intellectual, what kinds of ideas or images or
people gave you the idea that you could do these things. To be in the public
sphere and do these things. You dedicated your book to your fathers, but who
were your role models?
C: Well it’s a mighty good thing that any individual can hear and respond to and
reject more than one message. I grew up, as you know, in the segregated South,
Jacksonville, Florida, where one message was definitively impossible for anyone
who was Black to ever be as good as, as smart as, as educated as, as
accomplished as someone who was White. But fortunately I had a very different
message from my family, which completely rejected all of that. Just as there were AAHP 316; Cole; Page 3
those two messages then about race, which I always like to put in pips since it
really is not something we anthropologists claim. We know it’s a social construct,
but the same is true of gender. That is, the prevailing message was “Women
have their place. It should be in the home. Men are the ones who are to be about
the affairs of the community, the nation, the world.” But I got a counter message
from that. And fortunately the counter message came not just from my mom; it
came also from my father. And in many ways it was more powerful coming from
a man. My dad was, I think, really better at taking us shopping, my sister and I.
I’ve often said he could really comb and braid our hair as well as our mom could.
He was clearly the better cook. Oh, any day we preferred what our daddy cooked
over my mom’s cooking. Highly accomplished woman; cooking was not
something that interested her and she didn’t do it particularly well. So again, I
think it’s really important for us to understand that no matter how powerful a
message may be in the common parlance, in the larger society, we can always
counter those messages.
S: I remember being taught by older people by their using wise sayings or proverbs.
What sayings did your family have when you were growing up? Do you
remember any of those?
C: Well, I was very fortunate to grow up not only in a household with my mom and
my dad. My sister and I really leaned on, were cared for by, were nurtured by a
maternal aunt, grand-aunt. My mother’s sister’s sister. Aunt Nina, as we called
her. Nana was an incredible force in our lives. First of all, she really could cook. I
still remember her banana pudding. But because both our mom and our dad AAHP 316; Cole; Page 4 worked outside of the household, Aunt Nina really was our caretaker for many, many, many years. I was also deeply influenced by my grandfather, James
Henry Lewis, and even more so in my earliest years by Abraham Lincoln Lewis, my maternal great-grandfather. So from all of these elders in my life, yes, there were many sayings. One that I’m thinking of right now, a saying that certainly my parents used to emphasize the importance of being of service and it’s that expression that goes, “Doing for others is just the rent you got to pay for your place on earth.” They were, my grandfather was, my great-grandfather was, they were all highly—in those days, one would use the expression, “civic minded”. In this generation, we talk about “being of service.” So that was clearly an expression that I grew up with. My great-grandfather Abraham Lincoln Lewis would often quote his favorite biblical passage, which is out of the book of Micah.
“And what doth the Lord require of thee? But to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.” There are at least two examples of sayings that I remember very, very well from my childhood. The final one, Fafa, which is the term that my sister and I used for A. L. Lewis, would often say, “Now, if you’re gonna get anywhere in this world, you gotta remember the three Bs. The three
Bs for books.” And we’d look and he’d quiz us. What are the three Bs for books?
And we would say, “One B is for the Bible. One B is for the school book. And the third B is for the bank book.” Abraham Lincoln Lewis was a very accomplished business man. He also believed deeply in education even though he never had more than a few years of education himself. And certainly he was a very devout
Christian who, in our church, Mt. Olive AME Church, he was the superintendent AAHP 316; Cole; Page 5
of the Sunday school. He was a deacon of the church. He was a treasurer of the
church. So again, those three books symbolized for him how one had to live a
good life grounded in spiritually, certainly propelled by education, and always
with an eye to a very solid financial base. The more solid the financial base, to
come full circle, the more one then was to be of service to others.
S: So I’m going to ask you to take these off because it will come through the—
C: Sure.
S: It’s very sensitive. Thank you very much. My father was a wonderful storyteller
and he was the cook in the family also and was very nurturing. I looked forward
to hearing his stories because every time he told them, he told even my favorites
just as well as the last time and couldn’t wait to hear them again. Was there
someone in your family when you were growing up that was the storyteller?
C: I would say…pretty much everybody told stories in my family. Certainly very
conscious of the role of the griot in West African life. The oral tradition in African
American life. Storytelling was not an organized moment or ritual in my growing
up. It’s just what happened. People just told stories about what happened on a
particular train ride when we were going from Jacksonville to New York and what
happened to the box of food that had the fried chicken and the deviled eggs and
the pound cake. Things as normal, in a sense, as that. Or people would just talk
about a particular person, lovingly, but nevertheless sort of doing a bit of a roast
as to who that person was. So I don’t think of anybody in my immediate or
extended family as being the storyteller. I just think of storytelling as being very
much a part of the way of life. AAHP 316; Cole; Page 6
S: People were more used to creating their own entertainment then too. Right?
C: Since you couldn’t go to most things that you wanted to go to, then yes. My
husband tells a very, very interesting part of his experience. He is one of nine.
Grew up in a very economically challenged area in North Carolina—the poorest
part of North Carolina, eastern North Carolina. He and his siblings, both because
they were Black and because they were poor, had nothing to do on a Sunday—
sorry, on a Saturday night. But his mom, and fortunately I did know Momma
Emma before she passed, would line up those Staton children and would teach
them Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson. To this day, if you run into
a Staton and you say, “Can you give me a poem?” you will hear one. And then
she would organize them to produce wonderful music. Just about everyone in
that family sings well. So that’s an example beyond my family of that tradition of
using the arts as a way of entertaining and of pleasing, especially since there
was no opera to go to, no theater, no art museum. One made all of that happen
within one’s familial surroundings.
S: And for education because they were blocked for many, many years, right, from
getting an education in the school system, the African American community. So
they’ve created a way to use the entertaining part of poetry.… As a researcher in
storytelling, I’ve learned that in Africa, the idea is that stories are a kind of
partnership created by both the storyteller and the listener and I thought that was
an amazing idea. Has African culture framed society as a co-creation of
knowledge before we had Web2.0 and some of these other crowdsourcing ideas
and things like that? Were African people already ahead of the curb on that? AAHP 316; Cole; Page 7
C: Well I think there is a strong value in many African cultures. I will never claim to
know the multiple cultures in fifty-five different African nations. But we
nevertheless have a sense of some—let me call them general—values
associated with Africa. And certainly one of them is participation so that rather
than the folk sitting or standing and waiting for the performer, the theater to
begin, the musician to sing, there’s often that interaction of the people and the
artist or the leader. And of course we see this most, I think, most obviously in
what we call “call and response.” Deep, deep, deep practice in many African
cultures which we know is found in the diaspora. We hear it in churches, in the
Black church when the preacher says, “I’m goin to tell you about this” and the
congregation says, “yes.” And he says, “Can I get a witness?” and somebody
says “uh-huh.” But we also hear it in the music. And we hear it most strongly, I
think, in jazz. So yes, I think there is that that notion of engagement to the extent,
involvement to the extent, that one is not sitting back to learn, to be entertained,
to be spiritually renewed. One must participate in all of that.
