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 , 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 , 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, 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

; 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 . 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