A close look at spaces African Americans have inhabited and fought for can deepen our understanding of the connections between race, space, and place. What types of transformative communities have African Americans imagined for the future? What improvements to urban living have they sought to make? Where do the suburbs fit in ideas about Black domestic life?

Materials in the NMAAHC collection document how African Americans claim, represent, and actively engage with the spaces around them. One of the areas in which the Museum is rich in ideas and storytelling is the importance of space and place. The exhibition Power of Place presents ten place-based stories, from Oak Bluffs in Martha’s Vineyard to the long black presence in the American West. The exhibition A Changing America: 1968 and Beyond delves into the histories behind Baxter Terrace, a public housing project in Newark, New Jersey, and Mr. Muse’s Den, a speakeasy nestled inside a South Side Chicago residence. These examples reveal the attention and dedication African Americans have shown to the places of their past and present.

The Museum’s collection illustrates the multiplicity of Black spaces and their respective complexities. From Floyd McKissick’s iconic visioning of Soul City in 1970s North Carolina, to LaVerne Wells-Bowie’s pamphlet on housing design traditions that enslaved Africans brought from the continent and kept alive in the Americas, printed matter in our collection presents alternative visions to contemporary Black life and alternative readings of historically Black spaces.

Further still, the Museum’s collection uses photography and film to offer new ways of thinking about place. In Sheila Pree Bright’s The Suburbia Portfolio, quiet interiors indicate traces of daily life for Black people in suburban America, a combination that may seem simple for some and revelatory for others. In Resurrection City, photographic slides from the Poor People’s Campaign by Robert Houston document the people’s occupation of the National Mall in protest of national economic inequality. In moving image, LeRoy Bowser and Charles Hobson’s 1970’s film It’s the Same Old Game pushes for community participation against predictable and problematic government planning efforts.

Whether drawing, text, photography, or film, these fragments of history, when featured together, form a complex and connected set of expanding stories that privilege the search for place in a never-ending series of contested spaces.

Soul City

In 1969, civil rights leader Floyd McKissick arrived in Warren County, North Carolina, on land that was once a slave plantation. He hoped to transform the land into a community for poor and unemployed African Americans to experience economic prosperity. The city was named Soul City. To both encourage people to move to Soul City and to promote progress of the community’s development McKissick created various publications for distribution. One of these publications consists of eight pamphlets, published by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, that advertise different aspects of Soul City. Each of the eight pamphlets features colorful renderings and dynamic graphic design (perhaps to appeal to investors). The Soul City Portfolio (1976) details the efforts for this planned community.

With their own distinctive titles, pamphlets in the Soul City Portfolio highlight different aspects of the community. “Industrial,” makes the case that Soul City would be ideal for industry because it is located at the “crossroads” of the North-South industrial corridor in North Carolina. “Industrial” notes that Soul City would provide stable, wage-competitive jobs with its convenient location. Plans for transportation and natural resources are also detailed in this pamphlet. A second pamphlet, titled “Soul City,” gives an overview for the planned community and features sections on community, shopping, residential, and industrial areas. This pamphlet details the location, climate, and thoroughfares of Soul City.

A third pamphlet, titled “People,” describes how the community plans to improve the quality of life for residents by “creating an urban environment which will offer a life of opportunity and fulfillment, to those who wish to return to a rural environment, from an equally deprived, if different, existence in cities.” An integrated group within the “People” rendering signals that, though this initiative is intended to repair racial capital inequities, it is also open to all races. While McKissick’s efforts were often described as being hidden with Black Nationalist or separatist efforts, especially with the Pan-Africanism red, green, and black themes that some of McKissick’s pamphlets display, the stated goal was not separatism.

Complementing the promotional booklets and pamphlets, the Soul City newsletter, The Soul City Sounder, documents ongoing construction, new property sales within the planned community, incoming families, and the achievements of Soul City’s residents (the front page of Vol III, No. 5 features an image of Floyd McKissick and Kimp Talley at the development entrance).

Holistically, the Soul City publications not only describe how this community would function, but through their vibrant perspectives and detailed descriptions, they also illustrate how this lifestyle might feel; Soul City provides an aspirational and attainable vision.

Daufuskie Island

In 1994, LaVerne Wells-Bowie, an architecture professor at Florida A&M University, published a pamphlet titled A Prospectus.

This pamphlet looks at African American vernacular architectural traditions, and asks the question “How have African-derived peoples applied their knowledge of environment in New World settings?” A Prospectus opens with a comparison of indoor and outdoor spaces in the Southeastern United States and the Caribbean, which appear similar in design, “containing a verandah, piazza, porch, or yard.” The design of porches, which are used for comfort in hot/humid climates, have roots in Africa. Along with transitional spaces and yards, their designs seem to nod at creolization, containing the cultures of Africans and Europeans blended into one.

Bin-yuh, come-yuh = been here, new come, a booklet published by Wells-Bowie in 2001, discusses African influences demonstrated in the architecture and landscape of Daufuskie Island in Beaufort County, South Carolina (Daufuskie Island is part of the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry, the home of Gullah culture). Opening with the history of the slave trade off the coast of South Carolina, Wells-Bowie emphasizes the connections between architectural elements like the roofing of the shotgun style houses on the Sea Islands, known as hip-roofs, and their origins in the Caribbean. Wells-Bowie’s notes that the large overhangs these roofs can provide result in porch spaces desirable for intimate gatherings adjacent to the more communal outdoor spaces of the yard. The title of the pamphlet is also a nod to change on Daufuskie Island, where some newcomers—the “come-yuh”—bring off-island practices like fencing in their yards that run counter to traditions of community sharing and land use that the “bin-yuh” or “been here” residents had practiced.