S: I’m very interested in stories about children. What can you tell me more about
your childhood. Was it a happy childhood or do you have certain things that
stand out that you can tell us?
C: I look back on my childhood with great pleasure. Like any kid, I can certainly
remember very difficult experiences. I can remember some absolutely scary
experiences as a child. But overall, it was a happy childhood. I do think that my
wonderful, diva, musician sister one day seems to have decided I was to be of
service to her. But even that, even my relationship with my one and only sister AAHP 316; Cole; Page 8 was nevertheless filled with love. It was. What I think about my childhood, I do remember, I remember very, very keenly the first time I ever heard the N-word used directly at me in an aggressive way. I’m not sure if I was three or I was four.
Probably more like four. My mother had taken me with her to Mrs. Harris’ Beauty
Parlor, which was in Mrs. Harris’ house. I was told to stay in the yard. I could play. I had some things to play with, but as a child will often do, I started to wander. Before I knew it, I had crossed the line. The line that separated a Black community from a White community. And because I was young and really didn’t see the line—or know that the invisible line existed is a better way of putting it—I was still playing my little game in the White community. And a little White boy saw me and started screaming at the top of his voice, “Nigga, nigga, nigga, nigga, get out of here!” I remember feeling such fright. I didn’t really know what the word was. I just knew aggression. I knew danger. And I ran as fast as I could back to my mom. It was then I remember that I had to get my first real lesson in all of those invisible lines. In many ways, that was my first—at least the first experience that I remember—with expressions of racism. I also remember an early encounter with what I would now, so many years later, describe as sexism or gender inequity. A group of us were playing in our yard and a little boy, African
American, started taunting and saying, “You girls. You can’t climb trees.
Nananana nana.” I remember to this day: I climbed that tree. I took that dare.
And while at that point I obviously was not old enough to understand the complexities of gender inequalities, I knew that I figured I was as good as he was at least when it came to climbing a tree. AAHP 316; Cole; Page 9
S: When and where were you born?
C: I was born in Jacksonville, Florida in the year 1936 on the day of October
nineteenth, the day before my mother’s birthday, which I’m sure gave her a much
happier birthday than had I come on a different day.
S: So you had a sister. Did you have brothers?
C: I did indeed. One.
S: One brother. Your sister’s name is Marvyne?
C: Elisabeth Betsch and she changed her name—she removed the “r” from
Marvyne. She was born or named after birth Marvyne and she removed the “r”,
which is another story and I’m happy to tell it. But when I was born, my dad was
pretty clear about what he put in for an order. It was quite simply that I was to be
a boy. Eighteen months after my sister was born, I was born, and he had the
name ready. Since he was John Thomas Betsch, I would be John Thomas
Betsch Junior. But I didn’t come in the form that he requested, and so what my
dad did was to simply add “netta” onto John and I became Johnetta. Well, nine
years later, John Jr. came and so my sister and I grew up with a baby brother.
My sister is no longer on earth. She passed away on September the fifth…oh,
that many years? September 5, 2005. My brother John Thomas Betsch Jr. lives
in Paris. He has lived in Paris for the past twenty-two years. He is a jazz
drummer. While my sister was incredibly talented with both voice and piano and
my brother amazingly gifted with percussion, I cannot carry a tune. But I do love
music very deeply. All genres of music.
S: Did you have family reunions? Was there a huge extended family? AAHP 316; Cole; Page 10
C: I would say for a southern Black family we might be described as atypically small,
actually. We had some wonderful traditions, one of which was our family
gathering at American Beach on Amelia Island, a beach that Abraham Lincoln
Lewis bought, founded, with the funds of the pension bureau of the Afro-
American Life Insurance Company, an insurance company that he and six other
Black men founded in 1901. Most weekends when I was growing up was spent
on that beach. It’s a place with just endless memories. Jumping the waves,
eating barbeque that my dad would cook right on an outside grill, sitting around a
big table with a huge bucket of crabs that would be overturned onto newspaper
and family members just sitting around. Yeah, many, many gatherings of our
family in that way. And then like many families, most of us went to the same
church. I’ve already referenced Mt. Olive AME Church. For my sister and me, as
we grew up, at least until 1947, which is the year that A.L. Lewis died, there was
a routine. We would go to Mt. Olive AME Church for Sunday school. Then we
would come upstairs for church where my mother was the organist, the pianist,
and the director of all the choirs. It seemed we would be in that church forever.
Once we did leave church, we would go to A.L. Lewis’ home. Not to our home,
but to his home where his second wife, Elzona Lewis, would prepare Sunday
supper. I’ve written about this in a cookbook. What Momma Zon did to fried
chicken was fabulous, and in fact, even though I try to eat healthily, every now
and then, I just have to do her recipe. That really was a ritual. Then after we ate,
my sister and I could play only two games because it was Sunday and A.L. Lewis
said on Sunday you respect that day. Our favorite thing to do was to sit at his AAHP 316; Cole; Page 11
desk, the desk which is in the home where my husband and I live. We would sit
at A.L. Lewis’ desk and we would play one of our two games. We could play
school or we could play Sunday school. That was it. But he insisted on getting a
little arithmetic in there and he would often come by and say, “Now if I put all of
this money here, because let’s pretend it’s been collected from church, how
much money do you have?”
S: Smart. How did your parents meet?
C: My parents met in Atlanta, Georgia, at a—what would it have been called? Not a
conference. At an annual meeting of the National Insurance Association, which
was a US-wide association of Black folk in the insurance business. My mother
came with her father and John Thomas Betsch, this young guy, was there. That’s
how it started.
S: Are there stories about that?
C: Just stories that would, as I suspect, many couples would do. It had two versions,
hers and his. Fundamentally, it was the same story.
S: It sounded like it was a happy marriage.
C: It was. I always sensed that it was a happy marriage. As a child, you’re never
privileged to what’s being said behind closed doors, but I never, ever had a
sense that my parents fell out of love with each other.
S: And she was a business woman?
