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