MULTIMEDIA EXHIBITION

Black Revolutionary Writers Fighting Colonialism: Queen Latifah, Samuel Cornish, and Amiri and Amina Baraka 

INTRODUCTION 

“Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” - Writer Chinua Achebe’s recollection of an African Proverb 

The 17th and 18th century colonization and enslavement of Native American and Black nations by Europeans is the foundation of Newark's history. Thankfully, Black revolutionary writers in Newark from the 1800s to today fought this attempt at the total control of Black lives. 

Colonialism works by forcing underground the histories that fight its legitimacy. Recently, a former church site on the Rutgers-University Newark campus revealed hundreds of thousands of objects and dozens of graves paved over with concrete. This exhibition includes some of these artifacts. Can these violently disposed of objects tell the stories of other violently treated histories like Newark’s first Black liberation community? 

Newark’s 19th- century Black activist community fought the removal and violence against Black communities. They also invited freedom seekers and revolutionary leaders like Frederick Douglass to speak at their churches formerly located on the present day campus. Recently, Rutgers University- Newark renamed the athletic field after Douglass to commemorate his visit and the dynamic, activist Black community that lived there, then. 

Beautiful Black writers featured in this exhibit, like Queen Latifah, Samuel Cornish, Amiri, and Amina Baraka, all contribute to the burgeoning canon of Newark’s Black Liberation Heritage. They have done this by building the Underground Railroad and fighting against the local and national colonization of Black people throughout the world using art, writing, land ownership, and economics. 

September is International Underground Railroad Month, and this exhibition and fundraiser (scan below) commemorates this 300-year Black Liberation Heritage centering on the essay The Colonization Scheme Considered in its Rejection by the Colored People, published in Newark in 1840 and co-written by Reverend Samuel Cornish. The piece was written to fight against colonization—the movement to remove Black people from the United States. It is a tremendous testimony of Newark’s 300-year Black Liberation Heritage. 

Join us in engaging art, unearthing these ideas, writing, and raising funds for our communities. 

Thank you and welcome, 

Curator: Noelle Lorraine Williams, Black Power! 19th Century 

www.blackpower19thcentury.com 

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Photographer Stafford Woods powerfully depicts the descendants of Newark’s 200-year-old Black liberation activist churches. Archaeologist and anthropologist Marc Lorenc, Ph.D of Unstuck in Time Gaming, creates a game called “Liberation Within” utilizing text from Reverend Samuel Cornish’s 1840 pamphlet, The Colonization Scheme Considered: In Its Rejection by the Colored People… to demonstrate how land ownership and community building was used to gain civil rights, organize against enslavement and fight the removal of Black Americans from the United States by the American Colonization Society movement. Writer Reginald Blanding shares with us the history of Amina and Amiri Baraka fighting against the colonization of Newark. Artist and intellectual Jerry Gant (1961–2018) shows the legacy of violence of the past and faith of today. Curator and artist Noelle Lorraine Williams, Black Power! 19th Century engages in “reverse archaeology,” revealing the Black Power sites around the Rutgers Newark campus. Williams encourages us to embrace the principles of the Underground Railroad by organizing a fundraiser to donate to Newark’s most vulnerable populations. 

Many thanks to the staff at the Paul Robeson Galleries, Form Design Studio and Lab at Express Newark and Margie "Mia X" Johnson.

Link to readings 

*Cornish, Samuel E. (Samuel Eli), 1795?-1858, and 1797–1847 Wright. The Colonization Scheme Considered: In Its Rejection by the Colored People--In Its Tendency to Uphold Caste--In Its Unfitness for Christianizing and Civilizing the Aborigines of Africa, and for Putting a Stop to the African Slave Trade: In a Letter to the Hon. Theodore Frelinghuysen and the Hon. Benjamin F. Butler. Newark: Aaron Guest, 121 Market-Street, 1840. 

Hunter, Karen, and Queen Latifah, Ladies First: Revelations of a Strong Woman. 1st ed., New York: William Morrow, 1999. 

Baraka, Amiri. Home: Social Essays. New York: Akashi Classics, 2009. 

Baraka, Amina et.al The Woman Question (Excerpt), Unpublished, 1977.