C: My mother was first an academic. She went to Wilberforce, well before
Wilberforce, because of the deep AME roots of my family, she was sent to Morris
Brown High School, which is now Morris Brown College, unfortunately AAHP 316; Cole; Page 12
experiencing some difficult times. So from Morris Brown High School she went to
Wilberforce College in Ohio, the only private HBCU that isn’t located in the
South. And my mom majored in music and English, and so for years she was an
English professor, and she became the registrar at one of our historically Black
colleges, Edward Waters College in Jacksonville. Then at a given point in her life
she did go into the family business and became the treasurer of the Afro-America
Life Insurance Company.
S: So do you get your diction from your mother, the English professor?
C: I just know she corrected me, I remember that. She did insist that our subject and
verb should agree.
S: I saw on the PBS series called The Makers that you said it was your father who
liked to cook and could braid your hair. Could you tell us more about him though?
What else was he like?
C: He was an extremely loving and affectionate person. And very warm. In many
ways if one were thinking of stereotypes, my parents really played role switch.
My mom tended to be much more reserved, more private, less talkative. My
father very much a part of whatever was the joy in life. And he was very
affectionate to my mom, who would always say “Oh, stop that,” and certainly to
us as his children. He was a very special man. I don’t know much about my
father’s background. I obviously know much, much more about the maternal side
of the family, but I do know that he was the only child by birth of a German brick-
mason and an African American woman and that he grew up in Henderson,
North Carolina. AAHP 316; Cole; Page 13
S: And you say that he was a man ahead of his time. Why do you think that was?
Was it his childhood or just his disposition?
C: I really don’t know how to answer that, but I would say again he was ahead of his
time on questions of the role and the place of women. My sister and I got very
strong messages that said we were not to be held back because we were girls.
S: Yes, I’ve heard you say it wasn’t a question of whether you were going to
college, it was a question of which college you were going to.
C: That is true, that is true. First of all, my parents were atypical in both being
educated through college for their generation.
S: Very much so.
C: Both went to historically-Black institutions, both supported HBCUs very strongly,
as did A.L. Lewis, who served on the board of Bethune-Cookman College, who
served on the board of Edward Waters College, and who gave very generously
to both of those HBCUs.
S: So what were you like as a child, were you shy, or bossy, or maybe a
bookworm? I’ve heard you knew a wonderful librarian.
C: My own sense of myself as a child is that I was not as, let’s say, comfortable with
myself as I became much later. Now one could say well that’s just the nature of
childhood, but I do remember just being a little shy. Certainly I can remember
always feeling that I was not as gifted as my sister. Not as pretty as my sister.
And I grew out of that, you know, I came to feel very comfortable in my own self,
but as a kid I was, I would say on the continuum I was more toward the shy end
of that continuum. AAHP 316; Cole; Page 14
S: Sounds like an introvert versus an extrovert too, that you found your world in
books.
C: I love to read. I loved to be read to. I wouldn’t describe myself as an introvert
because I take that very seriously as quite a term to describe someone who is
extremely inward. I’m more comfortable just saying I was a little shy.
S: When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up? I’ve heard you
said something about the medical field.
C: I always said I wanted to be a doctor, a baby doctor. And no doubt, as an
expression of where gender questions were then, that’s what a girl would say.
You know, you wouldn’t say “Well I’m going to be a neurosurgeon,” or “I’m going
to be an internist,” or “I’m going to specialize, as an ear, eyes and throat person.”
If you were a girl and you wanted to be a doctor, then you were going to be a
baby doctor. So that was my little recited response to “And when you grow up
Johnetta, what are you going to be?” “I’m going to be a baby doctor.”
S: That was stepping outside of the lines anyways, because typically it would have
been a nurse that you would be expected to say, right?
C: True, but in the African American community baby doctors were certainly not
usually women, but every now and then there might be an OBGYN.
S: Being successful business owners, were your parents friends with well-known
intellectuals and celebrities, such as fellow anthropologist and writer Zora Neal
Hurston, who was also from Florida?
C: My parents did not know Zora Neal Herston, at least not to my knowledge, but I
remember lots of celebrities passing through our home. It was a consequence of AAHP 316; Cole; Page 15
racial segregation; there was no place for celebrities to spend the night. You
couldn’t go to the White hotels and in Jacksonville there really weren’t hotels that
a celebrity would stay in. And so the pattern in our town was the same pattern all
over the South. There would be some prominent family who would simply invite
this individual to be the guest in their home. So I remember Joe Lewis, I
remember Cab Calloway. People like that would literally stay in our home. Of
course, now I wish I had the sense to, even as a kid, have a little autograph
book. I didn’t, but my sister and I knew that periodically we would just be told that
we were giving up a certain space at dinner or our rooms were needed because
there would be very special guests. And we would bunk some other place.
S: Was it a big house?
C: The house that I grew up in initially on Louisiana Street was a modest house, but
then the house that we moved into in my teenage years was a very large house.
In fact it was A.L. Lewis’s house on Jefferson Street, across from a beautiful,
beautiful park in which we could not play, across from a park with a wonderful
swimming pool that we could not go in. And so our house, the street that we lived
on, was the last line of African American living, and then the park, which became
the park for White folk, and all of the rest looking forward was White folks’
territory.
S: So there was a real dichotomy because you were from a well-to-do family in
some ways, but still you were blocked from just everyday experiences that, you
know?
C: Mmhm. Class, I’ve often said, could not trump race in the South. AAHP 316; Cole; Page 16
S: How have you passed some of these experiences on, during the Jim Crow
years? Have you tried to use that in your professorial positions to explain to kids
coming up what it was like?
C: Yes, because I think it’s really difficult for young people who are not experiencing
that to attach to it, to understand it, and to make that promise “never, never again
is this to happen.” And we know, you and I know, as academics that there’s
nothing quite as effective as storytelling. And so when we’re at our best, I think,
as teachers, as professors, we’re telling stories. And when we can tell a personal
story, we can often have even more impact in the learning process.
S: Well, racism is such an emotional kind of brutality, so that doesn’t really come out
when you are just reading facts and having it be distanced in a certain kind of
text.
C: It’s true. It’s true.
S: But because your family owned American Beach, that became a place where
Blacks could go and find recreation, and I’ve read that your sister spent a lot of
time and effort trying to conserve that beach.
C: It is true. It is true. After her years in music, my sister was a double major in voice
and piano at Oberlin, and then she went to Paris to study with Roland Hayes and
then became quite accomplished. She did lead roles in German State Opera,
and at a given point, and our family never really knew what happened, but she
returned to the States and gave it all up. Obviously, psychologically my sister
went through something. And then she moved to the beach and dedicated the AAHP 316; Cole; Page 17
rest of her life to preserving that beach. It’s the reason that she’s called “the
beach lady.”
S: And how long was that, was that thirty years of conservation or more?