As Wells-Bowie poetically describes it the buildings and landscapes of Daufuskie Island, “are responses to the shout of hot and humid climatic conditions; the syncopation of handclaps with change over time, telling history- as the story, conveying the rhythmic meter that links kinship to settlement patterns.”

Suburbia

Sheila Pree Bright’s The Suburbia Portfolio (2006) is a portfolio of color photos that explores race, class, and popular culture. Bright’s photos depict the suburbs—environments that historically excluded African Americans in their initial development. In Bright’s photos, homes of African Americans in the Atlanta suburbs bring to light lifestyles that are ignored in mainstream media. With their intimate perspectives and carefully cropped views, Bright’s images may make viewers feel that they too are occupying the scenes depicted.

The image above focuses on a bedroom, containing a wardrobe with a chest of drawers. On top of the chest of drawers is a framed portrait photograph of a woman. To the right is a chair covered with a white slipcover or sheet, with two dolls propped up against a pillow on the seat of the chair. Behind the bed stands a woman in a white shirt, out of focus. These photos radiate a cozy and comfortable energy. They imply familiarity and signal home.

Resurrection City

After civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination, Baltimore native Robert Houston (1935–2021) left his job as a lab technician in Boston to pursue a career as a documentary photographer full time. Within a month, Houston traveled to Washington, DC to photograph and participate in the Poor People’s Campaign. With his camera and ethnographic agenda, Houston captured a culture of America’s poor living in Resurrection City, the encampment constructed along the National Mall that housed protest participants.

Participants in the Poor People’s Campaign lived in makeshift houses in Resurrection City, typically in hand-painted tents or shelters constructed from wood and nails. Houston’s motivation to evidence this occupation comes from King’s pushback against economic inequality and poverty, and his eventual demand for an “Economic Bill of Rights,” calling for equal opportunities like access to jobs, equitable income, healthcare, and safe, affordable housing. Led by Ralph Abernathy, King’s successor in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the campaign garnered support across racial lines.

In the photograph above, a Native American man is depicted wearing a feathered headdress. In front of him is an African American woman, holding out her hands to a small child standing in front of her—an image documenting the multiethnic, intergenerational population and the forms of solidarity at work.

From physically occupying the symbolic space of the National Mall, the demonstrators offered a vision of America that was distinct from the racially stratified cities of 1968.

Resurrection City lasted for only a little over a month before a series of violent interactions between participants and police forces led to a mass eviction of Resurrection City’s residents. Despite the demolition of its tent city from the National Mall, the Poor People’s Campaign and anti-poverty movement marked a critical shift in American politics and culture. Through Houston’s documentation of the construction of the tent city, the multiethnic participants, and the African American leadership, we gain an insider perspective on this courageous occupation of America’s front yard.

It’s the Same Old Game

It’s The Same Old Game (1971) is a 16mm motion picture film, directed by Charles Hobson and produced by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. The film encourages viewers to participate in the urban planning process of New York City, referred to in the film as the “same old game,” or the set of forces that create a disregard for the needs and concerns of residents. Some of the results of these examples of poor urban planning seen in the film range from air pollution by trucks to water pollution. The film makes it clear that while poor urban planning/development is referred to as the “same old game,” it most certainly is not a game because “it [urban planning] affects our daily lives.”

The film features interviews with children about their neighborhood, community activists, and planners that advocate for community involvement. LeRoy Bowser, the writer of the film, makes an appearance. He stands with a pole over a large floor model of New York City, discussing housing in the city while pointing to different neighborhoods referred to as “slums” by urban planners. According to Bowser, “words have been coined up the by the urban planners that say in effect, a land is blighted, it is a slum, and behind these words is an effort to take the land from people, to take away their community, to deprive them from what they’ve come to know as home.”

Architect J. Max Bond Jr. emphasizes the importance of community power. In one scene, a community meeting is held about a planned high school for Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. Many residents speak out about the planning process and how decisions are made, with the main issue being the integration of Black and white students within the school. This film also features Greenburg, New York, where low-density, low-income housing exists away from industrial areas. Overall, the film is told like that of a public service announcement, emphasizing the seriousness and the importance of community involvement in urban planning.

Whether it be a film meant to unify a community against monumental planning efforts (Charles Hobson’s It’s The Same Old Game), photographs that prove African Americans’ commitment to equity and equality (Resurrection City) or architectural drawings that illustrate and track spatial and cultural connections within African American vernacular architecture (A Prospectus and Bin-yuh, come yuh), the objects and stories in the collection of the National Museum of African American History and Culture record both spaces of care and spaces of resistance.

While Sheila Pree Bright’s The Suburbia Portfolio (2006), through its serene portrayal of Black suburban life, redefines a canonical Eurocentric depiction of the everyday, Floyd McKissick’s Soul City Portfolio (1976) envisions the transformation of a slave plantation into a community for poor and unemployed African Americans to experience economic prosperity. For both Bright and McKissick, spaces are represented, fought for, transformed, and imagined. These visions, through their creation and through their distribution, exemplify a peaceful resistance to the social and financial forces that so often destroy Black neighborhoods. They also index the ability that has historically ensured the survival of Black space at the local, municipal, and national level—the ability to thrive despite spatial limitations, the determination to proclaim that we are here.

Undoubtedly, the exploration of space and place is also an exploration of relationships between people, communities, and cultures. These relationships, in turn, demonstrate the power that maintenance, care, and the cultivation of space and place can imbue.

Written by Marissa Anne Coleman, 2022 Intern, and Isabel Strauss, Curatorial Assistant, with Michelle Joan Wilkinson, Curator of Architecture and Design.
Published on July 19, 2022