C: Yeah, you could say a good thirty years. She, well, nothing of any consequence
is ever done by a single person, but she certainly was the leader in conserving
that beach for African American people, in having the sand dunes placed on the
national registry, in having American Beach in total on the national registry. All of
that was my sister’s work, with others, and she became quite the
environmentalist. When we celebrated her life, it was very moving to read
messages from all over the country, coming from conservation organizations like
the Sierra Club. And probably the most touching moment during that whole
celebration, which happened on American Beach, was when we released a
basket full of butterflies. She loved butterflies and loved the very image and the
very notion of metamorphosis, so that she called, in the last years of her life, if
you called her home—after we finally convinced her she should not be living in a
trailer, or sleeping on the beach, and needed to be in indoor space—but if you
called and she was not there, the voicemail message would say, “Hello. I’m sorry
I’m not here to take your call. I’m probably on the beach, where I have evolved
into a butterfly.” She had an incredible sense of humor. She was a very devoted
environmentalist.
S: And ahead of her time in that, right?
C: In many ways, yes. Yeah. AAHP 316; Cole; Page 18
S: And this is keeping in mind that the beaches you’re talking about are one place
that hurricanes can easily come into in Florida, and we have a season every year
where we worry about the sand dunes.
C: Absolutely, yes.
S: So it’s a serious, serious effort to protect something like that because it protects
everyone too. In a moment we’ll talk about your career, but I’ve heard that it’s
difficult for women in academia to have a family while they’re putting in the long
hours to advance in the professoriate. Did you have children and how did you
manage that?
C: I have three wonderful, wonderful sons, and one stepson. My late husband,
Robert Cole, and I really did grow our children together. He too was an
academic, Ph.D. in economics and a professor, and was very much like my
father in the sense that he did not have old, barbaric notions about a woman’s
place. It was an interracial marriage and he obviously didn’t have ideas either
about the inferiority of Black folk. And so we grew these three sons in an
academic community, a very special, wonderful academic community of
Amherst, Massachusetts. But Amherst was during our time, and remains, a part
of a five-college academic area. And so I taught at UMass, at Amherst, and
Hampshire, and Smith, and at Mount Holyoke. And Robert taught at UMass and
did some courses at Amherst. So our kids grew up in a very liberal community.
They grew up, I think, without notions that they were to be waited upon by their
mom. They all had assignments and they laugh to this day about trying to get out
of weeding the yard, or helping with the housework, or whatever. But Robert Cole AAHP 316; Cole; Page 19
was a very active co-parent. And that helped. I mean there’s no way that I could
have been a full academic and parenting if he wasn’t participating in that
process.
S: What was his specialty? What was his area of research?
C: Within economics?
S: Uh-huh.
C: Development. And we both went off together in 1960 to Liberia, where we were,
as graduate students along with a third graduate student, Bob Armstrong, the
students on a team with professors who were doing a study of Liberia. It ended
up in a book, well not it ended up, the research is in a book called “Growth
Without Development,” with the lead economist being Robert Clower and the
lead anthropologist being George Dalton. The condition under which the three of
us participated in all of that work was that we could also use data for our three
respective dissertations, and indeed that is what happened.
S: Do you have grandchildren?
C: I do. And I fully understand that Italian proverb that says “when a grandchild is
born, so is a grandmother.” I have one granddaughter by marriage. Oldest son,
David, married Janet Mariethra Cole, and Janet had one daughter, and so
Marissa is now my granddaughter. She is in her early twenties, a graduate of
Smith College, so you know that pleases me, that we have a Smithy. And then
my youngest son, Ethan Jay Cole, has two children: Hollis, who is seven, and
Miles Alexander, who is two.
S: How do they manage to wrap you around their little finger? AAHP 316; Cole; Page 20
C: Easily. It’s built into being a grandchild.
S: So let’s talk about your career. How did you decide on anthropology?
C: Well, I’ve told the story a million times, but I’ll tell it again. I ended up in a course
at Oberlin College and the reason I was at Oberlin is because my father died the
year I went to Fisk. I went off to Fisk University when I was fifteen years old,
because my pushy, pushy Black parents said I had to take a test and if I passed
the test I would go to college early. And so, not having the sense to fail the test,
which I easily could have done, I passed the test so the next thing I know I’m at
Fisk University. It just an incredibly important experience, but it was also the year
that my father died and I experienced my first real trauma with his death. And so
my sister, my brother, and my mom all decided with me that it would be a good
idea if I went on an exchange program to Oberlin. A year with my sister, just to
sort of get through the trauma of my father’s death, and then I would return to
Fisk. Fell in love with Oberlin and I never went back to Fisk. Although I remember
very keenly the important ways in which Fisk helped to form me. So in many
ways I am the beneficiary of both a historically Black college and one of the most
outstanding small liberal arts colleges in our country. So, I went to Oberlin fully
prepared to be a baby doctor, and one day I ended up in a class, because I
looking for a course that didn’t meet too early in the day, that did not have a
boring professor, and, of course, it would help to satisfy my social science
requirement. So here’s this class, and I could barely read one of the words, I had
to sound it out, but it was Introduction to Cultural Anthro-pol-ogy, and at the end AAHP 316; Cole; Page 21
of that class, taught by Professor George Eaton Simpson, I knew I was going to
be an anthropologist.
S: What was it like for you to go away to school in the North? I mean was that a
tremendous transition? It sounded like you knew you wanted to be there.
C: Well in a sense it happened in stages, because I went from Florida to Fisk and
then from Fisk to Oberlin. And Oberlin was a very, what is that word I would use?
It was a very welcoming community. Not a whole lot of Black folk, but a very
welcoming community of liberal White Americans, and with a strong international
presence, both on the student body and, to some extent, on the faculty. And I
remember being really very happy at Oberlin and I’m still extremely tied to my
alma mater. I go back as often as I can, I certainly support Oberlin, and Fisk,
financially, and feel very fortunate that I had the two experiences.
S: What about your graduate work, where did you do that?
C: It really wasn’t my choice. George Eaton Simpson was a sociologist turned
anthropologist. He was a student of Melville J. Herskovits. And once I discovered
anthropology through Professor Simpson, I basically majored in Professor
Simpson because there was no anthropology major at Oberlin. So when it was
time for graduate school, it wasn’t anything to be discussed. I was going to go to
Northwestern and study with Melville J. Herskovits because that’s what Professor
Simpson said that I should do.
S: What was your dissertation about?
C: The master’s thesis was very Herskovitsian. It was . . . I’m not sure I should be
proud of it these days because it was so Herskovitsian, but I looked at the AAHP 316; Cole; Page 22
retention of African rituals and beliefs in a Black church on the South Side of
Chicago. Reverend Body’s Greater Harvest Baptist Church. And just as
Herskovits had pioneered in the very notion of African retentions in that classic
book Myth of the Negro Past, there was no question. I was going to find exactly
what Herskovits told me I would find. My doctoral dissertation, as I said earlier,
came out of research that was done in Liberia, and it looked at the movement of
men out of traditional labor, farming, fishing, into the wage-earning economy, and
the effect of the movement of men into that economy on women and children in
the traditional villages.
S: I’ve heard you say that you were heavily influenced by two powerful women to
apply for the job of a college president. Can you tell that story?
C: Well, I had gone to Brazil with other faculty in the City University of New York
system. I was at Hunter, and other faculty and I concocted this exchange of ideas
to take place at the Catholic University in São Paulo. And at the end of that
experience, one of my colleagues from the Brazilian part of this process said, “Do
you want to go to a diviner?” She was an anthropologist; so am I. Of course an
anthropologist wants to go to a diviner. So off we went to Maruka. I’ve written
about this. Maruka—I’ll give you the short version: at a given point, when she
became possessed, we began just in conversation, but at a certain point she
grabbed the cowry shells to throw them and to read by the configuration of up
and down of the cowry shells. She actually became possessed and said to me,
with her eyes closed in a full state of possession, that I would return to my home
and I would do work that is rarely done. And she was a Black Brazilian woman, AAHP 316; Cole; Page 23
and she went like this rubbing her hands saying, “Work that is not usually done
by us, and certainly not by us as women.” I didn’t know what in the world this
woman was talking about. I was a perfectly happy professor at Hunter College.
But when I got to Hunter, back to Hunter, where my appointment was in the
anthropology department, and I walked into my office, on my desk there were
notes saying “Urgent. Call the President.” And another note: “As soon as
possible, call Marian Wright Edelman.” And these two women, who I still consider
as special mentors and wonderful friends, had been in cahoots and had decided I
was to apply for the presidency of Spelman.
S: You’re talking about Donna Shalala, who’s now—
C: Donna Shalala and Marian Wright Edelman.
S: She’s now president of the University of Miami, I believe.
C: At that time, she was the president of Hunter, went on to be the president of the
University of Wisconsin, and, of course, from there to Secretary of Health and
Human Services under President Clinton, and now the University of Miami.
Marian Wright Edelman, over all of these years, the sterling leader of the
Children’s Defense Fund.
S: I’m afraid I am going to run out of time if I don’t go forward with some of these
questions to the part about your family’s heritage, so I’m going to do that and see
how we get through this. There is in storytelling a related concept called story
silencing. A kind of societal mechanism to purposefully omit some stories from
the official accounts of history. When I was growing up in Florida, I never read an
account of your African ancestress in our history books, but would like to talk to AAHP 316; Cole; Page 24
today about her story. What have you heard, when did you first hear about the
story of your great-great-great-grandparents?
C: I regret that I did not hear those stories about Anta and about Zephaniah as they
came to share the same name of Kingsley. I regret that I, as a youngster, did not
ask my great-grandfather to talk to me about Mary Sammis, the great-
granddaughter of the Kingsleys. His wife, his first wife, I never knew her. I
proudly look at her, many a day, in a beautiful, beautiful photograph that is very
near A.L. Lewis’s desk. I heard stories from my mom, or maybe from someone
else, that A.L. Lewis was married to, or married into, a very good and prominent
family. But I must be honest and say I was way into my young adulthood before I
knew the story of Anta Ndiaye.
S: Well, I would like to just kind of go through what I’ve run across in my research,
and just check with you on what you may, or may not, know about. So her name
was Anta Madjiguene Ndiaye Kingsley, right?
C: Right.
S: And it was changed to Anna Kingsley, but she’s one of the few Africans brought
to America who kept her family names. Does the family know what part of Africa
she was from, other than generally what’s now known as Senegal, or?
C: Well this becomes very mixed up, because while I did not hear the story of Anta
as I grew up, I have read. And so when you ask me “Is this something I know,”
then yes, I’ve read just about anything I could ever get my hands on, so I know,
of course, that her people and she were Wolof. AAHP 316; Cole; Page 25
S: At only thirteen, it was said she was brought to Florida in 1806 by Zephaniah, but
there is much that has been conjectured about. Do you believe the story offered
by historian Daniel Schafer, that she was from a ruling class family but was
abducted and sold into slavery in Africa and then brought to the slave market in
Havana?
C: I appreciate that Professor Daniel Schafer is appropriately cautious about the
telling of this story. And I can say, in general, that not only do I appreciate his
caution, but I’m prepared to just say in the absence of data that counteracts what
he has said, then we will go with that story.
S: Anta was said to be very beautiful. Do you think it’s true that he saw her in a
slave market in Havana and fell in love with her or do you think that that’s
apocryphal?
C: That’s what’s been written; I have no evidence to counter it.
S: From what we know, there are no photographs or paintings of her, is that right?
C: That’s my understanding, but there are of Zephaniah Kingsley.
S: Oh From what the ranger said at the National Park Service, they had two men
that visited several years ago that thought that they were related and that
somewhere in the family attic there might be a picture, but because it was a
Black women with White children, you know, it wasn’t something that the family, I
guess, had conserved or published. It’s unknown where it is, so, I guess that’s
the way it stands right now. Some academics have questioned whether there can
be a true marriage, love match, if you will, between Anta and Zephaniah because
she was both a wife and a slave. What’s your reaction to that? AAHP 316; Cole; Page 26
C: Well my understanding is that while they could not marry by the laws of Florida,
obviously, but they did marry by Wolof custom. And that sounds like a marriage
to me.
S: It was thirty-five years or so, wasn’t it?
C: And if not a marriage, they certainly had a relationship that endured over at least
three decades.
S: She was said to have been an excellent manager from the beginning of the
marriage, though some have questioned whether she actually was allowed to
manage the business affairs when her husband was away. How do you see this,
is this a kind of denial of possibly the record of a very capable woman, or?
C: I have no reason to doubt that she managed the plantation. All that I’ve read
suggested Zephaniah Kingsley had enormous trust of his wife, and what I read of
her sounds to me as if she would have no trouble being very much in a
leadership role on that plantation.
S: There are stories of Anta that show that she was a woman of courage and clear
thinking, like when she flagged down a Spanish colonial ship on the St. John’s
River to get her family away from militia during Florida’s colonial era. She even
burned down her own house rather than having it used by soldiers and slave-
catchers, but critics have pointed to the fact that Anta continued ownership of
slaves, and that’s a major problem for people in identifying her as heroic or not.
So, as a storyteller, I see it as making an unusual story which already has a
quality of an epic, with all the turns of fortune. What are your thoughts on this? AAHP 316; Cole; Page 27
C: Well we’ve obviously, over time, come to acknowledge the participation of African
people in enslavement. This is no longer big news. And I think, while it’s not
something that I’m proud of, that my great-great-great-grandmother owned
slaves, it’s certainly not something that should be denied. Again, we’re talking
about the necessity of re-creating stories, for which we do not have all of the
details that we need, but that she owned enslaved people seems, to me, to be
pretty well-documented.
S: I was writing a play about the friendship between Anta and Susan Fatio L’Engle,
a neighbor of European descent who lived near Anna, and was known to visit her
for her stories of Africa. At first, I wasn’t aware that she had a descendant that I
could talk about the story with and then I found the video of you on MIT’s website
from 2004, where you gave an address on the problems of hiring practices in
higher-ed and diversity. And that was with the president of MIT, Susan Hockfield,
at the time. And I thought that was an interesting parallel, that there were two
Susans and two kind of Annas, in a way. So, Susan Fatio L’Engle’s great-
granddaughter, Madeleine L’Engle, credits her family’s stories as why she
became a writer, and it’s said Susan L’Engle boated up the river to hear Anna’s
stories about Africa, but talked about how lonely she was. The only things
Africans could take with them when forced to leave Africa were stories, customs,
food ways and recipes, and seeds, and expertise such as music or reading the
alignment of the stars. Is this a challenge to connect the object in museums such
as this with the African American experience of diaspora, since it was difficult to AAHP 316; Cole; Page 28
have objects that were taken with them, that things had to be sort of brought with
them that couldn’t be packed during the trip here?
C: Well, you have to remember, this is not a museum of African American art. That
museum will be opened in 2015, and there’s widespread confusion about what
we do in this museum as opposed to the new museum. This is a museum of
African art, and so what we are exhibiting and educating about, inviting
conversation about, are the historical and the contemporary works of African art.
And these are objects that, in the historical and traditional sense, we are rarely
getting from people who were enslaved, brought into the United States, kept
those objects of art and ritual. They are coming from the continent itself.
S: I read in an article in the Jacksonville newspaper, it said that Anta was known to
dance during the full moon. Do you have family stories like that that have come
down?
C: Unfortunately, I do not.
S: On Zephaniah’s side you’re related to Anna McNeal Whistler, Zephaniah’s niece
and the mother of the American painter James McNeal Whistler. We don’t really
think about the outcome of slavery in that there are often relationships that are
unrecognized, right? Like this summer, I was in Dublin and Caroline Kennedy
was visiting and so were Michelle Obama and her daughters. And the Irish news
said that President Obama’s Irish heritage could be traced more directly than
John Kennedy’s, which I thought was really interesting. But one of the things I
think is unique about the story of Anta and Zephaniah is that it ties the slave
trade with European café society through that painting, because the family was AAHP 316; Cole; Page 29
involved in the lawsuit, that we’ll talk about in a minute, so it becomes a
backstory of that iconic painting. But it was about motherhood in a way, it’s
become the icon of motherhood. Do you thing that there’s a kind of—but it
seemed to me that the mentorship, the mothering that Anta did seems to have
passed down the generations. That, somehow, she hasn’t maybe been as fully
credited for what she started as the woman who sits in the painting. So, are there
any thoughts on that? It just seems like you have a very strong family history of
mentoring the next generation of those around you, of education.
C: Well, the easiest way to answer is but of course. We have yet to experience
equality of Black and White women; though each has been subjected to gender
inequality, only one has been subjected to racial inequality. And so to say that
Anta and the Whistler woman are somehow not perceived as being on the same
level is to simply make the obvious statement.
S: Kingsley had an unusual, and what sounds like a contradictory, belief in that he
was pro-slavery but anti-racism. He wrote “Color ought not to be the badge of
degradation: the only distinction should be between slave and free, not between
White and Colored,” and praised the character and the work of his African wife
and his slaves. He seems larger than life. How do you see him as the
descendant of both Anna and Zephaniah?
C: I see him as having an amazing ability to live with his contradictions. I mean,
that’s a contradiction. How can you be the owner of enslaved people and say that
you see no inequality between Black and White? It does not make sense to me. AAHP 316; Cole; Page 30
S: Very self-serving. The Kingsleys had four children, two daughters and two sons.
Anna and the first three children received their freedom through documents of
manumission in 1811. What’s your reaction when you see her signature, which is
all we have of her by her own hand, and are there any family stories about her
and the children?
C: Again, I wish that there were. I know of no such stories, but to simply have that
signature is a priceless thing. It’s really all that we have that is material. But I
think we have much more in the oral history and obviously in the written historical
record.
S: I’ve read somewhere that Mary and Martha had nicknames. Have you heard
that?
C: No.
S: There’s a lot of information that’s kind of piecemeal, that has scattered, like you
say. Mary married John Samos, and Martha was also married and settled in the
same area of Jacksonville. And I’ve read that the daughters established a school
for Black children because the Black children couldn’t attend anywhere else.
Wasn’t that in the house that still exists in Jacksonville, in the Clifton area?
C: If that is the case, I do not have evidence of it.
S: After Anta’s manumission, she moved across the river with her children and a
few enslaved people to her own plot of land. What does the family say was the
reason for that? Was it to establish herself as a free person of color, or was it
something she planned with Zephaniah as a way to become free, or for safety, or
business purposes? Is there any knowledge? AAHP 316; Cole; Page 31
C: There is no family telling of these stories. So I cannot give you a yes or a no.
S: In my research I saw that Daniel Schafer thought that John Maxwell, the
youngest son, had an illegitimate daughter in what is now the Dominican
Republic. Have you heard that?
C: I read the same books you read.
S: Ok. The story ties together the islands, Florida, and Quakers in the South, and
also European society and Africa, in an amazing way. Now there is a family
member, Kathleen Gibbs Johnson Wu, who has suggested a different scenario
than the other accounts I have read. She thinks that Anna was a slave in name
only, and that her marriage to Zephaniah was arranged through a friendship with
a man called John Frasier and his African wife An Fendot, who was from Rio
Congo in what is now Guinea. Have you heard of that version?
C: Not only have a heard about that version, I have been confronted by Madam Wu,
so I have met her at the Kingsley plantation. That’s all I can say. I mean she is
obviously very committed to her understanding of the historical record.
S: Also, the historical accounts show that Anna used her last years with a girl
named Bella. Does the family know who that girl was? Do they think that she
could have been the youngest Kingsley son’s natural daughter, whose name
was—
C: I have no family stories, no family information that can either confirm or reject any
of these stories.
S: Ok. Do you know if they knew what happened to the granddaughter Emma
Baxter Mox? AAHP 316; Cole; Page 32
C: Nope.
S: I have a picture that I, I don’t know you have that, I can send it to you.
C: That would be wonderful. No, I don’t have it.
S: It’s a beautiful Victorian portrait that was up on a Jacksonville historical site that
you might like, so. Sadly, not long after Zephaniah died, the eldest son died also
on a shipwreck on his way back from what was then the Free Black Republic of
Haiti to help his mother with the estate. Does anyone know where he is buried,
or?
C: Unfortunately, no.
S: Anna was blocked from the inheritance that Zephaniah had spelled out for her
and their children, 1/12 of a very large estate, and after years in court with the
help of her White sons-in-law, she actually won the case in the Supreme Court of
Florida due to her Spanish colonial citizenship and the Adams-Onis Treaty of
1819. Isn’t that incredible, considering the time?
C: Absolutely. And I think as you read of it, it is perhaps the most dramatic portrayal
of this extraordinary woman.
S: Does your family think that Anna is buried in the family plot, behind the
daughter’s house that still exists? That’s what I’ve heard.
C: It’s all we can do, again, is to go by what is said.
S: And is your family in touch with the scattered descendants? I know Zephaniah
also fathered children with other women, and so they are kind of linked that way,
but— AAHP 316; Cole; Page 33
C: Every year, as you probably know, maybe you’ve attended, there is a gathering
of the descendants of the Kingsleys. It happens on the plantation, which is now
under the care, of course, of the National Park Service. And so I have been to
some of those, my sister would go rather regularly, and my niece. I have one
brother and he has one child, Peri Francis Betsch, who is deeply interested in
this family history and has gone to the Kingsley Plantation I think really more than
I have. And so it’s always a very interesting experience to meet and talk with
people who can come from as far as Brazil, who range in pigmentation from
White to Black, but all of whom, and least they believe, that they can trace
themselves to one, or the other, or both of the Kingsleys.
S: I haven’t been to those, but I think some of them had been cancelled because of
budgetary concerns, so I look forward to doing that one day. Once I found out
about you while doing my research for the play I wrote for my master’s thesis
project, I was so struck by one of your quotes that I used in it the play. You’ve
been quoted as saying “the more we pull together toward a new day, the less it
matters what pushed us apart in the past.” Do you think this is the most important
lesson that we have to acknowledge after what happened in the past and the
horrific practices of the Atlantic slave trade?
C: Clearly I do. I mean, those are my words. What haunts me is that we seem
somehow to make some progress and then to fall back. And obviously the two
incredibly hurtful events of recent days remind us of that: the shooting of Trayvon
Martin, the removal of key passages in the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme AAHP 316; Cole; Page 34
Court of our country, these remind us that if we think we live in a post-racial
society, we better think again.
S: I hear you. And Treyvon Martin happened in Florida, so—
C: It certainly did.
S: Well, I’m going to go back to some things now that I skipped through. I’ve taken a
course on anthropology and social memory, and this semester, in an article by
Dr. Jennifer Cole, she described a cultural practice of the Betsimisaraka people
in Madagascar, off the coast of Africa. And it said that they believe themselves to
be the living monuments to their ancestors. One person said that the unfulfilled
wishes of their ancestors are like a sleeping bird, wishes that could be carried out
in later generations. In a rapidly changing global society, do you see one
important role of a museum is to aid in the transmission of social memory? Like a
sleeping bird?
C: I think one could say in a museum that is not in some way transmitting social
memory, is probably not doing its job. We obviously have our minds, we have our
voices, we have our written words, but artifacts are also the keepers of what has
happened in the past. And so this museum, which I just feel incredibly honored to
work in and to serve as the director of, is such a storehouse. What I do think is
important is for a museum such as this to have balance so that we are not only
presenting for conversation, presenting for education, presenting for inspiration
artifacts which allow us to remember the past. African artists exist today. There is
somebody, somewhere right now creating an extraordinary work which one day AAHP 316; Cole; Page 35
will be called a historic or a traditional work. And so, for me, it’s really important
that we collect and exhibit and converse about contemporary African art.
S: Some of the strongest art I’ve seen on display at the university is the African Art
Collection with some contemporary pieces. What is important about artifacts as
mnemonics that trigger things, memories like your grandmother’s china or the
smell of her house, is that a special strength of African art, is that they draw on
kinds of sensory triggers or are part of a cultural code that is embedded in the
artifact itself as part of the society?
C: I think in some ways any work of art is that. Even the most abstract. But if one
insists on these comparisons, then you might want to say that on a continuum,
from one end to the other, African art probably is more encoded than the art of
many other peoples of the world.
S: It seems to even have levels of systems and stories within stories encoded in it,
which I think it makes it something that you can come back to and look at over
and over again and see something new.
C: But isn’t that the case with any exquisite, extraordinary work of art? I always want
to, in a sense, privilege African art, but I also want to be very careful with that
because African art is, when it is at its best, all about what any work of art is,
from any people, when it is at its best.
S: Yes, and as an artist I can say that’s a real challenge. To make something that
doesn’t have people walk away from it without wanting to come back.
C: Exactly. AAHP 316; Cole; Page 36
S: In general, the African continent has a rich history of oral transmission of culture,
such as the storytelling we talked about. But how do you approach planning and
the creation of museum exhibits in that you’re in the West, which privileges the
visual over the auditory, for example?
C: It’s tough. It’s just doing the best we can with the challenges that we face. If we
were able to present African works of art as they should be presented, it would
take many, many more square feet than we have. Nothing would be a mask in a
Plexiglas case. They would all be in situ. They would be with all of the fabrics or
the raffia with the mask on the head, and there would be many such figures
engaged in a communal activity or ritual. But we must deal with what we’ve got,
which is limited space, the need to protect these art objects, and so that is what
ends up with museums looking the way that our museums look.
S: One of the stated goals listed in the museum’s strategic plan of 2010 was to raise
the museum’s profile, then fast-forward to August of 2012 when the museum’s
exhibit entitled “Under African Skies: Gazing Up with Awe,” was profiled in an
article by Holland Cotter, eminent art critic of the New York Times, in a rave
review, I must say. You and your colleagues here don’t just do things in a small
way, do you? I mean, that’s about how high-profile as it gets for the museum
world, isn’t it?
C: It was a breathtakingly wonderful review of the exhibition “African Cosmos:
Stellar Arts.” To get a review of that much praise from Holland Cotter, it doesn’t
get any better than that, it simply doesn’t. And we are so hopeful that he will
follow his usual pattern, unannounced, or if we know that he’s coming, he wants AAHP 316; Cole; Page 37
nobody to walk him through. We are hoping that he will be interested in “Earth
Matters.” In many ways, “Earth Matters” is a part of a trilogy. Before I arrived at
the museum there was an exhibition entitled “Inscribing Meaning” that looked at
indigenous writing systems in Africa. And then “African Cosmos,” and now “Earth
Matters.” All three of which really are helping our visitors to understand the
complexities and the beauty of African indigenous knowledge.
S: In your interview with Jill Scott, that took place at the beginning of August, you
spoke to her about media, and how Africa is often portrayed as a place
constantly in crisis. I saw Scott in her wonderful role as the lead in the No. 1
Ladies Detective Agency, where we saw a positive version of Africa. What are
you trying to do, in your position as museum director, to counteract this negative
portrayal of an entire continent?
C: We feel it’s a very important responsibility that we have. And I am taken by the
power of art to do that, and perhaps to do it more effectively than with the spoken
word. If we present these exhibits in the best way, then you can’t walk out of here
saying “It’s just a bunch of savages over there. Nothing has changed since
Tarzan and Jane were swinging through the jungle.” You cannot look at an
exquisite Chokwe mask or an incredibly carved Yoruba work, or something that
women of Ndebele group have beaded, or the current work of an El Anatsui, or a
Yinka Shonibare, or a Sokari Douglas Camp and say, “Africa is nothing but a
bunch of folk who are about as primitive as they can be.” If these works come
from the hands, from the creativity, from the mind and the soul of African people,
that tells you something about who those people are. AAHP 316; Cole; Page 38
S: Even if you just look at the placement as you walk through the museum, or the
color combinations, or some really small part of all the pieces, I think you have to
see a genius for stylization, for example.
C: Exactly. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
S: But it seems to me, from my experience with art history, often people coopt that
idea of stylization or abstraction like they did with Cubism, without crediting back
where it came from. So, I guess…
C: That’s true, but I also feel that we have just said this enough. We need to find
something else to say about the influence of African art in the works of Picasso,
and of other impressionists, and so we end up really talking about the
impressionist and not talking about the qualities of the African art.
S: And there’s kind of a negative cycle to that, in a way, right.
C: Mmhm.
S: Now that you’ve helped establish Black studies as a research area, and that
there are more African American majors, which, we have a new one at UF. What
else needs to be done in that area, that may relate to an appreciation of Africa
and what it produces?
C: An enormous amount. First of all, for too many Black studies, or African
American, or Afro-American studies programs, they have never been solidly
grounded into the curricula of universities. Programs, little something over on the
side, and, of course, when times get tough, then that’s when lines are not given
for new faculty positons, budgets are cut. And so, for me, having helped to start
one of the first Black Studies programs, I remember with enormous pride the AAHP 316; Cole; Page 39
work that we’ve done, but I also see just a whole lot more that needs to be done.
In terms of some of the points of real victory, I look at a department like the one I
taught in in Amherst, the W.E.B. Du Bois department of Afro-American studies,
which now has a graduate program producing extraordinary, well-trained
professionals. That makes me feel really, really good.
S: Was that at Hunter College that you began?
C: No, I’m referring to the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.
S: Right, but where did you begin your Black Studies program, which place was…
C: Washington State University in the 1960s. And then, my late husband and I
moved from Washington State University, which was really the first teaching job
for each of us when we came back from Liberia. And then we moved from there
to UMass, or the five-college area, where I was for thirteen years, and then to
Hunter College.
S: Is there anything else that you’d like to say that people might want to know
about? Is there anything we haven’t covered that you want to talk about?
C: You know, I was just thinking how much I talked about my sister and how little
you asked about my brother. He really is an exceptional musician, who has
played, we often say that’s just the wrong word, it’s not play, it’s work. Worked
with some of the great, well-known figures in Black improvisation music, like
Archie Shepp, like Steve Lacey. He is a student of Max Roach, a great
percussionist. But John Betsch is one heck of a drummer. And, of all the things
that I can do with my life, on the list of doing something that is just filled with joy
is to go and hang out with him in Paris. AAHP 316; Cole; Page 40
S: That sounds fabulous.
C: That’s where he’s lived, it’s the city he knows even though he tends, these days,
to spend an enormous amount of time in Eastern Europe, especially Poland. But,
if I think about the importance of music in traditional African life, the importance
of the griot in the life of Anta, John Betsch carries much of that. And he’s been
very fortunate to spend time in parts of Africa, as well as in the diaspora, and I do
look to him as, in many ways, a carrier of that tradition.
S: And the griots are not only the musicians, but they are also the historians of…
C: The keeper of the oral traditions, yes.
S: So you and your brother are kind of covering both sides of the culture, in a way.
C: And his daughter, Peri, is, in her own way, quite a historian. She has gone to
Senegal; she is very, very interested in the family history. And when I do leave,
which will probably be after another couple of years here, Peri and I are going to,
we hope, do some very serious work together.
S: I’ve heard that Anta is known in Senegal, but then I asked someone from
Senegal and he had not heard of her. What does your niece say?
C: Well, I can tell you this, the ambassador from Senegal to the United States, his
excellency Niang, N-I-A-N-G, as we sat, the first time we met, and obviously I
said to him, “It’s a real honor to meet you. When I go to Senegal, and I’m
fortunate to have done that a number of times, I just want you to know there’s
more meaning for me there than just as a tourist.” And I began to talk about the
fact that my great-grandfather married the great-granddaughter of a Wolof
woman and he stopped me and he said, “Do you mean Anta Ndiaye?” I said, AAHP 316; Cole; Page 41
“Yes.” He said, “I know her story.” And on another occasion, when I was at the
residence of the ambassador for Morocco, Ambassador Niang was there and
there were some other folk from Senegal, and he introduced me as a descendant
of Anta, and among those folk, some knew of her story. So, I think it just
depends. I don’t think it’s a household name all over Senegal, but there are
people who clearly know that story.
S: Well, from how it sounds she really longed for her family, so it’s good to know
that they remember her.
C: Indeed.
S: Well on behalf of Dr. Paul Ortiz and the Samuel Proctor History Project, Dr. Cole
thank you so much for kindly sharing your experiences with us today.
C: You are more than welcome.
S: Thank you.
[End of Interview]
Transcribed by: Hannah Lyons, February 2018
Audit-edited by: Anupa Kotipoyina, April 18, 2018
Final edit by: Ryan Morini, February 24, 2019